So you want to be better at choosing ICO's? Here are some golden rules

ICO's are getting hotter by the day and more and more different youtubers are coming out and giving their opinions on varying ICO's. There are undoubtedly good reviewers but sometimes you just want to be able to better decide for yourself rather than solely basing our decisions on something someone else says. We decide our things in real life so I strongly believe it should be the case for our cryptocurrency investment decisions as well. We could use the youtube reviewers to fill the gaps of our understanding. Hope this article makes u better at deciding rather than simply following the hype seen so much in this space.

1. Token Utility
A token has to have a strong use case and has to fit into a larger ecosystem (large usergroup) for it to be successful.

2. Community
How strong of a support the ICO has, this includes support from various individuals such as tech experts, crypto reviewers, media and wider public etc. Just because a project has a large telegram following does not mean it has community support, it is quite easy to have a huge member base in telegram by simply creating a airdrop with a huge referel programs.

3. Legitimization
This feature could be gauged by looking at how much institutional money is flowing into the ICO, experienced board members, how strong the KYC/AML requirements are, proper filing and simply the overall regulation of the ICO.

4. Sustainable Business model
The ICO should aim at solving a existing real world problems. Be vary of ICO's promoting sex, drugs, gaming etc.

5. Experienced Team
The website should give clear details about the team and each members LinkedIn profile should be viewed. If there is a doubt you could directly contact a team member to get information about his/her involvement with the ICO.

6. Smaller Hardcap
Smaller hardcaps have more room to grow and it is in the opinion of experts that in future more ethical and realistic hardcaps would be more common place.

7. Working Prototype
The ICO should ideally not be raising money for a mere idea but to finance a product/platform that has a already working prototype. Sometimes it should also be noted that finances are needed to put a idea into a working prototype and in this situation other factors should be carefully evaluated, for example a solid team or established partnerships.

8. Partnerships
Partnerships with leading companies would most definitely be a strong backing for any potential ICO, however the authenticity of such statements should be checked thoroughly. This could be done by checking for a official publication of the partnership or directly contacting the company in partnership with the potential ICO.

9. Scaling Solutions/ New Blockchains/ New Protocols
Blockchain is a new technology and it is now solutions are introduced to make the technology work better and blockchains for different purposes are being introduced. Therefore these kind of projects has a huge upside potential for investors and deemed very popular.

10. Thorough Whitepaper
A detailed and well explained whitepaper is always a must. If you are not a technical person you could always refer to a experts view on the whitepaper. As a extra step you could independently carry out a plagiarism check on the whitepaper as it should be noted some ICO's have contents copied from other projects.

11. Transparency
The company website should clearly state all details of the ICO in their website and should have a support system that would readily answer questions posed about the ICO.