Not Even Hackers and Screwups Could Thwart Our ICO’s Momentum

Last call to purchase your KickCoins before our ICO ends on Sept. 16

Over the last two months, KICKICO has experienced undeniable momentum. It all started with our secret round, which raised 573 ETH. Then, in our pre-ICO, more than 700 backers helped us raise 5,560 ETH in one week. Needless to say, we were riding high on this energy when we launched our ICO on Aug. 29.

And for good reason. Our ICO has now shattered our goal of 70,000 ETH, putting our funding total for the last two months at about $30 million. We can’t wait to see how that number grows in the final three days of our ICO.

But like any success story, we’ve also had a few hiccups along the way. Here’s a quick recap of the major twists and turns in our ICO—the good, the bad and the ugly that we quickly made good again.

We resolved our Clif High slip-up

 A few days into our ICO, we got an amazing review from Clif High, the ultimate blockchain guru. Naturally, we quoted part of his review on our site, which was fine. But then, one of our contractors made banners using Clif’s image without our knowledge. To make matters worse, these banners included a button that prompted the viewer to buy KickCoins — which made it look like he had recommended it directly! We didn’t realize these ads were published until a flurry of resentment started coming in from the crypto-community. As soon as we found out, we immediately removed the banners and apologized to Clif via Twitter. We were grateful that he said he had no complaints against us for our slip-up.

We survived some major hacks

KICKICO was attacked twice during our pre-ICO, each lasting 30-40 minutes until the hackers apparently ran out of money and stopped their DDOS onslaught. But during our ICO, the hackers got a lot more serious.

Scammers completely cloned our site, including all the campaigns and our Starbase platform repository in Github. Their plan was to organize a DDOS attack that would cause our site to go down, and then give out their phishing site link in chat rooms and communities, declaring that it was a mirror site with a functioning payment acceptance system. These hackers managed to trick a dozen users, collecting around $50,000. We immediately reported the attack to Cloudflow and Github registrars, which blocked the attackers. This thwarted the scammers’ plan and, fortunately, kept our community from losing even more money.

 We held a record-breaking Meetup

One week into our ICO, we held one of Russia’s biggest blockchain Meetups to date. Who attended? More than 1,000 blockchain enthusiasts, as well as global industry innovators like Eric Gu (Metaverse, China), Eyal Hertzog (Bancor, Israel), Scott Freeman (C2CX, China), Evgeniy Xata (Cyber Trust, Russia), Edgar Kampers (Qoin, Netherlands) and Scott Morris (Ithacash, USA).

We made progress on a Russia-China strategical alliance

 China’s ICO ban threw a wrench into our planned Russia-China cryptocurrency fund with Metaverse. However, the mission of that partnership is as clear as ever: to develop blockchain structures for startups in Russia and China using the KICKICO platform. We’re excited to continue working on this initiative with two of China’s leading platforms, and the сrypto-investment bank CyberTrust. Stay tuned for more on this innovative partnership.

Through all these twists and turns, there was one constant theme: our community is the real driver of our success. Our backers, authors and blockchain enthusiasts are at the heart of KICKICO’s mission, and we’re thankful to have their unwavering support.

There’s still time for you to be part of our innovative blockchain community. Join the KICKICO movement by purchasing your KickCoins before ICO ends on Saturday, September 16 at 11 a.m. (UTC). Let’s make crypto history together!

Hitesh Malviya

Hitesh Malviya is the Founder of ItsBlockchain. He is one of the most early adopters of blockchain & cryptocurrency enthusiast in India. After being into space for a few years, he started IBC in 2016 to help other early adopters learn about the technology.
Before IBC, Hitesh has founded 4 companies in the cyber security & IT space.