The 3D’s of TOKEN — reinventing the ICO

Blockchain at its core has always been envisaged as the technology that can improve the world with the 3D’s: decentralize, democratize, and disintermediate.

This cuts across many varied industries and use-cases. It creates the kind of excitement that the Internet first created for the US military, or Facebook for the Ivy League of US universities. The fundamental differences are highlighted in those 2 examples — the US military is hardly a decentralized or democratized environment (follow orders young people!), and Facebook’s has morphed into something that by its nature can never conform to any of the 3 D’s (the original use-case was for Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends to compare female students at Harvard).

The TOKEN project at https://presale.market is a great example of how Blockchain can fulfil the 3D’s — let’s look at each in turn.

1. Decentralize: Being the first project in the ecosystem that has a working Alpha where you can connect, follow the steps to get your testTOKEN through a Rinkeby TestNet deployment, and actually use the service makes TOKEN stand out. Any activity you perform on the platform is decentralized, immutable and visible to everyone.

This DApp could play a de facto role for the service industry catering to ICO’s / STO’s. As a supplier, your services can be published on-chain transparently. Prices will reflect capability because a rating system allows projects to immutably score service provider’s performance. This means that those who provide the best services at the right price will be added to presale funds more frequently. This drives decentralization as more providers will become more competitive and the project owners will reap the benefits — to be passed on to investors / contributors.

2. Democratize: Blockchain was built to create the vision of a true democracy, and to completely eliminate the intermediary in the transactional chain. In living this ethos, we have developed TOKEN to be a true measure of value for all participants in the ecosystem, not least the projects that will be listed and rated on our platform.

Investing becomes more democratic over time. Projects are listed and then rated by experts whose assessments are upvoted by actual investors. The weight of those upvotes depends on how active the investor is. As more projects come onto the platform, and the investor base grows, so does the information flow on the platform amongst all participants, creating more transparency and the ability to find those projects that are most suitable for a particular investor’s risk profile.

3. Disintermediate: The design of the TOKEN platform has taken to heart the underlying investment issues with Venture Capital and Angel Investing. It is our belief that being able to create circumstances that replicate these investment classes without the concomitant loss of control, equity and potentially management of a business (project) is of maximum value to project owners and investors alike.

For project owners, they are able to access investment opportunities designed to maximize their monetization opportunities for the project. Investors will have a range of tokenization and other investment techniques that while simulating VC’s, actually disrupt this model, and will create the kind of flexibility, assurance and liquidity that they would never have access to as a smaller investor seeking VC-type returns. We all know that crypto investors are risk-seeking by nature, however imagine if investment banking-style structuring came into this ecosystem what a devastating outcome that would be.

The last group of participants is the Experts. In Alpha, Experts are a pre-selected group of 100 respected individuals in the ICO/STO space who will rate the projects and will be part of the virtuous circle described above. Eventually, even this function will be decentralized.

TOKEN is a decentralized market for token presales. But it is much more — it is a “decentralised Amazon for the picks and shovels of the ICO and STO markets”. Arguably, it is what an investment bank in a tokenized investment world is.

Join us at https://presale.market/ , connect with Metamask, and participate in the decentralized future of ICO rating, and early stage investment.