This is a good project actually but people are posting negative comments and acceptance is not really good in general,this is not about the project,but certain aspects and parts of your Ico gave us a warning sign ,some of these are : Newbie opening an account,no pre announcement so people can prepare and look further,No escrow to establish the reputation of the project there may be many more red tag but we'll see in the coming days.
Totally fair, my account is actually from 2014 if you check my profile and I've been a lurker on the boards before that, I just never post here and wish I did as I didn't know about the newbie posting rules (makes sense in hindsight).
The pre-announcement on Bitcointalk is my fault, we have been engaging with the community through Reddit, Twitter and Facebook and I was trying to find help with posting after I realized the problem was my newbie account. I'm mostly active on reddit under the same username JohnnyCryptocoin, but for the most part I am a lurker and don't really have a ton of experience with managing forums. At this stage we just went ahead to get awareness of our project out there and start talking with the community here as it was clear we are not getting the eyeballs on the project.
We understand the short notice and to reassure everyone, the ICO is not our only funding source. We are also have traditional startup funding and investment coming in and have always been planning for it. The reason for us to run an ICO, and specifically the Branche Loyalty Token, is to raise awareness of the project and get some early feedback. We are not looking to raise a ton of money here either, we are really just looking for about $100K of investment into the ICO and that is to start getting individuals directly involved in the company as customers.
https://www.smithandcrown.com/event/branche-ico-crowdsale-payday-lending-platform/The Smith and Crown review and listing is worth it just for that, it has already been a tremendous help in the last 24 hours with our negotiations with some local Angel investors, we are working to lock in investors that will also be Lenders and provide liquidity during the alpha and beta testing phases.
The escrow bit is the one complaint I don't really understand, our accounting firm Welch LLP,
http://www.welchllp.com/about/, are providing the financial oversight for the company. They will be providing the monthly financial statements and are responsible for holding the ledger nano S in escrow.
We will not have direct access to the funds and while Welch LLP has an crypto-tax expert in house, that is for the accounting side and are not comfortable with PKI disaster recovery and access control policies at this time. The company will not have direct access to the funds, it will require a representative of Welch to be present to access the bank storage of the key. I will write up a more detailed blog article and get it posted tomorrow to clarify that.
While I recognized they are not from the crypto-community, they are a well established account firm that goes back to 1918 and have tons of experience with holding funds in escrow. This process is just slightly different for them in that we are securing a physical key instead of the physical assets themselves.