Not so serious look at tokensales

Tokensales have received a lot of buzz in the last few months. Some sang praises to tokensales as a new fundraising tool and a promise to democratize venture investment. Others condemned tokensales as a dangerous weapon in the hands of scammers and a dubious get-rich-quick scheme.

It’s been only recently when new projects started popping up everyday by a dozen like fresh pimples on the face of a teenager and CoinMarketCap has become a serious competition to Candy Crush for the time in public transportation.

Only a few months ago, each tokensale could be a contestant for a superlative: the fastest, the one that raised the most, the one that broke Ethereum, and the one where the founders got away with all the money. Though these days each new project seems to trump the preceding ones in various ways, it were those initial few tokensales that established the benchmarks against which all other projects would be compared.

For those who only recently joined the crypto movement and for the veterans of the industry who want to reminisce about the good old times, we made a short video about evolution of token sales. Here’s how the projects have changed over time and how their investors changed with them:

Despite the variety of approaches to conduct a tokensale, the key to a campaign is building a strong community. It is fascinating to see some people take projects personal and how they treasure their opinion about a project like a last candy in the house.

A token sale community consists of three large groups:

Projects conducting a tokensale;Contributors/investors to the project;Onlookers and supporters, opinionated about the project but not necessary placing money in it.

Let’s take a look at all three archetypes.

Projects: Dreamers Changing the World

Teams conducting tokensales and building blockchain technology based projects are usually enthusiasts driven by an idea of decentralization, democratization, and a more fair world. This is how they perceive themselves. The society, however, oftentimes has a different perception. We asked different people how they understand a token sale. You bet, your Mom thinks of it differently than a VC that turned you down with your first startup.

Investors: Tuning in a Bullshit Detector

Speaking of VCs’, investors supporting tokensales are people of different walks of life and professions. Their daily routine is to listen to the project pitches and sort the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s a tougher task than what it seems: the info is limited, the number of projects is huge, the FOMO is real, and the teams who learned how to sell themselves. Oftentimes, in the conversation with the investors, they mention how they get to tune in their own bullshit detector to not get caught up in pretty pitches. We played with a thought how this “bullshit detector” can look in real life:

Onlookers: Die Hard Supporters and Evil Trolls

Finally, the largest group around any tokensale is those who are willing to support a project just because. Whether they share the team’s grand idea or simply because a project teases their fantasies about the moon, they advocate for a project without looking back. These people live in reddit, medium, bitcointalk, and slack channels and can be easily identified by a name, decorated with suffix: Crypto-, bitcoin-, cyber-, and hustle-, just to name a few.

The more you spend watching these people in habitats, the more fascinated you can become about how self-forgiving they get defending a project in the eyes of a community at large. Beware, however, that these people’s hate is just as strong as their love. Beg for mercy if something about your team, tokensale strategy, or way you respond to them triggers a doubt. And there probably no better place to watch the wild west of crypto, than in BitcoinTalk. We made a video about the platform, which has become a cultural phenomenon of the industry. If you are familiar with BitcoinTalk, many things will ring a bell. If you are not — it is worth spending time there. Time well spent and entertainment are guaranteed!

We hope that we did not hurt anyone’s feelings. The industry that, as a whole, has to defend itself from a lot of criticism, can start being taken seriously by the financial community when it can recognize its own flaws and laugh at itself first.

Moreover, we all need a little laugh when the market is going crazy.

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Not so serious look at tokensales was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.