Remember the 16 Billion lumens that should have been given away on June 27th (well, in fact it was 17 Billion, since there were also 1 Billion reserved for Ripple XRP holders)?
It was an absolute joke!
Last week I wrote an article on this giveaway, stating that the market would react to this enormous giveaway, which would almost triple the circulating supply of lumens (was around 9.5 Billion at the time).
In order to participate, you had to either claim ownership of your Bitcoins, if you had your coins in a wallet, or let exchanges do the work, if you held your balance with one of the participating ones.
As of today, June 29th, there are a bit over 10.1 Billion lumens circulating, so I ask myself,
WHERE ARE THE OTHER OVER 15 BILLION COINS?
The main problem appears to be a lack of communication between Stellar.org and some of the partners, mainly POLONIEX (how strange, poloniex involved in some wrongdoing, why am I not surprised?).
Since March 8th, Stellar have posted on their website blog how exactly the Airdrop would work, and which exchanges were involved. Poloniex was included, and according to the post, users didn't have to worry about it and just wait until June 27th to receive the money.
Out of coincidence, after the snapshot was taken by Stellar on June 26th, to know who was to be rewarded for holding Bitcoin, Poloniex twitted the following:
Theoretically, this should not be a problem for Poloniex, since them, as a company, are not forced to confirm or deny any claim made by another company.
However, what if I tell you that I, among other hundreds or thousands of users, contacted their support department before the giveaway, giving them enough time to answer our queries, or at least know that they were listed as participants of this airdrop?
I wrote them the following message:
And in the following screenshot you can check the date when this was asked (I believe 3 days is more than enough to answer before it is too late):
Once again, I understand they are not forced to take care of claims made by other companies (even though their customer support is among the worst I have ever seen, it's been 5 days and no answer), but what bothers me is that they were clearly aware of this event long before it was due.
WHY WAIT UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE TO LET PEOPLE KNOW YOU ARE NOT PARTICIPATING?
Maybe because people would have been able to move their funds to other exchanges? Maybe because they wanted to keep the reward for themselves (too scammy)?
As far as I'm concerned, participating in this event would have had no negative effect or cost for them, so why refuse anyways?
WHY DO I COMPLAIN EVEN MORE?
Even though people are responsible for their own money and how they use it, I, among other people, made a big trade due to the giveaway news.
What I did was short STR on Poloniex, expecting the price to drop drastically due to the huge increase in circulating supply. Remember there were 9.5B and by now there should be around 26.5B (there are only 10.1B), almost three times the previous supply.
Considering there were no particularly positive news to pump the price, or negative news to dump it even further, it was right for me to asume that the price would probably drop to close to 1/3, to keep the total market cap from before the airdrop.
In order to short, you need to borrow money from other users, and trade on margin, which increases the exposure and therefore the risk.
Fortunately, I entered the trade a bit early on, and took a decent price before the event, as you can see in the following screenshot:
Of course, after I saw the misunderstandings between companies, I closed the trade and moved on, and I repeat, I was fortunate enough to make a profit out of this move:
Imagine now if you trusted the goodwill of these companies, and took a big loan in Bitcoin to be able to claim more lumens (as I am aware many people did), or made any transaction related to the event.
What I'm trying to say is that this misunderstanding (or scam, or whatever it was) between two companies, ends up with no consequences for them, and the only ones negatively affected are users, as always.
If we are to enter and adapt to the free market, this is the kind of environment that we should expect to face, where there will be absolutely no consequences for this kind of behavior.
I am not saying that I am against it, and I insist that each person is responsible for their own money and their own decisions, but I really believe there is a long way to go before we become fully independent from centralization, if we ever do.