So either these guys are extremely clever, or have created something very sneaky by accident.
Yesterday nearly 6.3 BILLION ICO coins were "released" into the wild.
Now firstly a great proportion of users have struggled to actually access these coins due to 502/504 errors with their website and issues with the SMS activation codes.
Secondly there is something very interesting that happens when you transfer. ETN automatically tries to stealth the transfer by splitting the amounts. If you are sending hundreds of ETN, there are a handful of splits, thousands have more splits, and hundreds of thousands of ETN transfers will have more splits still. These splits increase the transaction size in kb, however the fee pricing in their webwallet doesn't have dynamic pricing like that.
Yesterday I send three transactions of released ICO coins to the only excahnge that is currently hosting the currency. The first was small - 000s of ETN and went through within 30mins. The second was medium 00'000s and took all night to go through (8 hrs). The third is large 0'000'000s ad is still pending on the blockchain. The fee (actual for completed and estimate for pending) is all approximately the same, despite the larger transaction being SIGNIFICANTLY bigger (c.4x) than the smallest one.
So you see, either by design or accident they have managed to make a situation where whales CANNOT quickly move ICO coins to the exchange to dump and take profits from the ICO price as the miners re not picking up the transactions that equate to huge sums of ETN due to the fees being set too low.
The last 24h trades plus sell orders posted equate to less than 2% of the coins released yesterday, I am willing to bet a lot that there is much more waiting to actually get on the exchange...
We shall see...
This is an interesting observation. If true, this renewed my lost trust in this team.
The splitted transaction is a feature of monero, but you dont have to do it within your transaction! Also you can higher the tx fee for faster processing.
They somehow managed to use a decentralized concept and put a centralized plattform over it. Their website and app are a single point of failure, where everybody is stuck with their coins. The longer people have to wait, the less trust the people have in the devs. By only a portion of users who are able to soll their coins, you also create an unfair situation. This might prevent a huge dump and drag it over a few days, but it hurts the coin in the long run.