Taking A Chance In Volatile Times
The approach to the iCumulate token sale has seen increased levels of volatility across all crypto currencies and tokens. There are many theories for this volatility and the subsequent downward moves in the crypto market as a whole.
These theories range from the recent Bitcoin Cash hard fork disagreements to rumours of badly managed projects having to liquidate their remaining token sale funds in order to continue to operate.
With mainstream journalism seeming to adopt a fairly pessimistic reporting stance on every crypto downturn, the binary opposite view is mainly taken in crypto journalism with suggestions of buying dips to be the way forward.
Operating a token sale in this environment is obviously no easy task, with some potential token holders naturally waiting for a bounce in the market to recoup some of their losses before moving into new projects.
As experienced professional traders we understand this psychology well and in fact one of the hardest lessons you have to learn as a serious trader is to know when to cut your losses. Its impossible to make money every time you trade and the goal of any professional trader is to make money over time. The aim of a professional trader is to stay in the game and to stay in the game, you have to cut your losses, re-assess the market with a clear head and try again.
You have to learn how to lose.
Many projects conducted token sales throughout late 2017 and early 2018 with nothing more than an idea and a whitepaper. The teams had little experience and many were thrown head first into a world which they knew little about in regards to running a sustainable business. Many projects didn’t conduct KYC procedures on their token sale contributors, which resulted in them amassing large amounts of money which their banking partners could not accept. Instead, the projects managed their business operations from their crypto wallets, which in most cases contained unhedged crypto currencies.
This meant the token sale contributions were now “swinging around in the wind” of market volatility. When the market is rising, projects ignore the risky situation they have put themselves in and when the market has a correction and starts to fall, it becomes an inconvenient truth. As the market falls further panic starts to set in as unhedged project funds start to evaporate and teams that were originally trusted to manage their token sale contributions, are now resigned to the disastrous policy of “waiting for a bounce”.
The famous economist John Maynard Keynes once said the following:
“The market can stay irrational, longer than you can stay solvent”
Inexperienced traders and projects are finding this out the hard way at the moment and there is probably more pain to come for any projects that don’t have a redundancy plan in place.
Unfortunately, its a stark reality that many projects who are currently suffering wont have the funds left or the experience to drive their original visions from where they currently find themselves. Some will probably use the situation as an excuse to throw the towel in completely,
This is of course not new. The Dot Com downturn saw many companies struggle to manage their finances and eventually disappear.
As lessons were learned, people started to invest smarter and chose the companies that had strong leadership teams and vast experience in running businesses in their fields of expertise. One of those companies was Amazon, who despite experiencing a 93% retracement in its stock price between November 1999 and September 2001, went on to become the second largest company in the world today.
Which brings us full circle as to why we are running a token sale in the current market climate. We believe we have the experience to be different from other projects and to also have learned from the mistakes that some have made in the past.
Key differences for our project include areas such as:
Clear Regulation
Clear regulation is needed in crypto trading for it to grow in a safe, sustainable manner and iCumulate is based in Gibraltar, which is one of the leading blockchain locations in the world after establishing a clear Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) regulatory framework.
The Government of Gibraltar is actively promoting the country as a technology hub for blockchain projects and this innovation drive has already attracted some notable large crypto businesses to relocate here. Gibraltar has a solid understanding of how to innovate new technologies, due to its experience in building its presence within the online gaming industry and is now home to many of the world’s largest operators in that space.
Blockchain Usage
Whether you are a believer that crypto currencies or blockchain being the way of the future, one thing that is crystal clear to us is that Tokenisation will be huge. We are sure that in the future you will see many areas moving across to a tokenised asset model including property, land, healthcare, entertainment and finance.
The benefits of tokenisation are huge and include the ability to adopt fractional ownership models bringing investment opportunities to demographics that previously had zero chance of getting involved. With so many new areas to choose from it would have been easy for us to make the mistake of getting involved in an area we knew little about and waste the valuable skills and experience we have built up over the last 20 years. Therefore it was important to us to build on those skills and experience and use blockchain technology to make areas of our specific industry more safer, transparent and efficient.
Our tokenised portfolio system has opened the doors to many exciting new things in regards to trading and execution, analysis and backtesting, and social portfolio copy-trading. We know this approach will be an industry first and change the way business such as ours will operate going forwards.
Industry Experience
To build a business well you have to understand the industry inside out. Our team has operated in professional trading environments for over 20 years. We have experience in every aspect of electronic trading including multi-asset trade execution, algorithmic modelling, risk modelling, trader training, education and legal and compliance frameworks in the finance industry. Many of the crypto exchanges that are used today were put together using 3rd party software and were not built to accommodate the number of users that now visit them on a daily basis.
Our platform approach is designed from the ground up by industry professionals who understand the needs of the modern trader and investor. Along with building a professional grade matching engine and connectivity network, over time we will make the social trading network as accessible as possible by integrating with smart home and wearable technologies.
Accessibility
We believe that investing shouldn’t be restricted to the more affluent areas of the population. Tokenisation will allow us to offer fractional investing opportunities to new demographics in some of the worlds largest untapped populations.
To Sum Up
Therefore in answer to the question of “why are we holding our token sale now”, the answer is because we are totally confident that, if given the opportunity, we can build something really, really good. We are also confident that when the dust settles on the crypto market, we will be one of the companies that surfaces during the new market cycle.
So lastly we would like to ask a question to all of the traders and investors out there that are sitting on large retracements in their crypto portfolios and are waiting (hoping) for a bounce or a return to old highs.
Can your tokens really do that? Is that likely if you are being honest with yourself? Have you learned how to take a loss?
If you have then do the brave, smart thing and cash out, switch and give us a shot. It will be painful and your body will be screaming at you to resist liquidating those losing trades, but we will give it everything we have and when we pull it off you will regard it as the best trading decision you ever made.
Best regards,
