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Hello guys, we are currently working in a smart contract powered pension fund platform, and studied how we could improve our ICO.

What do you think about using the following rules, do you have any suggestion to improve it? We will publish it on github and if community support it, it could become a standard for next ones.

Main Points:

• ETH Locked through smart-contract, the funds will gradually become available based on Auctus business budget plan.
• Smart Contract source will be published well in advance, this will allow potential investors to audit the contract.
• We will publish our crowdsale contract address in advance, minus the last 5 digits, so there is no chance of funds being sent to an incorrect address.
• Team will have 2 years vesting with 6 months cliff.

I think the last point (the vesting) is very important. It makes the team more committed.

The biggest drawback of the first point is unexpected events. What happens in case you need more funds than planned?

We would set a reserve for future stakeholders that could be used to raise more funds in case of excessive devaluation, otherwise, if deemed unnecessary, we would burn it .

the team should be committed in this project and they should be always hearing out opinions coming from the community I think give and take between dev and the supporters will make this project successful I'm sure the idea will be supported if the team will be more serious to get in touch with the investors.

To get investorst trust, the support team cooperation is a must. Whenever I'm investing though it was small amount , i really appreciate whenever there's a team representative who replues on my questions actively. And it will interest more investors to support them if they are approachable.

We invite you to join and interact with us on our post/slack , we really want to build this interaction, even if you are not investor and wan't to follow a project progress closer, feel free to join us:  http://slack.auctus.org https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2044504.0

You miss one thing, you should make execution of the project in the short future time. There are many ICOs execute their roadmap in the end of 2018 even in 2020. I think the coin will be forgoten or Investors will recognize scam ICOs. It is better to be ready a test net web application before launching ICOs.

I don't think most investors are willing/able to audit your code.

You should instead pay someone indipendent to do it.

I've been thinking about some ideas around how to create an ethical ico for a while although I was coming from a slightly different angle.

Top of the list was the idea of having a smart contract that is programmed to release funds along a schedule, based upon project milestones being achieved. Initially I was thinking that the tokens attached to an ICO could vote to delay/speed up such a schedule (thus empowering investors) but then I wondered if technically this could create issues with the SEC (would token holder's hold technical shares)? Lo and behold we get the annoucement from the SEC this week and I'm having to reformulate ideas. Where are you planning to base your ICO? Switzerland?

A simple ethical suggestion is to just raise the amount you need to hit the next milestone and raise more at that point.

If you're a product versus a mission this makes more sense (missions in foundations typically look to maximise funding of the foundations).

Have a treasury plan if you raise more than you need.

I quick cash flow projection and a timeline demonstrates you have thought through your CASH burn rate.

With a successful ICO project comes with a great people behind it. For sure an ICO is gonna be successful if the team behind it is passionate and well-connected to the project. If people wanted to invest in such ICO project they need to raise standards especially about the projecr and the team behind, if it is legit, safe, and if the people are willing to answer one's uneding questions about the project given.

I see all these points except for the first one (and to some extent the 3rd one) already being used by the majority of good projects and is generally the kind of factors I look into when I decide if I should invest in an ICO.

Transparency and communication.if you can legalaise your company can be great,if you can deliver some beta of your platform will be also great.Legal aspect in your case is very important

Yes i think this is the best way to show that we are able to deliver what we promise. We are almost done with those crowsale smartcontract (but still open to any suggestion and could implement it). And we are willing to deliver an alpha platform running on testnet before ICO. I think it will help to build trust and also to learn from community how we can improve our product.

In my opinion the most important is to already have a working product at least in alpha/beta mode before asking people to fund the project.

With more and more scams out there that will become the norm.

The most important is to have a good team and good product.
Good luck with your ICO

Thanks for sharing your opinion!

We are currently developing an alpha version of the platform and smart contracts, and we will be able to deliver a beta before the ICO. We completely agree that the legal aspect of our core business is very important and this is one of the main reasons why there will be a token sale to fund our project. It is very important to have a specialized legal firm backing us up and since our team is composed of professionals from investment and technology fields we need to hire a third part. Our plan for the beta / MVP version is to provide an unregulated pension fund using only digital assets that will be a Proof-of-Concept and showcase to attract traditional funds and help us with regulation to be accepted as a legit pension fund.

EDIT: In addition, we believe that our first release (digital assets pension fund) could receive support from other Blockchain startup companies that may have developers and employees around the world receiving their payments in crypto currencies and our first smart contract pension fund could be really used by our fellow blockchain enthusiasts.

I think there should be some escrow for the funds raised from the ICO, for example a third-party escrow, many investors think it is important for evaluating the risks of scam.

With the eth withdrawal rules we hope to make something like an escrow, do you thing that would be enough? I think its even more secure than an escrow because it is impossible to withdrawl most of funds even if entire team tried to. Don't you agree?

It makes sense , but you will need a static roadmap, it is quite possible for short-term but not for long-term. What would you do if a new opportunity arise that is clearly more profitable ? For example: All clients/users start asking for the same new feature that wasn't on the roadmap.

It's just right for a person to raise some standards upon investing in such ICO projects because it's what theirs are going to be at risk here. For a ICO project to be successful for sure it will have a great team behind it. A team that can a answer all unending questions a person want to know about the ICO project they are going to launch and to share ideas and knowledge about it. And if it can stand the the project will be a legit, safe for people who are going to invest and will be showing some successful sides of it.

i think the ico must have a threshold, it can be doing some product first or hold their own money for initial develop, some scam ico are just to raise money with a white paper or ppt

Depends what for is your ICO most ICO is about getting your cash from you and your buisness plan is pointless.
There is no money in the world that can not be wasted :D for real guys.
Sad part is  in curret stage ICOs are joke only paid milestones are way to go to me  :)

Continuous raises make sense, or gradated ones, but the temptation of whales proves too much for many private companies.

"We will publish our crowdsale contract address in advance, minus the last 5 digits, so there is no chance of funds being sent to an incorrect address." I really like this idea, which could be a very cost-effective way to prevent the potential website hack loss.

Which has been done by others in the past, or even publishing the full address a few hours or a day in advance, the smart contract can always reject transactions that come in too early.

Not publishing it in advance is just an amateur move in my opinion and I hope ICOs start considering this much more.

But I have a question for your idea. What is that? And how it works? In the real life, the pension platform used the system that the worker must do dues since long time ago. And another worker too, it just like insurance.
But you have a responsibility to distribute it to the pension worker.
Like above me said your business is pointless. I don't think that will work.
Basically, the project must generate its future funds from the result of the development and not by using the funds from the investors. That makes you are no need to make a lot of money through ico.

This is a good idea if implemented that it would bring some level of sanity into the game but the issue is about adoption because there is no way to force compliance with this because there is no central body to do that for those interested in raising ICOs and even if the forum admin should adopt (which is higlg unlikely) there are other forum or platforms to make it happen thereby limiting the effectiveness of the control.

This topic is just about ICO, to understand our business model you would need to read our medium post (https://medium.com/auctus/introducing-the-auctus-project-84f2398e0be1) and you can find even more details on our whitepaper draft (http://dl.auctus.org/Auctus_Whitepaper_draft.pdf), i couldn't understand you very well, but please user our ann  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2044504)if you have any question about it.

Thanks for this topic! Thanks for your effort!

And I really love the idea to publish address some days or weeks before. That's really smart.

Will watch your progress. Good luck!

How about instead of releasing coins periodically regardless of achieving your projects plans, set milestones, goals and the coins are only released if you achieve them?

People are afraid the hard work won't be put in, and receiving the $ regardless removes motivation, inspiration, and can allow "bare minimum" effort to get by. If you demonstrate not only to the investors, but also to yourselves, that you won't be rewarding yourselves until you have achieved your goal, then thats some integrity right there

How could you do it with smart contracts? it would require a static roadmap

For a company it may be crucial to have a possibility to spend additional funds in tough times.
Without some money reserve a company can literally die.

So for investors better to allow company release more tokens and make possible to change roadmap.
To make this kind of decisions investors have to have an access to company's private info and even secrets. =)

Up to me - it is not possible if ICO tokens owners remain anonymous. Because otherwise company cannot protect itself from information leaks.

I think this is a relevant point, an ICO that ask money and that has nothing to show for is suspicious, and whatever they are trying to accomplish is going to take a lot of time, instead if they have a beta about what they want to accomplish then that will make the ICO a lot more successful since people will know they are investing in something real.

Yes, it sounds perfect, but you would need that all investors follow closely enough to vote on each roadmap milestone.

Exactly, a road map is just an approximation of how long something is going to take and about what you want to do, but if you can achieve something even better, or if people ask for something different then the road map can be changed to accommodate those new circumstances.

The use of smart contract itself acts enough as an escrow but only to make sure that the users who invested their money into the project have their token, about the use of the funds, maybe someone reputable could take care of it. Otherwise, there'll be a misuse case of the funds which were raised.

Yes, but even with an escrow there is no way to deal with this problem, so we are working to build trust showing how hard we are working to really deliver what we promise. thanks for your feedback

I think that's good enough, but I suggest you make a special team that is always active in social media. So potential investors and dev can communicate directly.
You can start by creating a telegram and slack group.

I think the most easy way to get your answer is: trying to see some successful ICO project as a reference. You will see their ICO standards and I think you will have yours after that.

It's really a good idea!

We are on slack and we really appreciate feedback, if you want to follow our project closely. We are always active there: slack.auctus.org
 (http://slack.auctus.org)

Oh, that's great. Actually I have a question, will pre-publication of the address help with DDOS?
You know, sometimes ICO websites are ddosed while ico process, and many fake phishing sites with that ico clones appear in the Internet same time. That makes some money goes to fake addresses =(

It helps since people will know before the ico starts the ens. Of course there is still a chance to someone that was not following to send to a random address.

you just quoted yourself =)

checkout 0x ICO, it was the best one so far imo

Thank you for opening this up for feedback!

A smart contract-powered pension plan platform sounds very disruptive in the best possible way. Are you first-mover in the space?

These are good points. If we hold ICOs more accountable everyone will be better off. Right now it's basically the wild wild west in the market but I think all that will change

it will not change magically :D
we have to force that change

This will take a lot of time but i want to know basically you are doing a ico for a solution for the ico weird nowadays just to raise money you all are coming with all these weird ideas which many won't implement.
Let's start with your features :
So basically the funds will be locked and can only be released by you either way someone is still involved with customers funds.

It can still be done now also what's the use of your business it's just companies don't wanna do you are just adding a feature which already exsits.

Again why will someone use you this can be done without using your plan.

All fake claims it's a online world now of this can be trusted.
Go find a better ides to raise funds you might raise a million but your product won't make a difference.

It is commendable that you are engaged in pensions.
Well done, letting investors know in advance.
Do you already have a finished product?