We went through something similar during the .com boom, you could raise silly amounts of money for anything as long as it was web based.
In the ICO world it's the same but far less regulated, you don't even need anything more than a dozen poorly thought out ideas with a grand sounding white paper title and you're not even paid in FIAT but tokens that have questionable origin and value themselves. Put all that together and you have a big honey pot for every lazy developer with a get rich quick plan and no idea how to actually execute it as well as people with tokens they want to pump into the next sexy sounding project.

There are good ICO's and the idea of an ICO seeding an economy is great, you just have to dig through a lot of piles of dirt to find the good stuff.

ICO's also create a conflict of interest with equity holders which is a cause of concern with regulators and investors.

An investor invests $10 million to build a dApp, the team builds it and runs an ICO raising $50 million. The tokens end up more valuable than the company shares and the investors often end up with no tokens and little benefit from the ICO. Maybe the company itself folds and the token holders walk away whistling. So investors increasingly like to see tokens linked to equity in some way unless it's a DAO and the tokens are the equity. ICO's don't have to be a bad thing but the ICO industry needs to get some code of ethics because there's just too many scams out there. The company I work at is pushing for just such a thing, a code of ethics to encourage good ICO's that reward all participants fairly which in turn should lead to a stronger ICO market.

Are there any strong C++ developers based in London looking to work on a new blockchain under development?
This isn't a fork of another blockchain but is a ground up development project with a lot of interesting R&D opportunity.

I've worked in a long term project that originally looked at running a public ICO as a source of funding and network capitalisation. We were encouraged by a number of ICO advisory firms to proceed with what promised to be a very large ICO but we decided to work with major legal and accountancy firms to really understand the landscape. What we found was that it's legally a very complex area and to avoid legal issues the only safe route was to run a private ICO which most other serious and professional organisations were already doing. We went quite far along the planning route for this but due to our particular client base we decided in the end to go the more traditional funding route. A private offering for equity plus tokens or more traditional route for equity was cleaner and allows more creativity around getting tokens out into the market rather than sat in the hands of a few investors. I've also worked with a number of other blockchain businesses that have gone through these thought processes and due to different circumstances have ended up with different funding results.

So I've experienced the public ICO space, private ICO offering space and traditional funding space for blockchain businesses and they all have pro's and con's depending on what you're setting out to achieve.

PM me if you have any specific questions.

I have some knowledge of the sector you're describing, I work for a UK blockchain business that is research and developing proof of concepts in a number of markets including the tokenising of assets including property. We have some links to very large property development firms who are exploring this very concept.

Now, we're not an outsourcing company so I'm not asking to have our team develop your platform. We do work with many businesses helping them to develop proof of concepts but usually to allow them to test their ideas while allowing us to test our blockchain and related technologies in new markets. If you have your own development team then even better. Since you're in the UK and are working in a field we're looking at as a market we need to support more without operating in it directly ourselves then it may be worth connecting to see if we can support each other in any way.

If you're interested in connecting then let me know. Good luck with the project.

There's the Proof-of-play idea which is along these lines.
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@todor/proof-of-play

I may be interested, can you share more information?

I'm not a major content writer but I do work on many projects and present at some conferences and so could write some content for the projects I work on if it makes sense to do so.

Most very large ICO's are really private offerings these days which I have mixed views about.

Essentially a public ICO is a traditional ICO open to the public. Some allow anyone to invest while others will require investors to carry out some kind of AML/KYC check, perhaps going as far as the offering providing a full prospectus much like an IPO. The trouble is regulators are really starting to clamp down and no one wants to end up wearing an orange jump suit and so the "better" ICO's as in the largest and most planned out ICO's are increasingly going to private offerings.

These private offerings are typically managed by ICO advisory firms who have a book of investors looking to invest in ICO's. An ICO therefore goes to those private investors who will invest significant sums. This is great for those investors who get a bargain price token and its great for the blockchain business because the tokens are bought by professional investors who have gone through a thorough KYC and AML process. The advice these days is to make your token a utility token but treat it like a security. In other words make is sit as far away from the legal fence as possible but put all the belt and braces in place so that if regulators decide it's a security then you're covered.

Also these private placements now typically want equity as well as tokens which resolves the conflict of interest that comes from businesses with shares raising money for tokens. This is a hot legal topic that's only going to get hotter.

And so yes, it's very possible to raise VC capital. If your team and project is strong then you can raise seed funding and then A round and continue on without ever having to run an ICO and if at some point you do run an ICO then seriously consider running it as a private placement through an ICO advisory firm to cover yourself legally.

My main complaint with this is that it can cause liquidity problems in your market. If you run a major ICO and the token holders are a small number of large investors then how does the market get sufficient liquidity to function? I think the best approach was the Bitcoin approach. Organic growth with no hyped up ICO, invented token ICO price while still building a large and strong economy.

Most will enter a state of limbo, kicking around on a few nodes for many years while their value dwindles, like a star using up the last of its fuel but without the impressive supernova.
But among them there will be long term survivors, perhaps 5% of the alternatives but they will have the liquidity, adoption and market to really expand.

Actually I don't think the long term winners even exist yet. Bitcoin will always have a special place in history, like the first computer ever built and I'm sure it'll be around for decades to come but I personally don't think Bitcoin is the end game. Ethereum to a lesser extend will have a place in history and won't be going anywhere for a while. But neither of these will be the long term big winners but they will fuel and continue to inspire the long term winners. Bitcoin has relatively limited utility although it's great at what it sets out to do. Ethereum has many problems with scale and performance and frankly the major rework being suggested with Plasma, Casper and Sharding is nothing short of admitting it needs replacing with something very different although I'm not convinced this trinity of changes is the right answer. These technologies improve scale and performance but lead to centralisation and frankly there are better blockchains out there if you need scale. Ethereum has around 15,000 nodes the last time I checked plus of course many lite wallets but it's not a massive network which the long term winners will be. And I'm not disrespecting Ethereum, I think it advanced the industry and has delivered a huge amount of benefit but it's also highlight a lot of challenges that the industry needs to deal with in imaginative and creative ways.

So that's a long winded way of saying I don't think they'll all survive, not in a healthy way but there will be a good selection of blockchains that will survive, the art is working out which they are. We don't really need to work out which will win long term, there will be a few and the main thing is that some do survive and really improve society.

It depends on what kind of support you need.

I've worked on a number of blockchain projects since 2012 before eventually forming my own UK based blockchain company that's now very well established. I'm always interested in supporting blockchain startups and I happen to have some knowledge of utilities and energy and so it may be an interesting opportunity. Of course it depends on the details, potentially partnership opportunities or consultancy, it depends on what you need exactly.

It's a real challenge since there are so many blockchain businesses out there. How to stand out and get noticed above the noise?

In my opinion you need a few things.

> You need a business plan. Don't make it too long but it should contain some key points including a reasonable financial plan which is ideally backed up with some kind of financial model that's available on request, enough detail to explain the business to a non-crypto investor, information on the market and competition and the team. 20 pages should be more than enough and there should be a powerful executive summary because most investors won't get past it.

> You need a team. One man businesses don't really cut it, you need a business that establishes credibility in technology and business.

> You need to show more than just an idea unless you have some serious credentials to make it worth investing in an idea. Everyone has ideas, you need to present more than that. The white paper and business plan at a minimum, a team, a partnership or end customer onboard, some code. Not all of this but something to show there's substance and passion.

> Sadly, what really helps then is connections. A good team will have some connections but it's really difficult to get going without some good links.


I'm happy to help if I can because I know it can be difficult to get going. Keep in mind that blockchain investors get spammed with countless propositions so you really need to stand out.

Good luck

Where do Blockchain developers go to find projects to work on and what do you look for from a project?

We use the usual recruiters to find talent and more recently I came across BlockTribe which has returned some interesting results but I'm not a big fan of recruiters with their inflated fees.
Meetups are a good way to find people but where would you go if you were recruiting developers for your team or as a developer looking for a project to work on?

We're recruiting engineers ideally to work from our offices in London or Oxford.

3 new teams being formed, 1 working on a new wallet (Ionic, Electron, Angular), 1 working on dApp's (Solidity, C# and F#), 1 working on a new .NET Core blockchain (.NET Core, C#, compilers, Roslyn etc).

The jobs are posted on the Atlas City Finance website at www.atlascityfinance.com and on BlockTribe. Atlas is well funded and so salaries paid in sterling with tokens included as an added incentive/bonus and with the option to reduce salary in exchange for more tokens if that's your preference.
 
https://blocktribe.com/job/3024/ionic-electron-or-reactjs-engineers-to-work-on-new-wallet-and-application-store-project/
https://blocktribe.com/job/3025/dapp-developer-for-financial-services-startup/
https://blocktribe.com/job/3013/net-core-developer-to-work-on-new-blockchain-project/

Extract taken from the ACF website to explain a bit about the office culture.

Atlas is defined by the passion and vision of its employees along with the great products and services we build. We don’t play safe, we experiment, we embrace the latest technologies and ideas and we combine them with enthusiasm and passion to do the unimaginable. We believe that’s how greatness is achieved, together for everyone.

We measure everything we do against 3 founding principles.

- Building to improve the lives of everyone
- Building to improve the world we live in
- Building new technology in the pursuit of 1 and 2

These principles manifest themselves in a multitude of ways.

For our employees, we don’t have a Human Resources department because we don’t see humans as resources. Instead we have an Employee Experience department who’s mission it is to improve the work life experience for our employees. This means empowering our employees with the best equipment, training and support while encouraging independent thinking and research as part of daily work life.

We look forward to having you come join us on this exciting adventure, to make your mark on our business and the world.

You can apply directly to jobs@atlascityfinance.com

I do sympathise with you because I'm a privacy advocate myself. It's a really difficult line to walk though, I think it has to be an individual decision for each ICO operator.

If it's an ICO that can exist entirely outside of the traditional banking system so it gets paid in crypto, stored its money in crypto, pays its staff and bills in crypto then there's less legal need to go the KYC/AML route. The problems really start when you have to work with traditional banks. Raise $10 million in BTC then try to deposit it to a bank so you can pay salaries and office space and you'll find the bank will want to know where the money came from and if it was investment then show AML and KYC compliance so they know it's clean money. Banks get punished if they don't check the source of money, just look at what happened to HSBC when they turned a blind eye in South America.

In our case we provide financial services which involves banks and other financial service companies providing specialised financial services so we have to interface with banks. We also have to pay the bills in non-crypto. For some other organisations it may be possible to live entirely in crypto, I hope that's a place we can all get to in time but for now its difficult for anyone planning to do something real with their ICO earnings. If someone is truly setting out to raise $100 million from an ICO without KYC or AML then it means they don't plan to bank any of it which likely means they don't plan to spend much of it doing what's in their plan which means they're probably planning to just sit on it and get rich, unless they live in a place where staff, offices, utilities and life can be paid for in crypto.

Good observations that I agree with. In our defence we’ve committed to building the OlympusBC blockchain whatever happens with funding since we need it for our main business platform and business plan which is Plutous. Plutous came first and was originally planned to run on Ethereum which would be the easier path for us to follow but because of reasons it became a problem using Ethereum which made OlympusBC necessary for us as a business.
It’s perhaps a bit of an unusual situation where we are developing a blockchain to enable us to do our business of Plutous but we believe others will have similar business requirements that makes OlympusBC a useful blockchain in its own right. OlympusBC was first discussed at the end of 2012 and started to take form more over the following years. If we can raise funding to support the development of OlympusBC then that would be far better than trying to develop the blockchain on a tight budget and extended timeline which is what has driven the ICO.

I think there are many reasons for ICO’s today, sadly most are just get rich quick schemes with no real business case or purpose. Hundreds of millions of dollars for a tweaked Bitcoin branch or a handful of smart contracts for some personal interest. Among them though are some great business plans and innovative smart contract based businesses or blcokchains. As with the .com boom, the challenge is to spot the unicorns because I have no doubt that we’ll have some major successes akin to PayPal, Amazon and Google.

I agree that many ICO’s don’t innovate but I think it’s unfair to say none do. Ethereum is a prime example, it raised over $18 million and Vitalik said he’d build Ethereum regardless of what happened with funding. Ethereum wasn’t easy engineering.

Today we seem to have three types of ICO.

Firstly, there are tweaks to Bitcoin. Tweaking properties isn’t innovative, it needs to be a substantial change before I’d consider it innovative.

Secondly there are smart contracts running on top of Ethereum. This is harder to classify since it depends on what the smart contracts do and how big a market it opens up. An algorithm can be very innovative, zip or jpg or SHA are examples of concise pieces of code that have a big impact. Facebook isn’t necessarily incredible engineering but it delivers big to investors and its users. As with the .com boom there are many organisations raising massive amounts for unsound business plans and projects that are less than innovative but there are some that are doing great work.

Thirdly there are entirely new blockchains which can be serious pieces of engineering and really innovative with new protocols, runtime environments, languages and much more. I’d argue that many of these are far far more innovative than most modern cloud businesses that have more in common with the Ethereum smart contract businesses that write something simple and leverage the power of the blockchain/cloud.

Well we had to take a lot of legal advice before starting our pre-ICO process and that advice has greatly changed our entire ICO process.

Our policy has always been for investors to provide the minimum amount of information necessary to invest and so our first process design was for investors to simply provide a username and password and with that they would be able to invest.

Then we took that to the lawyers and regulators and it quickly became apparent that it wouldn’t fly in the UK, Europe or USA. The reality is that regulation is really tightening up and ICO’s are going to be subject to increasingly strict legal requirements.

If a token is classed as a security then it will be strictly regulated. It doesn’t take much for a token to fall into the security category. Is the token sold on the understanding that it will make the investor profit? Then it’s a security. Is it being sold so that the investor has some rights such as governance or influence over how the blockchain runs? Then it’s a security. The only way to ensure a token doesn’t fall under securities law is to say that there’s no rights over the blockchain by the investor, no governance by the investor and the token isn’t being sold with any expectation or guarantee of profit. So as an investor you are paying for coins with no rights or expectations. Even all of this doesn’t preclude the ICO from risk, for belt and braces it should be targeted towards sophisticated or institutional investors rather than the person in the street. Regulators generally take the view that a sophisticated/professional investor with money to burn can do so at their own risk but everybody else needs protection.
What does this mean for an ICO? Well regulation is coming and quickly. Our legal advice has been that regulators can make those who run ICO’s return the money even if regulation comes after the ICO since regulation will just be a clarification of existing law applied to ICO’s. What if the money has already been spent? Well that’s bad news indeed for the people behind the ICO, the law is very strict in this area. So all the legal advice we received was to run an ICO as if it was an IPO. Don’t sell tokens with the suggestion of profit, don’t offer any rights, don’t do anything to place the token in the securities category. Then assume that regulators will still rule it a security and so put in place KYC/AML checks so when they come at you you’re already covered.
It will put some investors off who don’t want to go through AML and KYC checks but it will also attract some investors to welcome the extra level of professionalism and protection. It means regulators are highly unlikely to turn around in 6 months time and demand that money is returned, collapsing the ICO, likely losing money and perhaps even landing people in prison. The investment is safer and that is good for the token and the blockchain.
It doesn’t have to be a bad thing especially if investors who are not classified as sophisticated are limited to smaller investments, perhaps 1BTC in value or less. Smaller investments are not really the problem, it’s when someone can invest tend of thousands of dollars in an ICO expecting to make a profit or have some rights only to lose the lot.

My background is in software security and I believe with a passion in the ideals of blockchain and privacy. Blockchain and its benefits should be for everybody, it should be an enabler that levels the financial playing field for all. Anyone, anywhere should be able to use blockchains for payments and investments and the overall result should be fairer and more transparent societies and money systems. KYC and AML doesn’t sit easily with me because it can preclude many people from the benefits of an ICO. But there are a lot of scammy ICO’s out there and there are a lot of people risking money they don’t have and so there has to be some kind of protection. Perhaps this is something that could be tackled within blockchains themselves, perhaps it’s something we can work out as an industry. For now we’re stuck with regulation which is coming and very soon and will be as strict as in the wider securities market and it’s going to be messy for those who run ICO’s and investors and since it applies retrospectively as a clarification rather than something entirely new then it’s really a buyer beware market. We’re being overly cautious by going the AML/KYC route while still allowing smaller investments to be made without checks but it will be interesting to see what effect it has on whether investors invest or not.

Is it inevitable or even desirable for blockchains and their ICO's to become more regulated or to least run their ICO's in more risk averse ways such as submitting to AML and KYC checks?
Atlas City Finance has just begun its 1 month pre-ICO which is expected to be popular in part due to the large 30% pre-ICO discount but to offset this the ICO is unusual in that it is being run against a set of AML and KYC checks to protect the business, the blockchain and investors. The question remains whether requiring such strict rules to be applied to investors will deter investors or attract more traditional investors who welcome more voluntary regulation.
Smaller investments up to 1 BTC in value don’t need KYC or AML checks but larger investments can be used to move money illegally which is why such checking can be helpful. Since Atlas City Finance is really trying to establish market credibility for its other products and services such as Plutous then it makes sense to be over cautious of how the Olympus blockchain is funded. It remains to be seen how ICO investors will react to such checks being carried out and it’ll certainly be of interest to other upcoming ICO’s who are considering how to present their coin offerings.

A presentation that combines Plutous and Olympus is provided in the following link. The ICO is just for the Olympus blockchain and its Olympian coins but this presentation looks at the wider Plutous financial services platform and how it makes use of the features of the Olympus blockchain to provide scale, anonymity and smart contracts in more familiar programming languages.

For full disclosure I'm involved in the blockchain and Atlas business but I find the wider question of whether AML and KYC's protection is good or bad for the blockchain industry as a whole very interesting. Sure it makes sense for a commercial organisation in the financial sector but is it over-restrictive for startup's looking to raise money quickly for without being too intrusive into funding sources? What are your views on these kinds of test or regulations more broadly?

https://www.atlascityfinance.com/media/AtlasCityFinance_BusinessPresentation.pptx

Some great facts there, you have to love the ICO market.

Any country with high inflation or where its common to move money across borders or where there's limited access to banking or corrupt banking is going to be a good market for cryptocurrencies.