IDO Recap: What Happened, Where We Stand, and What’s Next
The CHIPS raise has officially completed, and it's time for the debrief.
Let’s start with the numbers:
Launchpad
Target Raise
Completed %
Committed Amount
Spores
$300,000
100%
$300,000
Eesee
$200,000
100%
$200,000
Polkastarter
$500,000
50%
$250,000
CoinTerminal
$800,000
~25%
~$200,000
Total
$1.8M
~52.7%
~$950,000
On paper, that’s close to $1M committed from all four launchpad communities, which is a great success. Right?
Unfortunately… not quite.
The Reality: Refunds, Fees, and Quick Profits
Despite the promising topline numbers, here's the hard truth… we ended up with less than $40,000 raised from all launchpads combined. That’s only 2% of our $1.8M target. This means that our IDO resulted in only 3% of the 15% tokens allocated for the public sale being sold.
Launchpad
Target Raise
Completed %
Committed Amount
Refund
Amount
Raised
Amount
Spores
$300,000
100%
$300,000
$294,773
$5,227
Eesee
$250,000
100%
$250,000
$246,148
$3,852
Polkastarter
$500,000
50.6%
$253,091
$233,466
$19,625
CoinTerminal
$750,000
26.2%
$197,126
$188,064
$9,061
Total
$1.8M
52.8%
$1,000,217
$962,451
$37,765
BUT HOW?
Some launchpads charge fees of 15–25% to the buyer, meaning many users weren’t incentivized to claim their tokens unless the market price was at least 25% higher than the IDO price.
Token claim mechanisms were cumbersome, including a lack of KYC support and required users to actively claim their tokens post-IDO, otherwise, their allocation was refunded by default.
As a result, refunds and no claims averaged 96% across all platforms, leaving only a fraction of the raise committed. Even with these obstacles, the $CHIPS token reached a high of $.03 and ended its first 24 hours of trading at $0.0165, up 37.5% from IDO prices on TGE. $CHIPS never dropped below $0.012 in the first 36 hours. $CHIPS start exhibiting weakness once Bitcoin fell from a new ATH of $124K down to $112K recently.
But between the quick-flip mentality, inconsistent launchpad practices, and silent refunds, we were left with far less than what our raise figures suggest.
The worst part?
Then There Were The Costs
Launchpad fees alone exceeded $90K in costs.
And then came our engineering, operations, and marketing expenses: internal efforts, community campaigns, and launchpads “strongly recommended” to engage specific agencies or influencers. This has come from our own pockets.
The end result: we’re in the red on our raise.
But not because of bad intentions. Simply because the structure and incentives of the IDO world are broken even though we played by their rules.
What We Didn't Do
We haven’t sold a single token. Including all unsold tokens returned to us from the launchpads, the supply on MEXC for liquidity, we currently retain 97% of the total token supply as indicated here: https://bscscan.com/token/0xceed119bbb38518962a2c130f0354cdcbd35d782#balances (Please note that the reflected balance will be higher as we are still awaiting refund tokens back from Eesee)
Since launch, we have also used funds to support the token price, buying back in the open market. However, every purchase has been met with instant selling. On-chain data suggests that some of our launchpad partners, who received tokens as fees, are continuing to take the opportunity to exit.
So if you're wondering who's been selling down the price, it’s not us. It’s unfortunate, but launchpads hold a larger allocation of tokens than our own community that purchased tokens from the IDO.
Despite all of this, we're still here. We're still holding.
So... What's Next?
Even with the results, the mission hasn’t changed.
With under 35M tokens truly circulating, this makes the new market cap for $CHIPS only $30K.
Even if we’d raised $0, CHIPS would still be building.
Maybe we've been to bullish or overzealous. Yes, we had ambitious marketing plans that relied on more capital. That timeline stretches a bit now. But we’re continuing with our mission of disrupting the iGaming industry.
CHIPS remains live on Testnet, processing thousands of transactions, and actively expanding our validator set and dApp developer base.
Closing Thoughts
We could sugarcoat this, but that’s not what this community is about.
This raise didn’t go the way we hoped. That’s on us. We’ll own it.
But we’re not quitting. And we’re not selling.
CHIPS was always about building a better foundation for on-chain gaming, not gaming the fundraising system. To those who joined early, held through the noise, or asked the hard questions, thank you.
We're moving forward. With feedback from the community, our advisors, and partners, we’ll provide an update on strategy and next steps next week.
— Team CHIPS
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