Buyer Beware

The SONM ICO is in 2 hours from writing this, but reddit user luvcheese13 has brought to my attention a post from SebastianJu on bitcointalk.org. The post can be found here.

If you don't know, SebastianJu was planned to be the official escrow (trusted third party) during the ICO crowdsale. His role was to manage to tokens so that SONM didn't directly hold all the funds, which is a potential safety risk for anyone investing.

SebastianJu states:

So the ICO is NOT escrowed anymore. The invested funds will be held by the SONM team totally. I can not provide any safety from now on and I need to take my name from the safety sign of the SONM ICO. Just to make clear that I will have no access nor control about invested funds.

Not sure what to say about that behavior. I believe nobody would have contacted me without me pressuring that way. People would have invested believing I hold the funds in escrow. Which is not the case.

Nobody contacted me about negotiating something upfront, telling me about a change or tried changing something in the deal for the ICO.

So that's what I unfortunately only found out by putting pressure on the topic.

So again... this ICO is not escrowed anymore. Funds will be hold and controlled by SONM totally from the start.

What is SONM thinking?

Sergey and rebel.salesman on slack state that:

We are going to use ICO smart contract with multisignature as the escrow. Multisignature will be held by Sergey Ponomarev, Alexey Antonov, and SONM advisers.

It's very hard to say whether or not this change is so bad that the project is now some sort of scam, but what is striking is how the SONM team handled it.

According to rebel.salesman, the lack of communication with SebastianJu was due to "lots of work", which is simply unacceptable. People planned on investing, in part, due to the escrow deal. Not formally announcing this change and misleading investors is bad enough, but the SONM team didn't even notify the escrow entity himself.

What now?

FOMO will still likely take over this ICO, and it will probably sell out very quickly. Personally, I'm still on the fence about investing or not now. I don't like that the funds will be "locked up" for a month without an escrow now, as stated in the business overview:

SNM tokens transfer will be restricted for security reasons for one month after the end of crowdfunding. All unredeemed tokens will be burned.

IF SONM releases some sort of statement before the ICO starts that explains the reasoning behind changing the escrow, then I'll likely still invest.

IF SONM at least informs investors that a change has been made, even without reasoning, it will go a long way in convincing me to still invets.

And if SONM does neither, they are simply being deceptive during one of the most crucial moments in their project, and I cannot support the project further.