Your excited because you just came across a new project that solves world hunger, decrypts your spouses emotions to human readable form and uploads them to the blockchain, 10x better then Bitcoin and can be traded worldwide with 1 Million Transactions Per Second (TPS). You rush home, bust through your front door, knock the kids over, and rush to your computer to invest in this new ICO!
Now your getting antsy!
It’s been a whole 5 minutes since you have completed your Know Your Customer (KYC) form and submitted your funds, and the strangest thing happens, your not seeing a return on your investment! (The irrational investor)
You launch your Telegram app and start demanding answers, and you deserve them!
You scroll through all 150 messages you missed:
Steve: Admin, when exchange?
Admin: We cannot discuss exchange listing due to legal advice and the sensitivity of the matter. We will update you when we have an official announcement.
Blockchain100: Anyone know when exchange?
Admin: We cannot discuss exchange listing due to legal advice and the sensitivity of the matter. We will update you when we have an official announcement.
Crypto Bob: Which exchange are you guys looking at?
Admin: We cannot discuss exchange listing due to legal advice and the sensitivity of the matter. We will update you when we have an official announcement.
KrypoKing: We deserve to know which exchange, just give us the first letter. B for Binance, G for Gemini…etc
Newguy: Not sure if this question has been asked yet, but does anyone know which exchange we are listing on?
You finally arrive to the end of the list and like a responsible investor and good steward of your community, you post the only logical response to the 150 messages you JUST read:
When Exchange?
The problem is that most ICOs fail to answer the one simple aspect of the When Exchange!? question, THE WHY?
- Why is the information sensitive?
- Why are you given legal advice not to mention which exchange?
- Why don’t you already know where your listing?
- Why do you keep repeating yourself to the inquiry, “When Exchange!?”
Why is this information sensitive?
In the crypto space, NO NEWS is BAD NEWS, but FAKE NEWS or BAD GOOD NEWS can be the LAST NEWS.
With the rapid increase of new ICOs emerging daily, marketing and community engagement is the life blood of all crypto projects. Investors want to remain informed of EVERY milestone, engagement, development effort, recruitment, partnerships etc, so they can retain confidence that they have put their investment of time and money in the right place. In the mean time, the media has their ears tuned and pens ready to publish anything resembling good, bad or even fake news.
So what happens when an ICO or group of people rush to deliver this unverified information?
Critical to the ICO phase and life of a project is the REQUIREMENT to only announce OFFICIAL and VERIFIED information. Speculation and conjecture can RUIN your investment and the potential for a project to be successful.
A new project is akin to an unhatched egg, you must maintain the right conditions for it to break out of its shell and thrive.
The responsibility to create the proper conditions for success does not solely lie with the ICO team, but with the entire community. The project simply created a service or product which is a vehicle that you are leveraging for your financial prosperity, why stab your own tires?
A responsible project and community management team will always aim for consistent and accurate messaging. Observation of the impact of inaccurate news has created a best practice of protecting sensitive information that may stimulate a Pump & Dump effect on a legitimate project. It is better to hit the market with an under valued coin/token then one that has been over inflated with expectation.
ICO Rule 1: Under promise, over deliver
Why are you given legal advice not to mention which exchange?
Although at the time of this article I am not aware of any international laws preventing the discussion of exchange listing,
after interviews with many project teams I have learned that they are bound by Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) in some cases and also warned about the perception misleading investors.
As regulations and speculations thereof; continue to pile onto the crypto space everyone is moving very carefully through this emerging mine field. One wrong move and BOOM! your leg is gone and now you have to hop to success.
Rejoice that projects are seeking legal advice!
We do not know what this space will look like 2–5 years from now and which projects will fail to have the foresight and advisement to survive. In instead of asking, When exchange?, We should be asking what steps are they taking to ensure conformity to upcoming regulatory requirements as they move to a public listing where they are open to scrutiny. Like every good business does before undergoing a financial audit you must allow time for the shredding of documents and destruction of evidence 🙂 All under legal advice of course!
So give your project time to get it right!
ICO Rule 2: Seek legal advise and stick to best practices
Why don’t you already know where your listing?
Werner van Rooyen, from International exchange Luno, explains to Coin telegraph just what goes into adding another coin to an exchange platform:
“We have to look at the four different resources a new currency will drain when we come to deciding on adding another one,” Van Rooyen tells Cointelegraph. “There are the technical resources; adding the new currency into the back-end (and making sure it’s done securely), including send/receive wallets, integrating it on an exchange etc, is vital and needs to be done properly.”
The decision to add a coin to an exchange cannot be accomplished prior to a coin being minted, which means the coins are distributed, stored and the chain established, calculated and verified. When a new project launches they own all coins and must sell enough to meet their Soft Cap (Minimum amount needs to start the project). The initial total supply often changes due to the practice of burning unsold tokens to lower the total available supply and increase coin value. There is a lot of moving pieces as the coin supply is going through this process.
Exchanges listings comes as an expense to a project and a business decision for the listing exchange. These two aspects play a role in where the coin is listed. As Rooyen mentioned, the exchange has to examine many aspects of a new listing to ensure security, resource requirements and technical compatibility with their infrastructure. It is easy to forget that many projects are launching simultaneously everyday and it takes time for exchanges to go through this exhaustive process.
Why do you keep repeating yourself to the inquire, “When Exchange?”
Are we there yet?, Are we there yet?, Are we there yet?
Your off for a family vacation and your little one is super excited! you pull out of your driveway and before you hit the corner, the questions start. Are we there yet?
Mom and Dad have to make a pivotal decision; do we keep lying to our child like we have been about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, or do we tell the hard truth that we have 8 hours to go?
The problem here is that there is no time to coordinate this decision in front of the child, so it becomes a game of Paper, Scissors, Rock, Shoot. Both parents fire off an answer at the same time, one says, “ where almost there honey”, the other says, “Go to sleep, we have 8 more hours to go!”
Consistent messaging within the community is important. It is common for a social media group to contain more than one admin working on behalf of a project. I have seen users send screen shots of admin discussions that conflict with later information as ammunition to hold projects accountable to miscommunicated information.
Repeating information in a uniformed and consistent manner ensures that there is no misunderstandings and maintains the expectations that are in line with the organizations objectives.
Within this calculated and measured market, people want personally crafted human responses, but I have watched communities rapidly shed supporters due to misinformation and admins having to fend off angry mobs while the guy who went off script is sound asleep in his bed.
So i say, repeat on!
to all my community managers. Stand your ground and communicate heavily with your project leadership to ensure that you are delivering the maximum amount of releasable and accurate information!
ICO rule 3: Establish healthy and effective communication channels with your team to ensure consistent messaging. Maintain transparency and update the community often, even with small wins.
So now you know! “When Exchange?” is not so simply answered.
Be an asset to your community:
- Ask the right questions that build value.
- Share what you know vs. what you would like to know
- Help rely answers to repeated questions with a copy/paste
- Kill misinformation as soon as it is discovered
- Informed your project of rumors that may have an impact good or bad
- Be patient and realize that full ROI comes at the end of the road map
- Don’t spread Fear Uncertainty Doubt (FUD)
- Express grievances in private and solutions in public
- Don’t spread unfounded Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)