Bitcoin Forum

So, lets say you've developed a new altcoin and you're going to do an ICO. How does escrow protect coin purchasers? I mean, the dev team is eventually going to get access to the BTC at the end of the crowdsale, at which point they could just steal it all.

ICO Escrow is just pointless, same as pointless are ICOs without escrow. ICO's are plan useless.

I mean, isn't it more important to have transparency regarding how the BTC that is raised is spent? For instance, access to bank statements, etc.?

Escrow holds the funds until development is done and the promised product(shitcoins) hit exchanges and available for public, means the coins now are openly accessible so those with bags of coins can sell at will because when listed in exchanges it has value and funds are released because the equal value of funds are in hands of investors.

I understand now. Thanks!

What's the most reputable escrow service for this?

There are a lot of reputable escrow here in forum and you can just choose some of them in this link. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855778.0

That is the list of bitcointalk escrows and you can see those escrows that are ready to help you with alt coins.

Because some of them are just escrowing bitcoin transactions.

Thanks. But isn't there a danger that the escrow could just steal the bitcoins?

Escrow will hold all of the funds and never will be releasing them until the dev will have distributed the coin.

Some day, there is ICO A and B was feeling interesting with it and gonna invest some of his amounts. and D will be the escrow for ICO A. And the amounts of B has held by D and anytime if the escrow will be failing or scam escrow still securing the investor's money.


Yes is there, that's why we are need choosing the recommended escrow. Master-p is an evidence for the shit escrow.

You call it "steal", but it's just what an ICO (or IPO in general) is meant to do: raise money for the old owners/creators. Don't make the mistake thinking they do it for you.

What if the owners/creators/developers take none of the proceeds and its all used to further the altcoin in ways that don't involve paying salaries, etc?

That's how any ICO/crowdfunding should work, developers set milestones to reach, agreed in advance with the escrow and whoever is interested in the project. Funds should be locked and released only at those milestones so the devs won't run with the money after releasing a simple wallet clone.

In that case it's likely they use the money to increase the "value" of their pre-mined coins. One way or another, they do it for themselves.
Don't get me wrong, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, although it would be better if they're open about that goal. In reality, they - for example - make up all sorts of possible future uses for the coin. Most likely, this will never be accomplished. That's why we have hundreds (maybe thousands?) of altcoins, and that's why they're also called "shitcoins".

ICO's are worthless. If you have such an amazing concept it shouldn't be hard to find actual investors and not some suckers who can put in $2 each from their last rupees.

Finally somebody with a brain I totally agree with you ICO's are worthless and most of them just scams.

So they would work for free and out of the warmness of their heart? OK. How are you going to live without being paid? You work full time for free haha

This is just a psychological way to comfort your users. Like, a popular person says that he trusts this project/dev team. This is like engaging a popular singer for advertisement. In fact, it does not give you any guarantee. But still, in any ICO, people look on the escrow agents. And if the project has no escrow, it is often marked as questionable.

it creates a false sense of security for the users so that they think that coin is a safe investment and they can give they money to the person asking for it.
in my opinion ICO is meaningless is cryptocurrency world, when everything is copy paste and open source and is done with the help of the community and more like a peer review kind of thing. and as long as developers are seeing altcoins as their cash cow to milk, ICO scam and other scams will continue.

I think it should be there for the escrow that makes the project ico, because escrow helping to secure a developer so as not to deceive and attract large investors entered in peroyek you make.

Actually in most of the ICO who will have escrow in middle have certain terms that will prevent devs from just running away scamming after ICO period. They need to deliver what they have promised in start to be able to get 100% of ICO investment and payments are made in parts to devs so that they will not run away and keep delivering updates and what is in their whitepaper.

YOu appreciate Escrow when the developers end up been a scam and try to run away with your Bitcoin, Two good example is Opair and Decloud, Opair investors were able to get their fund but Decloud not becuase Opair used a credible Escrow

I think much better to choose the big 3 if you seen 3 above monbux is one of the reputative here in forum and i think they do not do what you are thinking because they already dealing with high amount of bitcoin if you can check his trust feedback maybe it can help you to have idea what you will use as your escrow..

How many milestones are ideal? I guess being listed on exchanges is important.

I think we will start to see release of the ico money in stages becoming more common.  Komodo was lucky to already have a reputable escrow on the team, so they accepted ico money directly into their 2-of-3 multisignature and can continue using the same 2-of-3 setup indefinitely if they want to.

Iconomi ico crypto is all still sitting in the escrow accounts.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe they don't want to officially take ownership of it until the platform is launched.


This was the purpose of the escrows for projects like Lisk.  The escrows didn't offer any protection to the investors other than the fact that they gave the project their stamp of approval.  If an escrow puts their name on a outright scam where the people disappear, then they probably won't get any more escrow jobs after that.

I have actually learn from this thread in understanding how this escrow of ICOs work but the issue of release of funds is what I am yet to understand

1. What if the developer approached the escrow that " I need 1btc to pay for marketing won't he still provide"?

2. Also I think more should still be done by the escrow in the sense that the funds should still be held and released in batches if the coin is gradually leaving up to expectation. This will reduce drastically the issue of developers getting the fund then abandon the project and move to another shit coin.

it seems you need to know and see how it works and whether he is responsible for his work, the most important of escrow is whether he is honest about handling your project.

Coin has to be launched and distributed before devs get funds released.
So i think Escrow is great. At which point anyone cant vote or request the coin to be listed on an exchange.

Moderated threads of announcements means that they don't want people post the truth and scare away their donating investors (if you invest in ICO with moderated thread you are practically donating your money).

Real ICO has any value when dev team are actually presenting an idea which will make money, otherwise escrow or no escrow they are literally selling absolute zero valued string of codes in the name of a token or coin like mass scam and egaas scam and other 99% of all ICOs.

An example of successful and real ICO with a legit money making idea behind it would be Iconomi, just study and research their project to see how it was a success for investors.

Escrows only care for their fees and just act as a trusted third party, they will then release the funds as soon as the dev team says so no matter if the project reached it's goals.

Simple. Protect the investors!

ico escrow is a third person who can be trusted or guarantor agara investors who will join it will believe, that this is not a scam

Hahahaha last rupees haha

What about DAO's escrow?

So if I would like to Launch an ICO, does it make sense to use a reliable escrow service
or would you say it doesn't matter?

Frankly speaking, I will have more confidence if the ICO has a reliable escrow and funds are released to the development team when each milestones are made. This is usually what I look out for in the white paper.

Good point and these kind of indications which would really make you tell that the project is good and as you said i do have trust and confidence if the funds are being escrowed than on those project who arent using this kind of service since they can anytime ran off with the funds and this is the start on why there are some ICO's do become scam in the end because of such behavior stealing funds since its not being escrowed.

OK, good to know.
Thank you for your opinions!
I am interested in crypto currencies for a while but never give
much interest in ICOs.
The runaway problem as an abuse of this basically good idea what an ICO is for
must indeed be solved to be trustworthy to any investors.
Which escrow services would you recommend for an ICO issuing ERC based tokens
and taking Bitcoin and Ether for this?

Hi all,
did anyone see good example of ICO escrow?

So, the point is when actually escrowed, if the investor gets nothing on their investment, the issuer of token would also get nothing. It surely makes the issuer more serious about the project.

wish i knew you could escrow a ICO  sigh sigh :'( :'( .Guessing my iCO would have be a success if i did .As the song goes nothing i can do about it now

I thought it was just an intermediary only. Even though the escrow will give access to the funds of ICO. But it depends on escrow they use usually escrow secure the funds of ICO until they release the coins to investor so they feel secure getting their shares.

here the thread about escrows
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855778.0

and ICO's without escrow, is bad,,
because with escrow the funds of investors is protected

The point is Escrow system in ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is working like the third party and by using this system both buyer and seller are free from fraud the system provide the honesty of transactions.

Hey guys, is there any company which provides escrow for the ico? Looking for one with a good reputation.

ICO is better if have Escrow, but cross check Escrows credibility

Escrow will be a good option, if it will be any kind of company which is protected and insured, or kind of organisation. If the escrow is just one person, doesnt metter what is his reputation it is a huge risk. Im not talking only about scam, but somebody could happen with a person, he can be robed, sick, die.. Its absurd that a company (ico), can delegate all finance (sometimes it is millions) to one person! I think this can be idea for a project, to make some kind of decentralised escrow service.

Can anybody give a few examples of recently ended ICOs with escrows?

We are making review for the ICOs, and I didnt saw it for a long time. Probably because of (read my previous post)

yes, escrow made the investors assured to participate in without worrying their money are abused by the team, its very common on the early years ico, but we can hardly see escrow recently, maybe blockchain are mutual than before, maybe the investors havent tasted bitter

Actually it is not as easy as you say. A lot of great ideas have try to raise funf by traditional means and they could only manage to get 400k to $1mil. However when they ico, they can get 10x or 20x the amount in one shot.

You are right, to get funds from angels sometimes could be a huge headache. I think ICO and traditional fundraising both has disadvantages. One is too hard second is too easy. Lots of crap ICOs appears every day, thats why we created icocritic.org , to have another opinion and critical view to the ICOs. And yes its kind of bubble in ICO world right now, probably 99% of ICOs will not survive 5+ years. But that doesnt means people cant make money on them in short term. Also huge plus, that event when bubble will blow, some great tech companies could appear from this. Like when it was doccom bubble, we got Amazon and many more huge and good tech companies.

Hey guys! I am part of the incremint.io team working on the smart contract based escrow solution. May not be - frankly - be as savvy as most of you in blockchain etc. But with my professional background, having worked as a lawyer on $hundred million / billion dollar M&As, I can tell you that escrow may be quite a useful tool to make sure buyer doesn't get screwed up. And more so in the ICO ecosystem. With so many scams, escrow could be the answer. Imagine in a Tezos situation $200mln out of $232 were escrowed. Backers would have received 85 cents on the buck back.

It that for real? In this case and only in this case am escrow would make a sense for an ICO. Could you please name at least one ICO which has used an escrow in this way?

I think the issue of whether Escrows can steal or Scam investors is not so pronounced, so far you actually make use of the well known ones in this regard. But I must bring back to memory lane that ICO with attractive patronage hardly made possible without the use of Escrow during White paper development and preparedness. So, escrow  standing between Developers and team management plays very vital or significant role which can never be under estimated.

Unlikely that any ICO used as escrow mechanism we are offering: escrow both in crypto and fiat (if selected by ICO issuers to avoid FX exposure). Besides, the release mechanism we are building doesn't really make us a middleman. Backers will be voting on ICO issuer's milestone performance.

Escrow could have been done on a multisig wallet basis but that's not really an escrow from many perspectives, including personal safety of a signatory - someone holding a key to, say, a $10m escrow wallet may prefer to keep his identity hidden from the community. That creates a different risk - colluding and running away with money.

Escrow is a third party that monitors money costs and cash flows of money raised during ICO.
Meaning that Escrow is a sort of protection from scum and useless wastes of money.

ICO escrow is out of date, and time told the truth.In case of escrow running away , don't think about this.

We at incremint, are not planning to monitor operational and capex activity of an ICO issuer but yes, we will be protecting investors from projects that raise cash on mere promises and then failing to deliver on actual product. Investors may vote in favour of payback. Obviously, the mechanism we are building is meant to be balanced. Serious ICO sponsor will propose milestones it plans to abide by. Moreover, deadlines could be postponed by vote too. But no delivery means payback to backers intimately.

In my opinion, once a product, altcoin in this case, has been developed there is no logic in using escrow. The developer should receive all the raise upon development. Escrow may be needed throughout a development stage to essentially incentivise the developer to complete the project before it gets all the ICO-raised funds.

"Escrow" by itself is just a word, like for example, the word "book". There can be a shitty book or a great one. Same with escrow. We at Incremint are working on bringing the best product to the market. One that combines our legal experience with a solid technical solution. There will not be an issue of escrow agent running away. Real people with real reputation at stake plus maximum transparency of the terms and code.

Thanks!
P

What if a team had already released MPV before ICO starts and needs all funds (which will be raised during ICO) to finish the development.
Is, in that case, having an escrow agent would be a necessary factor (for people) to contribute?

there are many ways to steal money at this stage, when even experienced users become victims of hackers because of silly carelessness or self-sufficiency ..

I understand it very much depends on how guarantee policy, terms and conditions, type of cap etc. are set.

So, escrow doesn't really makes much sense if contributions are not refundable with soft cap and no specific obligations.

On the other hand, it show at least that the team has serious intentions to provide contributors with most guarantees possible.

It's like getting sec D approved. ICO team shows they've done their homework and have all intention to fulfill the project and meet the promises given.

The role of escrows in ICO campaign is the proper provision or supervision of the obligations imposed on a service provider. this system basically provides an intermediary service ensuring smooth business transactions between two individuals or groups of individuals. Simply put, an escrow will handle transactional values pending when agreements of the set trade are completed.

I agree with your opinion. ICO escrow does not guarantee that the investors will get back their money in a hassle free manner, but it does indeed show that the team is serious about their project which is something I appreciate. There is an obvious risk involved here since the ICO can pack up and run away at any particular point of time which is why adequate research needs to be done before investing even if they are providing an escrow service. The ICOS that provide escrow services to investors are generally legit majority of the time which is reassuring.

I'm looking for a trustworthy ICO escrow. I'm putting my real name and even my face on my project. I am 100% legit, does anyone have advice on an affordable ICO escrow? Also, looking to get listed on an exchange to trade.

I think much better to choose the big 3 if you seen 3 above monbux is one of the reputative here in forum and i think they do not do what you are thinking because they already dealing with high amount of bitcoin if you can check his trust feedback maybe it can help you to have idea what you will use as your escrow..