How can the token price of a project that won Ethereum Hackathon dropped by 99% from its ICO price?

As Bankex foundation won the ETH Hackathon last year and promoted themselves as “the first plasma protocol implement case”, many investors think this is a solid ICO to invest on. However, many issues happened during and after the token sales of Bankex, making many investors lost their confidence. In this article, we will discuss many, but not all, mistakes made by Bankex foundation, showing that even though a team have solid technology foundation, the market would not favor them if they are not trustworthy and have bad public relationship to its community.

1. Abnormally long public sales period

The Bankex ICO began on November 28 and ends on December 28. At the meantime, the ETH price increased from 472.9 to 737.02, which is nearly 55% increases in USD value. Thanks to that, in the first two weeks, the team nearly received enough USD for the project already, but instead of ending the token sales quickly, they did nothing and only end the token sales 2 days earlier. Thus, they received $70,600,000 USD, which exceed their USD cap by 150% while many token were not sold.

2. 5 exchanges promise

During token sales, many admins in Bankex Chinese telegram group mentioned about the token would be listed on 5 exchanges soon after the token sales ended. After the token sales, this information spread to English telegram group as well. In the first week of January, this statement altered and changed into “BKX token would be listed in January. We have committed five exchanges.”

This kind of statement mislead investors during the token sales, many of them thought they could sell their token in few weeks and underestimated their time costs in participated Bankex ICO

On 28 January 10:22 am UTC +8, in Bankex telegram group, the admins there will be “good news regarding the listing information” in 2 hours. And when the time came, they announced that there would be a Facebook live on 9:30 pm UTC +8 where Bankex Managing Director Constantine Kurbatoff would provide “exchanges information”.

While the way of “announcing an announcement” received many negative attitude, many investors were expecting Bankex team would provide the information about what 5 exchanges would Bankex get listed on.

However, in the live, Kurbatoff stated “the team has filed everything in December, and now is up to the exchanges to decide the listing.” The truth is, the team only sent documents to exchanges, without any conformation from exchanges, they told their investors “committed five exchanges” and would “definitely listed in January”. The team redefined committed, definitely and January. This is definitely a false promise.

3. Announced first but fail to get shortlisted in Binance voting competition

On 8 February, Bankex team tweets this:
Again, the team announced too soon before having any confirmation from counterpart, making them look like a joke when the truth revealed.

4. Listed on OKEX, circulation supply and advisor token problem

Information about Bankex on OKEX
On 26 February, the team stated that the coin would be listed on OKEX tomorrow (27 February). And people discovered that the circulation supply of Bankex token is 120m according to OKEX information, while the token sales only released 80m token, and telegram group admins kept telling the community the circulation supply was 62.2m. Bankex team accused that is the fault of OKEX.

When the trading started, the price of token pumped to 0.002599 ETH then dump to as low as 0.00088 ETH, which is normal price action for many ICO.

However, with the crash in token prices, investors tried to find the reason behind the reason of the crash, and some of them realized an advisor, whose token should be locked for a year, transferred his/her token on OKEX exchange without any announcement.

TxHash: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x26e346aa8336ab004e12dcda4a24cae72e5597acb3c44e25c42d37bb7afd8102

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x315f12f1db61306e9a607d07bc452b154182db8ac02a81f708e05a9edff2a2b7

This create panic to many investors and they tried to find a proper reply from the team, so the problem raised in Bankex telegram group. Instead of having proper response instantly, the telegram admins ban everyone who raised the advisor token issues. On next day, they claimed that the advisor didn’t sold any of the token, but they didn’t provide any proper reason regarding the transfer of token.

Only after a week, in an article “How to get listed on exchange” written by Bankex COO Dima Dolgov said the advisor transfer his/her token for testing, but the best time to response the doubt has gone.

In conclusion, the team keep repeating their mistake and always fail to response to community in time, leading many doubts among investors. So, this is reasonable for the price to dropped by 67%. While many of solid projects are underdeveloped by Bankex team, including App coin, Media coin, Movie coin, that’s a shame to have this kind of bad public image after all these mistakes. Bankex team is definitely a bad example to all the solid projects to the ICO spaces, and let’s hope similar silly mistakes would not be made in other projects as well.



https://medium.com/@jordanwong_70450/how-to-make-a-shitty-ico-even-if-you-win-ethereum-hackathon-using-bankex-as-example-968de0b8475b