This year is the year of Crypto and ICO. A lot of new coins and projects appeared. However, the old model of ICO campaigns is not working. Investors are afraid of scam and they need a quality product and the stable base that will support a currency. 2018 will be the year of new generation ICO.
For example, Pavel Durov, the founder of “Vkontakte” (the Russian version of Facebook) and Telegram Messenger is preparing to launch a cryptocurrency Gram. Thus, Pavel will be able to monetize Telegram and will provide Asian countries with a digital payment system. The name of the new project is TON (Telegram Open Network). The platform will be integrated with many of the most popular messaging applications. TON will be used as so-called “light wallets”, and its currency will be called Gram.
It is the brand new level of ICO campaigns. Gram is created to serve and support the ready-made working product. Also, ICO campaign will be launched to let the company expand in spite of making a name for an unknown company without a product.
Another example is KickCity community platform. Company exists for 2 years and now its ready to expand. KickCity is an existing event platform that focuses on community building and social interactions. Funded by angels and founders, KickCity has been bootstrapped for the past 1.5 years. The company has built revolutionary products for the event space and its currently generating revenue.
KickCity is building a decentralized reward-based event marketing protocol on blockchain. Having worked with many event organizers, it became obvious that their biggest problem is selling tickets or getting registration. KickCity team is solving this problem by creating incentives. Rewarding anyone to promote events. This simply means that users can invite their friends and when their friends buy tickets, they earn Tokens (Cryptocurrency), while the user who bought ticket gets a kind of cash back — motivation to buy more tickets on KickCity platform. KCY tokens can be used to buy tickets on the platform and can also be converted to FIAT.
In your opinion, will such projects will be the new generation ICOs?
Do you know such projects?
Projects you mention are one way blockchain and ICOs will evolve. Another is Equity Tokens - fully legal way of funding equity in start ups. Neufund.org is the first one on the market with this solution, but more will come. Equity is much more responsible way of investing then tokens, and fits >90% of projects much better then a utility token ICO. Therefore, I see Equity Token Offerings as a much larger potential market then utility token ICOs.