Four Important Things To Look For In An ICO’s Planned Product
(An Example of COBINHOOD ICO)
Disclaimer:
This article is based on my own personal research and experience, and is not intended to be an expert investment advice. It is a guideline to help you do your own due diligence on ICOs.
Introduction
With so many ICOs popping up on almost daily basis, one can easily become confused about how to appraise these ICOs, especially in terms of their planned product offering. The fact is that the product of any ICO (indeed any start-up) is one major factor that determines the ICO’s (or start-up’s) future positioning, potentials, and — in the case of ICO — the growth of their token’s price and worth.
Many times, people have invested in so called great crypto-companies only to find out they have received some worthless tokens, mainly because there really is no valuable product to match the hype. Some other times, ICOs may just be a guise to create another cryptocurrency without any real innovative product other than just the tokens. Examples of such dead coins can be found here.
Because of these issues with ICOs, this article is written as a guide to help interested parties thoroughly scrutinize the product being touted by an ICO. We shall consider an example of the ongoing COBINHOOD ICO in examining ICO’s product’s appraisal parameters.
To start, let’s briefly introduce COBINHOOD ICO:
COBINHOOD ICO
In a nutshell, COBINHOOD, found at cobinhood.com, is a cryptocurrency service that is planning to launch the world’s first “ZERO trading fee” cryptocurrency exchange. Yes, ZERO trading fee (you read it right!). The zero trading fee will apply to both spot trading and margin trading, and will definitely maximize traders’ profit and increase market liquidity. Also, COBINHOOD will provide ICO underwriting services to solve the problem of ICO token liquidity issues. Participation in COBINHOOD’s ICO is aimed at sponsoring the COBINHOOD exchange development.
More details about COBINHOOD ICO can be found in the links below this article and their product is referenced in details within this article.
Now, here are the 4 things to look for in an ICO’s product:
1. Innovation Value / Imitation
2. Improvement / Replacement Potential
3. Feasible / Implementable
4. Timeframe for Product Creation
1. Innovation Value
First and foremost, looking at the ICO’s product, we consider issues like:
· Is the product innovative? And to what extend is it innovative?
· Is the product an imitation? And to what extend it is imitating another product?
· What differentiates the product from other similar products?
Innovation, in the context of this article, refers to, not just the product’s novelty, but the measure of revolutionary ‘thinking’ that is put into the product’s design and development. Innovation depicts the originality of the product.
As stated on wikipedia.org, the term “innovation” can be defined as something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new, that “breaks into” the market or society.
In checking the product’s innovative value, we seek to find out if the product emits some level of originality and better than existing ones. It must not be a completely new invention, but it should also not be a common imitation of other products. For example: a product might be a word processor, but unlike the existing Microsoft Word, it may have some innovative features to perform calculations like spreadsheets. You see, that’s not altogether a new invention, but definitely an innovation around an existing product.
The “Innovation Value” can be a strong factor to position the ICO’s product, when launched, to a specific market segment and drive its worth and value.
Also, if the product is innovative, to what extent is it really innovative? For instance, introducing a product similar to others in the market with just a different colour may not pass our innovation criterion. As an illustration, creating a chat system like Telegram with a different colour theme isn’t really innovative. This colour update can easily be implemented by Telegram, and the new product may not have the desired demand. So, we take into account the content and depth of the ICO’s product’s innovative features.
**COBINHOOD’s Product’s innovation value
COBINHOOD ICO’s product is a “zero trading fee” cryptocurrency exchange with ICO underwriting service. Let’s analyze its innovation value.
For sure, cryptocurrency trading exchanges are not new. In fact, as at the time of writing this article, CryptocoinCharts indexes 112 cryptocurrency exchanges with a total 24hour volume of 558,350 BTC and $2,369,916,490 on 5197 trading pairs! But none of these exchanges offer Zero-Trading Fee. None acts as a fully dedicated ICO underwriter to solve ICO token liquidity problems. Introducing these features as planned by COBINHOOD would be some great innovations. In fact, there’s a ready market waiting to grab the opportunity to trade for free. Also, there are good ICOs looking for effective ways to solve token liquidity issues.
Summarily, COBINHOOD plans to introduce the following innovations:
· The World’s first “Zero Trading Fee” Cryptocurrency Exchange” — this will feature more innovative properties like: high frequency Order Matching Engine that can process more than one million orders per second, User-friendly KYC Process, truly international exchange with 10 major global languages supported and multiple currencies allowed, etc.
· ICO Underwriting Service — this will underwrite high-quality, promising ICOs that pass Cobinhood’s stringent due diligence by a dedicated ICO review team.
· ICO Spark Program — this will help well-known enterprises and successful startup companies, and even celebrities launch their ICOs.
Without mincing words, these features are definitely innovative and revolutionary. So, even though COBINHOOD is launching a cryptocurrency exchange, it is not just an imitation of existing ones. It isn’t “another crypto-exchange” on the worldwide web. It’s an innovative product, fully loaded, and most likely to appeal to the masses.
2. Improvement / Replacement Potential
By Improvement / Replacement Potential, we mean that the ICO’s product, apart from being innovative, should clearly improve upon existing products and/or even replace some worthless ones. Not all innovations create improvements of existing systems. For example, changing the packaging of a product may not necessarily improve the ease of opening the new package. The new package should be both better than old ones and also easier to open.
The advent of internet and computing networks in the mid-20th century drastically changed business and global landscapes. So, also, the current buzz around Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies should improve and change the present systems.
**COBINHOOD’s Product’s Improvement / Replacement Potential
The features of COBINHOOD products mentioned above, beside being innovative, will definitely improve upon existing exchange services. For instance:
· The high frequency order matching system built on Google Cloud Platform and programmed with Golang will improve upon current issues of delayed order book updates that make traders unable to trade in real-time;
· ZERO Trading Fees will improve and maximize traders’ profits.
· User-friendly KYC Process will improve KYC completion timeframe by reducing it to 24 hours, unlike the current system that takes days, weeks and even months to complete.
· ICO underwriting & spark program will definitely improve ICO token liquidity and help startups launch their ICOs easily
· …and many others … (see the whitepaper in the link below)
3. Feasible / Implementable
ICO’s product shouldn’t just be innovative and have good improvement potentials; it should also be feasible and implementable. This means, the product can actually be launched — it’s doable, achievable, and workable by the development team.
One should be wary of ICOs with bogus mission, claiming to disrupt an industry with some “Elephant” project that gets abandoned along the way. Don’t me wrong, big projects are cool, as long as there is a clear-cut path to achieving it.
Also, in analyzing whether the product is implementable, one should also check if there is a prototype or beta version of the planned product. Of course, an ICO does not necessarily need to have a prototype or beta version of their product. But, where there is a prototype or beta version, the possibility of actually creating the product after the ICO is higher. It also mean that development is already on-going.
**COBINHOOD’s Product — How Feasible / Implementable?
For COBINHOOD, there’s already a prototype of the exchange being developed. This lends credence to the fact that their product is feasible, implementable and achievable. You can view the exchange here: https://trade.cobinhood.com/trade.
See the image below:
4. Timeframe for Product Creation
Many times, an innovative product is only likely to succeed when launched during the time of that innovation’s technology buzz. For instance, launching a blockchain startup now or within a year from is very likely to position it for huge success. But delaying the product launch for over 2 to 5 years may find that product struggling to compete with many other similar products that would have been launched during the years of delay.
Generally, we look for ICOs whose innovative products are planned for less than a year or at most one year from ICO, so that contributors will start seeing their supported project working and possibly raising their tokens’ values. The product does not have to be 100% fully functional when launched, but some features should be working effectively, while development continues.
**COBINHOOD’s Product Timeframe
As per their roadmap, the COBINHOOD zero-trading fee exchange will be online in November 2017, that’s just barely one month from ICO. By December 2017, Margin trading and FIAT funding will commence, while ICO Underwriting Service will start from first quarter of 2018. More details on their whitepaper (link below).
The COBINHOOD ICO actually has a very good timeline. There’s no excessive waiting before the ICO funded project comes online.
Conclusion
An ICO’s product is perhaps its most important selling point. A good product will ensure future growth and higher token value. A bad product will kill the business and ICO contributors will not get any reward from their contributions. Therefore, we consider the product analysis very important, and we hope the above points will help you in analyzing ICO products.
COBINHOOD ICO Links:
To find out more information about COBINHOOD and to contribute to their ICO, please visit the links below:
COBINHOOD Website: https://cobinhood.com/#
COBINHOOD Whitepaper: https://cobinhood.com/assets/whitepaper/whitepaper_en.pdf
COBINHOOD Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cobinhood.exchange/
COBINHOOD Telegram: https://t.me/cobinhood
COBINHOOD Twitter: https://twitter.com/cobinhood
COBINHOOD Official ANN thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2169745.0
My ANN Username: chatbtc
My Bitcointalk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=936680
