Bad Timing: ‘Thousand-Year Cryptocurrency’ Metronome Blames Bear Market After Pedestrian ICO
Bad timing and a less than spectacular user experience — that’s what cryptocurrency startup Bloq says is to blame for the pedestrian $12 million raised through the metronome (MTN) initial supply auction (ISA), referred to by nearly everyone but the company as an initial coin offering (ICO).
Bloq made this assessment in a lengthy post-mortem published earlier this week, nearly two months after the conclusion of the metronome ICO in June.
Metronome’s creators, a group that includes early Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, have boasted that the token’s portability will ensure that it will be a “thousand-year cryptocurrency,” one that will survive long after other once-popular blockchains have been forgotten by history.
MTN tokens, as CCN.com reported, can be ported to any blockchain with support for smart contracts. Garzik has often said that MTN is a sort of “boxcar” that can easily be disconnected from one train or set of tracks and attached to another.
But though characterized by developers as the ideal cryptocurrency for institutions, the metronome ICO attracted a paltry $12 million, far less than hundreds of projects — including many outright scams — that have been funded on the back of nothing more than flashy websites and hastily-assembled whitepapers.
At present, metronome ranks as the 304th-largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of just $13.4 million.
Bloq chalked up this poor performance to two primary factors, the greater of which being that the ICO went live while the cryptocurrency market was trading near the bottom of a prolonged bear market — the severity of which could perhaps not have been predicted when the project was announced last year.
From the report:
“Without sugarcoating it, Metronome’s Initial Supply Auction took place during one of the deepest dips of an already stubborn bear market for cryptocurrencies as a whole in 2018–but particularly for ETH. We suspect this did a few things: (1) purchasers seemed hesitant to purchase new cryptocurrencies with their ETH, which they may have purchased at a higher price than what it was worth during the auction and because of this (2) many purchasers chose to wait too long for the price to descend a bit lower than many expected — a ‘reverse-FOMO’ effect.”
In addition, the unconventional pricing structure of the metronome ICO — the token price went down over time — may have confused some less-sophisticated investors and scared others off altogether.
Despite the poor performance, Bloq sought to frame the MTN launch in an optimistic light, noting that — unlike some of its better-funded competitors — the cryptocurrency is already fully-functional and that Metronome smart contracts are being deployed on new blockchains.
Like most token creators, Bloq retained a portion of the initial metronome supply. However, unlike most projects, the firm did not keep the funds raised by the ICO; rather, these funds (along with all others raised through the daily MTN auctions) remain in the Metronome ecosystem to provide liquidity to the network of smart contracts that allow users to port the token from blockchain to blockchain.
“But we are not here to dwell on the past,” the team concluded in its report. “Following the blur that was the launch of MET and its subsequent first weeks, the Metronome team has been working non-stop and the ecosystem is shifting from “launch-mode” to expand the ecosystem based on Metronome’s utility and functionality. Now is the time to expand and explore.”
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