I have nothing personal against the team or their product. I don’t want to spread negativity, Don’t want to spend my time unproductive by writing negative. But, this should be a lesson for future greedy ICOs who want to use community power to serve self interest.
Refereum is really a good project, with great team and partners. But still the missing point for a successful blockchain project is community. They build biggest community in telegram. Even they reached the user limit for telegram group and asked telegram CEO to increase the limit. The community was happy and genuinely working to spread the word all around the world.
But, they keep asking to fill the whitelist form in 2 different places, no one got any conformations. Everyone waiting for email or social media announcement about whitelist. But suddenly a tweet that the token sale is over.
The refereum team used 100k people’s time and effort, showed that impressive numbers to whales and bulk investors, got 1,000,000 ETH (almost a billion $). And finally thanked the community. Impressed.
Blockchain / Decentralised project is not about the code. it’s community work, contributed by 1000s of volunteers, spend their time, money and effort to build and run the network. It wont take more than few weeks for crypto community to build and run better than refereum, all without ICO.
There are really good projects like KyberNetwork 0x Civic Beetoken and many more. Though many raised lot of money from private investors. They still allocated fare share for everyone who volunteered. Projects like CoinFi even distributed everyone with airdrop after successful private sale (We don’t want your free tokens now). Many raised lot less money, distributed good share of tokens to everyone.
What we can do is, unfollow their social media, bring that impressive numbers to low. Don’t buy the refereum token. May be we can support similar project from community with 10 times more intensity.
It’s good to question the team about token sale before we start join any project. It’s good time to take serious look on Vitalik Buterin’s proposal about DAICO.
Good luck Refereum team. And dear future greedy ICOs, people are watching you.