In this article:
- How ICO Grill was born
- How it works
- Roadmap
- On-boarding ICO analysts
Hello everyone!
Thank you for landing here and for your genuine interest in finding out what ICO Grill is all about.
In the beginning of this year, my partner and I created The Online Crypto Summit as a crash course in blockchain and crypto for ourselves and for the people who followed us.
For the purpose of this introduction I will not go into a lot of details about the summit. I’ll just say that we had a blast with over 25 leading industry makers including co-founders of DASH, Bancor, Electroneum and AION just to name a few.
Inevitably the topic of ICOs was ingrained into the summit. We decided to invite a few of ICOs to present to our closed group community and see the response. As we dived deeper and deeper into the ICO world we quickly realised that, as cool as this disruptive funding model seems, it lacks one utmost important thing to be lasting in time — transparent, accountable relationships with investors. As more and more people got burned with projects ghosting away, the pressure for regulations almost killed the excitement in the beginning of this year.
There are sure a lot of ICO rating and review websites and services but yet, it seems that this is not enough and not working.
As almost 50% of the ICO projects are at just the idea stage and the majority of them don’t even have a proper old school business plan, it is almost inevitable to see a lot bunch of them fail. Problem is investors “fail” along with them.
As we kept featuring more ICO projects to our community and we saw their interest to get involved, the ICO Grill project was born.
It started as a simple idea — Get them grilled. On all aspects of their projects. We envisioned it kind of like the Shark tank for ICOs.
ICOs loved the idea, our community loved the idea and we quickly got excited on how to bring even more value into it.
So here is the simple strategy.
We decided to invite ICO analysts on board to give expert reviews of the projects we already grilled and reward them in exchange with a % of the ICO Grill community fund that we already started.
In the meantime we also team up with some of the greatest minds in tech to develop a rating algorithm for both ICO projects and experts. The algorithm will be directly related to the fund rewards, meaning that the higher your reputation on platform as an expert, the higher the cut you get from the fund. This will all be automated, recorded and executed through a smart contract.
Experts reputation will be directly related to their activity on platform — how many projects they rated, how the projects they rated performed over time and also how the investor community evaluated their analysis. There will be a limited number of experts we will accept over time, depending on the number of projects we list (number of listed projects will also be limited, based on the total annual volume of ICO projects; and starting at 60 projects per month). Also there will be a limited number of analysis a project may receive to avoid repetitive insights and save time for the investors.
Logically the early experts to join the platform will have a competitive advantage in building their reputation score, thus a higher chance for a bigger cut from the community fund. We will also add bonus reputation points to the first 30 experts to join ICO Grill.
IMPORTANT: At this bootstrapped stage, ICO Experts/Advisors have the opportunity to gain more reputation by referring audience traffic to the projects you review, as well as who refer projects to be grilled. More info through the invite only Telegram group.
Where money in the fund comes from:
Some of the first grilled projects voluntarily contributed ICO tokens to our token fund. Next batch of projects will contribute both unappreciated ICO tokens as well as Ether for the services of ICO Grill platform. Pricing will be based on negotiations with the founders — and these is the funds that will be distributed to ICO Grill team (see next section). In future we will unlock other revenue channels and user experiences.
You can see the status of the fund here: https://etherscan.io/address/0x22A617cF290b4b6e9Ce1DC5251e6a143873b46a8
Fund distribution:
50% will be distributed among the ICO Grill community in the following manner:
10% — Founders
12% — Operations Team — developers, video editors, marketing, admins
13% — Early partners and investors
6% — Top ranked ICO analysts
3% — Operations reserve
6% — Education — producing educational content for entrepreneurs and investors to bring them on the blockchain and crypto market
The other 50% of the fund contributions will go toward funding Idea stage ICO projects that will be listed on the ICO Grill platform in the future. The ICO Grill community will decide which projects to receive funding by voting. The corresponding amount of tokens received from funded ICO projects will go back in the fund and distributed in the same manner, once the tokens appreciate.
Major breakthrough:
The next step in the ICO Grill Platform development is to develop escrow functionality within the smart contract to enable on-platform projects funding and to allow investors to use it as a tool to further reduce their risks.
Profit potential:
In the near future (when we onboard the first 30 experts) we are planning on setting up several packages of pre-determined fees that ICO projects will pay to get grilled, receive expert analysis and access the investor network.
Our goal for the fully developed platform is to accept and list the top 60 projects each month. At that time we will have full functionality and will offer Initial Coin Offering projects a one stop shop to find advisors, mentors, investors and additionally receive a full range of ICO startup services including legal, community management, smart contracts development etc.
Our fees will be 5% to possibly 20% of total ICO project token amount, depending on the service level they optin for on the platform.
For early ICO Grill team members: Just focus on the long-term prospect. This fund will get big and your stake could be secure, diversified and much greater than any ICO involvement you are currently into!
ROADMAP (as of 22 May, 2018)
Now that you know what we are up to, we’d be excited if you join the ICO Grill community as an ICO Expert / Analyst / Influencer.
Are you ready to jump in?
- Comment ANYTHING below — let us know what you think about the ICO Grill project, give us your critique, suggestions, congratulations or anything else that will better establish this collaboration.
- Return to our invite-only telegram group for ICO Advisors and follow the process outlined there. If you did not get an invitation to the Telegram group — comment below and introduce yourself, then connect anyone of the founders either through the website or on LinkedIn and request to become an ICO Advisor / Expert / Analyst / Influencer.
