ICO Investing pool system

It’s become quite popular nowadays for groups of individuals to ‘pool’ together funds, in order to participate at an ICO which has a mandatory minimum investment.

The way this usually works is you pick a leader who contacts the ICO, negotiates a bonus and other conditions, and does the KYC process.

Everyone sends ETH to the leader’s personal wallet, while he updates an Excel sheet with each contribution, or uses a centralized platform. Then he sends all the funds to the ICO’s wallet, and after the token sale, when the ICO transfers a bunch of tokens to him in return, he starts to distribute them to the other participants, proportionally to their contribution.

Problem

This usually works out, but not always: human errors are possible while doing calculations and needless to say, you are totally trusting a single person to hold a large amount of funds. Some platforms, like PrimaBlock, go a step in the right direction, but they’re still not fully decentralized, as stated by a disclaimer on their website: the pool’s owner has the power to mismanage funds.

Open Collectors Network saw a market need for a trustless pool, where the leader’s role is replaced by publicly verifiable code. So we made one.

Solution:

What’s great about our solution is that it will keep all the benefits of the existing process, but will reduce the risk of losing funds, by replacing middle man calculation with public code. In simple words, instead of sending funds to a person, you send them to a piece of code: an Ethereum smart contract.

All participants have equal rights. There is no owner or leader. Anyone can join, leave & send the pooled funds to the ICO, subject to the pool limits, specified upon creation. This means you are solely responsible for the decisions to join, leave, send funds & withdraw.

There are currently no fees, other than normal transaction gas fees, though in the near future, our platform will require a small, fixed fee, paid in ECTO.

There’s only 2 pieces of information the contract needs:

the ICO wallet address, supplied at creation time, where the pool will send it’s entire ETH balance
the ERC20 token contract address, supplied later, together with the withdraw transaction, by each participant

In order to better explain the inner workings, without going into actual code too much, let’s try to tell a short story of how the process unfolds, step by step: