ICO analysis and assessment resources — an overview
Most of you probably already have a good idea of what an ICO is, and some of you may even have an investment portfolio (a well-diversified one, hopefully). At this point, you should ask the following question: if there are so many ICOs and the chance to lose all you invest in them is so high, then how can you identify reliable ICOs to include in your portfolio?
When it comes to traditional IPOs, things are more or less clear: there are established procedures, companies must provide guarantees, registration documents, and lots of other papers needed for a launch. ICOs are a completely different animal, however; and although tons of services have appeared lately promising to analyze the quality of potential candidates for your portfolio, the risks remain high.
There are several kinds of resources providing ICO-related services: websites that publish assessment results, online ICO calendars, news channels, and so on (and it is a very lengthy “so on”).
What follows is a short but comprehensive list of websites and what they do; of course, it is far from a complete list, since new resources appear every day, but we hope it will do for an initial analysis and monitoring.
General ICO analysis
This is probably one of the best-known, most interesting and useful resources:
- first, it has not only the more popular cryptocurrencies and tokens but also those that few know about;
- second, it provides a wide range of data on prices and trade volumes, as well as graphs, allowing for a strategic evaluation of an asset;
- third, it has its own API, meaning that we resource’s features can be integrated into any other website, including yours.
Note: API means “application programming interface”, that is, a set of definitions, tools, protocols, and structures provided by an app (a library or service) or an OS to be used in outside software.
How can you use this website? For instance, it helps monitor the market performance of most cryptocurrencies or their popularity (the site has data on “communities” — the number of people potentially interested in buying or selling an asset). Every graph window contains a direct link to a digital exchange, where you can buy the desired token (if it is still traded).
Here is another site with similar features and options: https://coinmarketcap.com/
The name says it all: this site gathers various statistics related to ICOs. Here you will find ROIs (return on investment) for different periods, token comparisons, data on total returns, etc.
The ICO analysis and evaluation market is developing fast, and, as we have pointed out above, new sites appear every day. Projects already exist that allow to simplify and streamline the process of project analysis; they include Smart Valley (https://smartvalley.io/). The platform’s founders aim to create a closed ecosystem that would guarantee an efficient communication among the three key groups of market players:investors, projects, and experts. Using the services provided by the platform, one can perform a complex analysis rather easily.
One of the key Smart Valley services is its unique scoring system, which is used to assess the quality of the projects published on the platform. This service incorporates three elements: decentralized scoring done by experts, mathematical algorithms, and so-called wisdom of the crowd.
The decentralized scoring feature is the most prominent part of the system. In its turn, it includes several elements:
- project team evaluation;
- technical scoring;
- financial model scoring;
- legal analysis.
The Smart Valley community includes a large pool of experts from various professional fields. In order to evaluate each individual project, a special algorithm selects at least three experts for each of the four criteria listed above (that is, at least 12 experts in total), who perform the analysis and prepare a report.
Once the results are published, it is up to you to decide if you should invest in a certain project or give it a pass.
ICO calendars
There are lots of ICO calendars around, but this is the one we consider most convenient:
https://tokenmarket.net/ico-calendar
On this website, you will find a list of ongoing ICOs, as well as those that have ended or are coming up; the list includes links to all the projects, allowing you to participate in ICOs that are still in progress. Moreover, the site includes founders’ contact details — from social network accounts to links to projects’ source codes on GitHub.
Here is a similar site that offers the same features: https://icotracker.net/
This is yet another good calendar: it provides ICO dates and basic info for free, while for a small fee you can access to more detailed reports. Here is a sample free report:
https://www.icoalert.com/ICO-Alert-Report-TRUEFLIP.pdf
Another feature of the service are its exclusive, thorough interviews with founders of past, present, and future ICOs. Two good things about these interviews is that they come out weekly and that you can request for an interview with a particular founder to be published. There is also a newsletter.
This is much more than a calendar — it is a whole evaluation system, best used as an ICO matrix with four categories: upcoming, ongoing, and past ICOs, as well as those that are beyond the timeline (and moral values) — that is, scams.
A scam is a fraud, an illegal trick to get people’s money; the term is applied to dishonest investment proposals in general, not just ICOs. When talking about ICOs, a scam list is a kind of a black list that includes pseudo-ICOs, the founders of which never actually intended to launch a product.
By clicking on a particular ICO, you can access lots of information about it: project description, technical and financial aspects, and — perhaps most importantly — info on the team members.
Yet another option is to sort projects by different criteria: name, industry, rating (which deserves special attention), description, starting date, and links. The sorting system is not interactive (for example, you cannot select just rating), but what it offers is quite enough to study a project in some detail. You can even search by project name.
The resources we have listed are more than enough to get a good idea about an ICO’s prospects. Remember: information is power! And considering the growing popularity of ICOs, there are tons of information available — you just have to search for it.
We have already pointed out what you should look for, but here is a quick summary:
- General ICO stats;
- ICO calendars;
- ICO news;
- Blogs, chat rooms, and channels devoted to blockchain.
What’s more, there are lots of mobile apps providing ICO stats (such as ICO Market), industry news, and calendars — more than enough to stay informed. Browse through such apps until you find a project that seems interesting and is going to launch its ICO soon, then use the links provided above to dig deeper.
We will be happy to answer your questions in the comments section!
