NeuCoin – The Most Successful Presale Since Ethereum

Dan Kaufman, co-founder at NeuCoin advises that the figure of 100 million NeuCoins (NEU) available for the presale at the price of 25,000 NEU per BTC was chosen with two objectives in mind; 100 million NEU was enough to provide access to a variety of buyers, and the low price would encourage more demand than supply.

“The presale price is less than 2 times the price paid by angels over the past year, when the service was much less developed – but all the angel (and founder) coins have sales restrictions on them for 5 years.”
— – Dan Kaufman, NeuCoin Co-Founder

Previous funding of US$2.25 million came from the founders, and a long list of strategic angels. The list of angels includes the Co-Founder of Candy Crush, the Senior Vice-President of Uber, the President of Hotwire, and the Head of Growth at Facebook. However, the current presale isn’t primarily about raising money. “It’s about building community and raising awareness within the crypto community,” said Kaufman.

NeuCoin recently released a comprehensive Strategic Plan and 39-page Whitepaper to explain their vision in detail.  “We’ve been trying to get our message out there,” says Kaufman. “We’ve been very engaged, tried to be responsive and transparent.” NeuCoin openly encouraged the community to contribute their ideas and opinions upon the release of each document.

“Most digital currencies haven’t done the job of making themselves useful or even understandable to mainstream consumers. We think it’s one of our main differentiators: our ability to bring digital currencies to non-tech users, by making it easy to use and useful to them,”
— – Kaufman

As a result community involvement has become a main focus for NeuCoin, and can be seen in the teams communications on various forums, “We’ve spent a lot of time answering questions and talking to people, and tried to build a strong community.” Since the public announcement of the project in February, the NeuCoin community has steadily grown.

“So, it’s really been a grassroots thing. A community slowly but surely growing and gaining momentum.”
— – Kaufman

Spreading the word on forums presented challenges, due to the disruptive nature of NeuCoin. Kaufman explains, “NeuCoin makes a lot of high power people uncomfortable, so it’s definitely an underdog David vs Goliath thing, lots of attacks and untrue rumors that we’ve been trying to address.” However, the positive response to the Presale has seen the negative efforts against NeuCoin dissipate. “Some of the reluctant or even hostile members are starting to come around, some even joining,” reports Kaufman

NeuCoin have made an effort to protect the growing NeuCoin community by the implementing measures designed to level the playing field. These measures were implemented merely days before the presale, due to advanced interest from larger buyers. In an effort to include smaller buyers a limit per purchase was set at 200BTC, for the first half of the presale. “This first half only took 8 hours to sell out. Then we lowered the cap to 40 BTC per buy, to slow things down and give more time for smaller buyers to get a chance to participate,” said Kaufman.

Despite their success, Kaufman believes that there are still many aspects that could have been done differently. “We wish we had done a better job at reaching out to the communities of other coins,” said Kaufman. “We believe in collaboration and trying to move crypto forward and into the mainstream and that there are a lot of common denominators between different coins, technologies and communities.”

If one digital currency can gain mainstream traction, Kaufman thinks others will benefit too. “A technical advance in one place will benefit someone else in another place. It’s open source, it’s about pushing boundaries and breaking new ground."

“Crypto is still niche in the grand scheme of things and we hope to collaborate with others. We wish we had done a better job at trying to reach out to those communities, and we wish we could have been able to get them to see that we’re a potential partner and collaborator and not an enemy.”
— – Kaufman

The NeuCoin team are amazed that their presale is the most successful since Ethereum. “We think it’s because so many people support our vision to bring an easy to use cryptocurrency to the masses through micropayments and freemium distribution,” said Kaufman