Why you are going to love your Incent ICO experience
We think we have put together the coolest, most secure ICO site you’ve ever seen. Think we’re wrong? Sign up, deposit your BTC and then let us know what you’d want to see done better.
By now you’ve probably seen a few standard ICO sites. They’ve come a long way in the last couple of years and most now offer a pretty slick user experience. Minimal friction, sign up, deposit your bitcoins to the unique address associated with your account, and you’re credited with the amount of coins for the given rate. So far so good.
But what’s going on under the surface? That varies. Sometimes it’s good enough, other times inadequate, and sometimes just downright scary. Just because it works doesn’t mean it’s ok — Gox being the archetypal example of a site on which millions of BTC changed hands but turned out to be held together with wishful thinking and the PHP Mark Karpeles had learned at elementary school.
Incent wanted to set the standard for ICOs, so we’ve updated the regular approach and added a couple of features of our own. Upon login, you’ll receive your unique BTC address and, naturally, any funds deposited are sent to two-of-three multisig escrow (and no, it’s not like Bitfinex’s two-of-three multisig ‘cold’ storage).
It’s how this is all done that’s important. What we don’t do is keep a MySQL database on the backend that records deposits and credits your account accordingly. That’s a Single Point of Failure, and we don’t like those much. Instead, your Incent balance is calculated by parsing the bitcoin blockchain and checking what has been deposited to which address, and when. It’s written in the bitcoin network, forever, not on a database that can be hacked, wiped or tampered with.
All the data stored is kept as JSON objects within Firebase, which allows us to gain speed and scale without any stress or sysadmin overhead. Then Algolia is used to search this quickly and powerfully to give us the data we need. It’s a really streamlined solution that costs less, takes less time to develop, performs better and is more secure than the alternative.
Now, we’re not saying it’s perfect, only that we like it a lot and think you will too. To take a look, register at incentloyalty.com/register and have a look around. If you have feedback, drop it on our bitcointalk thread or join us on Slack. Or communicate your approval through the medium of bitcoin, deposited to your account. We think you’ll be glad you did.
The Incent ICO officially launches on 1 October. Larger ‘angel’ investors who feel they are able to offer something further to the project are eligible for a discount pre-ICO. Contact us on Slack or by email on incent@bitscan.co to find out more.
