Improving Polkastarter's community protection

Hi everyone!

I’m Miguel, co-founder of Polkastarter. Happy to be making the first post on our discussion forum, the platform for in-depth and healthy discussions around Polkastarter’s vision and ecosystem.

Today I wanted to reach you about a very important topic for us and our community: investment protection. Especially during the current market conditions, this matter has become more and more important.

So, how can we improve community protection?

  • Should we push projects to receive funding only by milestones?
  • Should community governance enforce those milestones?
  • What are other launchpads doing in terms of good practices?
  • What other ideas come to your mind?

Your opinion is important to us. So please let us know your ideas and we’ll make sure to move these into our development cycles.

Thank you and welcome!

13 Likes

At least 5 known launchpads implemented users protection recently.
Today the question is not “if” but “when & which” rules you will implement.
Investors can now choose choose a place, where they’re feeling safer
Glad to see POLS looking for feedback in that matter.

Below you can find commonly used rules, addressing the common problems:

  1. Minimum LP (200-400k, based on amount of funds raised) - to stabilize price.
  2. Minimum LP lockup (9/12m/full vesting) - to prevent stealing LP.
  3. 100% tokens to launchpad before launch - to protect vesting schedule changes.
  4. Synchronous distribution - to avoid receiving tokens later than others.
  5. Money release per vesting by launchpad - to protect user funds.
  6. Short time before IDO and listing (21-31 days) - to avoid having users liquidity locked.
  7. Price maintaining (2 vestings / 41-50%).
  8. Full refund in bad cases ex. LP added incorrectly, bots on launch, team selling out of vesting, rug pulls.
  9. Team, Dev, Advisors, Marketing lockups.
  10. Limits of raised funds (ex. $1M, max 5 launchpads)
  11. Maximum difference between private and IDO price (5x) - to prevent private buyers having too large advantage vs risk.
5 Likes

Thank you Phirozp! These are valuable proposals, specially paying the funds to projects based on milestones and also getting smaller raises.

As for the M2E trend, we actually launched really good M2E projects before the trend was hot, like Dose, Dotmovs. But yes, it’s very important to be mindful about the current trends and launch projects that gather strong community interest. We are on top of that. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Hey Sin, completely agree that it’s time to implement additional solutions.

We’re actually pushing for most of your suggestions since day 1, but we do it directly with the projects without disclosing it publicly. It makes total sense to be more open and transparent about these and communicate with the community a set of rules that the projects have to follow.

The ones that are more difficult to implement are price requirements and full refunds, but we are studying those.

Thank you for spending some time gathering these, we’ll make sure to announce new investor protection measures soon!

1 Like

i agree especially can be small mc project but strong project

1 Like

thank you. we trsut Polkastarter. we will be again 5 usd maybe 10. and we will have perfect project again soon…

2 Likes

Thanks for looking into investor protection which is obviously crucial in these market conditions.

The investor protection regarding projects falling below listing price like other top launchpads have done months ago badly needs to be put in place before ArtMeta listing if possible. This is least Polkastarter can do if they still refuse to refund even after ArtMeta postpones again with no set date. I just can’t believe investors can be treated so badly as to invest something January and the project team erodes all trust and Polkastarter still hasn’t refunded us 6 months later.

I don’t want to mention other launchpads here but something in 3 other launchpads I’m in is apart from the refund if price goes below listing price after varying vesting releases is also a requirement for listing within certain period.

1 Like

Hey Geoff, thanks for your suggestions and feedback.

Yes, ArtMeta has been a big challenge for our community and us and we understand your position. Rest assured that we are on top of this, with daily meetings and interactions with our team and ArtMeta’s. A solution has been found and we are confident it will all be solved soon.

About IDOs going under listing price, it’s a popular suggestion that we are analyzing, but we are talking about investment after all and there’s always risk in investing. We can’t guarantee risk-free investments, it wouldn’t be fair or realistic both to investors and projects.

We believe that before refund policies, there should always be a strong tokenomics structure, a fair valuation, and a smart vesting schedule that makes it almost impossible for the token to go under IDO price. We are working in that direction!

1 Like

Hi Miguel, first of all I would like to say that it is a great idea to start a forum where we (community) can communicate with the team. the point behind a launchpad is that the project gets liquidity ahead of time in order to push it forward and adhere to the roadmap. if we freeze the capital until the milestone is reached, the idea of ​​a launchpad loses meaning. we can all deal with the project in advance and read through the white paper and thus decide whether the project has potential. I think we would only lose projects that have great potential. Now for a few ideas that could drive us forward: how about we increase the POLS power for hodlers after a certain time of staking? so we would not pay out staking rewards directly, but offer a higher chance for loyal hodlers. this is how Raydium does it, for example. Also, I have another idea what we could do to take advantage of the current bearmarket . since nobody wants to launch their project right now, there is hardly anything going on on the launchpads. how about if we were to focus on NFT projects right now? move2earn is trending right now and everyone wants to have an NFT of one of these projects. We have already taken the first step with Defy, but there are other great M2E projects to come, such as AMAZY, which are developing a really good project.

1 Like

I have some small suggestions for polkastarter, hope my suggestions are adopted
1: IDO funds can be handed over to the project party before the opening, but polkastarter should review the project party to ensure that it is a legitimate project party. If there are several project parties such as FCD, everyone will lose confidence in polkastarter
2: You should pay attention to projects on launch platforms such as Coinlist and Daomaker, and choose projects with high market popularity and investment institutions nice
3: Interest or rewards can be generated for staking POLS tokens, and airdrops can be issued for those who hold POLS tokens for a long time
4: There is no popular project this year, a 100x project should be built to attract more people to participate in the IDO of polkastarter

1 Like

POLKASTARTER the launching pad for projects is amazing at the first stage. But at this stage, I am really disappointed, not only the project does not create confidence for investors, but also reduces the value of Tonke POLS. For investors holding POLS Tokens for a few months now, there is no benefit, causing them to sell off, which causes the price to drop sharply, so in order to improve the development of the project, the management team must give policy that is beneficial to loyal investors such as: Staking, choosing really quality projects, prioritizing but keeping POLS for a long time even if there is no launch project,… thanks! !!

I don’t know if I understood the question correctly, but here is my contribution!

I recently had my Metamask hacked. I’m a beginner, it’s my fault and I can’t go back. However, the hacker used my wallet to empty my POLS which were staked on Polkastarter … and he had no problem doing so.

I personally lost 3000 POLS and unfortunately I no longer have the means to recredit them and will therefore subscribe to the adventure here.

Maybe setting up a 2FA to connect to the platform would be a minimum?

Ai Karamba! Thanks for the feedback and for the kind words. Yes, it’s important to understanding that one thing is investor protection, other is investing without risk. Investing without risk is not called investing, probably is called “utopia” or something similar.

Applying increases of POLS power based on holding time is a great idea and we are already working on it. Focusing on NFT projects, smaller raises, in-narrative plays also makes sense. The only thing we have to make sure is that the projects that we launch make sense from a business perspective and and are here in 5 years time. That’s one of our mottos when we’re researching.

Thanks you for your suggestions John. :slight_smile:

  1. We’re already doing this
  2. We also do this in the background, we know every new project that goes on the market and to which platforms they’re going
  3. For legal reasons we can’t offer stakingrewards with POLS. It would also reduce POLS value. But we’re always thinking of new ways to add benefits to POLS stakers.
  4. It’s true we didn’t have a 100x project this year, but this is a deeply “philosophical” topic. A 100x project is good for the launchpad and for the very few that entered in the private rounds (usually influencers and VCs), but it’s bad for the retail investor that buys at 100x and gets dumped by these early investors. The secret is to find a balance and that’s what we’re doing on a daily basis.

Hey Thuonggiaso! This is valuable feedback, thank you. This year and the next are going to be more challenging due to market conditions, so it’s definitely important to apply suggestions like yours. We always prioritize high-quality projects and we’re launching new staking incentives soon. We’ll keep you posted!

1 Like

That’s really unfortunate, sorry for your loss of funds. Even If we enforce 2fa in that case, the moment you lose control of your wallet there’s nothing that can be done. What we do to fight against these hacks is invest in education. That’s the reason why we’re always delivering content on Youtube and our blog that helps our community navigate the challenges of decentralized investing.

I haven’t lost control of my wallet. Someone had access to it, then used it to connect to Polkastarter and requested the unstaking ! If there had been 2FA authentication, this could not have happened. Or set it up only for unstaking. This would add an extra layer of security.

Creating content to inform is obviously a great way to go. However, inserting a 2FA to protect staking funds would, I think, be an interesting additional alternative.

Thank you for taking the time to read me

I wonder why you cannot staking the POLS token not only on the POLKASTARTER platform or on any other platform or exchange. In the event of a decrease in the value of the token and a bear market, projects on POLKASTARTER are usually in the red. It is staking that partially compensates for losses, after all, even a token such as BTC can be stacked. It is not about a large percentage, but POLS staking is nowhere to be found. It is also a good idea to increase the power of POLS, depending on how long the token is kept (for hodlers).

Firstly, I’d like to join others in saying that it’s a great idea to have this forum and reach out to the community. Really appreciate it!

As somebody who is in the top most category on POLKASTARTER and other launchpads, investor protection boils down to the following:
I need to be able to trust the vetting process of POLKASTARTER that the presented propositions are not just superficial, but have some solid grounding. A launchpad investor is typically (or should be) able to make an assessment of the business value or profit potential of an offer, and assess the martket conditions to evaluate whether the investment is worthwhile for them or not. What an investor can not typically do is get below the “whitepaper” and “web site”-based information and speak to the start-ups, gain a view of the product-state (alpha version, beta version, key differentiators etc.), look at the viability of the organization etc.

This type of “deep vetting” of business viability is something that some other launchpads provide, and which I miss at POLKASTARTER.

Good day. It’s good idea to communicate with community about this problems.
In my opinion team could implement some features to make community more loyal to platform and reccomend it to each other
1.) to improve tier system with more bonuses for long-term holders. To stimulate community hold tokens and avoid sale pressure on POLS tokens after each IDO.
2.) include sales on seed or private stage for middle and high tier holders (especially for long-term POLS holders)
3.) Maybe organise investing in companies from fund market in seed and pre-ipo stage through crypto (I undestand that it’s very difficult but no one do it - first player rule good).