Bitcoin Forum

ICO scams have become increasingly common, it takes considerable work to sieve through the huge numbers and get to the good ones. Here are some indicators that could be a template in making your own choice, The list is not exhaustive , please feel free to add yours and help us build a better forum.

1. Project Concept or Idea- what stands out with the project? is it another 'payment' coin with no additional innovation or something mind-blowing

2. Team -A great project will not succeed without a great team, proven expertise and integrity, you may need to use "reverse google image" to ascertain if they are real

3. Board of Advisers - Great projects usually do not fall from the skies, there is usually some build-up to it,and involves respectable personalities giving some guidance to the project

4. White Paper - If the white paper is bad or plagiarized, there is really nothing to work on.

5. Feasible plan- Is it a plan that can be implemented, not just on paper

6. Website- should not be crappy ,great projects have nice and easy-to-use website loaded with information about projects, no malicious links

7. Marketing and Promotions - Project must have a good reach and publicity, usually reflected in social media activities

8. Legal Compliance - There should be enough legal back for he project, no restrictions or government regulations against it

9. Code Security - Ideally should be public and safe ,without bugs

10. Token Issuance and distribution -  Fair distribution to teams members, advisers, community, reserve etc.

A good project will score high in all these fronts.
Please add your own views

Yes thats rigth, if we sre talking just about the legitimacy of a project to not become scam. Verifying the team will tell everything. If it in real existing and more public appearance in front of more people. I can say this is legit but not meaning will become successful project. Be more researcher if need to find good ico

They have three celebrities already. Owen, Pacquaio, and Jason Derulo. They also have a great list of private investors, one of them is Bin Zayed. Sounds good, but I don't know how successful it will be.

I will stay away from ICOs that are promoted by celebrities. Look at Centra Tech which was promoted by Floyd Mayweather. I don't know if it was a scam but the US regulators had already shut it down and gave warnings to celebrities on endorsing ICOs.

Anyway back to the topic, a good ico must not hide information from investors. I have seen projects where the devs do not release any future plans. Only invest in projects where the team is honest and provide a long term plan in the road map.

Those celebrities are not promoters, but partners of GCOX. If I get it correctly, they've signed a deal that GCOX will list their "celebrity token" when the platform is ready.

Just as Manny said in his tweet https://twitter.com/mannypacquiao/status/1028116116936175616

wow nice one bro, u did a lot of research!

Celebrities provide hype, not trust. They probably know nothing about all of this and were just paid out, it doesn't show that ICO will be successful.

Celebrity is directly connected to GCOX, as GCOX is the platform for those celebrities to create their own token. Recruiting celebrities is not just for the sake of marketing but it is because they're part of their ecosystem. Judging by Manny tweet, at least he knows a little about it.

Thats broad, top 3 of a successful ICO are team, product and marketing strategy. Having these qualities show the success rate of a certain project is above higher. Legitimacy is prove by the team, product will attract user to invest and marketing handle the ways on how to raised a big fund.

i think this coin would be great invest, their first tranche is over subscribe 56% and the price raised 50% at 2nd tranche, soon will be start

i heard many said would stay away from ICOs or ICOs promoted by celebetries, may i ask why ya?

dont think so, if hype is involved then is either celebrities would declare or announce, dont they?

One argument I've heard regarding "what makes an ICO successful" is really one single entity: the leader. This is upsetting because decentralized environments shouldn't rely so heavily on a single individual, but this seems to actually be the case more often than not. Good leader = good returns. This may be due to the fact that you can use ICO funds to contract /everything/ you need in your startup. If you've got an individual to look over all that you'll be in good shape.

Investing in any ICO at this moment is pretty risky as opposed to 2017 when it was the trending thing to do.

If certain people were to work on and release another project the 3 main things i look for are:

1.Team- who it comprises of and what have they done in the past with other ventures. This is usually a fairly good indicator that they have the ability to make a product that works/will make money, it also indicates that they are trustworthy and not there to specifically grab peoples cash and run.

2.Use case- If the project is unique or has a better chance than a competitor (because of point 1) then i'm interested. I'm not into fantasy stories of "we are trying to do this" or "we aim to disrupt that", i look for solid fundamentals and actual real life use case where you can look at something and think "WOW".

3.Fund allocation- If the first two criteria are satisfied then next I ALWAYS look at this. To see how and where the funds will be spent, specifically how much the team and advisors are keeping for themselves. I tend to think the lower the number the better. Anything over 20% i am simply not interested as i deem it an unsafe investment.

I think Security Token offerings will be the next big thing by the looks of it, so i'm not really looking at ICO'S unless its something truly groundbreaking.

I strongly agree of what u have listed and thanks for sharing..ive been a victim of losing my money on lending icos way back last year coz I invested eventhough I dont know who are the team behind the project..i learned from my mistakes and I never ever do it again..Now when I am investing to an ico I consider very important is the team and the use case of the project..

Why did you invest in the first place if you don't know the team?

a good project must have the community, ie bounty hunters at heart, token allocations to bounties are somewhat high. this is so because they understand a project only succeed when its well publicized.

I strongly agree with this statement about community cause it's the driving force of any project. And the number of people involved is an important indicator of the project's success. p.s. I'm talking here about real people not bots, as it's popular nowadays.


Sure, advisers have to be well known personalities in the area, whether it's crypto, gaming or other, because people don't trust impostors.

No, bounty hunter doesn't contribute to project development/success at all, though I agree that what they need is people who use the coins/adoption. I highly doubt bounty hunter even use the platform of ICO that they promote. Most of them only care about money.

Personally I don't see the rationale behind a celebrity token as same do not constitute any business idea to me. I wonder what will motivate someone to invest in such ventures. On the other hands, am still struggling to understand what the celebrity might want to accomplish by launching his own token.

I think that indicators is just a normal for me. It is like the standard have to be done by the ICO to be proof of its legitimacy.

It is nice post. Every bounty hunter should read and do it as the guidance for participating in any bounty campaign, otherwise they will be involve in bounty scams. Now the forum is full of bounty, every day there is a new bounty. It is quite difficult to define which bounty is real and which is scams. Therefore, this is can be used as guidance for the hunter.

Successful ICOs always has clear whitepaper and transparent total tokens to distribute. This is now becoming popular issue in forum that there are a lot of bounty scams appear every day. The bounty hunter moan and ask about this, how to see the real and successful ICOs because they do not want to be trapped in bounty scams. And this post can be a guidance in participating in bounty.

yeah, a great and successful ICOs must have those characteristics. A great ICOs must be developed by great team inside, the crucial thing in ICOs is the team developer. They must have good individual work and team work. ICOs perhaps can not reach the goal without their contribution or their hands.

yes, i agree with you, I think the endorses of the celebrities don't ensure the success of an ICO, because successful ICOs are those who continue to develop applications and expand their project implementation

I think there is one again a criteria for indicating successful ICO, namely the trusted ICO tracker, such as icotracker, icobench, icorating, etc. because the review of the tracker includes some of the criteria that you mentioned above

Yeah I always check that before joining the ICO and I agree with you. If you want to invest in ICO, you must research carefully because we all dont want our money/our investation disappear. so i rather spend a lot of time to do the research about the ICO before joining them. ICO is needed exactly cause from new coin/tokens sometimes we can have a new technology, new idea or new improvement than the old coin/token ever have.