Just days after launching an IEO on MXC, the CEO Tao Ran accepted the blame for mismanagement of the TicTalk foundation. He acknowledged that his words might make people angry, and apologized for the fluctuations experienced by the TIC token.

“I don’t understand marketcap management. I only understand investment incubation and operations. In the first few days after IEO, I was as excited as the friends of the whole community. With the efforts of the community partners and the cooperation of investment institutions, the TIC token rose 5-10 times, and the momentum made a lot of people excited. However, the market is so cruel, the more excited you are, the more crazy you are, the more dangerous it is. If you don’t respect the market, you will definitely be educated by the market. In the past 24 hours, Bitcoin has risen by 20%, causing huge fluctuations in the price of the the entire MXC market and the TIC token price.”

The CEO Tao Ran went on to discuss how they had released 600 million additional tokens on the exchange in order to launch the IEO. In order to protect the community, investment institutions bought back 400 million tokens, spending ￥10 million ($1.5 million USD) in the process.

He later insisted that he was not running from the problem, and vowed to “serve the community for free for an entire lifetime” as he refuses to let the TIC token fail. This apology, issued entirely in Chinese, may not be enough to win back the favor of angry community members, who raised questions about the project’s ethics on social media.

Undoubtedly, the IEO was nothing more than an attempt to manipulate the token price and please investors. Having already been on OceanEx for over 6 months, there was little reason to hold an “Initial Exchange Offering” as the project should have been past the token issuance stage. Their IEO was loaded with dubious decisions, including selling tokens at 1/3 the active trading price on OceanEx. In their Chinese language IEO information guide, they claimed to be the world’s largest incubator, with more than 1 million registered users. Other questionable statistics included boasting about 200,000 high-value users and 100,000 paid app users, despite not offering any evidence or sources to support this claim.

This comes just weeks after the project announced its intention to switch from a decentralized social media project to a project incubator. While seeing an apology may alleviate fears of an outright exit scam, the damage may already be done to investors left holding the token.