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The first thing I look for with any coin or company is the capital structure (how much supply, inflation, any ICO or pre-mine or crowd fund, is there a fair distribution). IOC has a low supply of 16m coins and 2% inflation for stakers that help secure the network. Currently 42% of the coins are staking by people leaving only 9m coins on exchange or not staking for such short term speculators and top 10 addresses only account for 32% so there is a fair distribution. Furthermore there has been no pre-mine or ICO or crowd fund for this project, all the development costs have been absorbed by the project team headed up by Joel who has financed the project himself with hundreds of thousands of dollars and recently sold his Mac business to focus 100% on IOC (no free money like ETH,LSK,WAVES,RISE…), now think about their interests v’s the recent coins launched via ICO, that have lined their pocket and become rich before even becoming a success…
The next thing I look for is transparency, security and robustness of the blockchain, since August 2014 these guys have been public about their identities and this blockchain has run smoothly with no hard fork or downtime. Rushing code out almost always results in massive structural problems, just have to look at Eth for that! These guys do not rush out code, and when they release code it is professional and properly tested but then again Derek the lead dev is a scientist, physicist and many years ago when he started coding he also became a security specialist.
Finally no investment is made without consideration to forward looking earnings and actual product viability in this case I/O Digital is aiming to build an entire Digital Currency Ecosystem and those services which it facilitates such as decentralised wallet aliases (DIONS), side chains, encrypted messaging and data on the blockchain to start with will be charged for in IOCoin and returned to the stakers.
DIONS (decentralised input output name server) beta is very close and when it comes out a higher market market cap will incentivise the stakers to become confirming nodes at 10 IOC per alias registration .01 ioc per message KB. Compared to other projects around with this will cause a massive repricing from today's current $0.15 to between $1-$2.
Tech projects can take a long time, especially if it is to succeed and not have any vulnerabilities. I’m not concerned about the time it is take this project to launch DIONS, i am investing in the people who are also invested and have their interest aligned.
In celebration for the 2y anniversary of their launch they are holding a public Q&A session this Saturday at 3pm (GMT), be sure to tune in to find out more about the project and the future updates. In the meantime please visit http://www.iodigital.io/about-io-digital/