This will be my first of a series of articles examining a project called 'Chronologic' (see http://www.chronologic.network). Please keep in mind these are my personal opinions only and they are highly biased based on my own experience.
Back when Chronologic launched it's ICO I was a participant and contributed 2 ETH which at the time was worth about $700 USD. I am confident I will never see a dime of value for that purchase in coming years.
If you look at the ambiguous white paper (I should have known better) the notion was to peg time to the ethereum blockchain through a token called 'DAY'. ICO participants were issued a 'time mint' - a self-minting algorithm tied to your ETH deposit address that would generate more DAY tokens on a time basis, gradually diminishing (hardly any mint now - time mints are essentially worthless at this point). It seemed like there would be some benefit to being a time mint holder, or more importantly a DAY token holder. After all, if these tokens indeed had time value pegged on Ethereum, shouldn't they gain some kind of material value or have a clear use case over time?
I believe they raised around $8M USD on their ICO - for a small project and team of developers that was ample and should have gone far. A fellow named Sean Morgan seemed to be something of a leader on the project at the time and was very active in social media channels like telegram. Their plan at that time was to integrate DAY token functionality in to the DAPPs they were planning to build. However the crypto winter hit and action seemed to slow down over time, much to the concern of several community members including myself. Also a consistent concern was how are DAY tokens required for timing functions?
At some point Sean Morgan and a few core developers cut and ran on the project. That should have been my first clue not all was well. The group had no clear leadership, no clear direction and appeared to be struggling. Then it went in a different direction working with 'ethereum alarm clock' to start developing timing functions for the Ethereum network. This involved scheduling transactions using timing or contingency functions. This was also enabled through their 'Chronos' DAPP, which you can use on mycrypto.com and myetherwallet.com. In order to run these functions they wanted community members to run 'time nodes' which in theory would give you a monetary reward as Ethereum for scheduling transactions...but no DAY tokens are required to use the DAPPs...making the tokens fundamentally worthless. Quality projects like e.g., Fetch AI require the tokens to do absolutely anything at all on the network...they are not just 'backdoor infrastructure'.
Flash forward to present - time nodes are losing money for those who try to run them. The team blames this on not enough people using them and insists that more people buy DAY and stake them to run a time node, however people don't want to PAY to run a node - that defeats the whole purpose of incentives in crypto networks. I tried to explain to the team that you need to have a use-case for the token - in other words, it needs to be a vital component required to use the network. However to use any of the scheduling functions, etc. you don't require any DAY tokens. They are apparently only needed for running the time nodes...not for DAPP functionality.
So essentially DAY tokens are a relic of the ICO that were doled out to investors who gave them their startup budget, and those tokens aren't a vital requirement for network utility among users. Further they never managed to achieve any major exchange listings so the tokens are terribly illiquid and difficult to buy or sell (once you buy em, you're more or less stuck with em). It seems their main objective is to get people using the scheduling functions and then have DAY token holders stake them in the nodes to schedule the transactions...to me that seems like holding a gun to the head of those now stuck with the tokens and saying 'run our infrastructure at your own risk and peril even though DAY tokens aren't going to be needed for any users of the Dapplications'.
Predictably, since there is no incentive for anybody to buy DAY tokens (except those who want to try and run a time node) the price has tanked down more than 90% since ICO. There is almost no liquidity and anybody who wants to use the scheduling functions has no need whatsoever to purchase tokens. This is another issue I warned them about - they took the opportunity to ban me from their Telegram channel, along with anybody else who voiced concerns. They accused us of focusing on 'speculation' and kept insisting they are building the network and that is their priority...although they have little to no regard for DAY token holders. Thiago, their primary admin is an outright jerk who doesn't answer questions and bans people to avoid a bad image. Go ahead and question him along these lines and see how he responds.
In summary, you don't need to buy DAY to use the scheduling functionality - meaning it is an application that benefits them almost solely as developers. Those of us who forked out good money can lose more or put ourselves at risk to run their timenodes in order to make the DAPPs work...even though it provides no benefit to other DAY token holders. It seems that DAY was just a clever way to extract millions of Ethereum and then use it to build an application that has little to no benefit for those who participated. Then the clever masquerade of 'they are for time nodes' is just a way to have us risk our remaining money to run a project where the tokenomics are distorted.
Every quality crypto project has a token that is central to all functions of the ecosystem - in other words, you shouldn't be able to do anything, including scheduling transactions, without first purchasing DAY tokens. This is why it is important to make tokens widely available for purchase and liquid, like most good projects you see on Binance. They also have little to no PR, business plan, project timelines, major partnerships, new listings on exchanges, etc. With all the money they got there is little to no transparency and the results don't justify the cost. They could easily make DAY tokens required to run their timing functions, but for some reason they don't. Seems to me they are just 'living the dream' of building their applications to try and make a name for themselves in the Ethereum community...advancing their own coding careers on DAY token holders buck.
Unless DAY tokens become a vital requirement for all network functions and utility they have done a serious wrong to all who invested in DAY (and in their project by extension). They treat their stakeholders like crap and ban them when they voice concerns (which are quite justified). No other project I have been involved in is quite this dysfunctional. It is a team of professional tinkerers who have no leadership or plan.
I don't see how DAY tokens 'peg time to the Ethereum blockchain' as their flashy website proclaims. Instead DAY tokens are their means of coercion to compel those stuck with a fundamentally useless token to put more money up so their applications will work. Wouldn't it make more sense to run a time node if we knew everybody who was going to schedule a transaction would also be purchasing DAY tokens? Then the tokenomics would make sense.
I am ashamed that I was foolish enough to invest in this project. Fool me once, shame on you. It won't happen twice. I will be trying to liquidate my tokens at anything above $0.
Let's hope for the sake of all DAY token holders that this projects makes some serious progress and revises their approach to tokenomics. It could have had a lot of potential but at this point it appears to be a sophisticated ruse to finance the careers of a few aspiring programmers. This just seems unethical and certainly a bad project from my perspective.
Do you have any experience with this project? Are you a DAY token holder? Have you tried to schedule any Ethereum transactions on mycrypto.com or elsewhere?
Let me know what your thoughts are. I could be 100% wrong about this project - it could all be good and they have some serious aces up their sleeves. But at this point I am very dubious and my intuition is telling me something is not entirely right...
Please share if you have any similar experiences with other projects. How have your ICO experiences been?