The long-awaited “major announcement by Komodo” happened several hours ago and it basically resulted in a huge token dump as well as a price drop:

Why did the announcement have such an effect? Let’s try and speculate (watch it on YouTube meanwhile):

First, the presentation sucked. Basically it was just three developers shot on a bad camera with a double-echo sound effect. The guys were standing in front of some curtain and talked their minds.

YouTube comments are always a special place, but this time the commenters were all in agreement:

Inconsistence of the pre-announcement hype with the presentation itself. The large countdown on the Komodo website, tons of Twitter mentions, general token price growth – and then suddenly the ridiculous live stream quality. Most probably many token holders dumped them the moment they saw the live stream, thinking this was an elaborate prank – that could’ve triggered the downward price trend.

The news were not that big. Sure, a partnership with a brick-and-mortar fintech company is great, decentralized ICOs are cool and all that, but this is not really what you expect when they say “breakthrough”. This did not break through.

Now let’s see what the actual essence of the announcement was:

Decentralized ICOs are added into the ecosystem; A French fintech startup Monaize will use it to launch its’ first decentralized token; Komodo token holders will become (minority) stakeholders in Monaize; A stable Agama wallet with atomic swaps will be introduced soon.

Atomic swaps are amazing (basically it’s an ability to convert bitcoin to altcoins and vice versa without the need for exchanges), but they are not fully there yet. The rest is not so much of a big deal, but it all could’ve been made into a properly exploited publicity stunt with a better presentation.

Which finally brings us to something great about the announcement:

These guys do not seem to be after publicity stunts.

From the whole presentation we get the idea that behind Komodo platform are the people that truly believe in decentralization, security, privacy and speed of cryptocurrency operations, and they speak their minds without worrying how they look. Considering the presentation, hyping up and selling out is the least of their concerns. They are all about their product. Which is why Komodo still looks very and very promising in the long run.

One of the Reddit threads in the Komodo subreddit actually voices the same sentiment – these guys are clumsy but they believe in their product and its’ getting improved little by little: