Ice Open Network@ice_blockchain
🚨 An Update from the CEO
I want to speak openly about the situation we are facing.
For more than four years, our company has operated out of the BVI without a traditional bank account. Throughout that time, the business was funded primarily through token-based agreements. That meant development, infrastructure, marketing, legal, and many other operational costs were covered through tokens rather than fiat. This was possible because we worked with a service provider who believed deeply in our vision and agreed to support the project in exchange for tokens.
For over four years, that provider stood by us and helped us build. However, due to recent market conditions, he lost confidence in the project and decided to claim tokens that were scheduled to unlock after two years, on 7 April. That event triggered the crash you have seen and brought our collaboration with him to an end. It has also placed the company in a very difficult position.
Over the past four years, the total cost of building this project has exceeded $18,000,000 USD. We have invoices, records, and audit trails for every expense. During this entire period, @ice_z3us, @robertpreoteasa, and @ice_apoll0 did not take salaries, because we believed in the long-term vision and chose to keep building.
As many of you know, under our tokenomics, the team managed approximately 4.2 billion tokens across the team, treasury, and ecosystem allocations. Because the monthly operating costs of the project were so high, we entered into a long-term agreement with the service provider under which he would receive a larger amount of tokens after two years in return for supporting the business and helping us scale. That structure was meant to buy us time to build properly and reach a stronger position.
The reality is that the cost of operating the project became far greater than what could reasonably be recovered. The provider ultimately lost money on the arrangement, and after investing around $18,000,000, he chose to exit and sell the tokens he was entitled to. That is what brought us to where we are today.
At this moment, the company still holds a little over 1 billion tokens. As the attached data shows, and based on the average prices at which the provider sold in recent days, it is clear that the company has been operating at a loss from the very beginning. Even so, we kept going because we truly believed in the project.
We have seen many accusations claiming that we, as a team, dumped tokens on the community. That is simply not true. What happened was the termination of an agreement with a long-term service provider, and that outcome has now been reflected in the market.
The project's current operating cost is around $400,000 per month. Many people do not realize how expensive it is to keep a project like this alive at scale. Even if every token we had received had been sold, it still would not have fully covered the total costs and obligations of the business.
We never lied when we said we believed in this project. In fact, we are the ones who have been hurt the most by this situation.
Because I want to remain fully transparent, I have to say this clearly: we are now reviewing whether it is possible to reduce costs significantly over the coming weeks, potentially by half. If we continue operating, it may require us to sell part of the remaining treasury tokens to cover essential expenses. We are no longer in a position where we can keep absorbing losses indefinitely, especially after already carrying losses of roughly $8 million.
What happens next depends on whether the project still has real support from the market and the community. We will watch the coming days carefully and assess whether there is enough confidence and momentum for us to continue building. If there is, we will keep going. If there is not, we will be forced to consider shutting the project down. And if that happens, I want to be clear: we will burn our remaining tokens, not sell them.
It is also important for the community to understand how much of the unlocked token supply was used to support the ecosystem. Out of the 4.2 billion tokens managed across these years, more than 900 million tokens were used for exchange campaigns, KOLs, and liquidity. Many people ask for listings, but few understand what listings actually require: exchange liquidity, market making, campaigns, promotions, and other associated costs. These are real costs, and they are substantial.
There is another truth I have avoided discussing publicly until now, but I believe it is important to say it. Exchanges do not value all user bases equally. Large user numbers from Tier 3 countries did not help with listings in the way many people assumed. In many cases, exchanges specifically asked us for performance and user metrics excluding those regions. This is an uncomfortable reality of the industry, but it is a reality nonetheless.
In the images attached, I have also shared detailed costs, including what different exchanges charged us and how many tokens were required for marketing and listing-related activity. I want people to better understand how this industry really works. We have nothing to hide, and the exchanges involved can confirm the commercial structures.
I am deeply saddened that we are in this position, but I owe you the truth. The documentation is there. The records are there. The transaction history is there.
If anything, we are the ones who lost the most trying to make this vision real.
