The Closure of The Acorn Collective
It is with much regret the Co-founders announce the closure of The Acorn Collective with immediate effect. This has not been an easy decision and one that is the result of a great deal of consideration. Whilst this decision is a recent one the cause of it can be traced back many months.
For those who have been following us for a while you will know that our pre-sale raised successfully. This money’s purpose was two-fold: firstly to promote the main sale later in 2018 and to enable us to deliver an MVP. The main-sale did not go well. We expended a great deal of time and resources into making our main-sale a success unfortunately the crypto market crashed. Like many ICO’s, we also lost dollar value from the ETH we had yet to convert to fiat. This was compounded by two capital-raisers also failing to produce and our main backer from the pre-sale failing to deliver their promise of another fund injection. Investment in ICO’s had also dried up completely as we launched our main sale, with ETH falling by over 50% in that period.
The result of this was that we had to rig the operation differently to continue the project and deliver for our backers.
Almost immediately, two thirds of our team had to be laid off with the rest taking significant pay cuts; focused solely on delivering the platform as promised. We as co-founders injected more of our own capital to ensure we delivered the platform. For a long while it looked as if this was possible. We are very proud of the team, who have worked in extremely difficult conditions to produce an MVP that has a virtual accelerator, crowdfunding platform and marketplace. Thus, we are among a very small percentage of ICO projects which actually delivered a product. However sadly, this had not been enough to secure our survival as a project.
Unfortunately, the faith in the market had not reappeared which resulted in a lot of selling of our tokens. It is quite clear that there has been an effort to drive the price down with market manipulation using 1–2 OAK transactions.
The lack of funding from the main ICO sale in 2018 meant that there is no liquidity fund as described in the Whitepaper. This fund would have been able to stabilise the early market and to mitigate the risk to project founders when they put their projects onto the platform. As such, there has also been no budget for market making. Coin Market Cap have a policy of requiring $5k/day in volume, which with no market making has not been possible, and so there are few new buyers to the token market.
These factors have combined to represent a significant risk to any founder putting their project onto the platform having their project wiped out. We have looked at several ways of mitigating this risk, but recent news from our main backer has now made even these last efforts irrelevant. The syndicate that were largely responsible for our pre-sale success in the meantime have broken up. This means that there is now no control over several million tokens, and no chance of mitigating the risk to founders on the platform without a significant liquidity fund which, as described above, we do not have.
The expectation that projects going onto the platform (of which there are many) would raise the token price and reduce the risk is no longer valid if a large token holder could just sell into the gaps and crash the price — the founder could be wiped out and there is no way we could prevent this.
With respect to the founders we have been working with, we hope the work we have done with you so far can at least stand you with a good chance of success as you continue your crowdfunding journey elsewhere.
To our community, token holders, and to our team many of whom have been with us since the beginning, we’re sorry this hasn’t been what we all hoped it would be. We’ve all tried our best to make this work and with your support came very close to overcoming the many obstacles that have been thrown at us since March last year. Sadly, this last one is insurmountable.
Thank you for being such a great and supportive group, without your support and work, the project would have folded long before.
We hope the above explains why this difficult decision is being made.
CEO and CFO as Co-Founders
support@aco.ai
