Polybius and the Future of Blockchain Banking — A Fool and his Money are easily parted
Hello again to everyone who is following the Polybius project or is interested in being a part of the journey to becoming a unique & successful digital bank.
This is one of the post in a part of a series that I am doing that not only provides a general insight into the project, but also tells you a story from an investor’s viewpoint. You can find the previous one here.
We have briefly discussed the objectives and ICO numbers before, now let’s take a closer look at what dogged the Polybius crowdsale event.
Needless to say that the ICO was a great success, but despite of a huge amount of preparation and technical expertise, wasn’t unhindered by its own set of problems.
This is officially documented in the post: Technical problems, or what to consider if you have decided to run your own ICO
What I am trying to do here is to bring attention to a certain organic issues that aren’t documented in the official post above, but, in hindsight, would affect the process of this fund-raiser and beyond, in its post-ICO world.
Ideally in the real world, I mean the physical world where you can meet with your investors and vice-versa, a lot of research goes both ways into who you’re investing in and who your investors are. In the digital space however, its a whole different story, one which some of the ICO organizers and founders of promising new projects are sometimes completely unaware of. They become the victims of what is commonly know as FUD tactics. This kind of fear-mongering tactics are affecting a lot of good projects out there, not just the Polybius Project.
FUD tactics are methodologies used by certain group of people to disrupt, discredit the project and demoralize the investors. But a layman would think, why anyone would do such a thing?
The answer is simple: Short term profit making. Short term goals of pumping and dumping of token value associated with the project and generating small profits from this constant reversal of trends.
Almost everyone who is familiar with trading stocks and commodities in a traditional setting, knows that there is almost always a certain kind of rumor-mill brewing up that spreads false news, either good or bad, about a certain brand or a company in order to manipulate the price. This is all considered fair game, although illegal in some countries.
But in the Crypto world, we are witnessing a new phenomenon — I call it — the Fish Market FUD.
Imagine you’re standing in a fish market, and there are a bunch of vendors trying to sell you their catch. Each claiming to have the best fish in the market, freshly caught, clean, ready to cook etc. In the Crypto world, not only the tokens are the fish, the quality of content is the flavor of the day — either pump or dump, but also these vendors are token holders, or future token holders that try to sell you their own brand of speculation depending on their position.
They start the day by grabbing their cup of coffee and heading to their desk to pick today’s Token. Whichever Token they have picked, they will then start collecting information on their active messenger groups, or forum threads or any other place they can cause nuisance in. They will begin by claiming to know something more about the founders, of how fraudulent they are, or how the project is a perceived scam, or plenty of other seemingly sincere pieces of information that investors not seasoned enough, may easily fall for and might end up selling their share of tokens for cheap. These cheap tokens sold by affected investors then fall into the hands of these FUD spreading traders.
This technique works more effectively when a token is fairly new and is listed on limited number of exchanges — the idea has just been presented, funds have been recently raised, and now the project team is preparing to get to the nitty-gritty of their project building. This in-between time of limbo is paradise city for FUDsters [FUD spreaders]. Here they can easily cause panic among new investors and make them sell for cheap, so they themselves can purchase these for lower than market price.
Once they have achieved their goal of buying for cheap, these FUDsters will magically transform into devoted supporters of this project and start shouting at the top of their lungs how amazing the project is, claiming how revolutionary the technology is or how this or that industry is going to be monopolized by the project they hold the token of. And then, when they succeed in achieving a slightly higher than the market rate, they will sell their tokens.
Rinse and repeat. Day in day out.
Now there are long term FUDsters too, one that the Polybius Project has been a victim of ever since the start of their ICO. Because one thing was very clear when they announced their plans to the public — They were going to be big.
Bigger in scope than any have come before as far as the blockchain Fintech sector is concerned, and not many will come even after they pave the path.
And so it was affected by numerous FUD spreaders on their Bitcointalk announcement thread.
Some claiming scam, some accusing of fraud, others simply calling names. Some were even paid to delegitimize the project, possibly — and most likely — by the competition, by people who clearly were not wishing well for Polybius.
Link to post here.
All this simply so they can get the shares of Polybius i.e PLBT for very cheap. And I must say, they succeeded too. Plenty of new investors who bought at ICO price $10 fell prey to such negative nusiance and sold of their shares for as low as $2.50. This huge drop in price although did allow original ICO investors, like me, to buy many more shares at a much lower price.
And I do feel bad for them, but I know that the amount of investors that fell for this FUD, are really low in number, and majority of the token holders still hold their PLBT, knowing and understanding how much time building an actual bank really takes. So no harm done there.
But my point is this, that the Polybius Project was and potentially is a target of this ongoing FUD even to this day, having organized groups of FUDsters visiting their Telegram group every day and posting absolute non-sense on the Bitcointalk thread.
Seeing the price now steady and slowly rising is surely a relief for the ICO investors and a good sign for the project, still, the PLBT price is lower than ICO.
So if anyone had previously passed the project for being surrounded by too much noise, I want to say, take another look, you might just be missing out on one of the biggest success stories :)
I will be talking in detail about what Polybius intends to create and how it will affect the global economy in the next post.
