NOTE UP FRONT: I express my opinions here (at least at the end of the article). If you don’t like them and don’t have evidence to support your dislike, then go kick rocks.

Things are moving forward quite rapidly in this space; I simply don’t have time to look at all the ICOs (ya know, full time job, podcast, wife, and stuff), but this one struck me as different while also being wildly anticipated. This article digs into the Status platform ICO model, how it differentiated itself from other models, and what the results were. If you aren’t sure what they do, go read about em here.

You might want to start by reading their recap of the ICO. Ya know, cause they wrote it.

Quick Obligatory Methodology Section:

This was all done using Project Jupyter notebooks and the Pandas package. The transactions were retrieved using my Python bindings to the Etherscan.io API (tagging Matthew Tan). The methodology is very similar to my previous articles mentioned earlier, and the Jupyter notebooks of all of it can be found in a new Github repo.

In particular, I retrieved all transactions from the SNT Crowdsale contract address from Etherscan.io, and parsed out the ones that had an error or had a value of 0 ETH, for both external and internal transactions. The values refunded by the internal transactions are removed from the corresponding external amounts when grouped together. This is my dataset. All conclusions and numbers are derived from that. I don’t do an errored transaction analysis on this one, one may come afterwards if no one else does it, but people like CodeTract have been doing an excellent job of this for other ICOs. Go check out their stuff.

I’m happy to see that others are doing analysis of this space, so we can see more of the trends developing.

Status.im ICO Summary:

The Status platform prides itself on really caring about their community, the Ethereum community, and learning from previous ICO models. By learning from previous ICO models, I mean attempting to widely distribute your token to those who are interested in its utility in the midst of a fever-pitched, FOMO induced, and irrationally exuberated (made that one up!) investor community ready to flip your ICO for profit.

What was their plan? Two-fold:

They created a pool of “Genesis Tokens” (SGT) to give to early contributors that clearly showed they wanted to help the platform grow, which were given out at the discretion of the core devs. This token pool corresponded to a maximum of 10% of the total token supply. After the contribution period, SGT could be converted to the ICO token (SNT) so early contributors could “get in” on the ICO token for being a contributor early. Basically, early disbursement of tokens that map to a given percentage of the total. As for the crazy investors, they implemented a soft-cap, and subsequent “Dynamic Ceilings.” What is that? Well, you should read it from the people who implemented it here like a smart person, and then frown at my shitty explanation here. My explanation of Dynamic Ceilings, just imagine that as time went on, large investments only got a portion of their investment accepted, and the rest was refunded. This was an attempt to increase the time window for smaller investors, and slowly make it more difficult for large investments to get in. The effect of this was for every transaction that got an amount kicked back, there is one regular tx and two internal txs, for example ( numbers are for illustration ):

1.) User attempts to send 100 ETH

2.) Over time, smart contract says "screw you big investor, give the little guys a chance!"

a.) Smart contract accepts 20 ETH

b.) Smart contract refunds 80 ETH

3.) User gets 20 ETH worth of SNT and 80 ETH refund ** Note that percentages changed as time went on.

Here are the stats I pulled from various sources, as well as my personal analysis of the transactions themselves.

Start Block: 3,903,900

3,903,900 End Block: 3,908,029

3,908,029 Investment Time Period: 4,129 blocks or ~17.20 hrs

4,129 blocks or ~17.20 hrs Initial ETH Ceiling: 12M CHF (Franks, yo!)

12M CHF (Franks, yo!) Total SNT Supply: 6,804,870,174.88

6,804,870,174.88 Total ETH Contributed: 299,343.15177772392

So this one got a bit hairy when summing up investor amounts from the smart contracts. You’ll notice (you probably didn’t notice) that I’m off by ~559 ETH from the reported numbers by the smart contracts themselves. This is because of the dynamic ceilings they employed.

So my analysis got a few of these transactions mixed up when combining external and internal transactions, which make my numbers slightly off, sue me (don’t). This annoys the shit out of me, but I don’t have the time to fix what went wrong. The trends will be the same, which is the main point of this article.

Total Supply Distribution:

Below is the Status graphic from the previously linked Contribution article for your convenience.