Problem
At the traditional crowdfunding platforms, the investor cannot control the project development process. He gives money and loses control over them, fully relying on his opinion about the developer, which is made up of many factors, and the developer pays the service a commission from the funds raised and pays for additional services.
Thus, the crowdfunding platforms currently available on the Internet do not fully take into account the interests of both investors and startups.
In my opinion, the Investor should receive maximum guarantees, and the Startup is an easy start for his project.
Only the use of blockchain technology, in the form of smart contracts, could help solve this problem, but ICOs were compromised by fraudsters due to the lack of generally accepted standards of smart contracts for their implementation. As a result, the funds were collected, but the development was not conducted.
Decision
Attempts to create such a standard were undertaken by one of the developers of the standard token Ethereum ERC-20, Fabian Vogelsteller. He presented his “reversible ICO” model (RICO). It is based on a smart contract, which allows investors to return their funds in exchange for the tokens they purchased at any time during the project. In this case, the returned tokens can be bought again by other investors.
This is a good idea to protect investors' funds, but it completely ignores the interests of developers. What is the point of organizing a crowdsale if the developer cannot use the money?
An acceptable for all standard smart contract for RICO should take into account the interests of all participants in the investment process by dividing the development period into stages during which investors can withdraw their investments, but only until the development period of the current phase has ended.
For example:
1. Stage 1 - MVP development, 100 Eth is required, the cost of 1 token is 1 Eth , the development time is 30 days (it starts flowing after the whole amount has been collected). Investors in this phase can return their Eth during the fundraising period and within 30 days of development. Developers take Eth from the balance of a smart contract.
2. Stage 2 - creating a web application, 300 Eth is required, the cost of 1 token is 2 Eth, the development period is 20 days (it starts flowing after the entire amount has been collected). Investors in this phase can return their Eth during the fundraising period and within 30 days of development. Developers take Eth from the balance of a smart contract.
3. Etc.
4. An investor can create orders to sell his tokens at a price slightly lower than the cost of the next stage token and make a profit even during the project development period, but tokens purchased in this way cannot be returned to the smart contract (mini-exchange).
Yes. Investors in the first stage are at risk, but if the cost of the token will increase from stage to stage, then this risk is offset by the expected profit.
Here you can see the source code of such a smart contract:
https://github.com/KotNaplakal/RICO/blob/master/ExampleHere to test his work in Rinkeby Testnet (need MetaMask)
http://satoshi.team/#0xcf781330fa20baf8808ce6f1908854f0b23e971fI propose in this topic to discuss the possibility of creating a crowdfunding platform based on this standard.
