One of the most hyped and anticipated ICOs for me was Bee Token. An impressive team of people from Uber, Google, Facebook and Civic with an even more impressive advisory team have come together to use the power of the Blockchain to revolutionize the world of Home Sharing.
Like many other popular ICOs the people at Bee were faced with a luxury problem. The interest in their ICO far exceeded the supply of Tokens. Bee organized a token sale for accredited investors, a private pre-sale and a public sale.
All three sales were split evenly, each sale had a cap of $5 million which ensured an even spread of the Tokens.
Kudos to Bee for evenly distibuting the tokens between the private investors, the accredited investors and the public.
The biggest challenge for Bee was the Public Sale. To keep things fair Bee initiated a whitelist. The questionnaire was extensive and those who had an Airbnb account and a wide variety of Social Media accounts had an advantage over the other people trying to participate in the ICO.
Fun detail is that one of the Social Media accounts listed was Steemit. I am certain that it was my Steemit account and the fact that I had a post about Bee Token got me whitelisted for the ICO.
In total 25,000+ people got on the whitelist and were eligible to proceed with the next step: The KYC procedure.
Here is where things got off the rails…
The instructions by Bee were very clear, only the whitelisted people could take part in the KYC but even Bee could not stop the FOMO that gripped the interested Crypto traders.
As soon as the KYC procedure went live, the servers buckled under the 50,000 people who were trying to upload their information.
The Bee Token Telegram group was swamped with people complaining, asking questions, it was chaos all around. Not everyone had received their email yet informing them whether they had made in unto the whitelist or not.
I even saw someone in the telegram group trying to sell his whitelisted account
At that point it was clear that people who didn’t make the cut would do anything to get in on the action one way or another.
After the KYC was completed it was time for Bee Token to announce the caps. With such a large group eligible to buy Bee Token, the people at Bee had to make sure that everyone got a fair chance to purchase the token.
In their wisdom they decided to implement a personal cap and split the ICO in three rounds.
In the first round you had a guaranteed amount of Bee Token that you could purchase. In the second round you could double your cap there were no guarantees. The third round would be uncapped and much like other ICO...first come, first serve.
I had to admit that I was disappointed when Bee announced that the personal cap was a mere 0.1 ether (0.2 if you had an Airbnb account) but afterwards this was to be expected. with over 25,000 people participating the $5 million cap would be reached in minutes if the cap was set too high and not everyone would be able to buy the tokens.
Bee professionally communicated the rules and conditions of the ICO. On the day of the ICO you would have to register on the Bee Token site, retrieve the ETH address for the transfer or the funds. All measures to avoid scams were put in place. There was even a video of the CEO added, holding the ETH address so that you could verify that the ETH you were sending your crypto to was legit. To make things to go even more smoothly, the participants had a 24 hour window to transfer their ETH.
In fact after transferring the ether you immediately got your Bee Tokens….nice service!
But again that FOMO monster reared its ugly head. After I had leisurely sent my ETH to Bee and immediately received my Bee Tokens in my Metamask wallet I noticed an e-mail from in my inbox. At first I thought that It was a confirmation mail but on further inspection I saw that it was a mail claiming to be from Bee and that they had struck a deal with Microsoft. Even more that there was a cap of 100 ETH and a bonus if I acted immediately. The good people had even added the ETH address where I could send my money to so that I could take advantage of this great deal at once.
Of course this was a mail sent by SCAMMERS!
Now there were a couple of things made me realize that this e-mail was not sent by Bee Token.
The Microsoft deal.
Even if this would be true, do you really think that Bee Token would announce this news during a whitelisted ICO? Furthermore don’t you think that this would actually be headline news?
The 100 ETH Cap
The Cap set by Bee was $5 million, this would mean that 1 person could potentially by $100,000 worth of Bee Token (the price of ETH was around $1000) at the time. So it would take just 50 people ( at 100 ETH) to buy up all the available Tokens. More than that why would a company that set a 0.1 ETH cap suddenly change this to 100 ETH?
The Whitelist
It was made very clear from the beginning that if you weren’t on the whitelist then you wouldn’t be able to participate. No respectable company would change this, certainly not during the ICO.
The ETH address in the e-mail
Have you ever received an address for an ICO by email….? Nuff said.
The e-mail address
Now I am not sure if the follow works with all e-mail clients or e-mail services but usually if you hit the “reply” button you can see the real e-mail address instead of the Alias. The e-mail I got had the alias BeeToken.ICO or something but when I hit the reply button I saw the real e-mail address
This is a good way to check if the e-mail you received is from a legit source.
After confirming my doubts about the email I went to check the ETH address on Etherscan. I figured that there was no way that people would be fooled! Boy was I wrong, the scammers were receiving large amounts of Ether. I saw multiple instances where people were sending 10 to 30 ETH to fund the fraudulent address.
Later I learned that there were even more ETH addresses in play. The cyber frauds are rumored to have collected around $1,000,000. Let’s hope that they didn’t had time to cash everything and lost a boatload of money on account of the recent dip.
The second buying round went as smoothly as the first and I was able to buy my second batch of Bee Token. I had already figured that the 3rd round was just for show and that I would not be able to get extra tokens (if they hadn’t sold out already in the second round).
And sure enough in the third round there was a still “small” amount of Bee tokens available ($180,000) but before you could say...Hey, there are still Bee Tokens available!. Poof, they were gone!
I have to say that despite all the drama, surrounding Scams, FOMO induced cryptotraders that Bee Token deserves a huge compliment on how they handled their ICO. They had to make some tough decisions but in doing so they made sure that everyone got their fair share.
The actual buying of the Tokens was a nice and relaxed affair even during the second round I had none of the usual stress that goes with ICOs.
The built up to the Public Sale was organized and they kept everyone well informed. Sure there were some things that could have been done a little better.
I (and also others) was a little bit confused about the “doubling” of the cap for the second round. I figured that double meant that I could buy 0.2 ETH in the second round but alas...no such luck!
Bee has done everything in their power to make their ICO a success, all the drama surrounding the KYC and Public Sale Scam were things that they couldn’t have prevented even if they tried. The reality is that the hype and expectations surrounding the Bee Token were just too high.
Bee Token has announced that their crypto coin will be hitting the exchanges (here is hoping for Binance and Kucoin) in March. It will be interesting to see how the coin will do.
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