The Basics of Investing in ICO

One of the most popular investment sectors at the moment is investment in crypto-currencies. There are many special exchanges on which you can trade crypto-currencies. There are already more than 800 crypto-currencies, the total capitalization of which exceeds already $ 100 billion. Half of this amount is the first crypto currency bitcoin (BTC), with a capitalization of 42 billion dollars.

Purchase with the purpose of subsequent resale of the crypto currency is not much different from the usual trading. But there is another type of investment - ICO, which we will talk about.

ICO (Initial Coin Offerings) is a model for attracting initial investment of crypto currency into a new project. Most investments are made in the two most popular coins - Bitcoin and Ethereum. When the investment acceptance period ends, the project organizers distribute a certain part of the issued crypto currency between the ICO participants. In this regard, you can draw an analogy of ICO with an IPO, Initial Public Offerings - an initial public offering.

The first ICO project is Mastercoin, announcing its intentions in the summer of 2013, having collected in this way 5000 BTC (at that time about 500 thousand dollars). Then in November of the same year was NXT, which collected on its ICO only 6 thousand dollars. At the same time, the maximum market capitalization of NXT reached 100 million dollars, and at the moment is slightly less than $ 49 million. Then began a tumultuous boom ICO, during which they invested in everything. One of the most successful projects so far is Ethereum, which collected $ 18 million for the ICO period, and now its market capitalization exceeds $ 34 billion.

The main advantage of ICO for investors is that even non-professional investors with a small budget can find a good object for investment and make a profit much faster than with an IPO. With the participation in ICO of a good project, a return on investment is possible in a few months with a profit, against the rate of return on investment in IPOs, sometimes measured in years.

The main task is to find a good and promising project for your investments.

Here are the main points on which to evaluate the ICO:

What task does the project solve? If this is simply the issue of a new digital coin, the more forge already existing, then it is not worth investing. But if this project does something new and breakthrough, like Steemit, Storj, Waves, then its investment attractiveness at the ICO stage is very high.
Feasibility of the project. This is a very important point. If developers set themselves unrealistic goals - for example, in terms of implementation or their scale, then most likely investments in such a project will bring you losses.
Development prospects. It is necessary to make sure how the development team is going to develop the project. Any project should have a clear business plan for project monetization and roadmap. It should be noted that the ICO itself is not a monetization, but only a primary attraction of funds in order to create a product that will further profit and ensure the growth of the value of coins.
Openness of the team will be a big plus. As well as fame. For example, the head of the Humaniq project is Alex Fork, founder of Future Fintech.
Openness of the code is not mandatory, but a weighty argument in favor of a positive decision.
Is there only an idea, or is the project ready? If the project is already running, and it can be touched, this is a big plus.
Do the partners have a project?
Let us consider an example: the ICO of the first Russian media block GOLOS. This project has set a task to make a Russian-speaking analogue of Steemit. The project plan included the acquisition of Steemit license, localization and the necessary completion of the platform, as well as the development of the Russian-language community, all items of the plan are quite feasible.

ICO of this project was conducted from 01.11.16 to 04.12.16, investors participated in it, buying out tokens (coins, cryptocurrency) systems, called GOLOS. During the ICO period, 601 BTC was collected, at a rate of $ 750 per bitcoin, for a total amount equivalent to $ 1 million.

Currently, the market capitalization of GOLOS-a is $ 14.675.800 million (http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/golos/). Thus, all the initial investors of the ICO project, if they wish only in six months of the start of the project, can already get out of it, fixing the profit with the coefficient x14.

Prospects for the development of the project are quite large. At the moment, the blog platform golos.io is working on the basis of the blockbuster, where users receive tokens for communication within the network, which can then be sold on the exchange of crypto-currencies, as well as many other services, whose number is constantly growing.

Get tokens and those who write content and those who vote for it. Also released is the alpha version of the Mapala Traveler community based on this detachment, and users of the Mapala.net site post their travel articles, likewise receiving tokens for this, which can eventually be exchanged for dollars.