Red Pulse ICO, which was most awaited and called as the first ICO on NEO platform was scheduled to start on Oct 8th 0900 EDT. It has reached hard cap of 15 million USD in just 6 minutes past an hour.
The Hype
Red Pulse was touted as the first ICO based on so called ‘Ethereum of China’ — NEO. However, with the ban on ICOs and bitcoin exchanges by China has brought too much of confusion to investors believing and ready to invest in Red pulse.
As expected, Red Pulse team has sent out communication saying they need to postpone the ICO, until all the regulations are met with. That’s a promising decision as it helped assure customers and investors about their commitment towards compliance and avoid unnecessary impediments from government later.
Verification & KYC
One interesting thing with good ICOs is they take KYC seriously. Red Pulse, as mentioned earlier to comply with all the rules have restricted investors from USA, Singapore and Mainland China(because of new ICO ban in place). They have done strict KYC and approved only candidates who have provided proper proof of residence in the form of passport or ID.
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T — 1 Month
Once verification is all done and laws are being complied, they have announced the new date of ICO as 8th Oct 2017. All the instructions are scheduled to be given only an hour before. Sombat and Jonathan from Redpulse team has been active on Slack channel. Also made crypto cointrading as their community manager on their Slack channel — who has kept up to the speed and answered most of the questions investors had.
T — 1 Week
RPX team has come up with a new twist saying investors would need a new NEO_GUI_RPX to participate in token sale as all existing NEO wallets doesn’t support token sale. Which inturn was a painful process of downloading the software from github, downloading chain.acc file (which accelerates sync up) and also updating your .net framework. (Remember to disable all firewalls and run as administrator) — Wait a second, as a normal investor who doesn’t know what all above means — will get scared for sure. Even with slight knowledge of computers and how to use them, you will be boggled and feel paranoid with so many security relaxations. Forgot to mention, this only works on windows machine! Mac & Linux users need to install VM and do it.
T-2Hours
RPX team sent out a notification to the relief of all mac users saying, City of Zion has come up with a surprise announcement of updating NEON wallet to be compatible with token sale on NEO platform. That’s a very happy moment! At least for me (even after spending a day and night on installing windows wallet, importing NEON wallet, syncing it and rebuilding index for infinite amount of time). We should appreciate efforts of City of Zion for their simple but working solution which doesnt need a lot of configurations and “Just Works”.
T-25 Minutes
We need a script hash to participate in the token sale. Red Pulse team decided to send this script hash just 25 minutes prior to the sale and sent out a mail to all whitelisted investors. Another twist here is, they have not included hash directly — There’s a link included, which on clicking will ask for your acceptance of agreement, firstname, lastname, address, city, state, country and then Submit.
First thing, approximately 5000–10000 people opened the website at a time. RPX team should have scaled the website to serve atleast 50K requests as they know how many people are going to open the website (from member coount on slack/telegram channels) — Website crashed. Cloudfare started throwing 504 errors. Even after few minutes of refresh, SUBMIT button didn’t work as it was trhowing 504 error again in the background.
T-10 Minutes
Slack channel announcement — new mail is going to come with direct script hash included in it. Panic goes up as it’s only 9 minutes to go by the time we read the message. Hitting refresh on website now moved to email client — waiting eagerly for the Script hash as the clock is ticking. Sombat on slack channel was very good at live streaming the things happening on their end — communication was clear and he was updating investors properly on what they are going to receive and when. He also mentioned the script hash is gonna look like this 0xecc**************1df9 — which is helpful to avoid phishing by some random users. Though not many know how token sale works on NEO platform and what role script hash has to play in it.
T-1 Minute
There comes our mail containing script hash at exactly 8:59AM EDT — That’s it. One has to copy it and go to your hard installed windows RPX GUI or NEON wallet on Mac, paste it in mentioned space, enter amount of NEO below 27(hard cap per account in 1st hour) and “Submit for Sale”.
By the end of first hour, it’s almost 70% goal reached. Later in the 2nd hour, where it is open for people who can invest up to $50,000 — there’s a confusion with the block number vesus countdown timer shown on Red Pulse website. Twitterati has mentioned that it’s about 18 seconds faster compared to the actual block number which triggers the acceptance for 2nd round — because of which few people who sent NEO a couple of seconds early couldn’t get their tokens (and got locked in for few weeks. Will be refunded in coming days/weeks). However, it didn’t last long. Hard cap was reached in less than 6 minutes of 2nd hour (higher contribution cap) and sale was concluded.
Opinion
Red Pulse team needs to be appreciated, along with NEO team helping them launch first ICO on NEO platform. City of Zion was well appreciated by RPX team saying they have worked day and night to get the NEON wallet support the token sale.
Appreciate the efforts — but scalability issues of the website, complicated process of installing RPX GUI and dealing with sync issues etc and agreement being asked to sign just before the sale and script hash being sent just 1 minute prior to the sale are some things that could have been done right to avoid lot of confusion.
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NEO Platform for ICO Launch
It’s not as bad as Ethereum. On Ethereum network, it was clogged when some initial ICOs were launched. On NEO, It just took a couple of seconds to respond saying “Submitted Successfully”. After a couple of minutes, it showed up on Token Balance
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