During the peak of ICO season (Dec 2017 - Feb 2018), when many people are "FOMOing" to get into HOT ICO crowdsales, I was in the middle of all the fiasco.
I was there when Matrix Chain struggled to keep the website from crashing during the crowdsales and later sold out in 10 seconds and many participants were shouting foul as seemingly the contribution wallet address were leaked to whales participants and only less than 100 people got to participate with very heavy gas war, eventually resulting in MatrixChain decided to allocate a portion of foundation's reserved coins for sales to those who send ETH to the contribution wallet but were not successful in the first 24 hours. Those minority who won in the first 10 seconds then cried foul as by doing so Matrix chain increased the circulating supplies of the token and softened their edge.
I was there when the Bee token database was hacked and whitelisted email addresses were sent fake email increasing the individual contribution cap and providing a fake contribution wallet address. Hundreds of ETH were scammed from innocent participants who responded to the fake email.
I was there when Arcblock were whitelisting way too many participants and later attempt to set a Gas/Gwei limit to avoid gas war but ended up having many participants ignoring the rules and cheated their way in whereas those who abided by the rules were kicked out, leading to a big mess and fiasco where the team has to spend days in analysing the data to rectify and reallocate token and brought justice to the rule abiders and kicked out the rules breakers.
I was there when you are have to quickly upload and submit KYC info at the time of crowdsales during Medical Chain ICO.
I was there when Refereum built up huge following in their Telegram Channel and decided to cancel their crowdsales.
Participating in ICO crowdsales has become such a challenging task with people staying up late at night nervously looking at the countdown clock ticking, fumbling with copying the contribution wallet address for submission and more usual than not, ended up not clicking fast enough or not using higher enough gas, and being FOMO out and got defeated, leaving only with the aftertaste of disappointment and sometime rage!!
After going through all the trials and tribulations of participating in ICOs crowdsales, I finally stumbled upon something called ICO POOL, which was really a godsent.
I started participating in ICO POOLs, where a group of people gathering the financial resources together to participate in ICO's pre-sales or private sales with higher bonuses or discounts using a POOLing APP called Primablock which auto calculate and distribute tokens to POOL participants..
After participating in POOLs, I no longer wish to go back to the old crowdsales route. Not only would you be getting higher bonuses via POOL, you also don't need to FOMO and miss out during crowdsales.
However, POOL is not without its shortfalls. I was part of a POOL where one day the POOL admin disappeared with all his social accounts being deleted. All POOL participants were panicking and thought that he performed an exit scam but it turned out that he was spending too much time on ICOs and Cryptos that his girlfriend was raging and deleted all his accounts, at least this was what he claimed happened!! This is a wake up call telling us that NOT ALL POOLs are safe and most of all, you don't really know who is really managing the pool you participated in and at any time any of the POOL admins can actually perform an exit scam if he/she choose to.
Further down the road, some of my POOL contributions got returned because the ICO companies decided to turn down POOLs participations in their pre-sales due to KYC issue and without KYC it can affect their future ability in listing in good exchanges as well as a myriad of legal problems.
Let's be honest, the POOLs are used by people usually from restricted countries (USA & China) to by pass the restrictions for participating in ICOs and there is no way for the POOLs to provide KYC information of the individual participants to the ICO companies.
So afterall POOL is not the be all and end all answer for ICO participation!!
Then, I stumbled on BULLTOKEN.TECH.
Bulltoken.tech is a Norwegian based crypto operations which is a people driven ICO investment community platform built upon transparency, accountability and democracy, where community members can propose ICOs for review, jointly DYOR on ICOs and finally vote for the ICO projects for the community fund to invest in. Through the Bulltoken process, individual members can 1) leverage on the power of the many and wisdom of the crowd in making ICOs investment decisions ; 2) leverage the community joined financial resources to gain access to private / pre-sales with big bonuses otherwise off limit to most individual ICO investors ; 3) leverage on the Bulltoken community investment to achieve wider breadth diversifications of ICO investment portfolio to mitigate risks which is otherwise not achievable by individual's reach.
I think Bulltoken is the ultimate solutions and is the future of ICO participations, where individual ICO investors will never have to do the ICO thing alone and with all the leverages at hand to excel in the ICO game.
Last but not least, apart from investing in community selected ICO projects using the community fund, Bulltoken is also planning to implement internal POOLs for the community members to participate in alongside the community joint fund investment in the selected ICO. These POOLs are especially for those more active members who want to gain full control over the ICO tokens as oppose of having bulltoken to hold the tokens on behalf of community in escrow.
Bulltoken will be able to solve the problems currently plaguing the ICO POOL arena. First Bulltoken is fully transparent and all team members and community members have to reveal their true identity on the platform and thus enhance the trust issue which is lacking in the current private and sometime anonymous POOL ecosystem. More importantly, since Bulltoken is conducting ICO crowdsales itself and is required to collect KYC info from the participants, the KYC info can later be channel to the ICO companies where required for the POOLs participation in the private / pre-sales.
So for those who are especially interested in utilizing POOL in ICO participations (like myself), I urge you to check out bulltoken.tech as it will be your ultimate answer for the future of ICO POOLINGS.