How to Participate in an ICO

The BAOchain Team
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read

We’ve been getting some questions about how to participate from people new to cryptocurrencies entirely and thought it would be a good idea to write a guide from nothing to buying our token. This guide is fairly generic and should apply for most token sales.

1. Sign up for an exchange

There are plenty of exchanges these days, with the most popular being coinbase. It’s fairly easy to sign up and start buying bitcoin, litecoin or ethereum here, however they have a growing reputation of bad customer service and ‘convenient’ downtime. Despite this they are my recommendation just for simplicity and familiarity. (they also have an app). Once you have an account, go through all the verification steps to maximize your purchasing and selling power. Then add your debit/credit card and start buying!

Another good exchange is Poloniex. As I’m Canadian I don’t know their limits or how long it takes to get approved, but they have a fairly good reputation and offer a wider range of coins.

2. Get a local wallet

You have your coins, but they’re on an exchange and not much use! What now?

Get a local wallet! For bitcoin and litecoin I suggest https://electrum.org/ and https://electrum-ltc.org/. Neither of these require a full node to be syncronized (downloading the whole blockchain is quite slow), and both get you up and running quickly. Once the setup is finished, you’ll want to go to the receive tab and copy/note your address (very important to get it right!)

My electrum wallet

Once you’ve done this, go back to your exchange and navigate to the bitcoin send/withdrawal screen. Enter your address from electrum in the To: field and then enter your amount. Next, you just wait. With bitcoin, transactions can take awhile. Be very careful when withdrawing to not only enter the correct address, but to also withdraw the correct coin! Sending bitcoin to a litecoin wallet or an ethereum wallet will result in losing those coins forever!

My coinbase send screen (note the warning at the top)

If you purchased ethereum, I reccommend the web based https://myetherwallet.com. It has a very very simple onboarding procedure, and requires no special software. Once your wallet has been created you will be given the oppurtnituity to download it. Do not lose this file, as any funds inside of this wallet REQUIRE it to be accessed.

Big warning!!

Following that, you’ll be given your private key. This is the minimal amount of information required to access your wallet, and must be kept a secret (just like the keystore file). I encourage everyone to write this down and store it somewhere secure. Somewhere it won’t get thrown away accidentally.

Try unlocking your wallet with your keystore and private key

Finally go to the “View Wallet Info” tab, and copy your address (you’ll be transfering your ethereum here!)

This is my personal wallet

Follow the same steps on coinbase as above but this time send ethereum. Ethereum transactions are way faster than bitcoin, taking a few minutes instead of nearly an hour.

3. Send your crypto to the corresponding ICO/presale address

If you’re paying with a currency other than ethereum, please sign your message with the ethereum address you’d like the tokens to be credited to. My tutorial only applies to Electrum, and I will detail it shortly here. These steps need to be taken AFTER you have sent your transaction to buy tokens.

Navigate to the Tools section on the toolbar and go to “Sign Message”
For your message, enter your Ethereum address, for your address, enter your address (from above), then click sign

Once you’ve signed your message, copy all three fields and send the information to icoverify@thebaobab.market, where we will manually transfer the tokens to your ethereum wallet on the ICO launch. We are working on a way to automate this, where you won’t need to send an email and hope to have it ready by the ICO launch. If we can’t get it done, our ICO will only accept Ethereum.

Our Addresses

BTC Presale: 31wve1xu7UCePzQxwmqdR4CdbAgT5XUz4z

LTC Presale: MBnfKTCPJzwmqQoiZmrRMKscGxstVGVfLd

ETH Presale: 0xAA042CA4BF5673b220f4aafCcAc54f70f4b7D32E

Our ICO address has yet to be determined, however we plan on utilizing an ENS domain.

The BAOchain Team

Written by

We’re building the next generation eCommerce platform, with Blockchain Technology and First Class Crypto Payments

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade