Crowdfunding
The Neo platform was designed to serve as a launchpad for Initial Coin Offerings. Since hosting the Red Pulse ICO last year, Neo has accommodated around a dozen ICOs, with another dozen in the works. From a fundraising perspective, these crowdsales have been successful, selling out rapidly and raising hundreds of millions of dollars. But from a technical perspective, several of Neo’s largest ICOs have been blighted by problems.
Also read: Neo Approaches Record High But Centralization Concerns Persist
Apex Gets Owned
In the last 24 hours, Apex has become the latest Neo crowdsale to suffer a major incident after a hacker replaced the website’s contribution address for its own. The feat resulted in 1,056 neo going to the attacker’s wallet. Explaining the incident in its Telegram channel, Apex wrote:
A short while after the start of our crowd sale, malicious actors were able to take control over our website and change the correct ICO address…We decided to immediately take down our website and go for an alternative route, i.e. post the correct address via our social media (Telegram & Twitter). We also posted a selfie of our CEO showing the correct address timestamped on a piece of paper.
It concluded: “We will make sure that users that have contributed NEO to the wrong address will receive their rightful amount of CPX. Only payments made to the specific address in the website will be honoured.” Apex is the not the first Neo ICO to encounter issues this month; The Key was also bedeviled with problems. As news.Bitcoin.com explained: “First the token price was jacked up 300% shortly before the sale started. Then the site crashed, and then the Telegram group was flooded with spam links, porn and thousands of complaints as the event degenerated into total chaos”.
Neo ICOs Aren’t Going That Well
Neither of the Neo crowdsales that have encountered problems this month are the fault of the team behind the Chinese blockchain. It’s vital though for any smart contract platform to get off to a good start, as the failure or hijacking of early projects can sap confidence in the fledgling ecosystem. For all its success, Ethereum is still haunted by the spectre of the DAO hack which saw $50m of ether stolen from its first major token sale in year one.
Seemingly every week, news emerges of Ethereum ICOs that have been hacked or exit scammed; in the last few days Experty had $150,000 stolen in the same manner as Apex, and Prodeum and Benebit both exit scammed. The weight of legitimate Ethereum projects far outweighs the dubious ones, however, and thus confidence in the platform remains. Neo conducts far fewer crowdsales and the projects that have launched to date have yet to prove their worth. In the light of ICO hacks and technical failures, pressure is now on early Neo projects to prove that they can add real value.
Do you have plans to participate in any Neo crowdsales? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Twitter, and Apex.
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