There are three big ICO failures that entrepreneurs and investors should study. The DAO, CoinDash and the original ICO, Maidsafe. I spoke with Daniel Dabek, the CEO of the Safex decentralized marketplace and previous member of Maidsafe’s core development team to share his thoughts on what happened with the Maidsafe ICO.
“Maidsafe launched it’s ICO on the Mastercoin protocol, now called OMNI. The original plan was to only accept Mastercoin for 10% of the crowdsale since there was not much market liquidity for Mastercoin. Bitcoin would make up the rest of the sale. However, the smart contracts did not work as intended, there was a technological failure and Maidsafe ended up with Mastercoin making up 60% of the sale.”
I emailed the guy who wrote the article, he says he will change it. Perhaps someone from Maidsafe can email him to confirm, he said he needs to look into the “fact” before changing it.
Nice catch @Josh that was one of our main criticisms of him. He was mad because he thought the team was incompetent and not finished and he was bored and was at a road block so we said, “why don’t you help?” He said “I’ll build my own network that’s just as secure!” and he thought he’d have it done in no time. He’s using Blockchain tech and he is STILL not done. Why doesn’t the Forbes author publish that little morsel.
If you happen to write back he can check GitHub
Or contact the team I suppose, I would even direct him to the thread where Daniel goes off the rails.
I remember Let’s Talk Bitcoin did an episode on the crowdsale postmortem back in the day. I didn’t find it, but the article below summarizes some of Adam’s thoughts. Looking back, it was actually very calm compared to the ICOs of today (sadly), and the realization that Adam points out shows how little understood ICOs generally were at the time.
"You Get Two But Not Three
When it comes to fundraising with a new token, there are three primary areas of concern.
Quantity (number of tokens) Value (price per token) Duration (length of Crowdsale)
…
MAIDSAFE fixed two of these parameters; Quantity (429,496,729) and Value (.00005822BTC or .00002941MSC each). They gave guidelines for the duration of the Crowdsale (4 weeks). Because both Quantity and Value were fixed and more value came in than was expected, it quickly blew through the quantity and eliminated the duration.
…
Setting the price INSTEAD of the duration is absolutely catastrophic for community involvement.
…
because it all happened between midnight and 6am PST (9am to 4pm in MAIDSAFE’s native Scotland),
many who had purchased MSC found themselves stuck with the tokens but still wanting to purchase MaidSafeCoin via Bitcoin. Yesterday’s MSC buyers became last nights sellers and the market slumped
…
In Bitcoin we have shining examples and horrible warnings. MAIDSAFE is a little of both. They’ve been wildly successful in the terms they defined, but the terms were ill defined and the consequences of success overlooked because of concern about preventing failure.
" https://letstalkbitcoin.com/maidsafe-a-wildly-successful-crypto-crowdsale-debacle
I spoke with Daniel Dabek, the CEO of the Safex decentralized marketplace and previous member of Maidsafe’s core development team to share his thoughts on what happened with the Maidsafe ICO.
This is awful journalism.
Daniel Dabek has never worked for Maidsafe or as part of the core team, and I’m pretty sure he’s never contributed anything at all to the SAFEnetwork code.
I’m also sure that Daniel wasn’t aware of Maidsafe at the time of the ICO because he arrived at the forum several months afterwards, and made forum posts about his excitement at just learning about the project, and his studies about how it worked
there are posts by Daniel on this forum raving about the SAFEnetwork project, months after what was reported at the time as the fastest ever crowdsale / ICO (selling out in five hours I think), hailed as a success, and which almost certainly inspired many to copy this route to fund other projects, including Daniel himself. The Maidsafe crowdsale in fact raised millions of dollars worth of bitcoin, even if the crowdsale was exploited and used to dump Mastercoin which plummeted in value at the same time leaving the actual purchasing power less than some of the figures in headlines at the time. But the need for further funding was as much due to the subsequent fall in the value of bitcoin. The value of bitcoin has now risen more than 10x since the crowdsale. Had that happened earlier, there would have been no need for a subsequent funding round at least to this point and beyond. In no sense was the crowdsale a failure IMO, and I was there. There were problems that have been openly reviewed and acknowledged, itemised and addressed in detail, all of which can still be examined online by any journalist or party wanting to look into exactly what happened without the need to rely on someone like Daniel, who has been openly hostile to Maidsafe and SAFEnetwork, and whose behaviour has included a lack of integrity IMO (see below).
Daniel later performed his own ICO for an exchange and trading platform (SAFE Exchange) to be built on top of the SAFEnetwork, which raised a lot of money from people in the SAFEnetwork community, including forum members
at some point Daniel was accused (on this forum) by his then business partner, of contract violations and so on - posts deleted I believe because the moderators regarded them as personal attacks. Perhaps the Forbes article author should interview @Culexevilman and search this forum for Daniel’s posts?
some time afterwards Daniel, again posting on this forum, made disparaging remarks about Maidsafe - the people, the project, and the SAFEnetwork technology - but without any substance IMO
Daniel subsequently changed his project (now called Safex I think) to be independent of SAFEnetwork, and has from time to time continued to make negative public comments about SAFEnetwork (eg on his own Safex forum and on Twitter).
Daniel originally registered and controlled the home address of this community forum, and then after making his negative remarks towards Maidsafe safe, it was redirected to take visitors to his own project websites. He has retained the ‘SAFE’ branding chosen initially to associate his project with the SAFEnetwork, and which still confuses people: this week we had another person arrive at the SAFEnetwork chat asking about SafeX (Daniel’s new project, which has nothing to do with SAFEnetwork any more).
What a source for an article about Maidsafe and SAFEnetwork, Forbes! I hope you print a full and frank apology and retraction, and will more careful about sourcing articles on such an important topic.
Yeah I don’t like pioneer. He didn’t “pioneer” anything he said he had code that’s it. His Github was empty at least later on it was. I don’t even think that title is justified…
I may be stretching here, I know I do on occasion, but…
Would the obvious source for information from a “reputable news source” not be to go straight to Maidsafe.
Advertising SafeX and Daniel seems kind of placed in the article.
That’s all I will say about the matter.
Not unreasonable at all, it’s a possibility. Daniel is shady and likely pumps the price of his own coin as a full time job. The dude was probably bribed. His hyper link in his correction goes to a Texas bitcoin conference page bio that Daniel wrote this article is full of facts
Jonathan Chester , CONTRIBUTOR Founder & President of Bitwage
As more people invested in Bitcoin “discover” the SAFE Network and SAFE Coin they are going to see the coin as a serious threat to Bitcoin’s prominence. Expect this sort of thing to increase as time goes on.
this article is full of facts