Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

I've been following bitcoin and altcoins for a bit now but was off since last year for personal reason.

Now, I would like to launch a "miniBank" business and I was wondering if ICO is the right tool for that. The idea is to run a mobile banking service (which are popular in emerging markets) through blockchain features. The initial phase will require around 500 000 USD.

Here is a list of services that will be provided by the miniBank :
- multi crypto-currency account pegged to EUR or USD
- VISA/MASTERCARD debit card linked to EUR or USD balance
- Mobile payment in several Emerging Market Countries
- Automated loans
- Transfer/Remittance from Europe to Emerging Market Countries

The presale and after the ICO will grant initial investor with token that will allow them to have :
- a perpetual fixed income on the miniBank (interest rate tbd).    
- a share of the miniBank or the cryptocurrency that will be used for mobile payment, loans...

Do you think that pre sale can be use to fund part of the initial phase ? And what are the steps that I should follow to have a successful pre-sale ?

PS: I worked in Investment Banking and I'm quite knowledgeable in term of coding and system architecture so I have a proper understanding of both.

ICO isn't needed anymore for this type of projects that you want to launch.

You can just ask in your corporation if they are willing to support this or you can look for start up groups where they love funding projects like this.

I don't really think that ICO is essential anymore for these type of services, you can propose this to potential investors but it's no need for a tokenized shares.

There are already quite a number of banking/card projects that ran ICO and after long time they didn't deliver (TenX) or they are in the early stage of delivering (Minex, Monaco).
And these are the most known projects.

Now, you have to see if your idea is better than theirs and if so, even an ICO is possible, but be careful: with so many bad ICO people are disappointed and regulations started to be more strict (which, depending on investors' country, may matter or not).

This is such an ambitious project, better do an audit if you can really do that, if you can comply and you think it will benefit the community and there no existing project or services like that, then go for it, but it's not easy to set up an ICO so many project has been paused because of not reaching the softcap.

What kind of startup groups / potential investors are you referring to ?


Yes it's an ambitious project, but I'm 100% certain to deliver because i'll do it from an emerging country where regulation is still in it's infancy.

What do you mean by an audit ? who will run it ?

Regarding the softcap, my initial intention (good ?) is to run multistage ICO with low softcap with contractual delivery commitment to investors (for example ~$50 000 for the first round, then ~$100 000, then $200 000...)

The value proposition is not really the visa card. I think the real value will come from transactions fees and interests from mobile payments, remittance and loans. The visa card will just be a convenient way to withdraw fiat from users accounts

There's a start up group here in my country that support those legit services and businesses that are looking for investors, developers, etc.

In any case, there must be the same group of people in your country that are doing the same business of finding start ups that they can support to start operating.

Do you refer to  VCs/Business Angels or is it a crypto group of investors ?

After a first look into the bitcoin/altcoin space, I found stellar network to be particularly well adapted to run financial services and I'm planning to launch a validator node to run a few tests.
But I also heard a lot of potential problem with stellar (amount of coin still held by founders...) so it'll be good to know what the bitcointalk community think of stellar network (to run a financial/banking service).