The massively hyped-up project Internet Computer turned out to be nothing short of a fiery shitstorm, especially for defrauded early investors. As it turns out, although investors of the early funding rounds had a 3 year long vesting period to unlock the funds, team tokens (constituting 52% of the entire supply) weren't locked up at all, and founders are extremely sus.
This story first started in Feb 2017 when Dfinity Foundation had its first token sale where they raised 4 million USD selling ICP tokens at 0.03$ per coin. The next round was Jan-2018 when they raised $20.54 million for 7% of the initial supply, while the last funding round was Aug-2018 when 110 participants contributed $97 million buying ICP tokens at a price of 4$ per coin.
The scam only started unfolding years later.
Now, more than three years after their last pre-sale, after falling in value by more than 96%, investors of the seed round are still up by a jaw-dropping 1666x. You might be wondering why I'm even writing this article in the first place if investors are still up by a lot? It doesn't matter that founders and VC's dumped the price to oblivion, r-right?
Wrong!
The caveat is that while investor funds are locked up for another 3 years, the team and VC's enjoy the ability to sell their tokens at will, and realize these amazing gains whenever they want.
The worst part being, the team never disclosed this to the public.
Dfinity deliberately failed to disclose this vital piece of information in order to intentionally mislead and defraud investors. Any time the team was confronted about this or any other incriminating piece of information in their subreddit, they promptly deleted the thread. Dfinity intentionally withheld the fact that team tokens are forever unlocked, and defrauded their investors for billions of dollars after dumping team tokens on the market - crashing the price by 96% in the process.
It wasn't long after the project was finally released that the deceptive, malicious, and greedy founders decided to capitalize on the opportunity by dumping an estimated 6 billion dollars worth of ICP tokens on the free market.
A devastating crash followed, leaving early supporters questioning their investments.
After all, now it's more than obvious how malicious and shady the people behind the project are. While you could argue that investors didn't really lose anything as they still got their tokens, they are rightfully enraged by the fraudulently misleading team cashing out billions of dollars while they keep saying otherwise. Instead of coming clean, Dfinity blamed bad actors on social media for undermining its project.
“Day traders with alternative agendas and unethical crypto projects have used Reddit and Twitter to confuse the public,”
Dfinity said in a statement.
Although the founders keep denying the fact, people have done some digging and unearthed the wallets from which the team has sold off a significant amount of their holdings.
Even though early investors are still up by a lot, who's to say that this price will hold up for the next three years as they wait for their funds to be unlocked? With such a massive scandal surrounding the project, I'd be rather unwilling to bet that they will still be in profit when their funds are unlocked.
What about the opportunity costs of holding a scammy shitcoin while the rest of the market goes up while ICP stagnates?
And what about the psychological pain and suffering inflicted on the defrauded individuals?
It's unaccountable!
So in a way, investors did lose a lot, and as the project lost all credibility with the wider crypto community, it will have an excruciatingly tough time gaining traction again.