The recent BAT (Basic Attention Token) ICO causes a lot of unwanted attention due to the fact that 36 million worth of ETH was raised and tokens were snapped up in as fast as 30 seconds. Yes you heard it right. 30 frigging second!
That is the time I took to switch on my laptop while having a nice cup of latte. Suddenly the telegram channels and slack groups that I am in was in disbelief and many have questions as to why it was snapped up so quickly?
According to the report from source : http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/05/31/ethereum-based-bat-ico-raises-36-million-30-seconds-disrupt-advertising
Majority of the tokens was snapped up by whales and in fact about 5 of them own about 80% of the tokens. Given blockchain and distributed ledger technology’s decentralization and democratization goals, many are questioning the fairness of such top-heavy ICOs.
So how to prevent this from happening again? How can we allow smaller buyers to participate in ICO when there are so many whales lurking?
Suggestion to all future ICOs
For future ICO, they may want to considered a tiered figure approach. There will be different limit on each tiered and the limit is a secret. Once the amount is reached, then the limit will increase to the next tiered. The amount which it will be increase is also a secret. In that way, this allow more smaller players to buy their tokens as the whales cannot just buy everything in one shot.
What do you think? Is this a good idea?