Token Sale Background

It’s been almost two months since we completed our token sale and our team couldn’t be happier to move forward from the fundraising and ferociously focus on building out the platform. While we’ve shifted a majority of our workload onto product, there was still one small element of the token sale that we felt we had to see all the way through.

For those not familiar with the story of our token sale, we’ll provide a bit of background to give context to this announcement. The Po.et team chose Zerion as a token sale partner because we both felt that the standard-smart-contract based token sale models were not user friendly, especially for first time investors. Zerion’s vision is to build direct, transparent, and secure access to business and financial opportunities for everyone, everywhere, and using their platform we assembled a custom token portal with a user friendly interface designed to help individuals easily navigate the token sale process.

Both Zerion and our team were confident that we were establishing a new set of best practices that future token sale models would embrace. Unfortunately, once the sale started, the portal could not keep up with the demand of participants attempting to purchase Po.et tokens, and many people were not able to access the portal. While Zerion’s development team worked to allocate additional server resources, we decided to push the sale back by 12 hours to better assess the technical bottlenecks and implement a sustainable solution. Once the sale was reopened, we ran into the same problems as before, but luckily, our engineering team was able identify the problem and immediately push up a fix. The token sale sold out about 17 minutes after users were able to easily complete the checkout process.

Our community was vocal about the inefficiencies they felt throughout the token sale process. The Po.et team was equally displeased with the obstacles that participants had to face when trying to purchase Po.et tokens. Many of our most ardent supporters planned their busy schedules around the sale and still weren’t able to contribute. Similarly, some of our European community members were unable to participate due to the time we chose to resume the sale. We want to reiterate that our intention was to create as smooth and equitable of a process as possible.

Community Gift

At the culmination of the token sale, David Bailey, chairman of the Po.et Foundation, promised our community a ‘gift’ to make up for the hurdles. We took our time to fully evaluate the situation after all of the dust settled to better assess what the most fair community gift would be. The Zerion team was closely involved in this evaluation process, as they felt an equal responsibility to give back to the community.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve completed a buyback of $100,000 USD worth of POE on the open market over the course of this past week. Accepting full responsibility, both the Po.et team and Zerion decided that a portion of Zerion’s revenue would to go back to the community. We purchased Po.et tokens across various exchanges over the course of an entire week in order to smooth out any price fluctuations. These tokens were sent to an address that deems the tokens unspendable. This token ‘burning’ process will have a deflationary effect on the total token supply as they will be locked in the address forever. We hope that our community accepts our and Zerion’s apology for the problems the portal caused during the token sale process, and we thank Zerion for what we believe is a fair and honorable gesture to the community.

We know that Zerion’s team is working hard to move forward from here and provide services to help companies raise capital all over the world, and for investors to securely and seamlessly invest in companies at any stage. We wish them all of the best.

Moving Forward

With that, we’re excited to put the token sale behind us and to continue discussing how Po.et will disrupt the digital publishing industry. We’ll be posting development updates here on our blog so our community has transparent access to the platform’s progress.