Finally, we’re there. We’ve announced that we are doing an ITO. The website dedicated to the ITO is up and running, the whitepaper is online and available for download. We’ve finished reviewing everything for the umpteenth time, so now it’s up, live, and ready for people to register for our ITO. It seems so easy — if only that was all there was to it!

Before we got to this point, we had to take numerous measures to protect our investors and ourselves from frauds. For example, the domain name we are using is only an interim site. Once the actual token sale starts, we will use a different site with a root domain where registering is much more difficult. Why? Because scammers will set up similar looking sites to siphon off and steal our investors’ money. Furthermore, our site and servers have enhanced distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection. This means that even if somebody attempts to conduct a DDoS attack against us, our ITO website should stay alive. However, I do still wonder if we would survive a Mirai bot attack.

The same need for protection goes for all the social networks, which is why we enlisted the help of Yannick Zehnder. He has already been part of a couple of ICOs as their social media coordinator and behind-the-scenes blogger. According to him, it isn’t sufficient to reserve all the names for your project or company on social networks. No, you also have to take care of the similar sounding names and block them. Why? There are hundreds of different scams that could crop up — some crooks will try anything to divert funding from our ICO and steal our investors’ money.

Like myself, many of you probably only have a limited online presence that is restricted to a few social networks. You will be surprised to learn how many types of social media there are now, and how widespread their usage is. I personally started out on Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, and then registered with LinkedIn for professional purposes. Yet times have changed, and we now have to deal with a plethora of networks. Thanks to Yannick, our ITO is now represented on Facebook and LinkedIn, but also on Twitter, Medium, Reddit, and YouTube. We have reserved channels on Instagram, Slack, and, of course, Telegram. You read correctly, we just reserved them, but we’re not actively using them. One exception is our information channel on Telegram, which will link to all official sources (TBA).

You might ask yourself why we aren’t using Telegram, especially considering that it’s become the must-have channel for ICO communications. Every ICO seems to have its own Telegram channel and groups. We’ve been told that some investors, in particular those from Asia, don’t think an ICO has any traction if it doesn’t have at least 10,000 Telegram subscribers. We believe this will change with the growing number of reports revealing that you can simply buy Telegram subscribers. We have received offers for packages from 1,000 to 20,000 subscribers.

Well, running with the herd has never been our thing. Being more conservative with our ITO and our security token (see earlier blog), we contemplated what the best communication channels would be for our company. We decided that we didn’t want channels that are manipulated like Telegram, where you have to hire a team to manage it 24/7 to head off the scammers and thieves. Looking somewhat old-fashioned, that left us with Twitter and LinkedIn as our main communication channels, with some Facebook messages in between. These were then augmented with Medium, where this blog series is published, YouTube, and Reddit.

At the same time, we put our ITO on some of the many websites that list ICOs. So far we’ve only used the free ones, though we were immediately offered costly upgrades to give us, amongst other things, better positioning. Most of these offers requested hard fiat cash, though some also would’ve been happy to take Ether or Bitcoin. Putting our ICO on these listing sites had an unexpected effect: we are now getting swamped — spammed, really — with service offers for our ITO.

The biggest of all of them is Cointelegraph, a marketing and news platform that we are considering to use. They were one of the first to reach out to us, and one of the most insistent. Their marketing department suggested that we wouldn’t need to spend $50,000 to $100,000 like other, typical ICOs, rather, we could just use the $30,000 premium marketing package, essentially a must have. Another company offered to list our ICO on all the ICO listing websites, of which they counted 434 in total. Moreover, they also offered to add a positive review of our ICO on each one of them. All for just €1,800 — what a deal! Really? Why would we ever take up such an unethical offer?

Being on these listing sites also resulted in unsolicited ratings and reviews of our ITO. One self-proclaimed expert actually wrote: “Team has a blockchain expert, but not enough to reach their vision. But still would need other crypto experts.” A quick look into our whitepaper would have helped this person to gather the correct information. Our CTO Andreas Curiger has been doing cryptography for over 30 years! In fact, our team members have an average of over 20 years of work experience. Our products are already being used to protect crypto assets — we’ve already reached, and overshot, our first vision. Hence I’m lead to ask myself if this review is just another attempt to extract money from us…

We’ll keep on sorting through this flood of offerings. Maybe we’ll find something worthwhile in it. However, we won’t go for fake reviews, paid subscribers, or other immoral and unethical offers. We’d like to remind anybody who is accepting these offers that they cannot get away with it in the end. Just remember that the Internet never forgets, and once something is on it, it can always be found. What might be anonymous today will be traced back to an IP, and then to a person. Somebody will find all those fake posts and list them. It will come out.

We are in the business of providing security. This requires trust, not just today, but in the future. We’ve already earned a lot of trust with our equipment, which reliably protects critical infrastructures and large crypto holdings. We don’t want to throw away this trust with a shady ICO and fake promotion. That’s why we chose the harder path in doing a security token offering (STO), where our tokens have dividend rights and can be converted into company shares (see earlier blog). Our corporate culture simply requires that we adhere to higher standards!