With all the talk about the issues with ICOs, here's one that might be interesting to analyze for educational purposes. At first glance it looks like a competitor of DNotes Coin and DNotes Global.
I'd be genuinely curious to know what you guys think. I'm not asking about whether it would be a good investment (I have my own concerns). I'm thinking of it as a real world example. It's an ICO. There's a website, a whitepaper (that seems thorough), and a team that consists of people with some real world experience. What would be the things you would tell people to probe more deeply? Do you see any immediate red flags (I mean, besides that it's an ICO and we don't like ICOs around here)?
Here's the whitepaper:
https://worbli.io/whitepaper/index.htmlEdit: After reading
this article about mini IPOs, I'm starting to realize that it's a lot less productive than I thought to analyze individual ICOs. Just one quick example. One of the documents you have to produce if you want to go the mini IPO route is two years of financial statements to show that your company already knows how to spend money wisely and use it to make more money. So this ICO wants to raise $47,000,000 all at once with no prior history as a company (hence no previous financial statements). Maybe it might be better for them to raise a small amount (like $100,000) through crowdfunding and then use those funds to build out the first pieces and kind of prove themselves that way. Funny how easy that is to miss. I'm sure there are other examples and maybe I'll write a Steemit piece about that, but honestly, just taking a few minutes to carefully read through the legal process, and suddenly all those questions you forget to ask of an ICO become glaringly obvious.
I just took a very superficial look at it. You mentioned a couple of the necessities of any project but here are a couple of other things I look for - they have no social media presence at all. No followers, no Tweets. In my opinion, it's never too soon to start building your follower base, even just one person at a time, even just beginning conversations with people. What are they waiting for?
They need some advisors, some people with global connections and big picture perspectives if they want to compete on a global scale. If they don't have any I wonder why not.
And they want to build on EOS? It's not even ready yet.
So, they want to raise $47 million with no proof that they can handle any amount of money at all, to build an ERC20 token that they will eventually turn into an EOS token (because EOS is currently an ERC20 token itself), assuming that EOS will work swimmingly when it comes out this summer. And then they can begin to build and market their product. That's a lot to ask for. But that's the environment we've been in. I would think there would be a different standard this year, but I'm afraid that a lot of new people are going to come into crypto this year and they're going to bring in last year's standards. It won't end well for many of them.
Sorry, I'm a little pessimistic. I look at coins, assets, and ICO's everyday and most don't meet basic business standards. And way too many are actual scams. I looked at one yesterday that wants to raise $200 million and they don't even have a website. Well, technically they did, it was a single blank white page with their logo on it. I guess they need some funds first to build it.
As a real world example, I usually ask if there are already other projects that are already doing any of the things they talk about and are maybe much farther ahead of them. In this case, we can surely think of one!
