https://artis.eco/en/blog/detail/the-ito-is-canceledBY LAB10 COLLECTIVE / 06.08.2018
The ICO market has been infected by a gold rush fever – creating a new, vibrant industry within months, attracting not only people interested in the potential positive impact of the technology on society but of course also people just out for a quick buck. The value of coins and tokens is often driven by pure speculation and in the competition for attention within this vibrant setting a huge marketing infrastructure has developed, trying to get everything to glitter, no matter if it's gold or not – resulting in a lot of scam projects which increase distrust and fears in regard to this new funding possibility, leading to increasing legal and tax insecurities.
This is not the right breeding ground for a project like ARTIS which is driven by the mission of sustainable growth and value creation for society. To continue the path towards a successful Initial Token Offering in fall, we would have needed to focus all our resources on playing the games forced by the toxic ICO world. That's nothing we would like to go for at the moment. But read on for the whole story…
Where we come from
ARTIS emerged out of a sense of urgency.
Many of us - especially those with technical background - started feeling uncomfortable about the way the Internet was developing already many years ago. With the Snowden revelations, the huge risks of the ongoing centralization and of the associated data and identity ownership model for the first time became apparent to a much larger audience.
But there was a big problem: What to do about it? Should we just try harder to get more people to use PGP for e-mail? And Diaspora for social networking? Should we build and encourage useage of tools like Privacymachine? Should we focus on influencing policy makers?
When Ethereum appeared on the radars, for many of us something clicked. It was not yet so clear what exactly it was (as wasn't even to its creators), but there was a strong intuition that this may be the missing piece of the puzzle we were trying to assemble.
The core team of lab10 started to assemble in 2016, initially under the umbrella of BlockchainHub Graz. We started reading countless papers, doing experiments and PoCs and connecting to the community (e.g. by conducting a Blockchain Startup Contest).
It was also 2016 when the legendary TheDAO happened - an event we watched closely (also participating with a small stake).
TheDAO showed that a lot had to be done before we could seriously try to have contracts automate organization governance. In fact, effective governance of decentralized organizations is still a significant challenge even off-chain. We've studied proposals like Teal Organizations and Holacracy and came to the conclusion that governance would remain a challenge requiring learning through experimentation for a while. That's why we chose to make lab10 a cooperative - it comes with less legal restrictions about how governance can work internally.
For a while, the crowdsale of Ethereum itself had been one of the biggest in history, even though the approx. 18 Mio USD it raised started to look modest in the context of TheDAO.
Then in 2017, Ethereum based crowdsales became a big thing. The number of projects doing successful crowdsales, increasingly branded as "ICOs", grew quickly.
It was during that time that we started experimenting with Streems and that our vision for ARTIS started to materialize. Doing a crowdsale looked like an elegant way to get a project funded by those interested in it, avoiding the legal and bureaucratic hassles of traditional funding mechanisms.
By mid 2017, the lab10 collective was founded, with ARTIS already being the designated main project of the organization and with a crowdsale being the declared way for main funding.
We started working towards the crowdfunding milestone, setting priorities accordingly. Considerable resources were invested in writing papers, developing a design language and stories and also in figuring out legal constraints.
lab10 collective eG / team ARTIS
Like many others, we were driven by the vision of a crowdsale leading to a kind of holistic stakeholders: maximizing the overlap between users and investors/owners.
The status whitepaper, published at about that time, is an example for an ICO driven by this vision. The status team went to great lengths trying to design an ICO which would lead to a fair and decentralized token issuance, but their recap blog post already contained clear hints about the difficulties encountered. Most importantly, they came to the conclusion that Participation that requires proof of individuality is likely a more effective approach moving forward.
This was also the time when a lot of technology focused people started having increasingly ambivalent feelings about ICOs in general. There were a lot of soft indicators that our vision about the role of ICOs may have been too optimistic, for example the kind of crowd entering community chat channels or the ambivalent reactions of outsiders to the topic "Blockchain".
Anyway, we didn't want to do things in a rush. We were busy building the organization and getting new team members aligned with the vision (while it was evolving) and up to speed. So, "peak cryto" went by and transformed into "crypto winter", with the ARTIS ICO still being prepared.
ICOs today
While we were preparing for a crowdsale, the whole environment dramatically changed.
The ICO process was kind of industrialized, with a lot of service providers making it much easier for outsiders to participate on the offer side.
With competition for "crypto investors" increasing, good "ICO marketing" became much more important (as theorized by Vitalik in a signaling theory model about cryptocurrency issuance where he wrote about marketing as proof-of-work).
The successful ICOs of 2017 also caught the attention of the old money elite. Some of them have figured out a pattern to take advantage of the new funding scheme: buy a considerable amount of coins or tokens in the presale with a significant discount (50% or more), help creating FOMO for a successful ICO and then use the delta between the initial market price set by the ICO and the price of the presale to make a quick buck, often destroying the token in the process.
While several of the projects behind successful ICOs are at least questionable, others are blatant scams, with the project and team simply disappearing after collecting funds.
Some of this scams caused a lot of public attention and severely damaged the reputation of the whole ICO concept (and transitively of every project associating with it). This in turn caused regulators to take a more skeptical stance.
The DAICO model was one of many attempts to advance the ICO model in reaction to the growing sophistication of "scammy ICOs".
In retrospect, we should probably have tried harder to run the ARTIS crowdfunding with such an adapted design in order to stand out. In fact, we seriously considered doing a DAICO a few months ago. But the difficulties to conduct even a "normal" ICO (clarifications of legal and tax implications) made such a strategy look too risky. In fact even the "conservative" choice already led to a delay of the token generation).
We had diverted from the typical ICO design somewhere else: the token price for private investors in the pre-sale didn't contain any discount (50%+ are typical nowadays). This had 2 important consequences:
no urgency to participate in the pre-sale
little momentum created by the pre-sale
This didn't come as a surprise. We had decided to take that risk in order to be coherent with lab10's mission of working towards a fair society. Giving a big discount to those with deep pockets seemed to blatant a contradiction in that regard.
So, the ARTIS crowdsale started in June with a simple token reservation contract. While reservations started coming in (after a few days, about 200 Ether were in the contract), we were struggling to deliver the "marketing as proof-of-work" needed to create enough momentum.
Trying to navigate the jungle the "ICO industry" had become was a fascinating and sobering experience. We were bombarded with offers for "ICO promotion", "exclusive investor events" etc.
ICO rating services repeatedly urged our lack of a visible community.
In fact, the predominant privacy oriented mindset in our team had not helped to build a vibrant online community.
But looking at such online communities of other projects also made it obvious that many of them consisted primarily of fake identities in order to artificially boost numbers.
We concluded that the average ICO nowadays works like this:
A significant share of the tokens is sold to private investors (often VCs) in the pre-sale at a huge discount. A marketing machine, boosted by 6- to 7-digit USD budgets, makes sure the project burns through the noise - just long enough to induce a FOMO effect. An important aspect here is the build-up of a "large community". That's because e.g. a Telegram group with a huge number of participants is the preferred way to rationalize a positive judgement - after all, nobody wants to admit that she was just bought into a decision. In fact those who've never seen the markets of the attention economy (social accounts, referrals, likes, ...) at work from up-close can hardly be blamed for that naivety. There's much room for collective learning here.
At this point we were challenged to take a decision: we could subjugate to the now dominant ICO logic, making much more noise, quickly pumping up a community and spending a lot of money in order to get good ratings, important listings and feed attention brokers by buying ads - postponing doing sustainable things to later. Or we could not do it, concentrating again on the ARTIS project itself and look for alternative ways forward.
We decided to not do it, because - put simply: we ran out of emotional resources.
The mismatch between what we were out to do and what we were forced to do in order to conduct a successful crowdsale just grew too big. We were not prepared to operate in such an environment, we feared that if we tried anyway, we may destroy the project by turning it into something else than we were out for. So we decided to stand close with our vision and core values instead.
This is not to say that it's impossible to do a non-scammy ICO today.
Indeed we still believe that in principle crowdfunding is a beautiful concept and that a Blockchain like Ethereum is a fantastic tool for sophisticated crowdsale design.
We do however realize that our attempt failed and believe that in order to conduct a successful (not just in terms of funds collected, but also in terms of alignment with the project vision) crowdsale today or in the future, a lot of knowledge about the attention economy is needed. The unique human identities ARTIS is set out to deliver combined with good reputation modeling, could help to create more resilient crowdsale designs in the future.
Where we go
With the ICO (or "ITO" as we named it in order to be technically correct) removed from the equation, we can and are eager to repurpose our resources to developing the actual project and related cooperations. There's no immediate funding needs (lab10 is well funded for the time being), for the long term we will look out for funding opportunities which are well aligned with our vision.
We have done a deep dive into the details of the new Plasma technology, were we can establish a close connection to Ethereum and provide a performant, scalable and secure Blockchain platform for DApps. Beside this great opportunity with Plasma and related business partnerships, we will focus on establishing a simple and easy to use identity wallet attracting as many people as possible for ARTIS. The stronger focus on DApps and its users gives us a clear mission working for a free, fair and educated society. We are excited to gain more and more momentum and provide you with our first tools soon.
We're following the Ethereum community closely in virtual places like ethresearch and in real places like at Dappcon. Time and time again, we're amazed by the speed at which things are progressing. We also see some persisting problems a lot of projects are struggling with, related e.g. to scalability, identity and privacy. This makes us confident that ARTIS can become a valuable complement within the Ethereum ecosystem.
We have already started updating the ARTIS vision to one which is not constrained by the ICO logic and will give an update on that soon in a follow-up article.
