The HIVE ICO prides itself on its website as "BEST ICO 2017 WINNER", awarded by CoinAGENDA Global. A total of $ 8.95 million from 2,234 participants have been collected. It says: "ICO successfully completed". But that does not correspond to the truth.
HIVE Project
HIVE's business focused on small and medium-sized businesses. There, these so-called SMEs have particular problems with liquidity, so usable money. If a large company pays for a small business for goods or services, the payment remains for a period of 90-120 days. During this period, smaller companies in particular lack the resources to buy their own resources for production or growth in the short term.
Traditionally, so-called factoring companies take over these open invoices. They buy invoices from creditworthy companies at a discounted price and provide them with money much earlier, which in turn can be invested in the purchase of resources. This is a direct disadvantage of traditional factoring systems: they require a lot of manual work and are therefore not very efficient.
A blockchain can change this by "tokenizing" bills and transferring them to the blockchain. Thus, the whole concept is digitized and fully secured by the blockchain. Now it is also possible to add a pool of single investors with a token, in the case of HIVE the HVN token.
As far as the business idea. At the beginning of September the ICO ended - but not for everyone it was "successful".
"Hell is loose in Slack"
On September announced the CTO of HIVE, Dejan Jovanovic, a glitch in the HVN token distribution. The distribution of tokens was stopped directly, but 119 users received twice the amount of HVN tokens. A total of 9,023,873.95 tokens have been issued by planned 500,000,000.
A BTC ECHO reader participated in the ICO of HIVE and invested 19 ETH, which at that time corresponded to almost 6,200 euros. With him and many others, this ICO was anything but "successful" - he and many others have suffered a total loss of their investment, communication between investors and the HIVE team has been sluggish or largely non-existent, he said.
And what happened to the duplicate tokens? As everyone knows with a bit of basic knowledge in blockchain, there is no way to get back payments. There were a few who, by their own conviction, paid back twice that amount, but the greater part retained their unexpected "luck."
Meanwhile, in the Slackchannel of HIVE panic broke out. Many users wrote that they could no longer trust the team, others told developers to send their HVN directly to an address:
In the meantime, in a post on Medium, the team agreed to make up for the lack of payouts from the tokens that the team originally had. After some examination and waiting time, this project was apparently not implemented. User keviu posted the Smart Contract used to distribute HVN tokens .
No change
As can be seen in the link, about 43 percent of the tokens are still at the paying address (0xdb969febe ...).
BTC-ECHO also has a payout list showing the double payouts:
Were there any reactions from HIVE?
Users who did not receive HVN tokens were reassured with an email announcing late payment of the tokens. But until today there was no compensation for the participants, who went out empty handed in the token sale - not even for our BTC ECHO reader.
Meanwhile , HIVE released a blog entry on Medium last week, which was a slap in the face for many investors.
"With minor difficulties that have now been resolved, we are pleased to report that HVN can be traded on HitBTC as of Monday, September 4, 2017!
As our CEO stressed yesterday: Our future is great! We believe that we have the qualities and the determination to overcome any hurdle facing us - and we will continue to prove that we have truly earned the BEST ICO 2017 award from CoinAgenda. "
BTC-ECHO tried to contact the HIVE team to get an opinion, but after more than a week, the team has no answer. Was that really the "Best ICO 2017"? At least we at BTC-ECHO know a dozen ICOs that have gone better for investors this year.