Medicalchain Raises $4 million in One day and gathers $20 million in pre-sale
Mohammed Tayeb talks about ICO journey and MedicalChain future plans with UNLOCK
Unlock Blockchain interviewed Mr. Mohammed Tayeb, Co-Founder and COO, Medicalchain on the conclusion of their ICO. The interview delved into the details pertaining to the overall experience, the challenges they faced and their upcoming projects.
Medicalchain’s ICO ended in one day. It started and concluded on February 1st 2018. In this one day, they managed to raise $4 million. In the pre-sale period, they had already gathered $20 million.
As Tayeb stated, “We could have sold more on the day of the ICO, but there was a kind of meltdown. We had 135,000 registrations, but were only able to sell to about 1700 of them.” MedicalChain’s target was to sell 175,000,000 tokens in total. As Tayeb explained, “At the moment, we don’t need all the money so we would rather raise a small amount and deliver some milestones and then later, we can raise the rest on the exchange. If we had sold everything during the ICO we would have raised over $150 million. Moreover, we didn’t want to jam the Ethereum network with the ICO because we want to be responsible participants and not negatively affect anyone.”
Importance of KYC (Know Your Customer)
Medicalchain took KYC very seriously during their ICO. As Tayeb explained, “All participants were invited to submit their KYC at the point of the ICO. Once we approved, they were able to proceed to make the payment. To do this, we had to rent out 200 servers from around the world in order to handle the high volume of transactions.” In the first 2 minutes, they received 45,000 applications, processed the first 1700 which amounted to $4 million, and announced that their ICO was closed.
In tune with Regulations
MedicalChain worked diligently to comply with regulations. Their ICO was done out of Switzerland, one of the few countries that has regulated ICOs. As Tayeb commented, “We applied for FINMA back in September 2017 and we commissioned KPMG to carry out a 3 page report on the utility of MedTokens to present to the Swiss Authorities and explain that it was a utility token and not a security token.”
MedicalChain went as far as seeking the opinion of lawyers to make sure they were following the utility token regulations. Some companies do airdrops, whereby they distribute free tokens or coins to the crypto community and token burning, whereby the token is made permanently unspendable by sending it, for example, to an address with no known private key, so that it is no longer usable. MedicalChain was advised not to do any airdrops or token burning as these are considered grey areas.
ICO Challenges
One of the biggest challenges that startups usually face once an ICO is finalized is getting listed on exchanges. As Tayeb said, “We were able to get listed by February 5th just 4 days after our ICO offering. We are listed now on Huobi Pro, Kucoin, Coinbene, Qyrptos and Gate.io and this is because we were fortunate enough to have built good relationships with them.”
However there were challenges especially on the day of the ICO when Medicalchain’s telegram group was targeted by spammers. It got so uncontrollable that the telegram app had to be removed from the Apple store. As Tayeb stated, “Telegram could not control it; we could not control it. We were targeted by about 400 or 500 bugs. That was quite challenging, and it was not very nice to the community.” He added, “despite the losses in the crypto-currency market our token survived, and did not go down below the ICO price, so anyone that participated in ICO would have doubled the amount of Ethereum the week later as our token was going up. We were fortunate enough to be in that position.”
The Future
MedicalChain has some major announcements in the upcoming weeks. One of them entails a large pilot working with doctors and treatment of patients using Medicalchain. Tayeb mentioned, “Later on this year we will launch a retail brand that is powered by Medicalchain. It will be a global telemedicine application.”
Advice to ICO community
Tayeb has the following advice to startups in the Blockchain arena, “The market is becoming very crowded. If you want to launch an ICO, you need to do proper research and see what else is there on the market, and why what you have is better. You should not just do an ICO to raise money. The most important thing is to build a community, to have a strong team, support and advisors that actually provide advice and not just want to showcase their names.”
Another piece of advice from Tayeb is to, “Talk to people who have carried out an ICO to understand the process from beginning to end. A simple idea is not good enough, as you need to know how to execute it. Ask yourself if you have the time and effort to do it.” He adds, “The market is very flooded and 90% of projects are going to fail. Do not jump into a project just because of the hype, as it won’t deliver value and it will die down, and you will be left with something meaningless.”
As for those who want to invest in ICOs or cryptos he has this piece of advice “I always say that if you want to participate in a project, get more involved, do not just put your money and sit on it. Research it and know what you are getting into, and that way you can add value. No one can get rich by investing in cryptos but we all can benefit from building a decentralized movement that will promote transparency, auditable transactions and a corruption free environment.”
