I have been participating of ICOs and other crypto business for almost three years now. Every week people ask me about how I chose the ICOs I participate in the middle of this sea of opportunities.
First of all what seems to be opportunities could easily end in traps, mainly because of the Gray's number of scams around the issue.
And in second place what I learn I learned in practice. Only in ICOs I must have been between 12 or 15, and of course not all of them I succeded. In some I got between 20-200% of ROI - Return on investment, on others I am still waiting to see what will happens, and in a few (and those are the ones that really make the thing worth) the return was between 1000-4000% on the top of wave (I will talk about when and what to sell in other article soon), how we can see here https://tokentops.com/stats/.
So below I leave 5 tips to help you in your selection.
1. What's the business? (and the moment)
Since we are on the beginning of this amazing technology, the most successful projects in this moment have been the infrastructure or platforms one, as Ethereum, NEO, Ripple and Iota.
And not because the other projects are not good, but because the technology are still stabilizing itself and struggling to achieve scalability and low cost that will let the other projects, like services and games, success too.
Lots of project of infrastructre are yet coming to solve this kind of problem, also caled as blockchain 3.0 or yet 4.0.
2. Team and advisors
I don’t mention the value of ideas on the list, because they are all very good (with some exceptions, kkk).
But I have seen lot of projects with good ideas fall because of the team. Some have a good group of full stack developers but lack of people that really understand the business that aim to be blockchained.
For example, once I saw a project of game platform that have no one of this industry or with past experience on projects like that before. For sure they will face lots of specific problems that an expert would easily point.
Good expert advisors generally appear on the page team to solve this problem. For sure it’s not enough have they listed on team page, but with a little research you can figure out if they are really committed with the project, as with public statements on twitter, videos on blog page, and others.
3. Good partners
As with the team and advisors tip, have good real life partners that are committed to use the service as beta users or first clients is important.
Imagine a project that aims to develop a supply chain track platform for tomatoes industry, from production to consumer. How much time will take to convince the main tomatoes producers to adopt the solution after developed? No one knows.
But if the project already worked on it, and some good industry players are already committed to use the service when delivery, it is some % more probable that the idea get traction and speed of adoption in the very beginning, and yet succeed.
4. Token price
This tip is more about numbers, but it is still very important.
How much the token costs? And how much it will value when available on first exchange?
After assess the tips above I always calculate the price of the token to know if it is an attractive ICO or not. I realy try to stay on ICOs that have a start token price bellow $1, what attract crypto investors that like to by low price tokens too.
How to calculate that? Simple. Look on the page of token sale the amount of tokens that you will get for 1 ETH. An example:
1 ETH = 5.000 ABC tokens
1 EHT = $ 538,00
$538,00 / 5.000 = $ 0,1076
So this ABC token costs to you more or less $ 0,11 cents per token.
5. ICO information and Process
The final but not less important tip, is the ICO information and process.
I have already participated of some ICOs where I don’t gave the necessarie attention to that, and that gave me a huge headache after.
Now I always pay attention if:
- The ICO have a good communication process, giving transparency of the process to the participants
- If the project have a good communication channel (commonly on telegram or slack) and if the team are available to answer questions.
- If the information are clear and complete about the token price, token use, airdrops, CAP, and others.
- And now I ALWAYS, ALWAYS question if the token sale will be done with smartcontracts or direct payment. In this headache ICO (done already on 2018) I bypassed this information and was direct payment. This resulted in selling of tokens above the CAP, with manual refund of the value after 1 week. WHAT? Yes, and was a platform project that aims to solve this kind of transaction problem (funny now, stressful before). Smart contracts will grant will a smooth ICO and in some cases with the token delivered on your wallet (not ready to sell) just after the transaction success.
Also with this tips, always, always, always do not trust in any one, on direct messages of team members on telegram (they never do that and never ask for money, kkkk), and facing doubts or awkward information, run...
I hope those tips be useful for you, and if helped anyway leave a comment sharing your experience