I have posted earlier this day on reddit, and I will make copy / paste here as well, as some of my insights over project:
I'm gonna be honest with you, I am not an investor here any more, but it's not because I dont belive in the project, it's because sometimes in life things happen and they don't ask if it is a good time to cash out of crypto. Unfortunately there was no other way. However, I still follow community closely because I was holding and mining GRAFT for so long that you can't even imagine, and even though there were some turbulence times, this project somehow got close to my heart.
I didn't have a chance to meet team members personally, but I had a chance to have a small chit chat with Dan and Slava via email and to be honest - it ment a lot to me.
I am going to leave behind all that ICO and miners dumping stuff. But I want to share a view on how I see this project, because I see a lot of FUD is going around these days. First you have to understand that entire market is crashing for past couple of months. Total market cap went down from 220 billion USD from 3 months ago to currently around 120 billion USD right now. Whales don't manipulate and hold only on BTC, you need to understand that small markets are so much easier to manipulate. Trust me, I've seen it all. GRAFT has market cap of 700 BTC at the moment of speaking and only 3 exchanges (and those are low volume exchanges). Someone with 2-3 BTC worth of GRAFT can do whatever he wants with this price - that's the way it is.
Yes, I agree that things are going slower than we all expected. I agree that team made some mistakes in the past, for example they didn't hold their community well enough. But what I've noticed over past few months is that things are changing. Sure, they are not online for answer every your question on social networks, but they are present, and there are those weekly reports and someone is reading all this stuff, since for example GRAFT forum was removed from website, like someone mentioned here the other day. So, as far as I am concerned, someone cares. Just compare their communication with community from 6 months ago with last month. Maybe they are not doing perfect job on that area - but they are learning and making improvements there.
What I want you to understand (even though I repeat, I am not any more connected in any way to this project, even as investor) when I had that short communication with Dan and he tried to explain me something, I literally had to ask him to come down to my level and explain it to me like I am 10 years old. That's when I realized that not all of us are made for programming, or not all of us are made for example for communication and "dumbing down to someone else's level". Yes, they probably should have bigger impact on social networks, but my vision is they are fully commited to this project and they think that technology will win in the end. This is the time when shitcoins die, it is up to you if you are going to call GRAFT a shitcoin, and I don't want to call any names here, but what does XVG do, for example? Nothing, it can move money from point A to point B. And it has 40x higher market cap than GRAFT. Not once, not twice, FOURTY TIMES. The question is - who will survive these hard times? Technology or Marketing?
There was a lot of talk here (and elsewhere) that development is taking too much time. To be honest - I feel the same way. I don't think for example they should've implement that exchange broker (I still dont quite understand what are safety mechanisms there) but they could've / should've turn to reaching bigger exchange for example, making adoption more easily in that way, insted of making exchange broker who will basically do OTC trading. Ok, they had their vision of the project, if I don't perhaps understand or agree on everything - it doesn't mean that I am right. If I were you, I would give them a couple of more months because I have a feeling they are - finnaly - really close. This definately didn't turn out good for short term investors, but you have to take a look at the whole picture - big things will come in crypto generally. And price is going down like a titanic - it doesn't make sense at all. Nasdaq confirmed launching BTC futures in first half of next year, I mean I strongly belive that crypto will recover - and BTC will reach another all-time-high, it's not "IF" but "WHEN". Crypto is everywhere, admit it or not. We don't even know what is going on behind closed doors. Nasdaq confirmed that they are actually closely watching crypto market for last 5 years. YO! LAST FIVE YEARS! When those SEC's were denied you could read in their report (for reasoning) that they actually understand the market, they understand what is going on, they even provided links from reddit and legal documents - you don't do such stuff and give so much effort for research, if you don't have real interest in it.
This post went way too long that I thought - but I wanted to say:
1. Don't be stupid, at these prices GRAFT is absolute a steal, whoever has any crypto knowledge knows that everything comes in cycles. GRAFT's cycle didn't come yet, but when it does you are going to be late. When regular investor misses the train - he missed the train. When someone rich enough misses the train, he pulls the train back - that's what is going on right now with the prices.
2. Do not forget that GRAFT is actually aiming for something. They have one of the best partnership they could possibly imagine. If you are going to whine over the price now or next few months - just sell it. Otherwise print out mnemonic phase on piece of paper, vacuum it and put it in your drawer, like I did in the past. Even though I won't be around for taking part of that, I'm absolutely sure it will skyrocket at some point. They collected 3 million in ICO phase. They also said that when everything is finnaly launched, they will use unsold ICO coins to make transactions on network, so Node holders would start earning from beginning, and try to compensate on start untill real adoption comes in. Well I have a feeling that real adoption isn't that far away as many people think. If they tried to scam you, you wouldn't know their team members and their real names, anyone thought of that?
3. I must clarify this is just my assumption - but remember how there was a talk about new exchange and donations on website and stuff? I think they decided not to go on with that, and to use their GRAFT (check out distribution chart) to slowly collect for exchange listing. You know they won't admit that (they are not even allowed to talk about that, for sure) but that might be PART OF THE reason because GRAFT is bleeding perhaps harder over past few months. Early investors aren't dumping - miners are dumping - but HEY - someone is. Liked it or not, that's how things are done, everything costs these days and so is listing. For short gainers, this is bad. For someone who loves the project - he will understand it and aproove this action. (assuming there is some truth in my assumption)
I didn't had a chance - but don't bring yourself in my situation. Just put some money in there and forget about it for 6 months. I mean, they have partnership with one of biggest POS terminal manufacturors in the world FFS, that's not a small thing. It's like Stellar partnering with IBM (which will open their way into banks since 97% of banks are using IBM in some way, and trust them). Well GRAFT and Verifone partnership isn't much different! If you're looking for fast money, go gamble or something, you missed the project. But hopefully you won't turn back and look on GRAFT the same way that guy who paid pizza 100 BTC is looking back now.
