Who Benefits from 76% of a Daily EOS Sale being Purchased in the Final 3 Hours?
To those of you who participated in the first 4 days of the EOS ICO, congratulations, you've tripled your money at least, depending on if you sold some the first day. However, a pattern I observed last night gives me cause for concern. When I went to bed, there were about 6000 ETH pledged against the pool of 2 Million EOS to be distributed for the 24 hour period ending today, July 6, 2017. There were about 3 hours left in the auction at that point. When I woke up this morning, over 25000ETH had been pledged. That means that 76% of the ETH pledged arrived during the last 3 hours. Who would want to do that?
Token Offerings and Cryptos are Largely Unregulated
Given the unregulated nature of cryptos at this point, it is necessary that we all pay extra close attention to what is going on. While we bask the glory of our new found wealth in cutting the worthless banking class out of our finances and replacing them with robots who don't steal our money, it is important that we keep an eye out for tricks so obvious that they were even banned from the old system. With our new power comes more responsibility. So back to who benefits from the trend above.
The EOS Insiders are The Most Obvious Beneficiaries of This Trend
The small time window implies a smaller group of contributors. It is clearly big fish that gobbled the thing up in the wee hours, but is this the best play for an independent big fish? Not really. If the goal is to get the biggest piece of the pie possible, putting the big money in earlier makes more sense. If you put in 19000ETH in the first hour, instead of the last hour, the hundreds of small fish that contributed the other 6000ETH might have decided "Meh, I'll till tomorrow and see if it looks better," and the big fish gets more of the tokens.
Now imagine the big fish is in fact an insider with access to the proceeds of the previous day's EOS auction. Big Fish would want the small fish to put in as much as possible before you dumped the previous day's take into the current day, and discouraged all the small hands hoping to get a higher percentage of the tokens for that day.
Conclusion
Are there other explanations for the phenomenon I've pointed out here, OF COURSE! Independent Big Fish could just want to be more sure of how much of the pie she is getting and not want other big fish coming in after she is committed. Hey, everyone knows that an ebay auction has most of its action in the final minute. The point is, nothing I have seen in the EOS offering smart contract forbids the use of ETH purchased one day to be spent on another day. As participants in this new and developing economic ecosystem, we should be mindful of our interests, and let those who we have trusted with our money know that we are watching them.