KuCoin Opens First Spotlight Sale, Only To Sell Out In Less Than An Hour

KuCoin is one of the most recent exchanges to offer a place for a public token sale, which is also known as and IEO. The Singapore-based company is calling the platform KuCoin Spotlight, which makes it possible for anyone with enough KuCoin Shares (KCSs) to engage in the token sale. However, US residents are not eligible for this service, and anyone outside of the US must go through KYC verification first.

This morning, at 10:00 am EDT, the first token sale for the new platform was launched. The token sale offered 600 million MultiVAC (MTV), which were priced at $0.006 each. However, the sale did not last long. Within less than an hour, the tokens were gone, giving the KuCoin Spotlight platform over 1.9 million KCS, translating to about $3.44 million USD, according to reports from SludgeFeed.

There were limits on the sale, restricting any single user from purchasing more than 600,000 MTV (about 0.1% of the total available). There was a minimum buy-in of 30,000 MTV, and the sale was being publicized as early as March 25th.

Still, CEO Michael Gan of KuCoin took notice of how fast this sale happened, which was a big sign that something was amiss. About an hour ago, Gan posted to Twitter to say that there were about 100 users that caused the token sale to be finished within three seconds. As a result, the CEO said that they are working to investigate the 100 transactions impacted, adding that they would be verifying if there were bots used in the process and that any bots would see “serious actions” taken against their transactions.

https://twitter.com/gan_chun/status/1113472872100405251

Shortly after this post, Gan tweeted again, saying that deductions of KCS were not done instantly, and some users sold their tokens before the KCS was withdrawn, resulting in a failed payment. This could have been prevented if the buyers abided by Gan’s tweet before the sale, telling investors not to sell for at least 15 minutes for this exact reason two hours before the sale.

https://twitter.com/gan_chun/status/1113443106085408773

Furthermore, the MTV share of the failed payments ended up back in the pool, which is why some users could still make their purchase 10 minutes into the sale, despite selling out within seconds.

https://twitter.com/gan_chun/status/1113480996408614912

At the time of writing, there has not been details released regarding whether the massive number of tokens were purchased via bots or scripts.

Before this token sale, MultiVAC was the subject of a Series A funding round, accumulating $15 million as a result of contributions from IDG, NGC, Hashed, Signum, Arrington XRP, Dfund, and ICODrops.

Even though KCS was up by 35% until this token sale, the fast activity on the IEO resulted in a very small impact on KuCoin Shares.

The launch happened a few days after Matic Network (MTX) said that their new token on Binance token sale platform, which is better known as the Binance Launchpad.