I'm sharing my tale, "ripped from the headlines" as they'd say here in the US, so that you can learn.
Was I ripped off? No.
Did I make money? Well, I don't know yet.
Did I invest time? Absolutely.
Would I do it again? Well, we'll see.
Meet Exscudo
Exscudo could have been any other blockchain startup. In fact, there's very little to differentiate it between the other mid- to low-tier ICOs we've bumped into. They raised something like $5m US in their ICO - that's why we wouldn't have them in the category of Bancor or EOS (neither of which we invested in) or even Tierion (which we did invest in last week; its $25 million target was achieved within the first couple days).
One problem, actually, is their lack of differentiation. When we first wrote about it on the Metacoin site - which you can read here: http://metacoin.co/an-ico-to-watch-exscudo-eon - we shared their mission statement, which was really trying to do way too much for way too many people.
So yeah, they're any other ICO.
But...THE BOUNTY PROGRAM!
TBH, that's what got me interested: a bounty program, when run effectively, can be an amazing tool to build community. And, in my case, I zeroed in on two things that I thought would give me a leg up on others in the bounty program: I have a blog and I have a lot of Twitter followers.
For the first time in a long time, I was ready to actually monetize my Twitter following.
By achieving certain milestones - say, retweeting their tweets, or writing a story about their ICO - you received "stakes" in the Bounty program. Those stakes were converted into actual coins once the bounty program was done.
The first sign...a lack of communication
I could have predicted the ICO wouldn't raise mega-millions after the first few days of the bounty program. Tweets were sporadic, the English was pretty average (which I can forgive), and my own bounty stakes weren't counted on a regular basis.
Updates were delayed, and the PR team - which did a great job - was hamstrung by the lack of communication from management.
Still, I invested
I dropped a little bit on the ICO; but, because others dropped a little bit, too, the terms of the ICO stated that half of the unsold coins would be donated to a foundation of some sort, and the other half would be redistributed to ICO investors.
This meant that my original investment was multiplied by nearly 7 - MOAR COINS! - but it also meant that dilution was going to be a problem.
Investment was set at 0.0002 BTC per coin (called "EONs"), at the time that was about 47 cents or so. But...if you now have seven times the number of coins you had in the first place, doesn't that also mean that the value of these coins should be much less? (That's my assumption.)
Milestones - not really achieved so far
EON is a "staking coin," so the potential exists for a metric crapton of profit from setting up masternodes. However, the testnet is supposed to have been live already, and other Q1/Q2 milestones are now into Q3 - with the fear that we'll see them in Q4.
The bounty ended up turning out okay for me, but the level of confusion was palpable - and the confusion around the rest of the product and when coins will be traded is really at too high a level for me to have any confidence in the success of the project.
What Next?
I have actually reached out to people at Exscudo to offer my assistance; since the majority of the team is Estonian, English is their second language, and my experience as a communications executive could be of tremendous value to them during this project. But I've heard nothing back.
The management team appears to be okay with the project having the appearance of going off the rails.
And it may not go off the rails...
Those Old Saws...
Don't invest more than you can afford to lose. Trust me, I didn't here. If the project does indeed go belly up, I'll move on to the next thing.
Read the terms of service, the agreements, and understand what you're getting into. (Again, since I invested risk capital I wasn't too gosh darn concerned here.)
And don't make a down payment on the Lamborghini. No, I didn't do that, either - but I've got to be honest, some of the chatter on the Slack channel really has me wondering whether people are looking at the same information I'm looking at.
For instance, one person compared the coin to Dash because of the nature of its product and the number of coins created. Following this reasoning, this person said the price for EON would be $100 within the next six months.
That would also give this coin a market cap of $24 Billion, which would put it second behind Bitcoin. Not gonna happen.
I share because I care.
Actually, I hope you learn that your due diligence should be rather intensive when getting into a program - that's actually one reason I invested a tiny amount, and relied on my bounty program experience to create coins. (90% of my coins are from the bounty program.)
And, like anything else, diversify your holdings. It's why I've got a little in the big coins, a little in the altcoins, a little on Bitconnect.