Currently, more than 20 ICOs are launched each and every single day. The market has been flooded with ICOs during the past 18 months, mainly due to the fact that ICOs are still unregulated investment and fundraising procedures. Anyone can build an appealing website, compile a whitepaper, and create a new cryptocurrency via Ethereum’s blockchain without ever having to go through a single line of computer code. As such, an ICO has become an attractive means for fraudsters to dig holes in the pockets of hopeful investors and get away with it. The pseudo-anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies renders it almost impossible to trace scammers, even after cashing out.
As an investor, you’re on your own when it comes to spotting fraudulent ICOs to avoid wasting your coins on ICO scams and star-crossed projects. Throughout this article, we will help you examine ICO projects to ensure they’re real, legitimate business opportunities that one can consider investing in. You can find even more tips and guidance in this ICO guide.
The team’s profiles:The team of developers is the most important block in the construction of a successful ICO. The project’s website should include a detailed section that includes the ICO’s team of developers. Ensure that the names presented on the team’s page are real people who have real profiles on LinkedIn, Github, and/or the BitcoinTalk forum. Mostly, be sure to check that the blockchain developers actively participate on the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and Ethereum Stack Exchange sites.
Examine the team members’ LinkedIn profiles thoroughly. Make sure that the previous employment history included on the LinkedIn profile is real, via visiting the websites or the profile pages of the companies where a team member claims to have previously worked.
Blockchain developers will usually have an active profile on Github and/or Sourceforge. Make sure that the project’s developers have Github profiles that include considerable contributions and/or repositories. Repositories with a large number of stars reflect the high quality of the code created by a repository maintainer (developer). Other Github members award stars to high-quality code as appreciation to the developer.
An anonymous team is an alarming sign. Team members collaborating on a legitimate ICO would never have to hide their identities. They should also make public appearances to prove their competencies via webinars, conferences, and other forms of meetups with blockchain enthusiasts. Recently, the most successful ICOs have had active Telegram groups through which the project’s team interacts with investors and responds to their queries and clarify any suspicious issues that can arise from time to time. A company whose team members have never made any public appearances should raise your suspicion.
The whitepaper:An ICO must have a professional whitepaper that clearly outlines the goals of the project. An ICO project without a whitepaper is an obvious sign of a scam. A whitepaper should thoroughly explain how the project’s platform functions and include relatively detailed technical specifications. A professional ICO whitepaper usually includes charts, encryption formulas, specifications, simulations, roadmaps, and other features relevant to the specific nature of the project. The whitepaper should also clarify the market or audience of its product, the problem aimed to be solved, and how the project is different from its competitors.
If a project claims that it is innovating a token with novel features, but the whitepaper lacks detailed explanation of how this will be specifically achieved, then this should be a red flag that the project is likely to end up being a scam.
A whitepaper that includes grammatical mistakes and technical errors, and/or fails to provide a clear picture regarding the project’s goals, technical features, and roadmap, represents an alarming sign that you are probably dealing with a scam.
https://ubecoin.com/get-whitepaper/ The project’s goals:The project’s goals should be realistic. Whenever a project makes illogical claims, especially if the project doesn’t offer any disruptive or creative innovations, it should be a scam alert. It is never logical to expect a new blockchain to remedy global warming, replace Bitcoin, drive banks to extinction, or offer a guaranteed 100% ROI within a few months. Even if the project is promising, professional blockchain developers will never make such claims.
Also, a project’s board will never make price predictions, because there can simply never be any means for predicting the price of a coin or token before, or even shortly after, the end of the ICO phase.
The code’s repository:Cryptocurrencies are all about decentralization, so the code should be open source, i.e. could be viewed and examined by anyone. It goes without saying that “code is law”, so even if the project’s website or whitepaper are suspicious, the platform’s code on Github or Sourceforge can clearly determine the authenticity and legitimacy of an ICO project.
Never consider investing in a project whose code isn’t visible to everyone. Also, a coin or token that is simply a clone of some other coin, with just few lines of altered code, is mostly a scam or a project that is doomed to fail eventually.
The project’s escrow account:An ICO project should have an escrow account to secure investors’ funds during the period of the ICO and thereafter. The escrow account usually involves a multisig wallet, where the owners of the multisig keys are one of the project’s team members, in addition to two or more trusted community members. In most cases, the multisig wallet has three keys, where two community members each possess a key, and a team member possesses one key (1-out-of-3). As such, the team member will never be able to move the funds out of the escrow account without permission from one of the two community members possessing the other two private keys.
There must be at least two well known, trusted community members controlling the escrow account, otherwise you are most likely dealing with a fraudulent ICO.
The mechanism of release of the funds from the escrow account is also important. Usually, around 20% of the funds can be released when most of the development plan has been completed, only 20% of the funds should be released upon token distribution, and 50% can be released upon beta release of the project. A percentage of the funds (10%-20%) should be saved to fund future development plans.
Examining the escrow’s account members and the escrow’s conditions can help you detect many fraudulent projects and protect you from wasting your money.
The pre-ICO:Most ICOs nowadays offer a percentage of coins or tokens for sale via a pre-ICO, before the actual public ICO is launched. A pre-ICO offers big investors, also known as whale investors, the opportunity to purchase coins at discounted prices. The presence of a pre-ICO is a good sign that the project has been vetted by big investors or crypto-whales. The lack of a pre-ICO should raise a red flag, as this means that the project hasn’t been examined and proven potentially profitable by real big investors.
A pre-ICO shouldn’t offer a large percentage of tokens for sale, to guarantee the decentralized nature of token distribution. If a large percentage of the coins are sold during the pre-ICO phase, this will result in centralization of the economy of the cryptocurrency, which will be highly controlled by the small number of big investors who invested early in the project. If this occurs, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the project is fraudulent, but it just reflects that the process of coin distribution wasn’t properly managed.
Ideally, a project should announce the names of the big investors who chipped in during the pre-ICO phase. Occasionally, owners of a project can buy their own coins at a discount price during the pre-ICO phase to fake a big demand for their coins, and to make big profits when the discount is over towards the end of the pre-ICO phase. This should be a red flag for a potential scam.
The board’s share of tokens/coins:The project’s whitepaper or website should clearly state how the coins will be distributed. Most importantly, investors should know the exact percentage of coins that will be owned by the project’s team members.
If the project’s owners own a small share of the coins, they won’t have considerable motivations to develop the project and boost the value of the coins. Likewise, if the project’s team members own a big share of the coins, this will undermine the decentralized nature of the blockchain platform. Ideally, project owners should possess somewhere between 10% and 30% of the total coins/tokens. At the same time, the project’s owners should be obliged not to sell their coins for at least three years, or else they would cash out via an exit scam.
To sum up:
These were just the most important points one should examine when looking to invest in an ICO. The advice presented in this guide will help you filter out potential scams through the hundreds of ICO projects that hit the market every month. You are strongly advised to do extensive research and use your common sense before deciding to invest in an ICO. Even after chipping in and buying your ICO tokens or coins, you should follow the progress of the project to perfectly time your exit point. Cointelligence is wishing you all the best of luck in all your ICO investments.
