I didn't know much about cryptocurrency and ICOs until October 2017. The only thing I knew was there was something bitcoin which is a virtual currency. I just wanted to make some money and I searched in Google to know what are the new ways to make money other than traditional methods such as make revenue from blogging, affiliate marketing, dropshipping etc. When I was searching for new methods I was able to find out about make money through cryptocurrency trading. However, there are millions of people who are trading cryptocurrencies. So I was very reluctant to enter to this way of making money since it's not that easy to predict the future movements of prices of these cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.
Finally I found the term ICO which stands for Initial Coin Offering which is similar to IPO (Initial Public Offering) in offline world which is not easy to access for people like me because usually it needs considerable amount of money to invest, lot of paperwork and regulations. You can buy shares of a company usually at a discount/lower price through a IPO and sell them in the secondary market (stock exchange) at higher price and make profit from your investment. However, price movement or the volatility may be very less when compared to price volatility of cryptocurrency. I analysed the price charts of existing cryptocurrencies from the CoinmarketCap website and it proved that almost all cryptocurrency had considerable price volatility.
So I wanted to take the advantage of discounted pricing at ICOs and price volatility of crypto as well as the ease of enter to the ICOs to make profits from cryptocurrency. I found most of ICOs are issuing Ethereum based ERC-20 tokens and accepted currency is Ethereum. In order to enter in this game, I wanted to know several things. I searched what is Ethereum and how to create a ERC-20 compatible Ethereum wallet to pay for ICOs and take my tokens (tokens are equivalent to shares. But you may not own the voting rights or dividend payments since most of ICOs are issuing utility tokens). So I found that MyEtherwallet is the best site to create the Ethereum wallet and CEX.IO as the exchange to buy ETH.
The most difficult task is to find a promising and trusted ICO which I can expect upward price movement after the ICO. I found there were scam ICOs too. Finally I chose Spectre.ai ICO as my first ICO investment. I purchased 14493 SXUT tokens worth 5.45 ETH in the pre-sale stage where I got 33% discount meaning I got extra 660 tokens per each 2000 tokens I purchased. Price per token set as 0.11 USD at the pre-sale. Price per 1 ETH was around $298 at that time and my investment was $1650.
After 6 months, in April the price of SXUT went up to 0.24 USD per token meaning a 200% increase when compared to my purchase price. If you compare the price chart of SXUT in Coinmarketcap you will see that it was went up to 0.57 USD per token in February 2018. But I didn't noted that. If I sold at that price I could have made $8000+ which means 400% profit. Unfortunately I didn't noticed until April 2018 that SXUT listed in Bibox. SXUT listed in Etherdelta/Forkdelta right after the ICO but I don't use Etherdelta/Forkdelta as they are difficult to use. Finally I decided to make the profit from my investment by selling it in 18th April 2018. I was able to collect 0.462 BTC which is equivalent to 3671 USD which means a 100% profit.
So its a really interesting way to make some money. But it involves risk like other investments. There is no hard work to do. The main concern should be to research and find a legit ICO which has a good potential in the future.
Lessons Learned
Always keep in touch with the price movements of the Tokens/ICOs that you invested in. This will allow you to not to miss great opportunities.
Warning
Investing in ICOs involves risk. Therefore, don't invest money that you can't afford to loose.
Important Links
The best place to know about upcoming ICOs - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0
Monitor price movements of cryptocurrency and tokens - https://coinmarketcap.com
Bibox - A user friendly cryptocurrency exchange - https://www.bibox.com/login/register?id=11303110&lang=en