Eos has been a much discussed ICO for many reasons. The tech is clearly very interesting, but it has also brought a different structure than we have seen to the ICO game. After the initial 5 day window that distributed two hundred million tokens, each twenty three hour window afterwards is its’ own window that will have two million tokens distributed each time.

Now a lot has been written about when to contribute. Whether you should wait until the end of the window, contribute early, contribute to future windows, spread it out or countless other examples. In addition, since EOS is listed on exchanges - this must be taken into account as well.

Just to go over how it works:

Each 23 hour window will consist of 2,000,000 tokens to be distributed. All of the eth that is contributed during a particular window will be proportioned out for the tokens. So if there is a total of 200 eth contributed in a window and one account sends in 100 eth then that account will get 50% of the allotment which would be one million tokens.

We are coming up on the end of window 8 which gives us some idea of how things will be playing out. Here are the stats for the first seven windows.

0
01/07 12:59:59
200M
0.8874
1
02/07 11:59:59
2M
1.7006
2
03/07 10:59:59
2M
6.296
3
04/07 9:59:59
2M
3.7296
4
05/07 8:59:59
2M
2.9009
5
06/07 7:59:59
2M
3.4853
6
07/07 6:59:59
2M
2.9339
7
08/07 5:59:59
2M
2.5522

As you can see, the first window has been by far the best price. This window also was unlike the others being that it was 5 days and one hundred time the tokens. Looking at the last 5 days, we have been in a relatively small range from 2.5522 to 3.7296. Note: If you are simply trading this, that range is plenty big to make big gains. But in terms of buying and holding, I am looking at it as a smallish range.

Here is a chart from bitfininex.

Right now, the exchanges are around 2.32 usd, but always subject to change. However, that amount would be a continued downtrend of the last three days. Also, this downtrend may have looked more prevalent if not for the bump in window 5. There is no way to be positive, but it is surmised that an issue on eosscan showing lower than actual prices caused an influx to push the price up. That is my guess of why that appears to be more of an outlier.

All the information is on the table. What do you do? We have seen every window that a massive amount comes in at the end. Will the sliding scale of the ending time matter to this? I believe it’s possible that as we change time zones that are more awake for the finale - it could affect the finish.

But does it really make sense to wait to the last hour thinking you now have all the information and you will just go and know what you are buying? Not really, because so much eth is coming in then. You can buy on an exchange to get an exact price. In many cases this does make sense right now.

I think there are situations that contributing early in the window makes sense. If you have a big enough stack that it influences the price, then maybe you scare off some of those late buyers. I like this strategy more than the flood at the end.

In conclusion, there’s not a huge reason to be rushing into the ICO. To be clear, that statement has nothing to do with the merits of EOS, but simply the structure and timing of the sale. We have such a long ways to go that to be rushing in does not make a whole lot of sense.

Good luck out there