This sounds wacky enough on the one hand, passionate enough on the other to be interesting. They are creating a user-owned virtual reality, with LAND on sale. The VR has several evolutionary phases planned, so it should not be stuck in the VR equivalent of 8-bit 2D. MANA tokens (based on Ether contracts) go on sale at 40% discount on Day 1 ramping to full price over a week. They can be used to purchase LAND, digital goods and services. Start price is US$0.024 per MANA, 1,000 are needed for the smallest LAND block if you want to purchase. Crowd sale goes live at 10AM tomorrow, with ETH as the primary purchase token (other Altcoins accepted via Shapeshift), and a $25m hard cap. You need a Chrome extension, and it creates a web wallet. Might be an entry ticket to a brave new universe, might go 'phut' - but they have been beavering away at this for a couple of years, so they have commitment.
Yeah - who knows whether virtual real estate is a good investment, but something which provides evolutionary advancements has potential. The Chrome extension gives a toolbar access to the ICO site; the wallet is a JSON; I'm assuming that they hold your public key association with your browser extension, otherwise a quick foray with MyEtherWallet will provide your public key. They provide a payment address which looks as though it will only work with an ETH contract (which is out of my comfort zone), otherwise wait for the ICO open.
I'm getting a little ICO'd out recently, I've gotten into a few over the last three months and there is only a single one of those that I could NOT of bought cheaper once they hit an exchange, and even that one was very close anyway. Yes they are all up now and yes you would have had to have gone onto some obscure exchange like EtherDelta to get a hold of them at the time and screw around, but overall most of them I have found just tie up opportunity until the market discovers them and in that time you can usually buy the same thing at cost or less if you are willing to hunt around for them. Tenx is a perfect example, crashed over 90% and could be had for 80 cents a piece just a few weeks back.
Technically TenX (PAY) didn't crash 90%. The ICO price was 0.75 USD, but it was HitBTC that was inflating the prices. I never did trust those prices as they didn't reflect the true market. But yes, there is money to be made in ICOs. Just gotta pick the right projects.
... and whilst I made my transfer within the first 30 seconds, it looks as though I missed the window before it was sold out. Not sure what happens next - they will probably run an ETH refund.
This is an insider trading right? Few people indicate this trend will continue. General puclic will always have the leftover price range instead of the lowest offering price per token...
So 86,206 ETH (or US$25m) were inhaled in the first minute and credited as tokens, plus whatever overruns are still in their wallet. In theory the hard cap was reached and the sale is over. I took a glance at the blockchain, and there are several pending transactions (including one at 636 ETH) and over 6,000 transfers to Decentraland. However, according to the TokenTracker we have: 60% which goes to community, team and foundation as planned. 7.7% with 215,172,000 MANA 4.5% with 125,000,000 MANA 0.7% with 18,750,000 MANA then three with between 333,336 and 3,657,043 and one leaker with 0.0006% or 16,666,8 - probably the single fastest typist. I saw a comment in the blockchain reader along the line that accepted smart contracts had been disallowed at the last minute. If, as it appears, only three big players have sucked it all up (or at least a big chunk of the crowdsale), it will be interesting to see what the Decentraland response is, given that their published intent was a wide spread of tokens in the community and a phased discount structure over a week. "Decentraland is for artists, gamers, students and online communities". AFAIK they could operate a queuing system or impose a maximum transaction per wallet using smart contracts, though perhaps doing this retrospectively is a big ask.. It's probably not insider trading, as anyone with access to the expertise and funds could have written a smart contract with any value of ETH and gas. So was the intent of any big buyer to see a 40% premium on their ETH in a week by onward selling, or to dominate the landscape? Either way they have subverted the ICO.
Be aware: I got an email from Decentraland announcing the ICO several hours after it closed, but probably at the original block time (the ether blockchain ran several hours fast). HOWEVER, I then received a mailchimp copy of that mail from Exante [[email protected]] which looks very dodgy. Might be a simple substitution scam for Ether payments.
Some more detail. Apparently the big orders were consolidated contracts, which are cheaper (and which also block the entrance for all other users, so it's not all good). One was apparently executed several hours before opening for 'cash' clients - still seems as though the ICO was cooked. Obviously Decentraland are feeling some bruising from the smaller punters taking their complaints to the boards, as they released this (they disabled the whitelist prior to open): "we're going to honor our whitelist and sell 2% of the MANA tokens to the people who got whitelisted. The price will be the Ether equivalent of $24/land, as originally planned. This will take place early next week. More details to come soon." - HUZZAH (self.decentraland) However, 2% seems just a tad ingenuous, given that they have held back 60%, so rightly or wrongly, they are copping some flack on failing to adhere to their stated principles and laying down a red carpet for wealthy individuals or groups. If you have ETH in their system you wish to recover, https://www.reddit.com/r/decentrala...ering_your_eth_if_you_used_the_chrome_plugin/ tells you how, as apparently the plug-in fails in reverse.
