Hi! Thanks for the questions.
We don’t use the smart contract technology on the first stage. We have developed our own service which
allows us to process incoming transactions from different blockchains because smart contracts at Ethereum
can’t control transactions on bitcoin blockchain. The decision to develop our service can be supported by
the fact that the software used on the main computer has been developed for decades, while the Ethereum
smart contracts appeared only a couple years ago.
2. Our service is monitoring all incoming transactions to our accounts. The service accrues tokens to the
contributors’ accounts and saves this in the database according to the token sale policy, as described on our
landing page. The contributors can see the amount of accrued tokens on their profile pages. If a contributor
would like to check the accuracy of the token accrual, they can compare the correctness of the calculations
with the information from the blockchain. In this case, the blockchain is the source of the primary data.
4. The service described above also helps us check every transaction twice before sending the tokens and
therefore ensure the safety of gathered tokens. All transactions done by the rules of the service will be
taken into account in full.
5. At that, we are planning on using a simplified smart-contract based on the OpenZeppelin framework (see
GitHub V2) at the end of the second stage of the token sale, which will allow us to solve two main issues:
1) Implementation of the ERC20 interface, which will allow trading our tokens on the external stock
markets.
2) Accrual of the tokens bought by contributors to their wallets using the smart contract feature.
As a result, the combination of our service and smart contract technology of token sale will guarantee
simplicity, reliability, clarity, and safety of the contributions and token accrual to the personal wallets of
contributors.
1 - That makes no sense. You can still use a smart contract for the Ether payments and your own system for the BTC payments. The benefit for your investors is that with a smart contract your tokens will be automatically and certainly distributed, while with your approach there is only a promise and nothing else. The whole point of using a smart contract is to avoid the middle man, which is you. You offer a project based on the Ethereum network, yet you don't use the one benefit it provides. That is counter-intuitive and can be interpreted as a possibility to scam.
2 - The blockchain only shows how much Ether you have received from each investor. No tokens exist yet, so the balance on your website is purely cosmetic.
4 - How can you possible believe that your manual approach is more secure than an automated contract? You are basically denying the underlying principle behind the Ethereum network.
1) Our token sale is currently available for two currencies, and we are going to add more options to choose from for the second round. A smart contract doesn’t allow to work directly with other blockchains. As we’ve already noted, it can include only one cryptocurrency. In this case, ETH. Unfortunately, not all of the investors are working with Ether. Those, who prefer other options, have to search for a way to transfer their coins to Ether, create an Ethereum wallet and invest in the ICO. We believe that all the investors should have equal opportunities.
We decided on the current method based on a unified approach for every customer and the simplicity of the investment process.
Unfortunately, even the smart contract doesn’t eliminate the possibility of fraud or scammers. Moreover, recently there were safety concerns with the usage of smart contracts.
2) You can use other sources - they will show you the same numbers. Calling it “cosmetic” equals to calling every blockchain transaction “cosmetic” as there is no access to the account.
3) As the recent months demonstrated both smart contract and multisignature wallets do not guarantee complete security. It all depends on who writes the code. We are creating safe and secure code for DMarket marketplace. As the Ethereum smart contract won’t be driving the marketplace, we’ve chosen the simplest and the safest way for token distribution during the token sale.