After our PAY token started trading on various exchanges last Friday July 7th, forums and social media has naturally become filled with “experts”, who want to share their 2 cents about PAY and where it might go. I don’t consider myself an expert, who can predict the future, but I know how to read data. And in this blog post I want to present you some of the facts that will reflect on how PAY has been performing so far, even though it is still young.

In order to analyse profits or loss, we have to lay the base first. Since PAY was denominated in ETH prior to the tokensale, I have checked the historical data on https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/historical-data/ where I will be using the closing price on the presale and tokensale day:

Presale ETH price: 359.05 Usd (June 14th)

Token sale ETH price: 323.70 Usd (June 24th)

July 9th: 241 Usd (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ )

Since every swap during the pre- and tokensale occurred with 420 PAY per ETH (350 + 20%), I will just assume that rate for PAY. Dividing the prices above by 420, it will give the following Usd rates, that assume of course that the person did not buy the ETH way before but rather in that very instant:

Presale: 359.05/420 = 0.85 Usd / PAY

Tokensale: 323.7/420 = 0.77 Usd / PAY

July 9th: 0.85 Usd / PAY) (https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/tenx/ )

So at first glance it might appear that if you bought PAY during the token sale or presale, you barely made any money compared to what the price is at the moment. Checking https://icostats.com/ shows, that most token sales do NOT make a profit and it would have been better not to buy into them. With TenX it appears at first sight that it is a similar case. But only at first sight.

Looking at the total market cap on the relevant dates paint a completely different picture:

June 11th: approx. 110 billion

June 24th: approx. 115 billion

July 9th: 93 billion

If a person found a way to diversify all his/her cryptocurrencies over the entire market on June 11th, that person would have lost 15% in roughly 3 weeks ((93/110–1)x100). A person that had diversified on June 24th would have even lost 19% in around 2 weeks ((93/115–1)x100).

Had a person stayed in ETH:

Presale (June 14th) — Drop from 359.05 Usd to 241 Usd:

= 33% loss in 3 weeks ((241/359–1) x 100)

Tokensale (June 24th) — Drop from 323.70 to 241 Usd:

= 25% loss in 2 weeks ((323/241–1) x 100)

So, here is where it gets crazy: Looking at the list on ICO stats, there is not a single token sale that has been beating the return of ETH so far: https://icostats.com/vs-eth

So, anyone who has been buying into token sales would have been better off just staying in ETH. These people would have made way more money. Or put another way: The only reason, token sales actually made money for their buyers is NOT because the underlying companies did well, but rather, because the market or the underlying asset of ETH did well.

WHO TO COMPARE TO?

Warren Buffett, arguably one of the best investors of all times never compares himself in actual dollar terms, but always rates himself against the index, in his case the SP500: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

So, we compared PAY to the entire market and also to ETH. PAY was the only one making a profit where all the “benchmarks” lost money. What about BTC?

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/historical-data/

Presale June 11th: 2958 Usd = LOSS of 15%

Tokensale June 24th: 2608 Usd = LOSS of 3.5%

Today: 2518 Usd

So, looking at a pure analysis over this short period it shows that holding PAY was by far the best option compared to other cryptocurrencies. Looking at the entire list of Top-40 currencies, there would only be LTC, DASH and VERI (and maybe 1 or 2 others), where people also would have not lost money: https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

CRITICS

When so-called experts discuss that in pure Usd terms people did not make much profits through PAY, they completely discount that the entire market truly crashed over the past 2–4 weeks, having a massive impact on each and every cryptocurrency. People tend to forget about that and prefer to pick out those statistics that show only part of the entire picture:

For example people love to point out that PAY dropped over 90% on the first day, which was due to HIT-BTC displaying fake prices over 70 Usd and us warning people that these prices are not real.

Bittrex opening up the trading 2 hours too early which lead to some additional confusion.

An ominous trader trying to dump PAY with a 2-million Usd sale order that got eaten up with lightning speed.

Our competition writing posts and articles on how this is the fall of TenX.

Like I said at the beginning: I don’t see myself as a guru who can predict the future, but I can look at the facts of what happened in the past weeks. Looking at these numbers, the TenX token sale was one of the most successful ones for token holders.

Going forward we at TenX have to prove that we can keep excelling at what we started:

We will keep hiring A-players to grow our team and speed up every step.

We will keep improving our product and adding new features.

We will stay humble and willing to learn.

We will stay open to listen to people’s feedback.

And… we will build the highest tower NOT by destroying other towers but by actually building it ourselves — and we would encourage everyone to do the same!

We want to congratulate everyone who bypassed the massive crypto hit over the past few weeks by being in PAY, we want to thank you for trust and we are looking forward to attracting more and more long-term PAY-hodlers to build a sustainable and forward-looking company together. It is our mission for our token holders to provide PAY as a place that was not only best to be in over the past few weeks but for the years to come.

The author Dr. Julian Hosp is the co-founder of TenX and co-author of the whitepapers of TenX and COMIT.

TenX (www.tenx.tech) is a Singapore based Fintech company that makes cryptocurrencies spendable anytime anywhere by offering a debit card payment system to its users on the frontend and by connecting blockchains at the backend through the COMIT protocol.

COMIT is an open source project that connects any blockchain without creating an extra token. Whitepaper: www.comit.network