In the last nine months Roger and Harith have been working with insane dedication to present supporters with the most comprehensive set of business plans, white papers and information sheets while Robin Lee, our CEO was in constant contact with our legal team to ensure that we stayed within the boundaries of the law in the shifting sands of 2017’s fintech landscape.

With invaluable help from some of our very good friends, they did a fantastic job of bringing in pre-sale investors while our CEO, Robin Lee, trekked through China to meet Fenbushi Capital who not only invested in HelloGold but also agreed to run a pre-sale on ICOage. In addition Bo Shen agreed to join our board of advisors.

My main job was to develop the smart contracts for the token sale but it quickly became clear that as a company that “used blockchain technology” rather than a core “blockchain tech” company we had a lot to learn.

I started observing each ICO as it happened, getting involved with a few as an investor or helping them with their smart contracts, each time making sure that I learned more about what we were letting ourselves in for.

We saw the network congestion caused by BAT and Bancor and the havoc that they caused on myEtherWallet and Etherscan. We saw the controlled way that Civic handled their ICO. And on June 21st when I participated in the TenX ICO I fell victim to one of the first Slack scammers and got involved in the war against phishing scams.

breaks off to ban somebody who signed up for the hellogold slack with the nick “HelloGold” hopefully before they can launch a phishing attack…

Slack admins have to stay alert

Within a week or so we witnessed phishing move from being a random hazard to an industrial operation. Slack channels were relentlessly trawled by automated bots, fake websites appeared, some with sponsored adverts on Google. I started signing up for slack channels just to watch for patterns and helping people who were targets.

quick pause while he has a quick chat with the admin of another slack channel about some suspicious new signups

Staying alert for impersonators…

The pre-sale went like a dream. Sold out within a few hours. They even asked for more to sell…

And then, on the 28th of August at 12 p.m. Malaysia time, we launched the token sale. It was perfectly planned and executed and all went like clockwork. They even took a video of me launching the contract.

In your dreams Mr. Appleton.

Ok. Guilty as charged. It was a typical mash of tools failing at the last minute and other bits of chaos. Despite testing on test nets and everything else and having a detailed launch playbook (which we used for the dry runs) we were fighting all the way until the launch. But it did launch on time and they did shoot the video.

And since then everything went nicely. The sale was divided into five tranches with up to a week for each. It took three weeks to complete. Not a single problem except that the Chinese government banned token sales and demanded that every participant in an ICO should be refunded. ICOage needed to refund the ether to every single participant. Every single one.

So, here we are. On the day the HelloGold token sale ended not jubilant but not quite back at square one. We are going to have what the company call the “ICOAGE Token Resale” but internally we call “round 1.5 — no limits”. My new smart contract for round 1.5 is with ChainSecurity who promise to save everybody from the bugs in my code and an updated website and contract interface is waiting to be launched.

It’s been an eventful few months.