Topic: ICO Due Diligence - get your ICO reviewed (Read 97 times)

Maybe I did not make myself clear on what we are trying to implement here.

Let`s review an example. Looking at Pantos website I found out that there are not links to LinkedIn profiles of team members. However it is not hard to find them by first and last name on LinkedIn.
Paul Klanschek https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-klanschek-a1808134/
Eric Demuth https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-demuth-9ba02943/
I do not see any mentioning of Pantos at all. Weird, is not it. The whole BitPanda team is behind the Pantos project and no mentions on linkedin. Possible LinkedIn account theft.

Let`s go on review this situation deeper.

Two CEOs is another thing that made me suspicious.
So I look at the company page on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/18164565/.
Click on the website https://www.bitpanda.com/ and see on the homepage a link to an article about Pantos.
https://tokensrecord.com/images/redflag/112/zxAdeS7d.png

At least this issue is resolved. So I added a green flag https://tokensrecord.com/greenflags/Pantos-Pantos-mentioned-on-BitPanda-website-1904 so others like you can recheck if I am right or wrong stating that BitPanda team is working on Pantos and discuss this issue (if it is an issue at all).

You may say. Cmon it is simple. It took you probably 2-3 minutes to figure that out. Yes. But it is not the most complicated situations. Projects like to mention people behind them just because they talked and received smth like: "Yeah, a great project to do." I always say that when I do not want to harm relationships or get into discussion with a startuper that is to emotional about his/her idea.

What if you have to recheck 5-10 members of the team to make sure that they are what they say they are. Or are they even part of the team or not?

Only one aspect of the problem connected to project.

To find a solution for due diligence procedure we are trying to structure at least part of it that can be put in a set of strict rules and combinations to simplify life for others. If there are community members who want to join us at this work feel free to add your facts or Red Flags about projects.

Thank you for your input.

We do not have sponsored reviews.

We are doing initial check of the project status. It is hard to do complete due diligence for all projects because it is time consuming.
What we are doing is a setting up a tool to add facts and validate them. Those facts affect the due diligence "checklist".

We are looking for those interested in joining us and work on covering more projects and share this information with the community. We are preatty sure that there are players interested in this information. Early stage due diligence for some projects is a closed information. For instance, Red Flags are not always public on the platform because we are rechecking them before making it public.

Sure. We use only public available information. If we do not find it and the team does not provide it we assume there is none.

Key points: ICO review procedure

Results are here https://tokensrecord.com/ico-due-diligence

A simplified scheme described below:

     Team: who are team members, are their social profiles available. - review linked in profiles if there are any (we usually skip those without public linkedin profiles).

     MVP: do they have an MVP available to test. - it is there or it is not there. The next step is to see how it works and does it work at all. If any code available we try to compile it.

     Company: is there a registered company already for selected project? - we use several website to check if the company is registered
      U.K. registration: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/
      Global https://portal.kyckr.com/

    Development: how recent are development updates uploaded? is there an open github repository? - we do basic code review and latest commits to understand is there any ongoing development or the team just adds comments to increase number of commits per day.

     Vesting: what is the vesting period for team/advisors tokens? - whitepaper, token sale section should contain that information. Good thing if smart contract contains vesting logic too.

    SmartContract: is there a smart contract available and was it audited by experienced team? - We look at github and review smart contract.

    Experience: is cumulative experience of team and advisors enough to complete the project? - compare goals of the project to previous team member positions and possibility of completing the project. We undrestand of course that you can always hire several members after the ICO but key positions should be there and it should not be one man army.

    Advisors: do advisors prove they support project? - Do advisers have relative experience necessary for the team to achive goals? We alos have a database of advisors that are joining almost any project that pays with tokens and do not provide any value for the project. But this is our opinion so we do not share it at this moment not to abuse anybody. We do not add it as redflags either. At least for now.

     Expenses: does expense plan correlate with road map of the project? - This part is the most questionable because if project is planning to work in US they can not call their investors investors (only contributors) and they do not have to share where they will spend money. But in other cases at least general idea of how money will be spent should be there. One of the redflags is when more than several percents will go towards early investors and

    TokenDistribution: are there any risks for investors in token distribution of selected project? - Key things we look here for the team to have motivation to improve project after ICO and not have ability to manipulate price afterwards.

     TechDetails: are there enough technical details to understand project? - This part depends on the project. If it is a solely tech project it is good to have understanding how deep team understands tech aspects. For other industry projects we are not so strict because business development is way more important there.

    Investor Protection: how protected are investors money after contributing into project? - There should be clear mechanism of investor money protection like escrow or at other ways mentioned in the whitepaper or token sale details document.

Each project should be reviewed individually and getting all green checkmarks does not mean that you should definetly invest into it. Due Diligence process does not include comparing to competitors, market research and doing any forecasts on project possible success or failure. This is represented by Interest Level. Not a financial advise. Right now only few projects are considered intereseting and even them are mostly for flipping.

Things described above is around 20-30 % of the work that should be done. It is a way better idea to have all things being rechecked by the community. That is why we have Red  Flags(not to invest) and Green  Flags (sort of proved facts about project) which can be rechecked by others. Our idea is that collaborative work can bring this process to a higher level.

Hundreds of ICO reviews means you had to do 1 every day. Proper due diligence is a full time job, I doubt you can push them all out with quality with 1 daily. And why do so many reviews? Why not select a few based on initial criteria and then do proper reviews? Isn't basic screening part of due diligence, after all?

Edit: I just looked myself and these are not really reviews. Just a checklist, which is only one of many tools in due diligence. And you also have sponsored reviews. That's a conflict of interest. You can't have sponsored content and rate ICOs without bias.

You can show how to do DD, what are the main points?

During last year we had reviewed hundreds of ICO and finally ended up doing an online project   to share our experience.

https://tokensrecord.com/ico-due-diligence - some of the latest ICOs reviewed are here.

If you want you ICO to be reviewed just leave a notice here and submit it to our website using this form.
Be ready for strict review and possible feedback you did not expect. But if you are ready to be 100% transparent for the community let`s do it!  

Details: ICO review procedure