You may have stumbled upon this post from here in which case you already know this is a first part in series of stories about how to inspect ICOs to find out if they are worth investing* to avoid being blatantly scammed.

*) I decided switch perspective slightly. I am not even trying to evaluate how profitable certain cryptocurrensies or businesses might be. I will focus on technical checks you can do to spot any fishy behaviour.

We will be looking at technical issues and how to verify some of the basics and what are some of the issues that should ring a bell.

Internet presence of the product/service

Don't just look at the generic layout or quality of the website, anyone with bit of an effort can cook up or rip off a flashy website. What you can technically check is who owns the domain/domains that they are using?

You can look at domain registration information with WHOIS query. There are several services offering WHOIS services, just use your favourite search engine.

For example for .com (and few other) domains you can use official ICANN website WHOIS query.

For list of all domains and their registrars go to IANA website, there you can find official whois services for each domain.

Domain owner information

WHOIS search may not show any relevant information because some domain name registrars offer domain privacy service to mask the actual information of the domain owner. The privacy feature may show third party as owner of the domain to safeguard real owners personal information from general public. Some top level domain registars allow domain owners to opt out of publishing owner information at all (which is the case with pretty popular .io -domain). Personal information is collected by the registrar and may be accessible only on request and sometimes just for for law enforcement authorities.

Example: If you look up steemit.com domain WHOIS records you will see registrant information but also registrar (the actual organization or person who owns the domain).

Domain status

WHOIS query may return domain status codes. There are some status codes that are pretty common and some that are uncommon and might ring a bell and then there's few that immediately should raise a red flag (like serverRenewProhibited or redemptionPeriod).

Product development, whitepaper, etc. technical information

It is worth reading through their whitepaper and try to evaluate if it's just marketing or is there technical specifications of what they are doing and how they are going to do that.

If there is no whitepaper or if the whitepaper is vague in technical details, there's a chance the people behind it are not actually competent enough to create the service they are promoting. Or maybe they have good ideas but actual work hasn't started yet.

But then again, elaborate scams might have good looking and detailed whitepapers. Good quality whitepaper alone is just one thing to count in when evaluating if the Project is legit.

Quite a few development projects present a roadmap about achievements and future goals. Look at roadmap and see if there are any past achievements (like working demo or alpha version of service released), and are future goals realistic in technical sense, scope and timeframe.

Codebase

Is the codebase open source or propietary. If it is open source, where is the code available? I have seen some "open source" projects with no links to their code what so ever or maybe just a promise that it will be open source after it is finished.

Github, a popular development platform for open source projects, has a nice Insights function to check the activity on project. If there is no activity on github or if there are no authors active on a project that should really raise a concern.

Propietary codebase means that investors place a lot of trust to the developers, with open source there's at least opportunity the check the code.

What to make of it all?

You can evaluate transparency of involved people, do they publish their company or personal names? If they use domain privacy service what is their reasoning behind that? Is project open source or propietary? Are they actively developing product?

You really can't draw any definite conclusions by looking just at the website or domain information, but it will be one factor in the big picture.

You can make some conclusions about professionality of it all by looking at their website and whitepaper. Poor quality of either should probably make you think twice before investing in it. Even if it isn't a scam it might not be the best bet to invest your money in it if the team behind the Project isn't professional enough to finish a working product/service.

Thanks for reading, I hope this helps someone to better evaluate projects to invest in!

Any feedback or ideas are much appreciated, thanks!

Best regards,
safir57