Bitcoin Forum

Hello all,

I've been investing in crypto since 2017 and now I would like to try to invest some money in a ICO.

I've been reading post from this forum and internet and now I now a few thing about this, though, I want to know if you have some hints on how to know if an ICO is promising.

Usually I check icodrop webpage but Im not totally secure on where to put my money in. I would like to know peoples criteria in order to choose a good ICO.

Please, any advice would be highly appreciated!!

Thanks in advance!

You need to know ICO on 2017 and right now has a lot differentiate.

On 2017
- The developer keep their promise about the roadmap and their goals.
- No scam and unrealistic money machine
- The coin is very worthy, just like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Right now
- The developer can't reach the goals and the project become dead.
- Many exist scam and offering 100x gains in few month(s).
- The coin is worthless and become shitcoin.

So I think ICO is dead right now and wasting your time, better go to ECO if you still want to invest in new coin.

But I suggest to invest in Bitcoin or Ethereum since it's has been proven and safe.

I have some criteria and these are my criteria

- Try to analyze its backers. The projects that backed by big companies will always be successful like injective, poolz, polkadot
- Try to identify team
- Try to take a look at MVP
- Try to engage with the community. A legit project will always have active community.


i have been actively joining in various ICOs, IEOs and IDOs on polkastarter, balancer and many more.

Still you looking for with ICO investment right now? I think the era of ICO have ended but now you can check with many stake coin giving big reward or you can joining with lauchpad on Binance, maybe ICO still worth by checking with team developer, good road map and looking with how experience developer of ICO project.

Too late for you to invest in ICO. What's on the trend are the defi's. But still do research on what makes a defi good to invest. And in my choice and opinion, I don't invest in any of those. Although I know that there really are investors who are making money from the features that it offers like farming, interest/apy.
Still, my personal choice would invest to altcoins that I know established and at the top like ETH.

the hype on ICO was decreasing since 2017 until now, maybe you should think about IEO or IDO
because both methode become a good options mate, moreover if the IEO run on TOP exchange like binance

I have a simple advice for you, stop investing in ICO as though I cannot say that it's a scam, but believe me, most of the projects are scam, you will just likely loss money. Why not invest in De-Fi, most popular now, or invest in coins with good liquidity listed in reputable exchanges.

simple criteria, you can learn closely if the project bring something new, such as features and tech buddy
also the project has a great and smart team inside, that always keep their promises

It's already 2021, I'm sure ICO is almost dead by now, what I mean is that we haven't heard any successful ICO who raises millions upon millions and became a good project. What we here from bounty hunters is almost complains, like the projects not paying on time, or decreasing their stakes on the campaign, projects not listing their token on exchanges and if they did, it's all on three-tier exchanges.

My point is that maybe you should look for other ways to invest your money, or just get bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) and then hold, less risk as compare to investing on ICO.

The features and tech didn't give a guarantee about the success of the project. The fact that if the project already supporter by so many VCs and Famous company and it can be used as verification to make sure if that's a legit platform.
I personally will not take the tech as the main consideration to invest in an ico project. It must be from the strategic partnership that already created.
The majority of legit projects were coming from this criteria. We know that injective protocol has so many strategic partnerships.

did you mean its better to invest on the project that already tradeable on excahange ?
and if yes, i agree with you because we have a lot of options now, rather than we bet our money by investing in ICO

Even the professional ICO developer finds it hard to identify which ICO is promising. Right now the market trend has changed and things are happening in a slow and steady manner without much of manipulation.

In the past ICO's were unorganised, and there'll be pump and dump teams that support the token for a pay. Few exchanges provide with good fake volumes, and this attracts the Beginners. Now this is very low, and that seems to be the reason why it is hard to find the potential ico.

Do you watch the result from the so many icos that ended recently, these icos have been making 10x from the ico price.
Investing in the tradable coin is good enough but it will not give us a lot of profit instantly. The people that wanna be another millionaire must do this through ICO.
They have no chance to be the whale from investing in the tradable coin on exchange site.

At this moment, investing in ICO is too risky. Most project owners are overpromising to entice investors with an unrealistic roadmap. If you are indeed interested to invest in a new project, it will be good to do such through IEO that is conducted a reputable exchange like Binance, Kucoin, BitFinex, Houbi etc. Most often, these exchanges do not conduct IEO for projects that lack good use cases.

This avenue remains the only way to capitalized and make good returns in this crypto space. Apart from the fact that people can participate in bounties and Airdrops. these are nolonger viable means to get better payments on crypto. else you can try trading if you think you are a good trader. it take time to trade and build a good portfolio. it is all about time.

yes you're right, community is an important one. a good and promising project must have an active community. and we also have to see their experience, background and how ready they are in launching the project.

ICODrops is a great site, I also usually see their recommendations. But that's not enough, nowadays there are many sites and telegram groups that can help you to choose projects such as:

https://cryptodiffer.com/ - https://t.me/cryptodiffer
https://t.me/Generation_Crypto
https://t.me/cryptodakuofficial
https://t.me/GainsANN

And many others, I usually see from their recommendations

little advice I can give for ICO

- see the concept of the project
- clarity of the team and its background
- partnership
- development to be carried out
- Make sure you cover the whitepaper
- do in-depth research on all the social media they have
- do research on their development.

after all, those are the suggestions I can give for now. It would be better if you are interested in ICO, because we can also see what market they will work with for their sales. the more popular the market they use, the more likely it is that the project will be successful.

If you watched closely you will see that a lot is not heard of ICO nowadays, that is, you either see a project having IEO or the most recent now which is IDO (Initial Dex Offering), nothing is heard of ICO again that is to say, ICO has phased out. The question is why is the ICO phased out? The answer is that, during the ICO phase, many projects exited scam and many were abandoned, owing to the rising number of scam projects, IEO was proposed and because of how the concept is, many embraced it and abandoned ICO.
So my suggestion or opinion is for you to stop looking for information about ICO, because you will hardly find since it's obvious many projects has abandoned that method of fundraising, however try and read more about IDO and IEO. Lastly, irrespective of the IEO or IDO, try as much as possible to understand the idea the team offers, know more about the team and so on, this will help you go for the better projects.

i thought you are a pro investor already based on the time you got involved in investing which was in the year 2017 , if you fast forward that , that was now 4 years or unless you have stoped somehwere but then you are back again in this biz .

 if your lookin for an ico i think they are already extinct but they extinct for good so dont worry atleast you havent scammed by them but the brightside is there are better replacements . try ieo or some few defi .

You are at least 4 years late to the party, icos for the most part no longer get the support of the community as we learned in 2017 that most of them are scams or at best are project managed by developers that do not really know what they are doing.

Since then we have had many other ways for developers to get funds but after a year most of those models get obsolete as the same thing keeps happening and scammers eventually get to dominate the market, so if I were you and I was not able to find good coins on my own I will not even bother investing in new coins and instead will put all my capital in bitcoin.

Based on my experience, coins that are listed to exchange and has huge volume are the ones that are worth investing. I've tried investing in an ICO with unlisted coin and they didn't keep their promises so I've just wasted my funds and time for them. It's also important to check the reputation and legitimacy of the developers of a certain coin.

It'll better option to go for listed alts or participate into IEO or even in IDO rather than participating into ICO. IDO is so much hyped up and many projects are doing great by doing IDO and instantly listed on uniswap. Though ethereum gas fee is so much high and getting anyone into whitelist is so much hard and depend on luck. But it'll be more poriftable instead of losing precious cryptos into ICO, IMHO.

Now IEO, which are conducted by such exchanges as Binance, look more promising and more profitable. Also, almost all IDO, which are analogous to IEO, but are conducted by decentralized exchanges, from the very beginning of sales bring a profit of hundreds of percent in a few days. But the problem is that it is very difficult to buy such a coin at the price of IEO, since the number of people who want it is very large.

Now on Binance have launchpad coin named but very little allocation coin getting although invest above $1,000, very lucky for many investor where investing on 2016 until 2017 because almost ICO project could give above 100% after coin listing on exchange market, right now looks impossible because many coin from ICO have lower price and listed with one market exchange only and become less interested to buy this ICO coins.

ICO is long gone now, only very few projects use ICO to raise funds nowadays, we have IEO, DYCO and Polkastarter, these are the best crowdfunding strategy that are reigning right now, if you aren't going to take my advice and still want ICO projects I'd advice you do thoroughly research

There is prolly no good ICO, and if you're not so certain or secure on where to put your money into, then Invest in Bitcoin; ICO's hardly have projects that gives ROI to it's Investors, you're more likely to be scammed and lose your funds if you Invest in ICO's than to make profits. If you prolly already have Bitcoin, and want to acquire altcoins, then ethereum is the best or prolly even the only trusted choice. Before making any investment decision, always verify and do not trust.

Your experiences are better than others. I don't know why you need advice when you are here since 2017. ICO investment is very risky, rather you should invest in Binance exchange IEO. The running situation of cryptocurrency is very critical. I would suggest this project "My identity coin" but don't invest all of your money.

ICO is now not a good investment tool in my opinion if you really want to invest, after there were so many frauds in an ICO, why are you still interested in ICOs? now IEOs and trading are a good way to be able to benefit from crypto but still in an investment in either IEO or trading we have to be smart in choosing crypto for us to invest in and it looks like a project or coin defi has the advantage as an investment means now and you should can try.

Now Polkastarter is in the first place in terms of the number of IDOS held, which immediately after its completion give investors a profit of thousands of percent. I regularly fill out the Whitelist, but I have never been lucky enough to win this lottery to purchase new coins. There are too many people who want to participate in the IDO held by Polkastarter.

I think those decentralized ones are a lot better, we are not doing that bad with them neither, they are definitely doing better than expected, and that is what we are after here as well, doing not that bad and doing better than expected in these. Most look like scams to me, but when I look at them over course of few months they are doing great.

Defi investments on early days and waiting for a long time will result with a lot of profit. I personally did a bit of investments, I have invested into 4 defi projects so far and all 4 of them did returned me a great deal of profit, I really like it and I will continue to do it. I have managed to make 5x return from them total and as long as it continues like this I will continue to invest more and more, if I did another 5x in 3-4 more months I am going have a decent profit to actually start making enough for a retirement fund all via defi, not to mention my other investments.

I think IEO good but many scam IEO before although listed on Binance exchange or bigger exchange, I think worth investing on launchpad only without have any risk with get back our money just depend when price up or not, but allocation for launchpad is not much although you hold and stake much money on Binance exchange market but its not too risk.

That is why I said to the OP that he's probably four years too late, the model of icos is completely obsolete and the developers of icos are completely to blame, there was a time in which people trusted ico developers because they were releasing good projects but then scammers realized that if they released a project that seemed to be legitimate they could get a fortune, and they did, but unfortunately so many people lost their money in the process that now no one trust in those coins anymore.

And while many other forms of raising money have been created since then the bad experience that many people got with icos is something they will never forget and that's why many prefer to stick with bitcoin and I really think that is what the OP should do because it doesn't seem as he has any way to differentiate good projects from bad ones.

Good question. Even I wanted to ask this. I have realised that if project is backed by good team and big partners, chances are it will succeed.
Most projects also secure big amount during seed funding. These projects are worth investing.

as many have suggested above, ICOs are already dying because most of them exited as scam. so most investors are now avoiding this type of crowdsourcing and go to more sure one which is IEO. but still, IEOs are now turning to a huge blunder because most of them also have downward trend in the market once they activated their trading right after IEO. so if in case you do want to invest, either in ICO or ICO, not only look for the team but their actual product or services. dont settle for MVP only, it is better if they have active working platform. in this regard, you can already have the hint of their capability  to hit in the market by checking the feedback from their users

Polkastarter is having too many requirements, only a few people that can also participate. It has very small spots for the users to participate in the token sales. It's not worth to try anymore. Im more interesting in coinlist.
FYI if my friend was making 2k USD to the 500k USDT just investing in pre-sale of flow project on coinlist.  

The only difference between an ICO and IEO is that the IEO is already listed on the exchange. You have to understand the background of why this move was made and why they thought it would work.

See previously when a ICO was tokensold, the excahnges would ask for huge fees for listing that - as a result the team had to cut down costs, listen to the constant bickering of social media channels on lack of exchanges. They would go for shitty and shady exchanges just to keep the majority happy.

IEO took that away and seemed to be a selling point. But basic problem of ICO is still here. Majority being vaporware and scams.

For now I advise against choosing ICOs with bad reputations. people no longer believe in ICOs. The absence of an agency that regulates the creation of ICOs makes everyone free to make for fraudulent schemes. Nowadays people are more interested in IEOs with large exchanges, which is definitely a profit. Like yesterday's $ SFP IEO launch at binance was a huge success and was capable of 20X the sales price. Don't waste your money on useless ICOs

IEO, which are conducted on shitty exchanges, should not even be considered as an investment in such projects. But at the same time, it is noticeable how the number of IEO held on top exchanges has now decreased. This is because there is now a rush around IDOS, which are conducted on decentralized exchanges.

Looking for advices? I advice you to not invest in ICO anymore, simple as that.  :)

You should wake if you are sleeping now, ICO's popularity was gone, scammers have already taken their money and people have learn from their mistakes. I'm not saying all ICO's are scam but their market has a bad reputation already, lots of scammers and only few investors are playing, please don't try to join.

It is really hard to understand whether a project is promising just by looking at their sales pitch to raise money as we have seen thousands of projects with promising concepts burning away after the initial boom and now a days i seldom spend time in finding any projects as i consider everything as a pump and dump market.

Never trust these third party websites that reviews these projects as well as they will shill for them and during the ICO boom there were many review websites and they do accept money to shill them and hence you cannot trust them with your investment.

Have a look at the project members linked in page , their previous work experience and how they fared in that . That's the major factor and also look at what the project is trying to achieve.

In such IDOS, it is impossible to honestly get the opportunity to participate in the tokensale, because it is simply unrealistic to compete with bots by the number of completed questionnaires to get into the Whitelist. It would be possible to get into the preferential list, but for this you need to purchase 3000 POLS, but the price of the coin has increased 4 times in a few days and is now equal to 6 dollars.

ICOS were hot back then but the situation of the market is just different right now. They don't really boom as they used to in the past and I'm very positive that when you check ico drops, the available ones will be very limited and almost sold out. They don't list coins like in the past due to regulations.
Instead of looking for Ico that are very risky ( we have received many reports about scam exit in this Forum ), why not look for reputable exchanges like Okex and Binance and participate on IEO since they are still hot, you get a chance of doubling your money with this bull run or participate on IDO on a popular decentralized platform.

Are you sure about this? IEO was only giving a lot of advantage to the big holders of tokens. When you are not a big holder and you will get only a small allocation and it's still nothing compared with ico that can give you the more chance to participate. Have you experienced with the binance IEO? the small holders almost never got the chance to participate in the crowdsale.
Big holders = more chance.

That's right and I would rather invest in solid projects like PolkaDOT instead of trying my luck in scam ICOs and you said it right, there is no agency or legal body that governs the legality of these ICOs.

100% agreed, a better option than investing in IEOs would be to invest in new coins that are listed on solid exchanges like Binance and others.

ICOs were great years back when there were a few of them and people introducing the idea were actually concerned about it. Now almost 99% of the ICOs and IEOs are scam and if you are able to invest in any of them and come out profitable that's just the definition of being lucky.

I will also suggest these two coins to invest but since OP is asking for ICO and what to look for, I advise him not to pour a lot of money into a project in their ICO stage, I have seen projects that look good but ended up as shitcoin because they cannot sustain it, I advise you to just wait for the project to get in the market and prove themselves worthy to be part and see if the platform that they have has real usage for the community then you can invest.

I stop participating in any ICO for me it is no longer profitable there's only a slight chance that it would be good in the long term investment and they will really go for their plan and continue their roadmap, personally I more invested in presale projects under binance smart chain and I would put more money if it is in pcs or any exchange that staking is available , it is more profitable this 2021 but do your own risk this is not a financial advise everyone should decide for themselves.

Many scammers use ICOs, which is why this industry is losing its initial ability and popularity. Many projects go broke before they even succeed. Although some projects were good, the team was unable to raise the required amount of money. But in any case, I would not risk with ICO now.

ICO is dead a long time ago and it isn't really worth to risk up money in todays offering yet legit projects count is almost to zero and if there are good ones
they are really bound to fail due to lost confidence of investors for them not to get sufficient funding.

Still got surprised that up to this day, there are still projects who do launch off and believing that they can get some market share but the truth is
that only the best ones will really able to achieve that.

There are still projects which are really worth of but finding that one is the hardest thing to be done.

At the end of the day, this is the only thing that matters, scammers are going to make all kind of promises they know they will never fulfil because as long as they can get your money they do not care, IEOs were successful for a  time but once scammers began releasing their coins in exchanges with a doubtful reputation it was over for that model as well.

So when people look at a new project the first thing they need to notice is if the developers have something to show for, if they do not then do not bother to invest with them, but if they do then there is a reasonable chance the project could turn out to be successful as they have advanced their vision without any funds and the money could be used to accelerate significantly the process of developing a project that becomes recognized in the market during the next years.

Yes, some good ones fail to reach the soft cap but I am willing to let a few good ones suffer in return of the mass number of scam ones suffering. If someone can derive data of how many successful and legit icos are there and how many scam are there, the ratio might be something like 5:95 and if you further separate them on how successful they were, the ration might become 1:99 so its nearly impossible making profit investing in icos and better to let the whole ico market die which will include some legit ones but overall will be good for the investors and crypto market.

Same here and I don't even invest on new coins either even when they are listed on exchanges because leaving the recent bull run aside, I failed to make any profit with investing in new coins.

I do invest in few selective coins and upcoming projects like polkadot but apart from these few I only hold Bitcoins.

Based on my observation, ICO programs is not a trend anymore in this days. New projects usually do IEO, ECO and etc. If you really want to still invest in new projects, then it is better check first whether they have a good development team to run their project in their tokensale period. I know that investing in new projects is kore profitable because of the big discounts but be wise on investing.

I could not agree with you about this, Did you watch some legit source like ICOdrop, 7top icos and many more. There are lots of legit icos being launched in daily basis and there are lots of people were still actively investing in the ico. You should watch the market and you must have visit that site to get the latest information

I agree with you. there are still many ICO projects running it. ICOs are not dead because we can still see how popular DeFi has also adopted ICOs.
although not popular anymore, IEOs are also not very productive at the moment.

Icos really fell out of grace due to all the scams that took place but it is not as if there are not a significant number of scams with ieos and other forms of getting money, which is why you must always look for the two most important things when it comes to those projects.

The first is if there is anything at all to show for, maybe a prototype of what the developers want to achieve, if the only things you can see from a project that asks you for money are a bunch of promises and a whitepaper then do not bother, the other is to see if the developers are who they say they are and if they actually posses all the credentials they supposedly have, if not then most likely you are in the presence of scammers and you should not invest with them.

Even those three you mentioned aren't up to no good especially IEO, it just that scams even follow the trend and continue screwing people.
Probably those three fall as well into how it fell for ICO back in the days especially in 2017-2018