How to find ICO Pools (even the hidden ones)
What are the best and quickest ways to find ICO Pools? And how can you find the private groups that want to stay hidden?
At Block Influence we predominantly deal with personalities in the blockchain and crypto space, delivering digital marketing strategies for ICO and blockchain clients. As part of our research in to the ever growing sector, we have been monitoring ICO pools, but up until recently haven’t had a reason to contact them. So when a client asked us to get in touch with the pools on their behalf, we needed to build relationships, and fast.
And we had questions:
- What different sorts of ICO Pools are there and how do they work?
- How can we find them and get in touch with the admins?
- How can we make sure our client’s ICO passes their tests?
These are questions we asked and eventually found answers to. So, in a series of articles, we’ll be sharing with the community what we found out.
Let’s save the basics of ICO Pools for another article and skip to the good stuff:
How can we find ICO Pools?
So it’s May 2018 and the number of ICO pools is really starting to pick up. Before the beginning of the year, there were around 37 pools organising through Telegram or Discord. Then January 2018 saw another 31 appear, 90 in February, 42 in March and 10 in April. We have 2 so far in May.
This recent explosion of ICO pools means it can be quite hard to find them all just because they’re so new.
With this in mind, let’s look into the discoverability options.
Option 1: Just Google it!
This will be the first place most people start. You can definitely Google “ico pools” and just start searching your way through the results. But if you’re just looking for pools that organise through Telegram (which is the majority), then there’s an easier way. Google indexes the Telegram join links in their database, so you can use the site: operator to search through all the groups Google has indexed (which is lots). Try searching for : site:https://t.me/ “ico pool”
And scroll to the bottom of the results and click repeat the search with the omitted results included.
It’ll return around 70.
Of course, not all the pools describe themselves that way so you can search without the quotation marks to widen the results to around 160
Other terms you can search for are:
- site:https://t.me/ ico pre-sale
- site:https://t.me/ ico “private sale”
- site:https://t.me/ ico syndicate
- site:https://t.me/ ico analysis
- site:https://t.me/ ico capital
- site:https://t.me/ blockchain investment
If you’d like those Telegram channel links in a handy list, just open the JavaScript console in Chrome
Click the “console” tab, enter this text and hit enter:
out=””;links = document.querySelectorAll(“cite.iUh30”); for(num in links) { if(typeof(links[num].innerText)!=”undefined”) { out+=(links[num].innerText)+”\n”; }} console.log(out);
You’ll get a print-out with just the links.
But what about groups that don’t organise through Telegram?
This technique won’t pick up groups that use Discord only or that don’t use Telegram or don’t want to be found there (by blanking their bio and/or using an obscure name). There are also many groups that position themselves more as capital investment funds rather than ICO pools. To hunt these ones down, you’re going to have search more widely in Google and sift through more results. You should search for:
Be prepared to get well down into the results pages — sifting through these is more time consuming than the telegram Google search.
Option 2: ICO Pool Aggregators
If all of this sounds like a lot of hard work then you’re right — it is. But don’t worry, there are people out there who’ve been here before and done all the hard work. They’ve even complied all that work into lists and put them online. So let’s take a look at a couple of the aggregators:
ICO Pool World
https://icopoolworld.com
This website lists 34 pools as of the time of writing. That’s not so many, but ICO Pool World goes for quality over quantity here with a hand written review of the top 20 or so.
For most of the pools they also list which ICOs the pool has completed, which gives a great idea of the success and activity of the pool. ICO Pool World is a good place to start.
(15/05/2018 — ICP have responded to this mention of them with lots more detail about their service: ICO Pool World’s response. Definitely worth checking that out. )
ICOPools.io
https://icopools.io/en/
These guys go for completeness and have a listing of just under 200 pools as of the time of writing. Like ICO Pool World they list the ICOs that the pools have completed. Their front-page also shows the active ICO for each group. They also provide a rating for a number of the ICO pools and by looking at the rating detail at the top of the pool page, you can see details such as whether or not they support KYC.
These guys update their data frequently and even have an alerts channel on Telegram where they inform users of new pool buys.
Option 3: for the hidden pools and syndicates
The methods above will allow you to find the vast majority of publicly findable ICO pools. But, that doesn’t cover them all. There are still many other investor syndicates who don’t have a Telegram group or even a website. To make contact with these groups, we recommend that you start some face-to-face networking. There are many crypto and blockchain events taking place all over the world and there are plenty of different websites that track such events. But here’s the one we like the best: meetup.com
Let’s have a look at our meetup recommendations over the next few days for crypto in London:
As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities to meet people, make connections and to find investors and investment syndicates. In your part of the world, things may not be happening quite so frequently (and they may not be listed on meetup) but they will be happening. You just need to get out there and find them.
What next?
We’ve put the above tips into practise and we now have 221 pools in our private database (together they’ve racked up over 876,000 messages on Telegram…). We’re not on first name terms with all the group admins quite yet, but we’re getting there! We recommend you start first with a bit of Googling to give yourself some wider knowledge of the space and to find some of the pools you won’t see on the aggregators. If you’re feeling lazy, though, just head straight for icopools.io — they have a great list. Then when you’re feeling confident you know the space and what you’re looking for, it’s time to meet some real people face-to-face and get networking!
Articles in this series:
- ICO Pools — what are they? (and how do they differ)
- How to find ICO Pools (even the hidden ones)
- ICO Pools — what do they look for in a token sale? (and how to pass their tests)
- ICO Pools — what’s the best way for a startup to make contact? (and what to avoid)
Related articles:
- The top 10 Crypto Portfolio Trackers (very in-depth read)
- BlockFi vs Crypto.com — which has the best interest account?
Please follow us to get informed when we publish new articles.
Block Influence delivers actionable intelligence to startups, agencies, consultancies, traders and investors operating in the blockchain sphere. Our flagship products — LiveLists and KEE — harness proprietary expert and influencer analysis to deliver turbo-charged market decisions, influencer discovery and content strategy. We turn insight into action, generating affluence through intelligence.
