well, in my opinion ICO is not a profit, it is a means to fund development, marketing and operations, which they (wings) seem to continuously be doing for more than 3 years (i think project was started in April 2016 or so) ? Lets remember they raised afair 1.7 or 1.8 million, not 15 and certainly not 100.
To be precise, they raised about 2000 BTC, which on the day of the ICO was worth 895.67 USD per BTC. Note that on the way BTC rised significantly, even to 20 000 USD at some point. It is unknown how much exactly they sold and how many millions they have, but it is definitely way more than is needed for development of such project. But they deserve it, since people gave them money willingly, just like any other ICO project. I agree with you, that the exact number is unknown and there is lack of transparency, but lack of transparency is something that characterises most ICOs and Wings was not the only one to never report how many funds they had and on what they are spending it, but it is something that you could accuse many other ICOs as well, so IMO not that relevant and I don't really care if they took some of that money for themselves via creative accounting like many other ICOs did, since it is standard practice here and noone minds it as long as some of that money is spend on the project. I am just disappointed by having multimillion sum from ICO and not spending it on marketing and PR and other things that might benefit the token holders. But I am not here to ask questions what happened to the 2000 BTC and how much of it was spent, if you are curious about it you can further pursue this issue. I am here to ask, why a project that has millions of dollars is not spending fraction of that money on professional PR in times of crisis like this (when price is plummeting, bug cased people lose trust in the project, exchanges are delisting)? Is it so hard to spend some of that mony on additional paid listing, hiring professional PR company to handle this, pay back people that lost money because of the bug, become more transparent about spending so far etc.
I actually checked this now and according to the terms, only 6% was given to the foundation (and another 14m to core members personally vested over 36 months, but thats personal tokens). So thats 6M wings belonging to the foundation from which i assume they needed to incentivise employees, pay bills and who knowns what else, like any other company that has an asset.
Even if they did forecast using the tokens (which i'm not sure they did as i couldn't find anything about it in the quick search i did), what makes you think they actually made a profit ? (forecasted correctly or sold the tokens that were received as a reward). if they did forecast, it would actually be logical if they didn't sell the reward tokens as that would be a warning sign for potential projects ("hey look the foundation dumps our tokens so we won't give a reward").
and lets say that you are right and they did forecast and they did make a reward which they did sell. how big do you think that reward was considering the fact that they were 1 forecast out of hundreds and considering that they probably had a significant number of employees ?
Exactly! 6% is a lot, when you look at the numbers that they gave multiple times, stating that the rewards they gave away so far were worth 120 million USD on the day of the ICO (and note that some of them pumped significatly immediately after launch). Assuming they were average with they answers at best (but do you think the were just average?) it was additional millions of profit. And remember, this is for project only, not including personal rewards of the individual team members. And it was stated multiple times the are using those tokens belonging to the Foundation for forecasting (which they have right to do, this is source of additioal profit for the project). If the numbers you provided are correct, it means they earned ton of money and why it is not spent on some paid exchanges listing, PR, giving money back to the people who lost it because of their bug and additional marketing is beyond me. It might be in their interest to wait for Wings.ai to fall to be able to cash out rest of the money and move to the next project, it might be simply poor management or it might be something else, but the fact is they are not spending this money right. Examples what should be done are in my previous posts.
that's actually incorrect. none of the examples i gave reimbursed people, because they all don't charge people for using their software (despite potentially making a profit from user data or what not)
That's my point. You gave examples of project that did not reimburse, while I was talking about those that did reimburse. This is why I stated that some did and some did not. Wings decided to be in a group that moves full responsibility to the users and does not reimburse in any way, which is their choice, but it also gives a vibe "do not trust our smart contracts, becasue in case there is another bug in them (or in the UI) and your money is lost, we will not pay you anything". So once again, you are free to do this, but then do not expect people to trust you and don't be surprised that the price is declining.
There is no point to discuss it any further.
We now see (partly to your research) that they have lots of of money.
We also do not know how they are exactly spending it (which is industry standard, we all know those ICOs had more money than they needed anyway).
We also see not much is being done to regain the trust (no effort to figure out how many people lost money because of the bug and paying those people back, no immediate PR statement, not spending money on additonal marketing).
Some might think it is OK (like you), some might think it is wrong (like me). The market will decide what happens next.