Bankera (BNK) Pre-ICO - what other ICOs and we could learn from it!

Update 4th September, 2017

SpectroCoin has credited me 0.05 ETH for the delay! Which I think is a really nice move!

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"Organizing an ICO is hard, but organizing a successful ICO is even harder!"

Website: http://bankera.com/

Contents

1. Prologue
2. Problem arises...
3. What happened?
4. What could have been done better?
5. Conclusion

1. Prolouge

Got interested in this pre-ICO of Bankera just a few days ago, I decided to join the "ICO world" for the first time. Excited for the concept they presented and after finished doing some researches, I created a SpectroCoin account and tried to deposit my ETH just 1 hour before the pre-ICO started.

For more details of an "unbiased ICO analysis", here is a great article to read: https://coins.best/ico-reviews/bankera/

2.Problems arise...

When the pre-ICO finally started, as many other early investors, I jumped in to check the website, hoping to get some BNK as soon as possible. However, it was not as smooth as I expected:

• The site was down for nearly 5 hours after the pre-ICO started. It is said that SpectroCoin has been either got DDOS attack or the sites just couldn't handle such large amount of traffics in a short period of time. Note that SpectroCoin is actually not a big trading exchange and their reputation is not that good as well!

• When the site was finally online again, I went in and there was no ETH in my wallet even though I have deposited hours ago. Frustrated and thought that I was scammed, I went online to their official chat channel to look for more information. And no surprise at all when what I saw there were full of complaints from angry investors.

• Different social media channels started to have "alerts" about this "scam" pre-ICO popped up everywhere. By the end of the day, beside the users who deposited their tokens the day before the pre-ICO and those who deposited everything else beside ETH could buy BNK again.

• As of today, I finally could trade my ETH for BNK just 1 hour before writing this article. My ETHs were "stuck" on the network for more than "2 days 10 hours" with more than 8000 confirmations.

3. What happened?

• Apparently, this was the first time SpectroCoin was put into such a situation where a large amount of transactions went to their site. Combined with the "DDOS attack", it was a DISASTER for this small trading exchange. Thus for the first 6 hours of this pre-ICO, it was chaos and disorder everywhere.

• After the site was on again, there were problems with only and only with ETH transactions! Many people reported that multiple transactions from different users were directed to the same address. And thus, the exchange couldn't figure out which transactions belong to whom and it took them more than 2 days to fix the problem. Lucky for us that BNK tokens were still available by the time we got our ETH back; otherwise, it would be even worse!
  

• Public relation, especially the "crisis handling" of the team is extremely weak! There was no official statement or any press release from the team behind Bankera. What they were doing was just trying to "calm down" investors only through their official chat!

• Tons of "scam ICO suspected" started to pop up, you can see the keyword around in Reddit and other social media platform.

  • One example is here on Bitcointalk https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2126829.0
  • Another one is here on Cryptocompare https://www.cryptocompare.com/wallets/spectrocoin/

4. What could have been done better?

Technical problems are hard to predicted and once they happen, the crisis management skill is important if the team wants to keep investors along with them in the long term. I wouldn't say the BNK team did a bad job, just think that they could have done better. Right now, the news have started to circulate around the internet and I am sure this is something could damage Bankera's image in the long term. Here are some keys "take-away" that I believe other ICO's organizer or investors can use:

1. Do an individual cap limit! Or a time schedule for and separate investors into "batches"! There are many ICOs have put this as a rule of thumb. Yes, there will be more troublesome steps to go through, but it will help the organizers to control the traffic as well as filter out spammers. They can even send special key/password to investors and allocate them into different time slots to reduce the traffic as well!

2. Publicly announce what happened as SOON as possible - An official statement from the team is extremely important in these dire times. Beside the engineers working behind the scene trying to fix the issue, it is also crucial for the team to put up some announcements for the public too! In this case, BNK's team could have use their Twitter account - instead of just UPDATING THE AMOUNT OF ISSUED BNK, they could have update WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THE SYSTEM AND ETH'S HOLDER. Evidence here:
   

3. POSTPONE the Pre-ICO until trouble is fixed OR do compensation for investors who got into troubles - Even though this is the crypto-world where regulations are not yet come to "life" and most things stay in the grey-zone, doing nothing when crisis arises is even worse than doing "something". The BNK's team could have either postponed the pre-ICO until the problem is official fixed or have some program to compensate investors who deposited their ETH there. At least, an official APOLOGIZE should have been MADE!

5. Conclusion

Well, I believe many people have lost hopes in this project and also have spread the news to everyone they know. It also shows that the team is incompetent and unprepared.
Their project is to make a bank for the blockchain era and if they can't do the things I stated above, are you sure you want to give them your trust?

Cheers!