In crypto, as in most other areas of life and business, there is often the alluring temptation of ditching your past loyal users in favour of that shiny big whale or glimmering fields of gold and riches. Chasing after the money instead of with sticking with the poor slobs who were there before you got famous!

It is a balance that every project needs to balance.... and I find that those who are going to be the most successful, or at least the most respected, will be those who value their past users and don't place complete priority on newer (and potentially less loyal) money. After all... when you are successful, everyone wants to be your friend... but you know who the true friends are when you are in trouble!

Examples of chasing the riches has been the unrestricted airdrops of the past... where projects had thought that the best way to get someone's loyalty was to just rain money and free tokens. Oddly enough, that just resulted in a cascade of airdrop chasers who had no interest in the project and would just dump the tokens at the first opportunity!

Fast forward to the more recent targeted airdrops that were generally retrospective rewarding users that had been using protocols and projects for a long time, and were therefore more invested and interested in the success and governance of the project vision. Of course, this would rub many people the wrong way... with endless complaints on crypto-twitter saying how unfair it was that airdrops were being "reserved" for special people. The retrospective nature just meant that people could not just run from protocol to protocol hoping to get freebies in something that they had never heard about!

I've been a long-time user of Coinlist... and I've been really happy with their previous IEO/ICO and crowdfunding rounds in the past. However, this year has seen a large industry popping up to game the queue system that they have employed to gain access to the sales. This has meant that users with single accounts would be heavily disadvantaged against click-farms and multi-accounts that would hog the purchase spots and then sell them OTC.

I've watched as Coinlist had tried to implement various incremental changes to try and combat this problem... but nothing was working, and you could see on the communication channels that people were getting angry. I had resigned myself to accepting that the entire thing was just going to be a rigged lottery, and would just put a ticket in... and if I got purchase spots, then I would be lucky... and if not, well, next time!

However, for this last round of sales... I've been pleasantly surprised to see that Coinlist have implemented a parallel priority queue that would reward past users of Coinlist (before a certain date) and those who were actively "adding value" to the platform. At first I had thought that it was a scam, but I figured that I might just give it a go...

... turns out that starting at number 5 in the queue is a whole lot better than starting at 2098759437639284935798347543049! However, I wasn't so lucky in the next round, with a ~1000 spot which wasn't enough to get me in. Still, again much nicer than being at spot 238479387598560509832097543986597!

So, I hope that they will keep trying to improve on the queue system... but this change has returned some faith that they are at least trying to work out something. I still think that accounts should be pre-funded, that way if people are gaming the system, then they stand to make a REAL loss instead of a banned account that is probably seeded with a fake ID anyway...

Interestingly enough... even with the requirement to complete a quiz about the sales... I still see people being irate about their tokens being locked up. The sales CLEARLY state that the crowdsale rounds are subject to lock-up times, in the same way that seed and VC rounds are! I wonder why people throw money at internet things without even bothering to read the contract and conditions?

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.