I am not saying this is good. I am just saying this is how things work.
People willingly donated 1 million USD to the startup based on both the promises and their chances of delivery.
The startup chose not to sell that 1 million USD in crypto for FIAT but instead kept it and multiplied it thanks to both bitcoin price appreciation and additional coins from forks, which was good move on their side and not every project behaves like that (for example Augur, which was first Ethereum ICO, has almost no funds, since they immediately converted most of it to FIAT). So the fact that they have now 20 million instead of 1 million is thanks to their skills/choices and congratulations to them, they fully deserve to keep it. It is all good, even if they decide to pay out 19 million as salary bouns that is fair. What is not fair though is that they promised some things and those things were not delivered. Yes, we have to say it once again - the project failed, it is a failure, what was promised was not delivered and who knows how much of those 1 million USD was spend towards achieving this goal and how much was spent on business trips in luxury hotels. That being said, it was our duty to do proper due dilligence and we failed to correctly estimate how solid is the team (it is not solid), what is their success history (previous projects failed) etc. It was their mistake that the project failed but it was our mistake to invest in it. Fingers crossed for everyone, who is attemtping to salvage anything from this, but IMO this is not how things work in crypto and in startup business in general - if startups fails investors simply move to other startups and stop investing the initial startup in secondary rounds, which is basically happening here (HEAT ICO investors moved to other projects alredy with some exceptions, new investors / secondary rounds are not coming). Nothing to see here, just better luck next time. But really curious how long people from both groups (both: "give me back my money" and "HEAT will recover") will hang around here.