ICO Mission Control: Bringing Order to the ICO World
One of the most common ways that coins and tokens are brought to market is through what is known as an ICO (Initial Coin Offering). Similar, to what is known as the IPO in traditional markets, an ICO is a means by which most crypto start-ups raise funds in order to issue new crypto currencies. An ICO is typically what enables the issuer to raise capital without having to follow many strict guidelines. These guidelines are often imposed on the groups aiming to achieve funding from institutional investors, venture capitals or banks. An ICO campaign typically offers a certain percentage of the coins in exchange for cryptocurrencies that already have established value, typically Bitcoin and Ethereum.
ICO’s are not only similar to the traditional IPO but they are also quite similar to crowdfunding in many aspects. It is important to note that an IPO normally deals with investors that are interested in buying a stake in the company or start-up. Often, this comes with the ability or power to have a say in how the company or start-up is run and maintained. However, the ICO’s on the other hand is offered to supporters and individuals who wish to invest in a token or new technology. Analogous to what is often seen on KickStarter crowd funding campaign, the backers or investors in a crypto currency are fundamentally interested in the vision of the project. The additional advantage for the investors and backers is the tokens provided to the investors have value and can be traded if they are on exchanges. Many investors are motivated by prospective returns whilst also being able to back revolutionary projects.
Although, there have been many successful projects that have had successful ICO launches, there are many times more ICO’s that have not only failed but those that have also turned out to be fraudulent and resulted in the loss of millions of dollars of hard earned money. It is undeniable that ICO are going to have a great impact in the future of cryptocurrencies in how funding will be secured, but it is equally as important to understanding points of failures and further bring order and simple guidelines to the ICO transactions to prevent funds from being lost or scammed and stolen. The crypto world definitely does not need or want the oversight of the SEC or (Securities Exchange Commission) but there definitely are some sort of oversight or community guidelines on how such transactions should be performed, such as KYC.
The title for one of the most successful ICO’s in the crypto world can be given to Vitalik’s Buterin with his Ethereum Platform. Since its inception, Ethereum has delivered an ROI of a minimum of 200,000%. With the ICO token launch at $0.30, Ethereum now stands at about $700, whilst also reaching a peak of over $1500USD at its height. The success of this coin and huge returns can be attributed to investors and early backers believing in the Ethereum technology and its teams abilities. Although, the Ethereum team keeps their word and many teams for other projects on the other hand misuse the trust of the community and scam people out of millions of dollars.
One of the most common ICO scams or exit scams often play out by raising funds and then is often followed by the team disappearing. The most recent scam and one of the most unfortunate exit scams that comes to memory is the ICO conducted by Modern Tech, a Vietnam based company trying to raise money for its Pincoin token. The company raised over $600 million dollars from over 32,000 people. The company first launched the Pincoin ICO which promised significant returns to investors. The company then launched another ICO that ran itself as the iFAN token. The company first offered the Pincoin token investors, cash as a return on their investments. Once people started to note and jump onto the ICO and the investments started to increase, the company then followed by offering iFAN tokens in return for their investments. Once the ICO had raised a significant amount of money the seven members of the team disappeared from the country and have no where to be found. This exit scam has been noted to be one of biggest and most recent and unfortunate events that have plagued the ICO and crypto world.
The absence of regulations or a set of guidelines has resulted in a sort of Wild West, where the environment has resulted in multiple ICO scams. However, it is important to note that although unfortunate, it is not abnormal to see people trying to take advantage of naïve people in an unregulated industry. That is to say, there are many people who will try to take any opportunity and use it to their benefit, where they can take advantage of people and grab money via get rich quick schemes.
Looking back at previous ICO campaigns and many ongoing campaigns, one of the most difficult tasks is identifying whether the said ICO is legitimate or not. In fact, many new investors are often holding back from investing in new project due to skepticism and the lack of experience and guidelines for performing ICO investments. However, it is not nearly as bad as shooting a dart in a dark room. In fact many ICO’s can be assessed by analysis of the content, management practices, investors/backers and how public and transparent the team is. Often many investors may chose to use ICO trackers in order to assess the how well the project is, by quantifying parameters on a scale and then combining all the parameters to predict the best ICO for the investment.
In order to further improve the ICO process and help individual investors the Quoine team have recently launched the ICO Mission Control platform that will not only simplify the ICO process but also ease many of the problems and headaches that many individuals are often subjected to when attempting to invest in new projects. The press release from the Quoine Marketing team has noted and that “We learned first-hand the challenges of running a large scale ICO, including client on-boarding, analytics, volatile currency process, understanding how to most effectively reach participants. From our own ICO experience, we decided to build a platform that solves the problems we faced and provide a tool for block chain projects around the globe”
The ICO Mission Control platform is designed to be an end-to-end solution for those from the ICO teams to the individual investors to ease their problems and help conduct easy ICO launches. The ICO Mission Control platform is designed to be flexible, transparent, SECURE as well as Scalable. Additionally, the platform will feature access to a plethora of KYC verified customers at one central location. Time and Time again many individuals have noted that
“For me, the most annoying thing is having to do KYC all the time and give out personal information to every ICO team and platform. It not only wastes a lot of time but also I have to conduct research in order to make sure that I am not handing out information scammers or those that are going to sell my information. This is another headache that I have to deal with on top of the uncertainty and risks that are associated with the investment” — Random Reddit User
The ICO Mission controls solves one of the biggest challenges for not only the investor but also the company raising funds for their ICO, that is to get their buyers KYC verified whilst maintaining and managing all other aspects of starting a new crypto project. For the buyer, completing the KYC process time and time again would result in quite a lot of wasted time and also missing out on certain ICO’s due to lack of trust. However, with the launch of the ICO Mission control, Quoine has sort of launched all in one platform in a sense. That is to say, once you sign up one the ICO platform and are KYC verified you will not have to perform the same process once again and get access to all the ICO’s that chose to be present on their platform.
The Mission Control platform also solves multiple other issues faced by teams such as advertising, data analysis, performance optimization as well as direct listing and market access. Quoine has stated that they will provide aide to team in order to increase and optimize marketing efficiency as well as real time data analysis. Furthermore, the members that participate on this platform will be able to trade their token very quickly due to the secondary market trading on the Qryptos exchange. The team is looking forward to making trading on the Qryptos exchange in order to create value and ensure that most users use their platform both as ICO teams as well as individual investors.
The token sales are planned to be launched with the ICO Mission Control platform, which contains a simplified panel allowing the user simple options which presents on which currency a user would like to buy and how they would like to pay for their token. Below an image can be seen of the first ICO Vuulr token that was launched on the ICO platform. A very simple and intuitive UX is seen with very clear option and how and what can be done.
One of the most important aspects and advantage of the this ICO platform is the future launch of the Liquid World book platform and the secondary listing. That is to say, once the liquid world book platform is launched and the ICO tokens are listed on to the platform one can expect a large pool of liquid and thus much more access to their tokens. With increased market liquidity, the entire industry as well the ICO team will benefit as liquid platform will be the first point of trading and thus more exposure and accessibility will be attained by the ICO teams.
The Team
The team behind the ICO Mission Control is also recognized for their Qash Token, Quoinex Exchange as well as the Future Liquid Platform. The Qash token and Liquid platform aim to be the ideal liquidity provider in the crypto market. The Quoine team has one of the most talented teams in the crypto-space with a total combined experience of over 250 years in the FinTech. They have not only acquired talent but have successfully been able to show their talent with their Quoinex Exchange which has produced over $12 Billion dollars in transactions.
The team is led by Mike Kayamori, an Ex Softbank Group president and Harvard Business School MBA grad. He has over 20 years in banking, investments and venture capital. Mike has also served as the senior director at Globespan Capital, which has manages assets of over $1.2 Billion. Mario the other co-founder, also has a wide array of experience ranging from serving as the CTO of Merrill Lunch Branch in Japand fro almost 13 years. Additionally, he has also served as the CIO of Fixed Income IT Asia. In addition to these 2 co-founders, the Quoine team boost over 100 members as well as many advisors and board of directors.