This morning my fiancé and I endeavored to get into the RPX, Red Pulse, (https://coin.red-pulse.com/#ico) initial coin offering (ICO). She seemed pretty interested and not being Chinese or American, as they are blocked from contributing along with Singaporeans, I figured I could help her out in showing her the ropes and getting her in. This post isn't so much about the product, but about how the ICO went.
(For all the uninitiated, an ICO is an initial coin offering. For more reading on that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering.)
RPX from the beginning has seemed like a very professional, well put together organization. Good looking website, already has a running product, serves the growing Chinese market, pretty good team, and NEO's nod. The thing that is groundbreaking with this particular ICO is that it is NEO's first BIG ICO. And NEO wants to be the ETH (Ethereum) of China, so to speak, so this was a pretty big deal.
Over the past month the team and its developers have been pretty good about getting emails out and updating progress. Since the China exchange ban, things have gotten a little tricky for NEO and its related products.
The first big problem with this experience cropped up when there wasn't a working desktop wallet in which the tokens would be recognized. And then all of sudden, there was one, the NEO-GUI-RPX wallet. That only came to be a week before the ICO and there wasn't a format for Mac users, which we are. So, it required some digging on our part to get the wallet up and running on our machine. Just getting it to work was more or less a three day operation as the blocks had to update - even with the chain file it took some time. And on top of that, that wallet is not intuitive at all.
So, we get the wallet up and running. She has some NEO she wanted to put in. The big day comes. 5:30AM on a Sunday we're at the computer getting everything ready. Super excited.
The sale was broken into 2 periods of an hour each. The first period came with a 27 NEO limit at 0900 EDT. The second with 1352 NEO limit at 1000 EDT. Only whitelisted applicants could contribute.
Here's what happened if you were in the mix, following Reddit closely, and were glued to what was going on like us.
(All times our times)
0640: Final instructions to contribute to ICO and read the agreement/final registration arrive (they were a forty minutes late).
Website to do the final registration doesn't work. They send out the wallet address anyway and say to fill out the form on the website later.
0701: We execute instructions in the email and on their tutorial. Send the first batch of NEO.
0710, more or less: RPX tokens arrive in NEO-GUI-RPX wallet.
Go to the website to do final registration again. Traffic must've lightened up and we can complete it.
0800: Second phase opens.
0803: Send second chunk of NEO.
No more RPX tokens arrive and NEO gone.
We reviewed the emails and Reddit. It seems that RPX will refund the unused amount of NEO, but in the meantime it could take up to several weeks said the email.
Here are our gripes in general.
The email with the registration and agreement form arrived 40 minutes late. Who has time to get ready to do a complex operation on a confusing wallet and read a 15 page agreement in about 5 minutes?
The second phase closed out in what seemed like 30 seconds, but that's not necessarily the fault of RPX. Yet we were pretty bummed anyway.
RPX is saying that it could take several weeks to get refunded the unused portion of NEO. This is particularly awful because NEO earns GAS. While NEO is outside of our wallets RPX is getting the GAS, not us. This is probably the biggest issue.
The wallet was not intuitive at all and requires very intense steps to get everything set up.
Now, to add fuel to the flames, the subReddit for Red Pulse is talking about how the second phase didn't actually start till after 1000 EDT, if not a few minutes after https://www.reddit.com/r/RedPulseToken/. We didn't get our block in before the last processed block, so we're waiting patiently to see what happens next. But at this point, we'd just be happy to get the unused NEO back.
The communication between RPX and prospective investors broke down over the last couple of days.
People are crying for a lawsuit and whatnot at this point, but I personally think that's premature. On one hand, you have to accept that this was a pioneering ICO for NEO. There will be hiccups as they perfect their methods. Also, with all the other stuff going on in the space, like the China ban, I'm surprised RPX was able to pull it off. They just need to refund the NEO quickly.
On the other hand, the problems talked about above could've been easily avoided. Now, Reddit is ready to march into complete revolt flaming RPX a helluva lot and NEO's price is dropping.
It remains to be seen what will happen next, but everyone needs to be careful out there. As developments come along I'll let you guys know.
We're all gonna make it!
Minderbinder
[Disclaimer: All the opinions expressed in this article are my own and are in no way meant to be construed as investment advice. Picture is a screenshot taken by me from https://coin.red-pulse.com/#ico]