I have been monitoring this thread almost from the beginning. First I need to apologize to Ohad for not having believed in the project.
It now looks like it's getting to places.
I would like to bring to attention the incentives that are associated with the pre-sale.
From a utility perspective, people have actually few incentives to buy tokens today, since supply is almost unlimited relative to demand (less than 4 million sold from 42 million) and they will be sold "up to Agoras' genesis" which is probably more than year away. This would make this the longest ICO ever.
People minimize their uncertainty by not buying now, since the genesis block is very far away and it's better to wait until shortly before launch. They lose nothing by this behavior since token price has been frozen and is no longer rising 2% per week. The people who have already bought tokens have no explicit incentive to spread word about the project, since this would dilute their own stake (maybe there is an incentive for people who are extremely rational and come to the conclusion that better capitalization and distribution increases the value of the project, but I would not count on this one.)
Project marketing and institutionalization are also still in their infancy and currently add not much yet in terms of reaching critical mass of awareness and the network effects associated with it. Nothing is known about other contributors than Ohad. I like the Youtube videos about Tau chain /Agoras /Zennet which did much to my understanding of the project, but they are not as professional as the videos that Ethereum did for their pre-sale (and even they did not convince me to buy into ETH ICO
). The good thing is that this project has definitely more substance than semblance.
I think it's not so good to introduce a trading market (Bittrex) to the tokens while the pre-sale is still going on. There will be a equilibrium market price that has to be below the pre-sale price and the pre-sale price itself acts as absorbing upward barrier while coins are still being sold. As more coins get available on the market, almost all transactions will take place below the barrier and fewer and fewer coins will be sold though the pre-sale. So the market results in less tokens sold though the pre-sale. I think it's better to first bring out an appealing website and marketing material to create enough awareness and only introduce a market once the pre-sale is over. Of course this is not an option now, but what can be done is publication of sufficient marketing materials and introduction of a definite time limit to the pre-sale.