Thank you for the update. Could you please also comment on the concerns raised in this post on Reddit?
I believe Block.one has already stated that the account does not belong to Block.one. Do you know who it does belong to? $114 million is a huge stockpile. For the sake of transparency, it should be known who owns +- 25% of the market cap of EOS.
I'd feel better if I knew if it's a group of people interested in using its stake for building applications on EOS or even investing long term. But at the moment, I can't shake the feeling that it's a group of people who are manipulating the price of EOS.
They can't manipulate the price until next year can they?
Please read the comments of the Reddit post. Someone/A group of people, is waiting until the last minute of each ICO window. Then, they pump a large amount of Ether in the ICO, which pumps the price of EOS to above the current market price.
The more ether that makes it into each ICO window only serves to drive up the price paid for each EOS token in that window. How would it make economic sense to try to get the price of EOS up on exchanges by paying a higher price than necessary for EOS tokens through the ICO?
Because if the group holds a large amount of EOS tokens so they wanted to put more ETH into the distribution to make the price high for their own benefit. Can't you get it !
Often times the ICO blocks come out 10% below exchange price too. The bulk of contributions rolling in at the last minute is the market working naturally. Have you ever participated in an Ebay auction? Everyone waits until the last microsecond and then the bids run up.
This is the nature of token sales. The crypto market caps are small enough that it just takes the few billionaires interested in these platforms to scoop up large portions of the market.
As this tech matures, i think that more fair token distributions models will appear. Someone could make an EOS clone with very specifically fair distribution models, but ultimately this will only be possible when more of the world is interested in crypto/blockchain.
As for your reddit link, it feels suspicious but really how does it amount to any thing else but arbitrage bots? The market is 24/7 and is what is driving the price at this point, not the crowd sale.
There is no reason to use a complicated website dealing with "scary" smart contracts when you can just buy it on a handful of exchanges (and as a US resident). So naturally the price before the last minute will be low, because there is no incentive to buy tokens that way (and bots will naturally compete until there is no profit).