ICO is still booming: what we need to understand in order not to make mistakes when investing

In 2018 the ICO market does not show signs of slowing down. This year more than 1000 ICOs have already been successfully completed with estimated $1.5 billion raised. And this is not counting the sale of Telegram project tokens – it is expected that the ICO messenger and the blockchain platform of Pavel Durov will set a new record for fund-raising. We already know about two rounds of investments, during which about 1.7 billion dollars were raised.

At the moment, the market entered the phase when the number of projects offering to buy their tokens during Initial Coin Offering events no longer allows investors to rely solely on their own analysis. Of course it is still necessary to consider the following factors that are extremely important when choosing an ICO to invest:

1. The project itself must resolve the actual problem faced by millions of customers, for example, a convenient crypto wallet, file storage rather than using a contrived binding to the blockchain to use the wave of interest in the new technology.
2. The project must have a well-written whitepaper, which lists all the basic information about the project: its idea, ways of technical implementation, significance for the market and competitive advantages.
3. The working prototype should be at least in the alpha version, published on Github and subjected to critical analysis by the crypto community and its leaders in other authoritative sources.
4. The released token must have a distinct economics of use. If it is a token for internal use (utility token), then we have to look at exactly what it can be spent on inside the ecosystem and how valuable it is. If the token is used as a security, then it is important to understand how the income is going to be paid to its holders.
5. It is extremely important to correctly assess the team behind the project. Founders must have a proven track record of creating and managing companies in the same field, or they must be significant names in the industry. The same applies to advisors, since they often have unique expertise or knowledge relevant to the scope of the project.

In order to make sure that the ICO meets at least these minimum requirements, there appeared many agencies and individual analysts who collect all of the above information, forming the grades of Initial Coin Offerings on its basis. At the moment, the most respected rating agencies with the most extensive databases are ICOrating and ICObench. They have been on the market for quite a long time and their ratings have proved to be fairly objective and therefore worthy of attention.

Nevertheless, their ICO evaluation principles are extremely different. For example, ICOrating is an agency with its own staff of analysts who review a significant number of projects and evaluate their hype score (presence in social networks and other venues) and risk score (probability of non-return of funds invested). Moreover, for some of the most interesting projects, voluminous reports are prepared, in which every detail of the forthcoming token sale is comprehensively analyzed. ICObench, in turn, relies on the opinion of many analysts at once, and forms the project’s rating based on their assessments of Team, Vision and Product including the rating of their bot-analyst studying the ICO profile.

In addition to these two agencies, there are many market participants whose evaluation methods differ from each other. This variety allows one to obtain a deeper understanding of the value and reliability of each ICO project, but can also confuse investor’s minds.

Therefore, in order for those who wish to invest in the ICO could get all the information of interest in one place, we created an informational and analytical resource Icostock24.com, where we have already collected one of the largest databases on token sales.

At the moment, our sources of information are 6 ICO rating agencies, which already have the greatest recognition in the crypto community and have the largest coverage of the Initial Coin Offerings  market. The list of the agencies includes ICObench, ICOrating, ICObazaar, ICOmarks, Foxico and TrackICO. Every day we collect information from their websites, adding even more projects and ratings so that they are actually up to date and it is easily seen if the website has removed any information or suddenly increased the rating.

The value of our services also lies in the fact that we summarize the results of the work of many crypto analysts who are the best professionals in their field, and thus we provide you with possibility to compare the results. The collection of different, sometimes diametrically opposed assessments is a measure that, in our opinion, can bring the market to a new level of transparency and make the choice of the most promising and reliable ICOs easy as never before!

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