[Monetha ICO] ETH sent in less than 2 minutes. Two and a half hours later, transaction error!

I present you with a detailed personal analysis of the events and outcome of the Monetha ICO (MTH token).

Events occurred as follows:

5 hours before the ICO

I woke up early and got ready by reading the instructions for the Metamask wallet, the one I used to participate in the ICO.

2 hours before the ICO

Monetha sends the first reminder of the ICO reminder on their Slack feed. All slack channels are blocked for users to avoid scams and irrelevant spam.

1 hour before the ICO

Another reminder message is sent through the Slack channel. This one is also accompanied by a warning message with a fake website and heads up for a future announcement of the last eight digits of the crowdsale adress.

20 minutes before the ICO

Justas Pikelis announces the last 8 digits of the crowd sale address on Monetha’s Youtube channel.

10 seconds before the ICO

With my finger on the trigger I unpaciently wait to participate.

The ICO starts!

I complete the registration form in about 15 seconds. Next I refresh the page another 5-10 seconds pass as I wait to see the full crowdsale address. The address. I paste it in my Metamask fast set the gas limit up to 250 000 as advised on their crowd funding page.
I refresh the page again and instantly see 20000 ETH raised. I refresh the page again... 59 000 ETH raised.

2 minutes in the ICO

By this time about 2 minutes have passed and I click the transaction to check its status to see if I got in the softcap.
Transaction status pending...

5 minutes in the ICO

I receive a mail from the Monetha team telling me that the ICO is live!
By this time the ICO bar bugged and was showing 0.002/95000 ETH.

Confused, I check the transaction on etherscan.io again and join the Telegram group.

15 minutes in the ICO

Panic sets in the telegram group with spam messages of pending transactions pouring in.
What does pending mean? Did I get in? Will I receive the tokens or get my ETH back?

Monetha announces pending is “OK”.

30 minutes in the ICO

A few people start receiving their tokens but more messages with pending status on transactions continue to be spammed.
I check my transaction again... still pending.
Same massage over and over by Monetha.

1 hour in the ICO

People that received tokens in MEW are shown the message "Not a valid ERC-20 token".

Monetha steps in with a sketchy message.

All seems very weird and I refresh my transaction on EtherScan and my transaction timer resets after about 54 minutes of pending!
I see some posts about this issue as well. I tell to myself its ok, the transaction is going to go through, I got in early.

2 hours in the ICO

Monetha responds to MyEthereumWallet problem.

FUD and panic continue as people that relieved their MTH tokens become aware of the fact that the tokens are not transferable. Monetha responds trying to keep things under control.

More and more people are receiving error messages about their transactions. I check mine, still pending…

Monetha announces the meaning of the error message.

On the EtherScan crowdsale adress page I see that the last transaction was processed 6 minutes ago and the one before 20 minutes ago. I tell to myself there is still a chance!

Over 2 hours in the ICO

The slack channel announces the ETH cap has been reached.

The post-ICO announcement:

Check my transaction, still pending…
15 minutes later I get the error. Bad instruction!

I was very enthusiastic about the Monetha’s product concept and confident in their core team as I was awaiting this ICO, the first one trusted enough to take part in.

Initially I thought the form registration for the ICO was good as people will not instantly sent in transactions, giving a rather fair chance for the whales and fishes to get in, as this was one of the more hyped ICOs and large numbers of investors were bound to participate.

On the telegram channel I also read that some people weren’t even able to participate because they were getting errors when trying to complete the registration form for the crowdsale address to show in their browser.

As for the lack of a cap limit of ETH sent / participant, almost all the soft cap was and the bonus associated with it went to a single address that sent it almost 21 000 ETH.

Speculation about the crowdfunding address being leaked beforehand was also spread throughout the social media channels stating that whales send the huge amounts before the ICO started.

Overall, I was left disappointed about the organization of the ICO and the sketchy procedures adopted by the team, as well as the transaction processing power of the Ethereum Blockchain.

Links to the etherscan.io for the crowdfunding address and the Monetha token page can be found bellow:
https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x741fc999f5b62c80831cf659aed04c64ac8ef24e&p=1
https://etherscan.io/token/0xaf4dce16da2877f8c9e00544c93b62ac40631f16