Propy fails to pay $200,000 in prize money to WCEF hackathon winners
The World Cryptocurrency Economic Forum, or WCEF, held a hackathon and a conference in the Bay Area in January this year. Propy, a real estate cryptocurrency project, was the title sponsor of the hackathon. The company promised to pay out 50k Propy tokens as prizes and an additional participation award consisting of a small amount of Propy tokens to every hackathon participant.
Propy tokens at the time were worth almost $4 so the 50k token prize pool was worth almost $200,000.
The hackathon is long over yet the Propy team has failed to pay out any of the prizes and have mysteriously cut off all contact with the organizers of the hackathon.
This incredibly unprofessional behavior by the Propy team demonstrates how incredibly young the cryptocurrency scene still is and there are still many questionable teams leading outrageously well-funded projects out there.
It's interesting to note that the hackathon happened right before the massive bear run down to $6k BTC. This sudden contraction in capital could have influenced their decision to withdraw from honoring the prize.
Hello @kjnk. This is Jun Dam (aka @steemrollin), one of the co-organizers of WCEF and the WCEF hackathon. There's been a big misunderstanding and miscommunication within our team about the delay in the Propy reward distribution. The Propy team has also issued the following statement: "Propy has every intention of paying out the tokens promised at the WCEF Hackathon. After some miscommunication, we were able to connect with the founders, Leland and Wesley, to confirm that we’re paying out prizes to the winners of the Hackathon. It was an awesome event that we’d like to be involved with in the future, so it’s crucial to us that everyone receives what they were expecting.
The plan was to release all WCEF Hackathon tokens right away and make them available for use by September - the lockout period we stated about before the hackathon. But at the same time we knew that the participants would prefer to be able to use the tokens right away, so we sought legal advice on how to do it and that took extra time. Now, our WCEF PRO tokens will be available for use upon distribution, and the distribution will be finished by this Friday, Feb. 23. We understand that we should have been more clear about this delay and we would like to apologize for it.
We want to reiterate that we have every intention of paying out these tokens. The submissions in the WCEF Hackathon are worth every coin. If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to our CFO Maria Angelova at [email protected].
Thanks so much for your patience as we sort through this issue!"
I want to thank Propy for their generous rewards and would like to continue to work together to help advance crypto and blockchain development projects in the future. I also want to thank hackathon participants for their patience and hope to continue to collaborate together on future events. If you have any questions please feel free to email me at: [email protected] Best, Jun
Ahh nice, thanks for updating and clearing the miscommunication.
Anytime!