Unfortunately, as a rule, ICO’s are not regulated. There is no central authority to watch over them. Governments have been reluctant to interfere with the development of cryptocurrency, but have done so in relation to other types of financial activity. But companies that evade regulation cannot be trusted. Look at the ICOs that failed: they raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and then disappeared without a trace.
Because they are unregulated, it’s hard to find out who is behind an ICO. In theory you should be able to identify the company behind an ICO by searching the company names in the Internet domain register (that’s a list of every domain name registered worldwide). But this information is not always available; sometimes it turns out to be incorrect; and some domains are registered by scammers, who want to make it difficult for people to find and investigate their identities.
The safest ICOs will be those that come from well-known companies with a good track record, who will have taken care of all the legal issues before their ICO takes place. The best way to find these companies is by asking people you trust from whom you have already heard good things about the company.
If you’re interested in finding out whether an ICO is safe or not, there are some blog
If you don’t know what an ICO means, or what it’s for, then don’t invest in one. There are a growing number of ICOs in the world every day, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good. The best ICOs, by definition, are those where the team has a practical business plan and there is a realistic chance of success. You can read about how to find those on the blog post called “How I found my cryptocurrency investments”.
There are some which are not good investments at all and you should NOT buy them. Many ICOs raise too much money for their goals (and promise huge returns) and will never get off the ground. Others make it look like they have a good idea but miss out on key details that make the project unviable.
Here’s what to look for:
1) A Quality Team: If you look on LinkedIn, you’ll see most successful ICO teams have a strong history of working together and collaborating on prior projects. Look at their profile to see how many projects they’ve worked on together over the years and how many of those were successfully completed. Their verticals should tell you something about how well they work together…
2) A Realistic Business Plan: This can be difficult to
The best way to find out about ICOs is to read blogs that are written by people who are interested in them. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can try to make sense of the ones that appear on Twitter and do an analysis of the projects they talk about. But this is a lot of work, and it’s hard to know what an ICO is without spending time learning about them.
Instead, you can use our list of ICOs. These are the only ones we think are worth considering right now, because they have made other people money.
If you want to learn more about what an ICO is, here are some books:
The Art of Startup Fundraising: How to Raise Capital, Build Products, and Build Companies by Chris Dixon
A guide for entrepreneurs looking at raising funds by block rewarding tokens
You will have noticed that this blog is about the ICO market. There is a reason for this. When I started writing it, there were many people who wrote about ICOs and who were not happy that I was doing so. I was told: “Don’t write what we are trying to suppress.”
I thought it was interesting to see how people reacted when they realized I was writing about something they worried about. But it became quickly apparent that there were two reasons why people did not like me writing about ICOs: one, that I had no real expertise in them; two, that as soon as I would start writing about them, someone else would write about them too.
The result had been that over the last year or so, there has essentially been no new information coming out of the ICO scene. What’s new? Only things you could have found out by Googling “ICOs” and reading a couple of websites.
I get asked this question a lot, so I have written a blog post to answer it. (I’ll try to write more of these on different subjects.)
You can check many things. Here are some easy ways:
1. Google the company name and see if there are any posts on Reddit or Twitter about the company.
2. Google the company name in combination with “market cap”, “price/hours” or “price/btc”.
3. See what other projects are doing this exact thing; you’ll find lots of ICOs that are using the same name as yours, just with different things in them.
What is an ICO? An initial coin offering, or ICO, is a way for a startup to raise funds. It’s similar to a stock market IPO, but without the regulation and oversight.
The ICO is an early-stage venture capital round. The company sells some of its crypto tokens in exchange for real money. These tokens can be traded on crypto exchanges, giving the company more flexibility to raise more money and grow.
Tokens, or coins, are a type of cryptocurrency. They are basically digital coupons that allow you to buy a product, usually a good or service. The most popular kind is the so-called “utility coin,” which can be used to pay for access to a service.
Utility coins were invented in 2014 by Vitalik Buterin, a Russian programmer, who thought they might help distribute the ownership of blockchains more evenly. (In theory anyone with Bitcoin could take ownership of the whole blockchain, but in practice it’s very hard to do.)
Buterin is now one of the best known figures in cryptocurrency and has been described as “the most important person in blockchain technology”. He also happens to be an outspoken supporter of democracy – a rare thing for someone working on cryptography – and he has given away 10% of his Ethereum fortune using an ingenious application of open source code called “The DAO.”
The DAO is a kind of crowdfunding mechanism that allows people to invest money directly into projects without needing experts or intermediaries to manage their money. It has proved popular: $150 million has been invested into various DAO projects since it was set up last year.
In this way Blockchain technology – which is what Ethereum uses – is starting to