Hi everyone, it’s the Polkastarter senior team here addressing the Artmeta launch and our community’s concerns over community protection.
Recently we allowed projects to immediately access their funds to increase their DEX liquidity from the start, and we’ve never had a problem since projects have always listened to our advice and followed our guidelines.
We had agreements with Artmeta and despite our constant efforts over the last 6 months, they didn’t adhere to them or follow our advice. All subsequent projects will now have to follow our new community protection policies.
Artmeta took these decisions to give investors a better chance of success. Unfortunately, the market just got worse and worse, which we warned of in January, but they didn’t have the same expectation.
We are extremely sorry for the upset this has caused, but we want you to understand we tried our very best in your favor.
2022 has been a turbulent year for crypto and bear markets breed frustration. We are sticking to our vision of picking long-term projects that we believe will be around for years to come. We are here to stay and we’re building for the future. We’re thankful for all your support and hope you appreciate our new community protection policies coming soon.
Still asking for the steps taken by Polkastarter to at least try to get back investors funds ArtMeta have basically stolen. It says in the post *“We had agreements with Artmeta and despite our constant efforts over the last 6 months, they didn’t adhere to them”
Did the agreement not have a penalty attached for none adherence? Is this not a legal avenue to pursue to force them into refund? I want to give Polkastarter benefit of doubt but it seems you collected your payment from ArtMeta and just don’t care enough about community to pursue further.
I personally have little issue with likes of OKLP, FCD or others that just didn’t work out. It’s the fact I and others where asking since March for ArtMeta refund knowing what was going to happen after they completely destroyed community confidence. Down nearly 50% now after only listed a week.
It’s this type of small investor matters last attitude that is going to facilitate Crypto regulations coming in and doing more harm than good especially for the likes of Polkastarter.
As mentioned before, Polkastarter team was constantly in contact with ArtMeta, to help them with decision-making on crucial matters. Despite offering our expertise, the ArtMeta team decided to proceed further based on their own assumptions.
As a matter of fact, Polkastarter, being a decentralized fundraising platform, serves as an intermediary protocol for the project looking for funding and the community interested in purchasing the token. In a nutshell, projects use Polkastarter platform and technology; Polkastarter does not raise nor hold the money.
Fundraising in a decentralized environment imposes some specific restrictions on us. We cannot hold the funds after the sale - all of the money handling processes are operated by smart contracts. This also means that any refund decision needs to be approved and executed by the project which raised the money in the first place. The ArtMeta team decided against it.
So far, besides ArtMeta’s situation, we have never had issues from the project’s end. Now that we have encountered this incident, we are preparing the Protection Policy to ensure that projects distribute the tokens on time. The update on this matter will soon be published.
Thank you for your efforts to improve our services and protection policy.