When I read about Ethereum in July of 2014, I saw the potential of the platform being described as well as the unfilled need at that time with respect to blockchains. I made what at that time for me was a considerable investment. Fast forward to 2017 and that investment has paid off very handsomely. But it did take 2.5 years to mature.
So am on the lookout for the next "big thing" - but it has now become very "noisy" as there are crowdsales and ICOs left and right. There are also thousands of uninformed and misinformed investors, and naturally, people who are taking advantage of them.
I have reviewed more than a handful of upcoming ICOs. What I look for: something that addresses a problem with blockchain today. Or something that will "own" the space for an application everyone will use in the blockchain community. Then I look at the team behind the ICO: what have they built before that is similar to what they are trying to do, what is their educational background to do it (the computer science part has to be hard, otherwise everyone can do it), and what have they achieved so far. Having a nice and fancy announcement website is not enough - nor just a long and descriptive white-paper.
What have I found so far?
- BasicAttentionToken - founder co-built Mozilla. Product ambition for Brave browser and how it will disrupt the advertising and attention economy . BUT I could not be part of the investors able to get in during the first 30 seconds of the ICO launch.
- Decentralized storage service StorJ: their product actually works, though I think their main pitch should be "most secure" rather than "cheaper than Amazon storage"
- Credits platform for games - makes sense to have a universal coin across all games and platforms. MobileGo made the most sense for me as they are focused on mobile game apps where the younger generation and billions of others are.
- Aeternity. They are solving the key issues of Bitcoin blockchain using the learnings from Ethereum and improving on it. They can explain it better than I can: https://cointelegraph.com/news/man-who-claims-to-be-ethereums-godfather-aims-at-recasting-smart-contracts. The team is heavy on the developers side which I like. And the founder seems to be in the same circle as Vitalik who created Ethereum. This will be another 2 year investment though, but getting in today is very easy and affordable. Long shot, but potentially huge, unless side-projects around bitcoin and ethereum achieve what they want to achieve faster.
Would appreciate any other suggestions for the next big blockchain investment.