Bitcoin Forum

What is the process of participating in an ICO? I am thinking about, how long is a token sale, how fast after the ICO does the token start trading etc. How much time is there from when I put my money into the token sale until I can sell it again? Thanks!

Can take a while, if you participate in pre-sales its often 2 months before you can start trading the token on exchanges.. most token sales last for one month and prior to that is a presale from which often ICOs will fund marketing and costs for the ICO etc.. on pre-sales you get a lower price.

There is no standard here. In all the project in different ways, someone immediately goes to the stock exchange, someone after a certain time

It depends entirely on the ICO so make sure to look in to all of these things before investing. Generally a token sale will last about a month for the main ICO and will start trading a week or two after the end of the token sale. Some have pre-icos which can be many months before the actual ICO. Generally if there's no bonus you can wait until the end of the ICO to invest and that will reduce the time you must wait to trade your tokens but you should make sure you comply with any KYC requirements in advance of trying to purchase tokens as it can be a hold up.

Where do they typically get traded afterwards? e.g. there is a whole list here: https://www.icoalert.com but I can't find any of the ones under "recent ICO's" on coinmarketcap or other websites

All of information you asked differ from project to project. In general money investing phase lasts couple of months. Devs will try to issue tokens in a month after and they try to make agreement with any exchange in a month.

Good ICOs usually have whitelist registration before the crowdsale. So if you missed to register in the whitelist, you won't be able to invest. If you invest on early stages of ICO or pre-sail, you can get more bonuses. But be aware when ICO offers huge bonuses, it's not a good sign. Another think that you should pay attention to is a hardcap. If the project has a high hype and it's hardcap is less than 20$ millons then such ICO can be sold out in minutes.

Follow their roadmap, and be careful before investing. There are many scam ones, and follow forum and make research about the team before investment. Process changes from ICO to ICO.

Analyse it thoroughly

It depends on each ICO, nobody can tell about the process and all the times that an ICO requires to complete their roadmap at a 100%.

Some ICO's prefer to launch their ANN thread a few months before the pre-ico because they want to make more promotion and advertising before launching the pre-ico, and that is the only thing that makes an ico succesfull, the marketing and the patience.

if you launch and ico and you expect to raise funds in just two days, your project will fall.

So the best ico's are those who launch their ann threads and wait a month or so to start their pre-ico.

It depends on project which you are in. For example some of tokens you can sell as soon as presale finishes. . Some of them takes a long time  whetheras some after ICO ending.

I think you should check the whitepaper of coin which you attending

Its also good to join the telegram chats or slack channels - you can get a real sense of the project through that.

Marketing is key but also its important that they are not dumping all of their money into marketing and that there is a good project at hand as well. 

I just joined an ICO project -

Here is there telegram for anyone who is interested

https://t.me/joinchat/FyQCyUR9IvlBlMwzvLMIwQ

They are pretty forwarding thinking in the cannabis community - which is amazing :)

Good Luck on your ICO investments!