Topic: [ANN] Conicoin – ICO insurance platform (Read 855 times)

As you stated the KYC procedure to be obligatory, so investors who decide to stay will have go through it. If necessary we can also assist in organizing this process through our platform.

Thank you for your question. The insurance period will be set for each project individually. However, we will adhere to setting this period to at least several months. This will give our Clients the opportunity to analyze the activities of the project team and monitor their commitments fulfillment.

The initial target audience of our platform are the small-time investors. You have presented the perfect circumstances to use our platform. If you had used our platform you would have had the option to return your funds throughout the insurance period by the same price as you had purchased them.

Unfortunately, that actually happens. Not sure how many projects had these kinds of end, but I was once followed a project that claimed to reach soft cap around the middle of their ICO, and by the end of it, they revise their announcement, saying that many investors promised to invest but never actually investing. And, as the statement of softcap was based on the said "agreement", the soft cap "failed" to be reached.

Up to this point, I am not sure if that unfortunate event really happened to them or that was just an excuse and they were planning to run scam from the beginning. Also didn't know if they ever returned the funds of investors who actually send their investment.

Anyway, back to your case, what'll be to the investors who decide to stay, then?

I got interested because this platform is really needed because a lot of fraudulent projects were launched last year. However, can you explain more details about the insurance period, where it begins and ends? Will it really help a small-time investor to avail your services? I've invested in ICO last year and though they cannot be considered a scam, yet their price was not the price I expected when I got the tokens. I waited and waited up until it becomes worthless to sell it now.

In our opinion this case is very unlikely to happen. But if this happens, the ICO team will have to consider the possibility of losing a part of investors after the implementation of KYC.

Understood.

This leads us to the second question, which is from a case I also followed once. It was a blatant scam, IMO, but let's apply this to a legit case.

What's your policy for this case:

ABCoin is a project of medical health, and so on, and so on. After three months long of ICO duration from the four months they planned, they managed to achieve their softcap of 10,000,000 ABC. Somehow, plan changed and they have to comply to KYC, requiring all investors to do it.

Given your policy on such situation, where the investors are allowed to withdraw their funds in case they refuse KYC (which is initially not required), many investors took their funds back, and within the course of one month (which is  around the end of ICO) causing the initially collected 10,000,000 ABC to fall to 5,000,000 ABC, which is below the softcap.

Thus, their initially "ABCoin, soft cap reached!" claim now turned south, and some people would consider this as a scam as they revoked their initial "soft cap reached" status which convince them to take interest on the project. While, as we know, they didn't really planned such scenario to happen and scamming people were not their plan from the beginning.

If the Investor decides to return their funds, they will be fully returned based on the initial investment.

So, to conclude, they're allowed to "cancel" their investment and fully withdraw their funds from the project? Or, will there be some dedducted fee? This company policy of yours somehow has a potent to merge with my next question about KYC, but let's see the answer up to this point

In our case this problem will be solved by the following scenario. As you have mentioned crypto-investors knew that the ICO has some investment from a real-world investor. This fact can be the reason to believe in the project, if the real-word investor has a “Big name", if it does not, crypto-investors are free to decide whether or not they want to have tokens of a company that does not wish to disclose information about it's performance and keep the option to return their funds if it's needed

Uhh... Actually, I'd like to leave the KYC case for now to be revisited later at a separate and different case. The case I'm currently discussing about is a project that's funded by 2 sources: by crypto-investors (namely, us, the user of your service) and by real-world investor (which ends up funding at a larger proportion).

With this established, the story developed to a situation where the real world investors demanded a complete secrecy, where development is limited for their consumption only, for the sake of protecting secret from competitor, which leaves the crypto investors (and indirectly, your platform too) in the dark for a really long time.

The interesting part is, this is actually a real story. I don't feel comfortable disclosing the name, for the fear of being considered as bad mouthing, but there is this project that stretched their token release for perhaps 8-9 months from ICO, and leave their crypto investors in dark because they're binded by NDA of real-world investors. Maybe you have an idea of what project I talked about as some crypto reviewer(s) declare them as one of the longest ICO. If I'm not mistaken, their project began in early 2018, ICO concluded on mid 2018, and here in Q1 2019, token release just happened one month ago, and they're not on any CEX yet.To be fair, it seems they deliver a really big project, given the indication of which "companies" are involved with them

Interesting example. We think that this situation is highly unlikely, but for the sake of mental experiment, let's discuss it.
 
In case when the ICO project has some secret breakthrough technology in stock and the interest of a Big Secret Investor or simply needs to start KYC, we will merely stay consistent in our solution - we openly transfer this message to the Clients. Then there are 2 scenarios: the Client can either go through the KYC process as expected by the Big Secret Investor and the ICO team or return their money. We think, that this is the fairest way in this case because it rests with our Client to decide what to do.
 
If during or before the integration period a widely known Company invests money in the project, a logical step would be to disclose the name of this Company. The name of the Company and its relation to the project will in itself be a guarantee of project team’s intentions and commitments.
 
In case if the Company investing into the ICO project is not widely-known or its name is irrelevant for the overall reputation of the project (Secret Affiliate Company) and at the same time we have the "conspiracy" scenario going on, we are not sure that this kind of project is worth the risk. Judge for yourself: no information on the project, no commitments, unknown deadlines. This project would be both useless and be a blow to our reputation.
 
On the other hand, if we get in touch with the Big Secret investor, we might as well offer them our services and sign the NDA on our side. All three sides would benefit from this arrangement: the ICO team receives a guarantee of timely payment for the work done, the Investing Company has a backup plan in case something goes wrong, we receive an opportunity to build up our reputation.

To avoid confusion and focusing more on the topic, I'd like to keep the second topic away for now and discuss more on the first one. If I may give an example,

ABCoin is a breakthrough project on medical sector that try to achieve healthier life. They requested ICO from your service, and managed to collect 30% of their hard-cap from the ICO. However, at the same time, private investors also interested on their project, amd fund them with something worth 65% of the hard-cap. And as project goes by during the funding, ABCoin developed so much that now they have an elixir for immortality. However, this needs to be kept hidden as the private investors don't want each of their competitors to know they're on the lead of something. Thus, an NDA where they may not give updates about their development or even date of token unlock until the product is finalized, even to your team. Which lead us to a situation where:

1. iCO investors only know that the softcap is reached and project should be successful, but their token is still locked until god-know-when.
2. ABCoin can only give "please wait for update, we will announce once available.
3. Your team only got a slightly better info about update as in "we're in the middle of something big with big companies. Please wait."

On this situation, without knowing that ABCoin is in the middle of something big, and there already 1 year passed since their presale event, most people will assume it is a scam, even your team will mostly think it is, due to the long stretch and intense silence, although in fact, it was not and it was truly a big project. Yet the stretch made ICO investors demand to declare the project as scam and their funds liquidated.

As we have explained before, If during the ICO integration our partner is forced to introduce any additional privacy rules, we will carry out the necessary changes to the list of commitments, inform our clients of the update and in case of NDA breach come up with some other kind of actions verification. After all, the investor should be notified by the ICO team of integration with our platform and act accordingly.

Based on your second question, you have not quite grasped the idea of our project. Let us go through once again. If our Clients face any kind of condition that does not meet their expectations/acceptance criteria(being that a newly introduced KYC, that they for some reason want to avoid, or any other reason), they are free to withdraw the invested money and un-hold the purchased tokens.

Regarding third party NDA, yes it is unlikely indeed, but it doesn't mean it's impossible. There still will some probability it'll happen. So what'll be your solution?

And regarding privacy, it's actually not a point that I asked, but your explanation sparked a curiosity on my mind, suppose a project require their investors to do kyc in the middle of their ICO, where they were not asking this at thr stsrt, will the investor allowed to leave with all their funds?

same name as POW coin?

Thank you for great question again.

Indeed there is a possibility that there may occur some NDA-based complications.

However, it is rarely the case that the ICO partner is fully restricted by the third party.

Furthermore, we are not a bureaucratic platform. We are easily adaptable. If during the ICO integration our partner is forced to introduce any additional privacy rules we will carry out the necessary changes to the lists of commitments, inform our clients and come up with some other kind of activity verification.

What is your insight for following scenario:

A project, which runs under your insurance ad well as seeking third party investments, expand so much during the middle of ICO up to the end that they have to delays so many things like distribution, exchange listing, etc. Also, due to the success with third party, they're forced to have NDA (these issues, claiming their projects are under NDA, so no distribution of info allowed, are very often nowadays) that renders updates about milestones and achievements undisclosable. Basically, distribution delayed, information are not for public, they pretty much seems falling into hiatus, going under, you name it, yet their development is still going --although silently-- and they're not scam. BUT, at the same time, the amount of silences would encourage the thought of scam.

Thank you for your question. We do not have direct access to the funds. The safety of the both sides will be guaranteed by our Smart-contract. The Smart-contract is open source and everybody can see how it has been programed.

Basically, you offered a position of an escrow for projects? Without any mean to accuse you of anything, may I know what ensures both the investors and ico devs that you won't flee with the funds, be it investors' or the ones that supposed to be liquidified to devs?

Now this is a question that we have spent a lot of time thinking through at the very beginning of the project. We have come up with a two-point solution: commitments check and longer period.

- Commitments check
Throughout the first stage of our communication with the ICO Project team we will establish a strict list of commitments that they make to their target audience and our Clients. The main acceptance criteria will be the clarity of verification of these commitments. Both our clients and we as a team need to be able to confirm real progress in the project - proven exposure to the community, pilots, MVPs, real traceable progress (such as real code for IT projects), etc. This way we want to zero out the “phantom” projects.

- Long period
We do not consider projects that are planning a several-week ICO to be perspective. There is only so much that can be done in a 2-week period. Our goal is to provide our clients with a way to minimise their risks. For this reason we will only be considering ICO projects for integration that last at least several months. Over this period of time the Investor will have enough time to fully familiarise themselves with the project, get in touch with the project representatives if necessary and observe the progress made by the project team.

I like the idea but what happens once the ICO is over and they do an exit scam 2 days later?
I mean it's pretty easy to fake that there is work done during a 1 or 2 week ico...

If we understood you correctly, you are saying that currently more ICOs are focused on quickly raising money rather than being future-oriented projects. We consider this approach to be wrong. We believe that this is one of the reasons why ICOs are currently going through a period of lack of trust.
We consider collaboration with our platform to be an indicator of the fact that the ICO team focuses on long-term work, partnership with the clients and development.
Please let us know if we understood your point correctly. If not, please clarify, we will be happy to follow up the discussion.

the idea is quite interesting and interactive, but it is not easy to attract ico project developers to insure their projects. Most ico projects do not have the authority whether their project is successful or not. all they think about how they get support in the market have value for their digital assets.

Thank you for your question!

As we are only looking for perspective ICO partners, we are currently working on partnership development. We are planning to run Mainnet in 2 months provided we find enough partners that meet our quality requirements. If not, we will be forced to move our deadline.
If you have any particular projects in mind, please let us know, we will make sure to consider them.

Long waited for sometime similar. When are you planning to run with the real projects on the Mainnet?

Thank you for this reasonable question. We are aware that liquidity is a crucial thing for some ICOs. We have come up with a solution to introduce several successive fundraising periods upon request of the project team. Thus, the team can receive the funds by the end of each period in case if the project satisfies all previously set requirements. Please also note, that we do not demand that the ICO tokens be only sold through our platform, we offer the ICO to sell a share of tokens with the insurance option to state their intention to realize their project.

Idea looks great on paper, but when you factor in market volatility and the fact that the ICO will need fiat liquidity to develop and run daily operations, the idea starts to stumbled. For example, last year's market collapse has made blockchain startups wary of holding funds in crypto, with many opting to liquidate immediately in order to preserve value. The crashing and burning out of those that kept hodling for that mythical bull run has become a painful lesson for us all. Undeniably, startups will need access to the funds documented for development and operation, the less volatile (fiat), the better. However, this project has its entire function based on crypto liquidity and thus, its attendant volatility. Yes, crypto is the future, but we're not there yet. We have to develop for this future and the truth is, fiat is integral to this developmental phase. So, how's the project addressing that?

Yep. We don't want to let ICO system die

I like the idea. It is a good reaction to all the shit that happened with regards to ICOs.

Problem

The underlying idea of our project was the fact that the credibility of ICO projects as an investment tool has drastically plummeted due to the latest tendencies of the ICO market.

The following are the major bottlenecks that we face when we decide to invest in ICOs:
a.   absence of guaranteed refund of deposits invested into unprofitable projects;
b.   lack of investment tools for small investors allowing fast income generation;
c.   absence of mobile investment platforms guaranteeing proper safety of available funds;
d.   lack of independent analytics of existing ICO projects.
 
Our service allows our clients to rid of these uncertainties and mitigate the risks.
 
Solution

With the help of Conicoin Insurance you can return the initially invested funds in case if the ICO Team stops satisfying the expectations of the investors or stops following the initial list of commitments.
Over the lifespan of the ICO, Conicoin presents you with an option to return the initially invested funds and give up the purchased tokens.

The Conicoin Insurance program is based on the ERC20 Conicoin Wallet, made by our team. Like when using any other cryptowallet the user has to log in to his/her account. Conicoin Wallet supports import with mnemonic (12 word recovery phrase), private key (64-digit hexadecimal notation) or JSON key (Ethereum account import method, with an encoded private key).
 
How it works – Instructions

Please note that this article is devoted to Conicoin Insurance in particular. For further familiarization with Conicoin Wallet app please visit
https://medium.com/@conicoinapp/conicoin-wallet-2a3f7d44ecce

1.   Download our app.
Currently you can find two Conicoin applications in App Store: mainnet version – blue logo and testnet version – black logo. Please, download testnet application for familiarization with Conicoin Insurance system:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/conicoin-rinkeby-testnet/id1434991023
2.   Create your personal account.
3.   Make up a 6-digit password for operations confirmation (withdrawals, payments, access to the assets).



Partners list
—   Here you can find the full list of all available ICO projects that you can invest in with a high-level overview of the current investment status.
—   Partners are the ICO projects, which were approved by our team for cooperation. We insure the invested funds, allowing you to return the invested funds at any moment before the deadline. Deadline is the end date when the insurance period ends. The deadline is set by our team before the integration of ICO based on the results of communication with the Partner, our understanding of the project and our forecasts.
—   Apart from the insurance period we also set the list of specific objectives for the ICO project with concrete deadlines. The Partner has to achieve these goals during the insurance period. We will be informing you about the progress in achieving goals with push notifications in our mobile application. You can use it as a tool for making your decision about investment return or additional investment.
Partner tab
—   Pushing the chosen Partner project on the Partner list tab will redirect you to the Partner tab. Here you can find the current amount of funds already raised out of the whole sum as well as the price for one token, the maximum limit available for purchase and the Deadline. Below you can find the description of the project.
—   Pushing the “Buy” button will allow you to insert the amount of funds you wish to invest. You will see the purchased tokens on the Partner tab once the transaction is confirmed.
—   In order to withdraw your tokens you need to tap one of the Partners and push the “Withdraw” button.
—   In order to return your funds you need to tap one of the Partners and push the “Refund” button.
Investing tab
—   Pushing the “Buy” button on the Partner tap will redirect you to the “Investing” tab with detailed information about the transaction.
 
How it works – Theoretical part

1.   Investment
The Client chooses an insured ICO from the list and purchases n tokens. Conicoin forms a transaction, which initiates the investWithEthers(address _address) function or investWithTokens(address _address) in case of CON tokens payment (tokens of our project), where “_address” is the Partner’s address. After completion of the transaction n ICO tokens are held by the smart-contract. The record of the investment and the amount of purchased tokens is catalogued in the smart contract register.


2.   Return of investment
The Client of Conicoin can call in the return of the investment before the end of insurance period. For this purpose Conicoin forms a transaction, that initiates the returnInvestment(address _address) function, where “ _address” is the Partner’s address. The invested funds are immediately returned to the Client’s account while the purchased tokens are released and become available for purchase.  The records of the invested funds and purchased tokens are deleted from the smart contract register.

 
3.   Withdraw of Investment
Before the end of insurance period the Client can initiate the withdrawal of the purchased tokens. For this Conicoin Insurrance forms the transaction, that initiates the withdrawInvestment(address _address) function, where _address  is the Partner’s address. The invested funds are immediately transferred to the Partner’s wallet and the purchased tokens are sent to the Client. The records of the invested funds and the amount of tokens are deleted from the smart contract register.


4.   End of insurance period
By the end of the insurance period the Client no longer has access to the “Return of investment” procedure. Only withdrawal of invested funds is available. The mobile app Conicoin Insurance will notify the User about the end of insurance period with a Push-notification and will recommend to withdraw the purchased tokens. At the same time the Partner can independently initiate the procedure of withdrawal of the invested funds, by initiating the withdrawalProcess() procedure. The Partner will withdraw the raised ETH and the non-sold tokens. The record of the Partner is then deleted from the register.

 

We encourage you to participate in testing our system today

1.   Download Conicoin Wallet (testnet - black logo) in App Store via the following link:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/conicoin-rinkeby-testnet/id1434991023
2.   Get test Ethers by following this instruction:
https://medium.com/@conicoinapp/6fd052a245a8
3.   You can find our code on GitHub:
—   iOS App:
https://github.com/Conicoin/ethereum-wallet
—   Conicoin Insurance Smart contract
https://github.com/Conicoin/insurance-contract

We will be very grateful for any feedback that you may provide as we are looking forward to improving our solution. Please contact us via the following channels:
https://t.me/joinchat/EwJRChSVXyeG6dE7ZqzBZA
[email protected]

Next steps of our project

As we have started our project from scratch, we had numerous ideas of how to make it more useful for our clients. We have come up with a solid plan and quite a number of initiatives that we are planning to realize in the nearest future:
—   At the beginning of 2019, we will commence the work of our system with our first ICO partner.
—   Provision of "Post presale" service – sale of tokens after the end of the ICO.
—   Introduction of an accountability register of ICO partners.
—   Creation of a marketplace (trading platform), where the users will be able to independently sell ICO tokens.

Mainnet version Conicoin Wallet (version without Conicoin Insurance) you can find via the following link:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/conicoin-ethereum-wallet/id1434562691

For cooperation or if you have any questions, please email us on:
[email protected]

We would be grateful if you could share interesting projects with us that are planning to do an ICO in the nearest future. We will gladly consider them for partnership. You can share the link to the recommended projects in the comments below.