If you’ve read my last few pieces, you’ll be aware of my recent fascination with the biggest trend in the crypto-coin world right now, ICOs, or initial coin offerings (yes, it’s a horrible name).
Since the best way to learn about stuff is to dive right in and do it yourself, I spent much of yesterday getting prepared for the Basic Attention Token (BAT) sale in an attempt to participate. Considering I had very little to do with Ethereum up until that point, the learning curve was quite steep. Nevertheless, I got it all together and had an ERC20 wallet funded and ready to go for this morning’s sale. While I thought the ICO might be pretty popular, $35 million is still a decent amount of money and I didn’t foresee having any real issues with getting an allocation. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
At the end of the day, I got zero BAT tokens and was left extremely frustrated with how the whole thing went down. While it’s undoubtably a historic moment for the nascent ICO market and an incredible achievement for an experimental browser monetization model to raise such a sum in less than 30 seconds, could this really be called a crowdsale?
While details still seem a bit sketchy, what’s clear is that a lot of people are very pissed off and a very small number of players seem to have received a huge chunk of the offering.
Here’s what Coindesk reported:
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