ICO 101
When a cryptocurrency startup firm wants to raise money through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), it usually creates a plan on a whitepaper which states what the project is about, what need(s) the project will fulfill upon completion, how much money is needed to undertake the venture, how much of the virtual tokens the pioneers of the project will keep for themselves, what type of money is accepted, and how long the ICO campaign will run for. During the ICO campaign, enthusiasts and supporters of the firm’s initiative buy some of the distributed cryptocoins with fiat or virtual currency. These coins are referred to as tokens and are similar to shares of a company sold to investors in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) transaction.
In 2017 ICOs gathered more than 8,7bn USD,
meanwhile 2018 surpassed 14bn USD already ,so it’s safe to assume that new form of gathering money inspired by IPOs is working ,yet we have another half year to make even higher “ICO ATH”, but for more about statistics just check this report from Elementus
Whole space is getting more mature about gaining funds — VC’s are coming to play, we are getting more difficult tasks for less allocations.
How to survive the ICO jungle
If you are going to get any profits from Initial Coin Offerings, you need to know few fundamental things, instead of chasing ‘another great project’ shilled by a friend or your beloved crypto persona.
We can easily divide projects from whole market into tiers by categories,
Best tier:
Blockchain
Projects with their own blockchain and upcoming swap from ETH pair to a native one, recent examples: ICON, EOS
Exchanges
Aura (IDEX), Binance Coin, upcoming: NEX and DX.Exchange
Protocols
Origin Trail, 0x
New categories:
P2P Internet (NKN, Holo, Hadera Hashgraph, nOS)
Mid tier:
Blockchain service
Frameworks-marketplaces
Low tier:
dApps
Advertising
Energy
Loans (saturated)
VR & AR (you dont need that trust me)
Real estate
Each case is different, depends on many variables — it can be good or bad, but in most cases that depends on:
✅Hardcap (growth potential both in terms of marketcap and funds to spend on R&D, marketing)
✅Backing, partners (excluding other ICOs) and advisory board: If project will fail on early phase, only this two factors will rescue whole thing from bankruptcy and total failure
✅Transparency both in progress, company, team and team’s connections with other companies
✅Market condition (bearish, bullish, volume, recent news, hacks, FUD)
✅If market is in full bull — even the shittiest investment will go up at some point, but that can’t be your argument behind any investment, ever.
✅Is there even logic behind project? (VR ICO? Really? Who needs that on blockchain?)
⛔️EXCLUDING FORKS⛔️
Yeah, let’s just say I am not a big fan of modifying someone else’s job and asking for money ,because your idea was so good. I wont give you here any example, but there’s plenty of such projects out there.
But where should I start? How to find projects like yours?
There is no good answer to this question that I got so many times. Sometimes I spent few minutes on my research, sometimes — few weeks.
Best advices I came up so far with:
✅Follow Venture Capitals, check their recent investments — if the project is good, in most cases — they are the first to know about it, long time before crowdsale starts.
✅Check Tech Crunch and Crunchbase for recent investment of biggest angel investors and VC’s.
✅If some influencer is advising you to go into exact project — it doesn’t mean to be a bad thing , unless he is a pure shiller.
✅If you like projects, your guts are telling you “go for it” and you did ALL research that you could — then invest by all means, if that’s not your first ICO and you have some experience — you wont loose your initial investment
✅If you want to follow some influencer — it doesn’t matter if that’s me or youtuber like ..Suppoman, check the background (especially when it comes to knowledge) of that person — don’t trust every buzzword you see, check that information twice or more if you need to ,because if someone is telling you that “NEW BIG SCORE ICO” — in almost 90% cases, he/she is wrong.
✅Stick to common sense, if you have no idea why this solution needs blockchain to work — there is high probability there is none, it’s just an excuse to do an ICO to gather neccesary funds that VC or any angel investor didn’t gave to the project because of bad idea.
That’d be all for now, stay safe guys, profits and skills instead of shills✌️.
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