Where’s the transparency?

Holding a Tokensale in current market conditions

We’ve gone through a rollercoaster of a year, seeing the crypto market rise rapidly in the second half of 2017, then stall downwards and now we’re seeing again consistent growth. This has been reflective of overall trust in the entire idea. Not just cryptocurrencies, but also new coins, new blockchain-based projects and their token sales.

The wild days when pretty much any token sale could generate at least a few hundred Ethers are long past us. We’re happy to see that the market has sobered up, because now proportionately more interest will go towards genuine and trustworthy projects.

However, the market is still far from a level of transparency that we at Bethereum would like to see it have.

Too many obvious scams are still getting promoted on mainstream channels. Just yesterday, I saw a not-to-be-named project being advertised to me via Youtube, claiming its token will grow by 1%, guaranteed to do so every single day, irrespective of what is going on with the market. In other cases, I saw pyramid schemes disguised as unsustainably generous referral programs. Such ads often run for weeks on end, and although everything about them screams “SCAM”, the websites hosting them haven’t taken any action.

Token sales are still being run without Smart Contracts governing them. This is inexcusable in this day and age, when practically every blockchain project boasts of the benefits that Smart Contracts bring into business, and yet they are unwilling to implement them into their token sale. This is either incredibly stupid on their part, or, worse, suggestive of their less-than-honest intentions. If you don’t use a Smart Contract in your token sale, you are forcing your contributors into an unfair position in which they must trust you blindly.

The current situation in the overall crypto market has led many projects to hiding the amount actually raised during their token sale, using pre-generated contribution addresses to create an illusion of success. Sometimes, it is as obvious as seeing a 1,000 ETH contribution from the project’s native country. Other times, it can be even worse. I recently viewed the source code (press F12 in Chrome) on a very suspicious looking token sale page, only to find that the contribution notifications were based on a pre-programmed script, combining random amounts of ETH with various countries as their source.

Our token sale is done using an audited Smart Contract with a source code that is accessible and can be viewed on Github. We can’t hide how much we’re raising, and we don’t need to either. Our project is for real.

At Bethereum, we’d like to lead the charge in improving the market. We want less scams and more trust in the blockchain industry, because greater trust increases value for everyone, us included.