The first round is over. Let’s look at the data
The first round of the IFO was a success for an experiment with zero marketing, and here are some of the things we learnt.
Before setting the starting block of the first round of the Initial Free Distribution of NIL tokens, my central question was “Should I set some kind of KYC to avoid spam?”
The response was “Nah, this is an experiment. Spam is a legitimate part of it (if it isn’t too much).” So, to minimize the risk of having a massive spam, which would have invalidated the entire project, I just promoted the event as little as possible.
Now that the first round is over, I have collected data about all the wallets participating in the distribution, the transactions among them, the results of the transactions, and so on, to have a picture of how it went.
The global stats
After three days of distribution, the smart contract distributed 12,750,000 NIL to 463 participants, and the same amount to the project itself and the team.
How many tokens per wallet?
During this round, there was a 30,000 NIL per wallet cap. To reach it, the participants had to send 0 ether to the contract six times. Since the Gas Price SafeLow during most of the distribution was ~2 Gwei, it is not surprising that the 84% of the wallets did 6 requests.
Successful and failing requests
Most of the transactions were successful. Although, 88 transactions failed because the gas limit was too low. Also, a few wallets had a lot of failures because they requested NIL after the end of the distribution.
Clusters of wallets: friend&families or whales?
Even if I never talked about limits per person, I was hoping that any person would participate with just one wallet. Of course, if your brother is not tech savvy and you believe that he should have some NIL, it’s wonderful that you set a wallet for him.
But what if 3 clusters of ~25 wallets, linked together, form a supercluster of 75? Could that be a 🐳 ?
🤔 Look at the following chart
On the left, 179 people used 1 wallet to request their NIL. On the right 8 people used in total 179 wallets to request the same amount of NIL.
😕 Is it fair?
Initially, my disappointed reaction was to apply a correction to the balances but
- I don’t like corrections in general. The blockchain is good because it’s immutable.
- It isn’t possible to be sure that a cluster is the manifestation of an abuse. It could just be a group of friends who helped each other.
Let say that you like that a few friends of yours participate in the IFO, but they don’t have an Ethereum wallet, what would you do? Creating a wallet is easy and fast, but buying a minimal quantity of ether to participate in the distribution is not that easy, and, essentially, can be very slow. If they, for example, would try to use that incredible collection of bugs called Coinbase, they would be late. The only way to allow them to participate is to send them something like 0.001 ether from your own wallet.
A minimal transaction like that is what linked the most of the wallets forming clusters. How can I say if that link is the consequence of trying to help a friend to jump on the train or a calculated operation? Also, in the second case, whoever manually set up 75 wallets to require NIL was undoubtedly a strong believer… should s/he/they be awarded instead?
So, I decided to accept the result as is.
In the second round, I will implement a KYC to block spam 🙃
Overall, it was a success 🎯
Having 219+ people who decide to invest their time and a few Gwei to request something that has no value at all to be part of this crazy experiment is a fantastic result.
Thank you all (🐳 included) 🙏
This analysis has been possible thanks to the Etherscan Api.
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