Reflecting on a highly successful TenX tokensale

When we started preparing for this tokensale almost a year ago (https://medium.com/@TenX/raising-money-from-vcs-vs-doing-a-token-sale-a-quick-guide-to-best-practices-e38e7645727b ), we could have never dreamed of it turning out as successful as it eventually did on June 24th 2017. Including the 100,000 ETH that were contributed during the presale (https://medium.com/tenx-wallet/tenx-presale-goal-of-100-000-eth-reached-within-36-hours-fb6d820832c ) we ended up with:

Slightly over 200,000 ETH total raised (including ETH, ERC20, BTC, LTC and DASH);

The actual tokensale completed in less than 7 minutes (8 minutes after start the first tweet was sent that TenX has completed and people should stop sending);

Over 4,000 people are holding PAY tokens after this sale. (considering all the groups who pooled their funds, we are probably closer to 10,000, but this is unknown to us)

The above is a quick summary of the TenX tokensale in terms of numbers, a detailed description will be provided later in this article. To begin, TenX is primarily focused on transparency and a ‘people powered’ module, we have no doubt that our supporters are the leading factor to how well TenX has grown and will grow in the future. I would like to share how the tokensale was handled behind the scenes in our Singapore office. This is a moment in any business where you sit down and reflect on the previous years in which myself and the team have spent almost all of our time primarily focusing on building the foundation of this service. While words cannot describe the feeling, we have captured the moment in one of our Vlogs found here:

ROADBUMPS

Leading up to the final day various challenges popped up that we have had to face:

Scammers duplicating our site and content while listing their own contribution address.

Facebook,Twitter & Reddit users labelling themselves with the tag ‘TenX’ to dupe users into sending them contributions.

Scammers on Slack attempting to impersonate admins via directly messaging users & posting duped contribution addresses.

Ultimately every member of our team along with the support from the community allowed us to greatly reduce the likelihood of any potential contributor being duped into losing their money. On behalf of the entire team at TenX we wish to thank the community for actively donating their time to report & help other users whether via Slack, Facebook, Twitter & Reddit. Every reported instance had the offending users removed or their accounts disabled almost immediately. We also want to thank Etherscan.io who helped us labeling addresses as scam or legit.

While the issues above continued our team also focused on coordinating all technical, legal and security activities towards our marketing and communications team. Prior to the tokensale sale our team spent several weeks analyzing social media of other tokensales and the problems that may arise. This has allowed us to have a proactive approach towards the likelihood of any issues pre post tokensale. Thankfully our mentors, partners, early adopters and supporters provided invaluable feedback which again reduced the likelihood of any scams or implications during the tokensale.

Just like in everything you do, you will have people supporting you, whereas others try to stop you from reaching your goal. Looking at Social Media, Reddit and Slack especially 3 questions kept popping up that I would like to have the chance to reply to in this post:

Why is the address listed on our website not the same address where we actually work?

Some users on Reddit wanted to check whether we actually exist or not. They looked up the company address listed on our website (which is the same as in Acra, the Singaporean company register) that stated that we are at: 9 Temasek Blvd., Suntec Tower 2, #38–02, SINGAPORE 038989. What people did not know was, that the CEO of ICH group (www.ich-group.com — they also list as a company they invested in on their website), Danny Toe, is an Angel investor in our company and allowed us to use a room in their office at the very beginning of our existence for us to save cost. We therefore also used their address as our office address since there was nothing else that we had. In 2016 we then moved from there into the PayPal incubator where we left in April this year since our team with 12 people became way too large for that. We never changed the registered address since our mail was still going to ICH Group where we would pick it up on a weekly basis. Furthermore we knew we would be moving into a larger office soon, since we were planning on being roughly 50 people by the end of the year in case our tokensale was a success. So why change the address when we were constantly moving around. Obviously we had never thought much of all that until a Reddit post popped up to challenge us three hours before the start of the tokensale on why we did not exist. Well, now you know the story — and yes, of course we do exist and if you ask us nicely, you get to visit us too :-) Just like for example people here come to pick up their TenX cards:

Why is Vitalik Buterin listed as an investor?

If you don’t know Vitalik Buterin in the blockchain world you must have not read any news about that industry — ever. Most people connect Vitalik to being the co-founder of Ethereum (www.ethereum.org ), few people know that he is also an avid investor through his fund Fenbushi, where he is a founding partner: www.fenbushi.vc We first met Vitalik around a year ago, when he moved to Singapore and both he and TenX used SGInnovate as a co-working space (www.sginnovate.com ). He also became one of our early card users and gave us invaluable feedback on COMIT (www.comit.network ). When TenX was doing the seed round investment in March 2017, we were introduced to his partner Bo Shen from Fenbushi. Fenbushi became the lead investor in this round and since both Bo and Vitalik are the fund’s main partners it was natural to list them on our website. The only ones who ever had a problem with that were the people watching from the outside and not Vitalik or Bo.

SUMMARY OF THE TOKENSALE

This brings me to the actual tokensale. We had considered a few things to avoid problems that many other tokensales just like Status etc. had been facing:

In order to take “whales” off the table, we did our presale 10 days before the actual sale. It was open to anyone who was willing to contribute at least 125 ETH. This strategy seemed to work really well, since only a handful of parties with 1,000 ETH or equivalent joined the actual tokensale (excluding presale).

We also only showed the actual addresses 15 minutes before the sale. This reduced unnecessary spamming of the network upfront and allowed for a very smooth start of the sale. The entire Ethereum network showed less than 1 hour of stress and cooled off dramatically soon afterwards.

We did not set any transaction size limits during the sale as we believed this would only benefit those who would know how to bypass this rule. Setting a gas limit would result in people being blocked who do not know about that rule. Our recommendation of 50–60 Gwei with 130,000 Gas limit turned out to be quite good. We had many people come in with under 50 Gwei, while a few had spent more than 60 Gwei (see more details further below when we highlight ETH). So after all it was shown that not pushing any rules onto people turned into the best self-regulatory option.

All this allowed us to have over 4,000 people in just 7 minutes to hold our PAY tokens and if you consider that we have been working with pools in China and Europe, it is probably a few thousand more. Many of these 4,000 people had contributed 10 ETH or less, showing that our tokensale was especially interesting for the “small contributor”.

When the tokensale started we had over 40,000 people trying to get into the sale. It is like trying to get into a room with only 4,000 chairs. 90% or 36,000 people will not get a seat. This is the key to a capped tokensale, just like ours. Obviously, a few people were confused that even though they came in during the first few seconds, they still did not get tokens. With 40,000 people trying to get tokens and only space for 10% of them, it is mathematically clear, that many will have to wait for the tokens to be listed on the exchanges. Following the token sale I made a video to explain the entire process:

From the feedback we received it is more than clear that the structure we had chosen of was one of the best versions people had ever experienced and we are especially proud of that.

FINANCIAL SUMMARY

Below you can see a table with all the currencies that were received during the pre- and tokensale:

Financial Summary TenX Tokensale

Here is the detailed overview in a Google sheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pNtHqo8x0RaLs5iaoj1DtxI30KkjRzGvdQSphYVYYnc/edit?usp=sharing

So, what does this table mean?

Including our presale we received contributions of slightly over 200,000 ETH. The reason it went slightly over is a combination of 3 factors:

First of all the TenX offering had some of the most diverse currencies ever offered in a tokensale.It was quite challenging to synchronise all the currencies as an alt-cap in the smart contract and so while the tokensale finished after 7 minutes it took another 13 minutes to completely have everything locked up. Approximately 5% surplus are because of inevitable technical delays.

Second of all we were working with partners such as ICOage, ICO365 and IMtoken in China and also several group-contributors in Europe who were helping us to get funds from contributors who do not speak English. Synchronizing all the caps had a slight delay which added to the total amount and the performance of our partners turned out to be way more successful than initially expected. Especially the small surplus of ETH and BTC are a result of that.

Thirdly, price fluctuations among the various currencies especially in the past 36 hours towards Ethereum (ETH dropped roughly 10% to the rest of our currencies) have added an additional increase of the relative total of Ethereum while in regards to fiat the amount stayed the same (roughly 80 million Usd).

Adding these 3 factors together increases the total ETH of slightly over the targeted 200,000 ETH to a total of 245,000 ETH. This amount may fluctuate quite heavily up or down, since roughly one third was contributed in non-ETH currencies (ERC20, BTC, LTC, DASH).

After speaking with our mentors and advisors, we agreed to honour all contributions even though this means that the total amount of PAY tokens exchanged to the public will be slightly higher, namely roughly 105,000,000.

This will have a minor effect on the total and trying to work out a refund algorithm would mainly hurt smaller contributors who did not come in during the first minutes. Some rough estimations have shown that in order to refund the excess 45,000 ETH we would have to cancel the tokens of over 70% or close to 3,000 people, which is absolutely not what we want for our community. It is our goal to provide a great price once the PAY token is listed on exchanges in a few weeks, so that more rather than fewer people get to enjoy the benefits of PAY.

Also, we will not withdraw the extra 45,000 ETH but rather leave them for additional liquidity in the crypto ecosystem to support a decentralised TenX as outlined in our whitepaper. This is actually a WIN-WIN for token holders AND the company.

Should you be unhappy with this arrangement then please feel free to reach out to us BEFORE Tuesday 27th 11:59pm EST and we would be glad to refund your amount to bring the total market cap down for everyone else, who will be glad you are giving your piece of the pie up. Considering that some PAY futures (these are IOUs that some exchanges start trading before the actual tokens are tradeable) are already trading at 5 to 10 times the tokensale value and having spoken to many of you, we highly doubt many of you will give up your PAY tokens. In case you are willing to give up your tokens, please send an e-mail with your Transaction ID to support@tenx.tech and we will help you. After Tuesday, the tokens will be issued to your Ethereum address and a refund will not be possible anymore.

Looking only at Ethereum this means

First block mined: 3922949

First block time: 2017–06–24T13:00:03.000Z

Time officially closed: 2017–06–24T13:07:03.000Z

Number of successful ETH deposits: 2,892

Number of successful Altcoin deposits including presale: 1,112

Lowest Gas Price used: 17 GWEI

Highest Gas Price used: 306,923 GWEI

Lowest Gas Fee TX: 0x193e8b25fca2054e8b49eae726040cafb379c4a8013caff75d818722d92c8dcd

Highest Gas Fee Tx: 0x766906ca3afe82e9e1f8bd51f78f431e3441584ef98b5773a15f8b16852ccf1b

WHAT COMES NEXT?

In our whitepaper we have laid out a detailed road map not only for the next few months, but even the next few years. https://www.tenx.tech/whitepaper/tenx_whitepaper_final.pdf Therefore I want to give you a brief outline on what you can expect over the next few weeks:

The tokens will be reflected online in our system within 2–3 days: https://tokensale.tenx.tech/#/verify If you don’t see it straight away, be patient. We are integrating everything one after the other.

After these 3 these you should see them in your ETH address. If your system does not support ETH import your private key into www.MyEtherWallet.com or IMtoken wallet. Both are partners of ours and have already integrated PAY into their system.

You will NOT be able to transfer PAY tokens until we place them on Exchanges. We expect this to happen within the next 3–5 weeks.

We are already talking to all major exchanges and have signed deals already. We will release them one after the other in a timely manner.

The most important thing for our token holders during these next few weeks is to create as much additional value as possible which should reflect in a great token price once they hit the exchanges.

Of course this also means that we are working on getting more App users on board and we will be releasing the iOS and Web App just as planned in the beginning of August.

For more Q&A please refer to this special post here: https://medium.com/@TenX/pay-token-sale-faq-post-token-sale-c66ea944d9d3

CONCLUSION

To summarise the entire event — we could never have dreamed of such a picture-perfect first stepping stone to where we want this company to go into. This tokensale is not a destination. It is only the beginning of a revolution that we will help bring about to the entire blockchain industry. We want to say thank you to the entire TenX team, its early investors, partners, mentors, customers, testers, families and most important in that regard: You, our contributors, our community who put your trust and faith in us, to deliver on our promise. We will not let you down.

Thank you so much for being part on this journey together to a world where people can spend any of their blockchain assets anywhere anytime like a dollar bill in your pocket.