I think you agree that ICOs can bring the best returns on investment.
You can also agree that 95% of ICOs are scam.
Can we find the remaining 5% golden ICOs?
It turns out we can, if we know what to look for and how to find it.
Disclaimer: I’m not your financial advisor. This is not financial advice. Do your own research
Anyway, here is the guide that I personally follow to discover the best ICOs out there:
Authority ICO reviewers
“Two Comma Fastlane” gathers the most prominent open spreadsheet ICO reviewers on the internet and shares their aggregate ranking scores daily.
https://twitter.com/TwoCommaFL
Ian Balina
https://twitter.com/DiaryofaMadeMan
John Mcafee
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee
ICO ranking lists
https://icobench.com/
https://icodrops.com/
Sentiment Analysis
Social sentiment plays an important role in how a particular ICO is perceived by the internet community. Most sentiment analysis data are not authentic however, since all the major social media such as twitter, reddit, youtube, etc. are dominated by fake accounts posting fake/insincere approvals of ICOs in so called bounty campaigns.
Bitcointalk.org has to be the most reliable resource to conduct proper social sentiment on ICOs. All you have to do is go into ICO announcement thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0
find a particular Announcement, then press “All” at the end of “Pages” in the bottom of the thread, and search for the positive words such as “ bullish”, “success”, “amazing”, “strong”, “moon” , etc. by pressing Ctrl+F.
Then search for negative words such as “scam”, “red flag”, “struggle”, “hype”, “fake” and others.
Be sure to only consider opinions of people with 3 or more stars and a lot activity on the forum (star rating and activity amount is written at forum member's left side in the thread).
Team/Advisors/Working product/Hard Cap
Pay attention to the team and advisors. If ICO doesn’t have all-star team and all-star advisors, then it’s a sign of company's weakness. Search the names of founders and advisors in Google.
Working products are a proof that ICO is actually standing on firm ground. If hard cap exceeds 30 million USD for all-star ICO, then probably the team is too greedy and I would avoid such company.
Github commits
Find github page on company’s official website and check the number of commits/code changes on their github page. The more the better. Also pay attention to the number of stars on the top right hand corner of github page and the date the last commit was made. Obviously, only a couple of github commits 3 months ago is a red flag.
Google trends/Telegram Channel Growth
Google explore is pretty up to date and provides decent information on the popularity of the particular ICO. It is especially helpful to compare several ICOs on the same google trend diagram and see for yourself which one is (or will be) more popular.
Although not particularly useful, but for a general education puposes I check this resource to find the most popular and most growing ICO telegram channels
Red flags
Check if the company is registered at all. Also, search for the “[ICO name] scam/fake” in google, youtube and twitter. There are some websites that conduct due diligence on ICOs as well such as
https://icocheck.io/
VC startup selection guides
VCs are investing in startups on a professional level, so it’s always beneficial to listen to their opinions.
Peter Thiel’s 7 criteria to understand startup’s long-term potential is one example
Breakthrough Technology Question: What disruptive applications could be built on blockchain
a) singularity coins
b) blockchain infrastructure coins? (decentralized exchanges, storage, etc.)
c) blockchain protocols
d) emergence market-networks
e) tokenization of assetsTiming Question – at what stage to invest: market-product fit, deployment, R&D and infrastructure?
People question
Team (teams’ stakes, full-time or part time?, vesting period, previous success, etc.)
4.Monopoly Question
a) Are u starting with a big share of a small market-network?
b) Don’t disrupt - How will it help existing enterprises to adapt?
5.Distribution Question – how fast can you distribute the product/token?
Mass adoption
6.Durability Question – do u see your product in 10-20 years from now? Does it solve fundamental problems?
What is the vision for the project? How valuable is the solution long-term? Is the project simply interesting or truly important for society?
7.Secret Question
What do you know is true that other people believe to be a myth?
What blind spot is the startup trying to cover?
Technical Whitepaper
Of course, do your own research and try to understand their technical whitepaper. If you don’t understand what the company is exactly trying to accomplish and how it’s going to technically do that, then you are basically gambling or following the hype.
I hope the following guide will help you do your own research more efficiently.
All images are Creative Commons