On Feb. 15th, Seele was set to open its ICO and as we all witnessed, it didn’t turn out well.
I think it can be summarized as a poor attempt, caused by panic reactions.
There were many signs of the high demand surrounding the project. ICODrops rated its hype as High. Telegram had close to 30k users in the official group. These are low hanging fruit, but not very representative.
Google Analytics could’ve been used to measure the number of users interacting with their site more accurately. Although many use ad blockers that also kills GA, but it still gives valuable numbers.
A poor decision was to give the Google docs link out before the actual website countdown finished. The explanation was they wanted to prevent scammers promoting malicious links. Since it was announced on every possible channel to be vigilant, this is a poor excuse. It’s easy to get scammed when a lot of people are in the sate of FOMO, but your integrity is far more valuable in my opinion.
After everything started to go downhill, there was no response from the admins for a very long time. “Very long time” is relative, but for an angry mob looking at a generic error screen, every second feels like an eternity.
It is clear that if you want a successful ICO, you need to pay attention to the technical aspects. Weather if it’s keeping your Telegram group check, or opening the floodgates to your whitelist, you need technical expertise.
Seele promises a lot of innovation in the Blockchain ecosystem, but if they don’t get their act together, people will move on to project that inevitably copy what Seele offers.
You also need to chill out a bit. Remember that coming up with blockchain 4.0 and running an ICO are two very different things, they require totally different skill sets. ICO popularity has risen exponentially in the past months, everyone wants to get into the next big thing as soon as possible. On top of this, Seele was having a whitelist tied to an exam, to make sure people who only want to dump their share on exchanges are kept to a minimum. There is not much experience out there for this kind of whitelisting. Obviously the people in charge had no experience in measuring the community interest and did not research how many people Google can handle.
If you are shaken by the unfortunate whitelisting, you need to look at it from a technical perspective and not an emotional one. The people who came up with Neural Consensus, VTP and VHTTP were not responsible for it. The two are separate. The values and ideas proposed in the whitepaper are still there!
