Today we are starting SPiCE’s pre-sale, and soon our token sale. When we started the project a few months ago, we realized that most of the existing ICO platforms will not work for us. This is because most of them are not designed to deal with security tokens (with few exceptions: Argon Partners and CoinList). Therefore, we decided to build our own platform so we could tailor it to our needs and provide the exact experience we were aspiring to our token investors and token holders.
The purpose of the platform is to onboard investors following securities regulations for each country, depending on each investor’s country of residence. The SPiCE platform will continue being active after the token sale completion so our new token holders who join the project after acquiring tokens in the secondary market can register back with us and enjoy the returns of the SPiCE token directly. The goal was to make the entire investment process on a security token completely automated and with a outstanding user experience.
Our plan is to spin off the SPiCE platform from the fund (of course given the proportional ownership of it to all SPiCE token holders) and try to run it as a separate business. We believe that there is significant value in a platform that can deal with security tokens crowdsales, and that many funds will follow and use it to tokenize their funds.
So what does the investment process look like? You basically need to follow the following ten steps:
1. Once you land into our Website, you need to register with us, create username and password, and access the token sale documents. Unlike other ICOs, we decided not to openly publicize our documents in the web site since in some jurisdictions it is illegal to market securities to the public but it is not illegal for people to solicit information about them for investment. We wanted people to express their interest in our project by registering with us to get the documents. While this may reduce the number of leads we get, each lead will be more qualified since these will be people that really want to learn about the project. So, in the landing page of our web site (image above), you need to click on “Request more information about the SPiCE Token Sale”.
2. Once you click the yellow button, you need to fill the form below. Notice that after you click on the conditions we request your country of residence since our platform will treat you slightly different depending on your country to comply with the regulations in each country.
3. Once you have done this, you will get an email confirming your subscription and you will be logged in into the investor section of our website. You can login to our website with the username and password you created any time. After logging into our website, you should be seeing the screen below - the SPiCE VC investor dashboard. The dashboard displays (among other things) the current status of the token sale, your balance of money invested and confirmed tokens, all the documentation about our project and finally, a button to apply for investment.
If you scroll down, there are some simple instructions about how to create an Ethereum wallet since you are going to need that to invest.
4. The next step is to click on the “Apply for investment” button and start the investment process. Once you do that, you will then enter in the wizard below that will guide you through it.
5. The first thing is to know more about you. This is a process known as KYC/AML (Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering) and consists of a standard check that financial institutions do to verify customers identity as well as to avoid taking money that might be tainted. To do so, you need to click on the “Continue” button to proceed to that step. In here, you will see the screen below where you are being asked to provide us with some more detailed information about you and right after that you will need to upload and submit one proof of ID (either passport or some other form of ID).
6. Once you have done that, the final thing that we need to know is what type of investor you are, a retail or professional/accredited investor. The reason to ask for this is because there are restrictions as to how many investors we can take from each country that are retail or professional/accredited so we need you to self certify yourself. Here again the type of screen you are going to see will depend on what country you are from since the meaning of professional or accredited investor changes from country to country. Most people will see a screen like the one below.
Read the text and tell us whether you agree with that definition or not so we can categorize you as a retail investor or as a professional investor.
7. Once this is done, you need to tell us how you want to invest with us, in fiat currency (USD or EUR) or in cryptocurrencies (ETH and BTC) in the screen below. At the beginning of the sale only ETH and USD is available and we will be adding BTC and EUR shortly.
8. Depending on which option you click on you will get one of the two screens below. In both cases, you need to indicate what is your planned investment size (no worries, it is just an indication, later on you can invest what you want). Please note that in the case of ETH, we do not need your wallet address and we will be sending you the tokens to the same wallet you use for sending us the funds while in the case of fiat or BTC, we will need you to register with us an Ethereum wallet. We are recommending MyEtherWallet.
Note: It is importanet that you do not send us ETH from an exchange since we will not be able to send you tokens there once our token sale finish.
9. You are almost done! After the screen below, you will receive an email confirming your subscription and explaining to you how to deposit the money.
If you chose fiat, you will get a bank account number. This bank account belongs to a third party escrow service so once you send the money to it, it does not come to us directly and we are not able to touch it till the token sale is finished and the project is ready to start. So your money is always safe. If you chose crypto, you will get a wallet address and a 3D bar code that is unique to you for security purposes. This is where you need to send the money. Once the cryptocurrencies are sent, they move immediately to a cold storage wallet that is protected by a third party custodian service again to ensure that the money is secure and that we will not touch it till the project starts. Please note that at this point you are receiving a personal investor code. Please use that to all the communications with us and we will use it in all the communications with you to make sure no one is sending you emails on our behalf.
10. The final thing to do is to sign the token subscription agreement. Unlike many other token sales, and given that we are a security token, we are also bringing the economic rights of the token and our usage of the proceedings to a legal agreement that you sign which protects you. Once your investment has been done, you will get another email with a document that you can sign digitally using DocuSign. The email looks like this:
Once you click on the “Review Document” button it takes you to the usual DocuSign digital signing flow that most people should be familiar with.
In your investment dashboard you will see the status of your investment and how many tokens will be assigned to you once we issue them after the token sale is completed.
So now we can welcome you to the SPiCE VC family!
