How to Participate in a Polkastarter IDO

Answering your questions about the new Polkastarter IDO whitelisting rules and how to participate in a Polkastarter IDO.

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At the end of April, we announced that on May 10, 2021, the rules for Polkastarter whitelisting would change. Since then, we’ve seen some questions from the community about the new rules and how they affect the process of participating in an IDO.

So we’ve brought it back to square 1 and we’ve written down the entire process to answer the question: how exactly do I participate in a Polkastarter IDO?

Polkastarter 101

A good place to start is: what is Polkastarter? (We’ll give you the brief version). Polkastarter is a platform that connects young projects with early community members through initial decentralized offerings, or IDOs. During an IDO, a project will distribute tokens to community members (aka IDO participants) in exchange for funding. Thus, projects get to raise capital and grow community, and participants get in (very) early to high-upside potential tokens. A happy marriage!

A lot of people want to participate in IDOs, but there isn’t room for everyone. So the process of successfully participating in an IDO requires a few steps beforehand to ensure fairness and security.

Step 1: Learn about upcoming IDOs

The best way to learn about upcoming Polkastarter IDOs is on our channels. Keep up with our Twitter and Telegram for announcements, and check in regularly to our blog and website for more information.

Step 2: Find a project and apply to whitelist

Once you’ve found an upcoming IDO you’d like to participate in, the next step is for you to get whitelisted, meaning your address will be eligible to participate in the IDO. Each project will have a bucket of addresses from which they will choose at random a smaller group of addresses to become whitelisted.

There are two ways to be eligible for whitelisting: 1) holding POLS in an Ethereum or BSC wallet, and 2) providing liquidity to an ETH-POLS pool on Uniswap or PancakeSwap.

Holding POLS

For every 250 POLS you have in your wallet, you will receive a “ticket”, which equals one entry into the whitelist process. So, if you own 750 POLS, you will have 3 tickets to your name when you submit your address to be whitelisted. Because projects choose whitelisted addresses at random, the more tickets you have, the greater your chance of being selected.

In addition, we’re implementing boosters. The more POLS you hold in your wallet, the higher the chance of successfully whitelisting with our new weight system.

**NOTE:** You’re not exchanging POLS for tickets; the number of POLS you own just represents “tickets” for the whitelisting process. Weights

250+ POLS = 1.0x
1,000+ POLS = 1.1x
3,000+ POLS = 1.15x
10,000+ POLS = 1.20x
30,000+ POLS = 1.25x & No Cooldown (see below for more information about the cooldown).

If I hold POLS in my BSC and ETH addresses, will both of these be counted towards calculation of tickets? No. We cannot combine POLS from two different chains.

Providing Liquidity

If you provide liquidity to the ETH-POLS pool on Uniswap, your LP tokens will also be counted towards tickets for being whitelisted. Each LP token is the equivalent of 100 POLS. Therefore, the 250 POLS required for a ticket is equal to 2.5 LP tokens. If you have 5 LP tokens (equal to 500 POLS), you will have 2 tickets.

Can I hold LPs and POLS for combined tickets? Yes! As long as your POLS and your LP tokens are in the same wallet, they will each generate tickets to increase your chances of successful whitelisting. There is no ‘cap’ on the number of tickets a user can have.

Do I have to whitelist for each separate project? Is there a universal Polkastarter whitelist? Yes, you have to get whitelisted for each separate project’s IDO. No, there is no universal Polkastarter whitelist.

Three more important things to note about POLS, tickets, and whitelists!

1) You’re not exchanging POLS for tickets; the number of POLS you own just represents “tickets” for the whitelisting process.

2) Each address can only be selected once for a project whitelist (i.e. you can’t get double your allocation if your address is drawn twice, the duplicate just won’t count).

3) You must hold the POLS in your wallet for at least 7 days prior to the IDO for the tokens to be valid for whitelisting.

Step 3: Submit KYC and Participate in the IDO

Once you’ve submitted your whitelist application, you will need to wait for the whitelist window to close and for the team to process all the requests. The project team will select whitelist winners at random and publish the results on their channels.

Whitelisted addresses will then need to complete KYC. KYC is completed to ensure the project launches fairly, no bots have been whitelisted by accident, and to ensure compliance with regional regulation.

Once KYC is completed, participants wait for the launch date and time of the IDO. IDOs are first come, first serve. It is up to the projects to determine how many people they whitelist, and depending on that number, your chances of successfully participating in an IDO may be higher or lower. You can participate in an IDO on either Ethereum or BSC; ensure you have sufficient funds in your wallet prior to the IDO so you’re ready to go. All IDOs will occur on the Polkastarter website.

The Cooldown Period

If you successfully participate in an IDO, the wallet you used to purchase the tokens will be placed on a cooldown period of 7 days. During those 7 days, you will not be whitelisted for another IDO. This is to ensure fairness across the ecosystem. It is worth noting that you have to hold POLS in your wallet for 7 days before you can participate in an IDO, so there is no use in moving your POLS to another wallet in the hopes of bypassing the cooldown period and participating in another IDO.

The cooldown period only applies to members who successfully participate in an IDO — i.e. exchange ETH or BNB for the project’s token. If a participant is successfully whitelisted but for one reason or another does not participate successfully in the sale, no cooldown period is implemented, and they can immediately reapply for a whitelist spot in another project.
And that’s it! If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll know the whitelisting rules were different a few weeks ago. If you’re interested in learning more about that switch, see here.

Originally published at https://blog.polkastarter.com on May 13, 2021.