ICO – Understanding Token Burning During an ICO

icotokens

I was reading about the AIR token ICO and they mention that they minted 1.491 billion tokens and burned 8,507,442 tokens. Why not just mint an even 1.5 billion tokens and distribute them evenly among the people who bought the token? Or why not just mint the 1.491 billion and just never create the 8.5 million?

I get that if you mint all the coins ahead of time then what's variable is how much they're worth but you can sell them all. If there's a set price, then you can mint the coins after the ICO ends. Either of these approaches wouldn't require burning tokens.

What am I not getting?

Best Answer

The burning was completely unplanned. There originally was no intention to burn tokens. The reason they burned the tokens was because there was a red flag on one of the contributors, so they returned that contributors ETH and didn't give them the tokens. Since the ICO was already over, the easiest and most beneficial thing to do for all token holders was to burn the tokens.

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] How to Retrieve Remaining Tokens from ICO Contract

If your contract(s) are already deployed, you're out of luck.

On the other hand if you are still developing either the token or the crowdsale, there are a number of ways you can move the tokens around.

Firstly, the token balance on your crowd sale contract is just a value allocated within the token contract, so you can just have a function on your token contract allow you to directly reassign the balance from the crowd sale contract.

uint256 unsold = balances[saleaddress];
balances[saleaddress] = 0;
balances[someLocation] += unsold;

A better option perhaps, is to have the crowd sale contract handle it. In this case you can do something like

function withdrawUnsoldTokens()
{
    require(msg.sender == ownerAddress);
    ERC20 mytoken = new ERC20(tokenAddress);
    uint256 unsold = mytoken.balanceOf(this);
    mytoken.transfer(ownerAddress, unsold);
}

[Ethereum] Dynamic total supply for ERC20 tokens

https://ethereum.org/token covers most of what you describe, so no, I don't think there are any issues with doing that.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] How to Retrieve Remaining Tokens from ICO Contract

[Ethereum] Dynamic total supply for ERC20 tokens

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