Topic: Past ICO SCAM Analysis (Read 969 times)

ICOs in 2018 Collect Nearly $14 Bln, Double of 2017 Funds: Report



Reports say that during the first half a year a huge figure of $13.7 bln was raised via ICOs

The reports were published by a well-reputed auditing company PriceWaterHouse (PwC) and Crypto Valley Association.

This year around 537 companies conducted an initial coin offering (ICO) and some first unicorn ICOs completed this year. Good examples are Telegram which raised $1.7 bln and EOS closing on $4.1 bln.

Last year, in 2017, 552 projects carried out an ICO and raised $8 bln. In 2018, except Telegram and EOS, 535 coin offerings took place and they collected almost $8 bln.

A top PwC manager said in an interview that this year the ICO sector became more stable and its focus on best business and legal practice improved.

Report details, ICO locations

The document says that ICOs are becoming more confident and popular once again, especially mixed models combining seed venture capital investments with ICOs to follow.

Curiously enough, in the UK this year as many ICOs took place as in the US and more ICOs in the UK are planned than those in the US.

More ICOs were carried out in Singapore than in the US  since the latter saw the pressure of the Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in this industry.

Also initial coin offerings took place in Switzerland, Estonia, Lithuania, France and Germany– as for Europe. In Asia, these events were conducted in Singapore as mentioned above.

Besides, some companies raised funds promising digital tokens in the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands.

Among other countries hosting ICOs were Israel, Hong Kong and Singapore. Some ICOs surely took place in Japan, Russia and South Korea but the report does not mention them.

ICO rules in various jurisdictions

In the US you are allowed to collect only $1 mln cap through an ICO. If you want to raise up to $10 bln– Europe would give you a warm welcome. In that area you will get total certainty on behalf of the regulators and exempt the ICO from accredited investors’ rules.

Many startups prefer to get a seed investment from venture capitalists, $100,000 to $1 mln, and then move on to ICOs. They feel safer and more confident that way. Although sometimes venture investors do not care about the actual product, but all they want is just sell their tokens 10 times more on exchanges later on.

Conclusions

The report says that around 65 percent of ICOs are about to deliver the product, five percent just planning so far, 10 percent do not have any product yet and 20 percent are struggling.

Generally speaking, the figures are positive and one may say that the ICO phenomenon is speeding up both in quality and quantity.

Blackmoon Ready to Upset Wall Street: Past ICO Review



Is it possible to invest in IPOs though ICOs?

Blackmoon is bringing tokenized investment funds that can be bought and sold to the market. You might be scratching your head and asking, “What is a tokenized investment fund?” It is just as it sounds, they are baskets of investments, funds and other financial instruments that have been turned into tokens and thus represent a value unto themselves. They are also referred to as security tokens.

Essentially, this allows participation in the traditional market though smart-contract enabled Blockchain technology.

Finances

Blackmoon had a two-day ICO Sept. 12-13, 2017, which brought in $30 mln in funding. The token, known as BMC, is ranked by CoinMarketCap at 353 and is, at time of writing, trading at $0.62. It debuted at $0.86, which is a decrease of 39 percent. Its all-time high was $2.36 on Jan. 10, 2018. Since that high, it has remained relatively stable by comparison with many other cryptocurrencies.

Investment tokens on the horizon

Blackmoon has already tokenized its first IPO. Yes, that is not a typo, you read correctly, IPO. Quoting directly from their website: “Blackmoon is the first company in the history to tokenize an IPO in this way and it allows cryptocurrency investors and users access to the Xiaomi Corporation IPO.” So as a token investor, you can take part in the IPO indirectly by purchasing the tokens that have tokenized the IPO. There are more investment types on the way, too.

Portfolio tokens

Blackmoon has three tokenized investment funds in the works for release. Think of these as tokenized investment funds with varying levels of risk. The first one is a one-day-most-volatile strategy. It promises to generate the returns corresponding to the yield of the crypto assets with the largest volatility. In other words, it wants to be more volatile than Bitcoin in one day.

The second token is a top-20-market-cap strategy, by putting the top 20 coins by market cap into a basket. Its strategy is to generate the returns corresponding to the yield of the cryptocurrencies with the largest capitalization.

The third coin combines cash and the top six coins by market cap to provide less volatility with cash as the buffer.

ICOs are for everyone

ICOs open the door to everyone to be able to invest, not just accredited investors. This levels the investment playing field for everyone and allows for more participation.

“Historically participation in an IPO has generally been a prerogative of institutional traders, but now with the democratization of the market and availability of new tools, it has become available for everyone. We have provided cryptocurrency holders the option to participate in the performance of Xiaomi stocks without leaving the Blockchain universe, and this is what Blackmoon has been all about from the start, ” said Blackmoon CEO Oleg Seydak.

The verdict

While it might seem hard for some to grasp the idea of tokenized IPOs and other funds, this way of investing is only going to grow as more and more people take advantage of these new investment opportunities, for which they were not “accredited” to participate in before.

If all goes well with the launch of the tokenized funds, we might see Blackmoon lead the way in the tokenized investment funds for the time being. However, once the market of tokenized assets is established, competition will creep up out of nowhere and things will get innovative and interesting.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Plain Payment System Slightly Dressed Up: Past ICO Review



In review: payment processor with a rating system for users, nothing new here

Trust. It is the glue that binds the world together. Without it, we would not be where we are today. However, trust in trade between a buyer and a seller has been a challenge stemming from ancient times: is the product going to work? Will the buyer pay in full? Is this a scam? These are some of the questions that are always running through the minds of buyers and sellers.

Monetha is a refreshingly new take on an age-old problem in a desert full of generic payment solutions all vying for your business. That’s what they want you to think, but after close inspection, there is nothing revolutionary here.

Pay to play, play to pay, don’t get played

Monetha raised $35 mln in a one-day token sale on Aug. 31, 2017. It’s sale token price was $0.16. The token entered the market 50 percent higher than the ICO price at $0.30 per token, hitting an all-time high of $0.55 in January 2017 before crashing down to $0.04 at the time of writing.

Despite raising more than $30 mln, the company’s market cap is only $8.8 mln, rather curious for a company that is going to revolutionize the payments sector.

On a further note, if you do the math, only 50 percent of the tokens issued in the ICO went to investors. Only half the tokens are in circulation, meaning that half are in the hands of the company.  In this model, investors are really only getting 16.5 percent of the revenue.

Invitation pending

Monetha has a functioning product, an app for iPhone and Android that allows the user to create a profile for buying and selling and gets rated on the deals done.

The rating helps other buyers and sellers know if the individual is reputable or not, but don’t most sites have this anyway?

The platform works with e-commerce sites.

However, the caveat here is that in order to make the transaction through Monetha, both users have to have accounts on the platform. If the buyer or seller wants to buy or sell something form/to someone who does not have the app, then they need to invite them to join to transact.

Something that is easier said than done. Imagine, you are are selling some items and you are asked by the buyer to set up an account to sell them. Most times, you are going to ignore that invitation, because:

1) You might not know what it is.

2) Being solicited by a stranger on the Internet to join something is the first sign of something being sketchy.

3) You might not have the time to be bothered to set up an account just to sell some old mirror from your house.

Fees, contracts, here come the problems

Monetha charges 1.5 percent fee on all transactions, of which one percent goes to the company and .50 percent to cover the “Voucher Smart Contract” which maintains the ecosystem.

They accept payments in many ERC20 tokens and reward users with Monetha for using the platform, but with prices as low as they are now, they better be giving away a lot, or it’s just going to seem like a worthless points system, where the points are worth fractions of a cent- not impressive.

We reached out for comments about how the rewards system works but did not get a response.

Not so special after all

Don’t judge a book by its cover, and that is true about websites and promotional materials. Always do your homework, and what looks too good to be true, usually is!

Monetha makes some pretty cool claims about what they can do, but when you get down to it, it’s really nothing that special that you can’t do with PayPal and eBay.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Leadcoin Leads on Dive to the Bottom: Past-ICO Review



So you’re tellin’ me I can buy your lead?

Leadcoin doesn’t seem to be leading the way for much, with a CoinMarketCap rank of 635 and a token price that plummeted from $0.087 initial price on March 27, 2018 to the current price of $0.005! Almost a 100 percent drop in value.

Despite poor token price performance, Leadcoin did manage to raise $50 mln in a 10-day ICO during March 1-11, 2018, on the premise that Leadcoin will revolutionize marketing and business practices. Haven’t we all heard that one before?

So you’re tellin’ me I can buy your lead?

The premise behind Leadcoin, founded by Shmulik Grizim, is to allow the buying and selling of hot, unused leads between businesses.

Sellers get value for their unused leads, leads find the right solutions, and buyers can buy hot leads. Everyone wins.

The everyone wins scenario finds its way into so many Blockchain-based companies these days. Sure it sounds like a good idea, but so do a lot of things until they are executed or attempted to be executed.

At this point in time, the system is not live yet so, we are in that awkward period after an ICO, where a company is sitting on a ton of cash but there is no product yet.

Sometime in Q3 2018, which is just around the corner, we should expect to see the launch of the first node, Webydo according to the website with integration to Salesforce and Hubspot by Q4.

Leader of the pack

Shmulik Grizim is the Founder and Heads up three other technology companies within the SaaS, web design and digital marketing industries. Grizim’s most recent venture, Webydo, is a patent-protected web platform with a global network of more than 300K users. Essentially, it's a cookie-cutter website building platform without using code. Grizim specializes in building new technology corporations from the ground up, constantly searching for solutions that promote the creation of a better web for all. So he is building up new companies, letting them get started and then moving onto the next project. He is a serial Entrepreneur with his sights always set ahead on the next project. Hopefully with his sights still set on Leadcoin taking off.

Why the sharp decline in price?

We wanted to learn more about why Leadcoin dropped so much after the ICO and asked,  “Since Leadcoin’s token entered the market, the price dropped hard and then has remained at a low level and has gradually been in decline, can you give some reasons to why this is?”

While it could be market conditions or lack of confidence by investors, we were unable to get a response as to why the token has been suffering such a hard time.

Nevertheless, investment sites have given Leadcoin a “bad” investment rating and some giving it an “E-”. Perhaps, once the first node is turned on and the network starts to function it will start to increase in price, or as so many times we have seen in the crypto market, Leadcoin might continue this dumpster dive further, let’s check back after Q4.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Hello i'm the co-founder of Bits2u, I understand that PeruCoin has been poorly stated (and we regret it), but, what I do not understand is how you can think that bits2u is scam if we arrived paying more than 2 years without problems, it is more, if you wish you could see our tests Payment: https://bits2u.com/payments.html

Regards,
Bits2u Team

Nucleus Vision Wearing Privacy Shades: Past-ICO Review



Nucleus Vision might need to get its glasses checked as price plummets and test market testimonies are absent

Nucleus Vision (NV) offers a way to track and reward walk-in customers in brick and mortar stores, which makes up a majority of transactions still, in today’s marketplace. Upon entering a store, Nucleus sensors register the customers phone and prompts them to share their information with the store in reward for Tokens. The Nucleus tokens can then be exchanged for discounts within the store.

It is similar to the rewards programs many stores offer, but instead of clogging your keychain with tens of barcode tags, which need to be scanned at the point of sale, NV puts and app on the smartphone and a sensor in the store.

The sensor can be used to gather data from customer as he/she enters the store to personalize the shopping experience for the customer. This will in theory increase conversion and drive organic growth, a win-win for the customer and the business.

Doing the math

NV had a two-day ICO sale from February 26-28, 2018 and raised some $40 million that is $20 million per day!

The token sale price was $0.0416. The price has fallen to $0.0145 at the time of writing. It is ranked 143 by CoinMarketCap and has market cap of $63,197,356 USD, daily trading volume of $1,215,610 USD and a circulating supply of 4,326,245,098 NCASH and a total of 10,000,000,000 NCASH.

Launch and Sensor Deployment

NV was founded back in 2013 and only just recently had its ICO. In 2017 it started deploying its sensor in test markets. For the second half of 2018, it plans to enter into India and South East Asia with 2,000 and 5,000 sensors deployed, respectively. It currently has a small footprint in only 25 stores and has identified more than 100,000 users.

NV plans to expand into North America by Q1 2019 and continue to ramp up expansion over the next four to five years.

However, despite them being in 25 stores now, they offer no names nor do they provide testimonials about how the product is working from either the stores of the customers using it.

Software and sign-up headaches

How many times do you just want to go online to a site and order one thing and be done? It’s a fantastic feeling when you can “shop as guest” without registration. For NV, The customer must register and authenticate with each individual store. Seriously?

Even though stores can share the gathered data with other locations, the user must confirm this every time. Ugh, so if I want to run in and out and I forget to agree, then I will lose my bonus, right?

Such a headache. In the promo video they show the guy going into the store and get a reward just for showing up. This is kind of false advertising. They make it seem like a cool process when you go into the store, but in reality it appears to be more complicated than that.

This registration and authentication process is quite inconvenient and requires a lot of maintenance from the customers and will get a big thumbs down from users. If the customer does not want to “check-in” at each store, then the retailer will not be able to tailor the experience to meet the needs and both parties will be dissatisfied.  When asked about this in an email, no response had been given by NV.

Top Heavy Management Team

While there are lots of high level management executives on the team, there appears to be only one lead technical developer managing a handful of other developers. Blockchain is a relatively new technology and needs to have a team of dedicated professionals to prevent and/or solve problems as they appear.

Final Thoughts

As the token price falls further, it gives some indication of the trajectory of the company, dowards. According to the website many Q1 2018 goals have not been completed and with lack of testimony from the test market, it makes one wonder how progress is coming and if things are working as planned.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Green Energy Competition Heats Up Down Under: Past-ICO Review



A weak roadmap, strong competition might push WePower out of Oz

The tokenization (what isn’t getting tokenized these days) of electricity is one major use utility that has recently caught on in the Blockchain space. A number of similar projects have surfaced, with a major competitor, Power Ledger, vying for one of the same green energy markets in Australia.

High competition in this space plays a positive role overall as the driving force of innovation, but the implications for any individual company, including WePower (WP), mean market dominance is not guaranteed.

We reached out to WP concerning the competition with Power Ledger by asking: “How do you perceive Power Ledger? A company you can with alongside with or a direct competitor?” However, we did not receive a response.

Throw another bill in the bank, mate!

ERC20 WPR token raised $40 mln in the initial ICO on Feb. 1, 2018. There was a presale that lasted from Sept. 22, 2017 to Feb. 1, 2018. So the company had a lot of time to raise the funding.

The token entered the market at $0.20 and then slid down to around $0.049 per token a 77 percent loss since its debut. It has a market cap of $22,281,006 and a rank of 284 with daily trading volumes around $460,130, according to CoinMarketCap.

Team is not from Oz

The company is Lithuania based with an office in Estonia. They are working on power projects in their respective countries as well as, most notably in Australia and Spain- it’s pretty sunny in these countries.

- Nikolaj Martyniuk Co-Founder

- Artūras Asakavičius Co-Founder

- Kaspar Kaarlep  CTO

- Jon Matonis Blockchain advisor

- Eyal Hertzog Blockchain advisor

- Heikki Kolk is Energy IOT Expert

Incentives

WP’s main goal is to make green energy projects easily financed by allowing it to come from the community and individuals as opposed to the traditional top-down method of financing.

The financing model created by the WePower ICO incentivizes both producers and energy buyers to use the platform.

For producers, the model helps to increase return on equity by 20-25 percent, according to the website.

For consumers, buyers purchase energy upfront on the market for a reduced cost. Since the energy rights are held within a smart contract, energy that is not used is liquid and can be sold in the market.

This is tokenization in action right here, making things that are not normally liquid, ready to be sold at a moment’s notice.

Buyers, therefore, have access to cheaper energy, using only what is needed and reselling the rights to access the surplus.

Not much news, where are we on the roadmap?

While WP has some cool stuff going for it, there is not much action in the news about them and the most recent article on the website is from October 2017.

This is not a good sign and can explain why there has been a recent dip in the token price. Investors are always ready to run when there is no news.

On the website, the roadmap does a poor job at outlining any goals or where they stand now in terms of completion.

Furthermore, the competition with Power Ledger may be a bit tough to handle as they are already established in Australia and the Australian Government granted the Power Ledger $2.57 million AUD for a two-year research project to take place in the City of Fremantle, just southeast of Perth.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Past-ICO Review: Stox Tied to Bancor’s Sinking Ship



Stox started out white hot, but it was tied to Bancor and that brought the curtain down on the token

When the ICO took place, it was a sure bet that investors were placing their stock in Stox, a open source decentralized prediction market platform based on the Bancor protocol. This platform allows users to make predictions on pretty much anything that can be predicted, such as sporting outcomes, elections, whether; you name it, you can probably predict it on Stox.

Financials

Gibraltar-based Stox ran an ICO on Aug. 2, 2017 that lasted for one day and raised between $27 and $30 mln in funding. However, the token, which was launched two days after the ICO closed, on Aug. 4, 2017, has been in decline since its entry into the market. It debuted at $1.21, peaked at $2.60 on Aug. 25, and then fell sharply to $0.42 by the start of October 2017. It saw a price surge in December 2017, and reached $1.66 but fell down to $0.36 at the time of writing, demonstrating that investors have shied away from this once white-hot ICO. For a prediction-based platform, what has investors spooked? There doesn’t seem to be a prediction section on how well Stox will fare on its own website.

Mayweather: prominent ICO proponent

Floyd Mayweather has been known to promote ICOs. He posted on Instagram about Stox, where he flashed a suitcase of $100 bills and boasted he will “make a $hit t$n of money … on the Stox.com ICO.” This is not the first time Mayweather has promoted a crypto. He also promoted Centra Tech, which ended up on CryptoComes’ Top 10 ICO Failures. Does celebrity promotion lead to the demise of companies using an ICO? It’s an iffy statement. It could be the fact that Stox rode on the coattails of Bancor, even basing its smart-contracts on Bancor’s model.

Do your homework before investing

Since Stox is based on the Bancor model, then it is understood why the price will go down. It is because any token created from Bancor will be tied into Bancor’s price. Bancor’s price is suffering since its debut in July 2017. Here is the reason why, taken from my Bancor Past-ICO Review here on CryptoComes:

According to Professor Emin Gun Sirer, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, Bancor will continue to trail the market and its lack of price discovery will diminish any smart tokens created from it.

This, in essence, will keep those coins [referring to any coins developed from Bancor’s Blockchain] from growing beyond that of Bancor’s price, remember they are tied together. In other words, the tokens created off Bancor have no chance to thrive. When the parent coin is going down, Bancor will take them down, too. Tim Draper, billionaire venture capitalist, and backer of Bancor argues otherwise that it will give liquidity to the market. If you bought Bancor, then liquidity is great, because you will want to sell it as fast as you can.

There you have it, it is the Blockchain Stox is based on that is dragging it down. The technology is cool and the users are enjoying the platform, who doesn’t love to take a gamble and place a bet, but its the parent Blockchain dragging down the token.

Better to lead, than to follow

While there are many tokens out there that are based on other Blockchains, such as Ethereum and EOS, these have been proven and accepted by the Blockchain community to be the proper places to build from. In many cases, the axiom, “it is better to lead, than to follow” plays to truth, if Stox did not follow Bancor’s model, it might have had a better chance at improving it’s token price, but alas, it is tethered to Bancor’s sinking ship.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Airtoken Loans out of Thin Air: Past-ICO Review



No smartphone, no Airtoken, no loan

Airtoken has a unique concept for underdeveloped countries and people without credit or access to a bank account. The parent company Airfox has created an app that turns a smartphone into a virtual bank.

The “bank” is part of a network of users that allows people to build credit and get loans from others and then pay them back over time, allowing the user to start a business or cover emergencies, etc. According to the website,

AirToken is an Ethereum-based ERC20 digital utility token that facilitates the transfer of mobile airtime, data and currency, as well as payments for goods and services, with minimal friction and fees.

Financials

A month-long ICO ran from Sept. 19 to Oct. 19, 2017 and raised some $15 mln in capital for the company.

Airtoken entered the market on Oct. 10, 2017 at $0.0161 per token and reached a high of $0.0822 per token before fall all the way down to $0.01103 at the time of writing.

The token has, like so many others, not fared well.

Airtoken is ranked at 456 by CoinMarketCap and has 1,050,000,000 AIR in circulation and a total supply of 1,491,492,558 AIR. Deployment plans are large for this coin.

The app was already released for use in Brazil and the team has plans to deploy to the rest of South America and beyond.

Marketing and Developing Countries

With the lofty goals for almost global deployment is part of the reason why we are not seeing higher token prices. Also, Airfox is not really adverting in developed countries because its service is geared for people without access to bank accounts and credit. These people are not going to be the ones investing in the token, they are going to be the end user. The only way Airtoken can achieve success is by mass adoption. This will be a bit tricky for the company as it is not the only provider out there offering credit, payment services, and microloans. Besides a handful of competitors in the cryptosphere, there are tons of other “off-chain” companies and nonprofits in this industry.

No smartphone, no Airtoken, no loan

Finally, another challenge that Airtoken will have to contend with is that many people may not even have access to a smartphone to use the app.

While smartphones have become more widespread since the initial launch of the iPhone in 2007, many still struggle to afford the seemingly basic technologies that are taken for granted in the developed world. Access to a smartphone could be a serious barrier to mass adoption that the company is seeking.

Wait and see, wait and see

While the intentions of Airtoken are good and great for the developing world, lack of awareness in the developed world is hard on the token price and the rather competitive market for microloans is large, coupled with access to technology could be the factors that are preventing Airtoken to take off. Perhaps, more time is needed for further implementation.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

So sad)
We've still got a lot stories, and I guess it's never ending with ICO

How about Perucoin?
It has "scam" written all over it IMO. Just look at the shoddy design of the OP

This ICO is supposed to raise $5M to $13M funds to buy a factory and a mining farm of 1000 to 2000 ASICS to show Peruvians how crypto mining works... but you know what? These are the same people who run https://bits2u.com/ a cloud mining service! seriously? a cloud mining company in need to buy 2000 ASICS to put them in public exposition? Aren't they supposed to own those machines already?

Also, they are promising up to 200% yearly profit at bits2u, what a joke.
More hilarious stuff: apparently they used to have a FAQ with the following question. "where do you get your profit from?" and the answer was 50% BTC mining, 30% PTC... and 20% HYIP. Can you believe it?

Their Perucoin token sale ends mid August, and I'll be surprised if they don't run with both Perucoin and bits2u's funds by then.

Am I missing something obvious here? Or perhaps most ICOs are scams and this is not news to anyone? To be honest I'm out of the ICO loop

JET8 More Ads in Your Instagram: Past-ICO Review



Gig economy marketing will spam social media to death

The marketer’s dream: get your target audience to participate in marketing and push products through social media with stickers that users can put on their Instagram accounts or special frames from their pictures with product branding.

That is the premise behind JET8, a Singapore-based marketer that is rewarding users with tokens for promoting brands. The tokens can be redeemed for purchases in stores such as 7-11, Alfamart and Circle K around Asia. The SEC and the IRS in the US are going to have a field day with the token.

Financials

While the company was founded back in 2014, the token was not launched until March 8, 2018, two days after the ICO ended.

The ICO ran from Feb. 28 through March 6 and raised some $32.7 mln.

The company has had close to four years to build its own brand and identity before launching the ICO and while it had a good ICO, the JET8 token has not seen much action.

It entered the market at $0.0347 and over the course of a month fell to $0.01, losing two-thirds of its value before being lifted up to $0.022 for a short period and again falling, then surging back up in May and now sliding down to $0.0136 down about 86 percent from its all-time high, which was its debut.

Tokens that that have downward trends after their initial release tend not to fare well over time. There is a reason that investors are selling them off.

Let’s look into what it could be.

The good and the bad, the marketer will sell you them both

While the design is novel and in an era of the gig economy, many people will think, “why not become a gig advertiser and get paid for it?”

Leave the Uber car at home and start taking selfies and adding badges and frames to push products and get rewarded for it. While you are at it, get your Uber car wrapped in an advert and take pictures of it and add your own badge for extra rewards!

Before I continue, I am not endorsing this kind of action, nor promoting shameless advertising tactics. However, it is this very action that will start to ruin it for everyone.

Rampant adverts will desensitize the masses

Herein lies the problem. Advertisers will reap rewards at first as users push ads to get rewarded. Then, the magic fades and people will start to get sick of their friends’ endorsements, the practice will become despised and hated and it will die off as quickly as it appeared.

Furthermore, if such a system came to the US, you better believe that Uncle Sam is going to get his cut. The redeemable tokens are going to be seen as cash by the IRS and they are going to want to tax it as income, and later introduce a sales tax to tax anyone who uses it to pay for goods or services.

As you may already know, governments are slow to react, and JET8 advertising will already be in its waning twilight when the government implements its tax on the crypto. That tax will be the final nail in the casket, as people are already moving away from the app and now the government wants to jump in and take a cut. The remaining users are going to drop that like a hot potato.

While it has a lot of cool marketing angles, JET8 does not leave much for people to have in the long-term future because sending pictures to each other is one thing, but sending pictures every day or every few hours with an advert is another issue that no one wants to be spammed. With the longevity and sustainability of this project diminishes. JET8 is not going survive the fall.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Top 10 ICO Scams



ICOs boomed in 2017, but so did the scams. Here is a rundown of the biggest ICO scam heists

1. Pincoin and iFan $660 mln
2. Plexcoin $15 mln
3. Bitcard $5 mln
4. Opair and Ebitz $2.9 mln
5. Benebit $2.7 mln
6. Bitconnect $700,000
7. REcoin and DRC $300,000
8. Confido $375,000
9. PonziCoin $250,000
10. Karbon $200,000

If 2017 is known as the year of the ICO, then it will also be known for the year of the ICO scam. Over the past few years in which ICOs have been running, there have been some scams here and there.

However, with all the attention that crypto started to receive in 2017, this limelight cast a shadow for the scammers to hide in and grow. With some good web development and marketing skills, scammers were able to swindle millions of dollars from poor investors.

Let’s have a look at some of the biggest scams, ranked by amount of money stolen.

1. Pincoin and iFan $660 mln

Two coins under one company called Modern Tech, which is headquartered in Vietnam, but the coins are located in Singapore and Dubai, respectively, might just have become the largest ICO scam in history.

The two coins combined have suckered some 32,000 investors out of more than $660 mln when they refused to make cash payouts.

On calls from the duped investors and some local government backing, the companies have gone silent, the first sign of guilt. Should it be proven that they made off with that much money, they will be the largest ICO scammers to date.

2.Plexcoin $15 mln

This Quebec-based scammer got the book thrown at him by Canada and the US in a cross-border scam that allegedly raised more than $15 mln.

The scammer and founder of Plexcoin, Dominic Lecriox, promised investors that Plexcoin would be able to do the same things Bitcoin can do, except his would be much faster.

This was back in the days before Bitcoin launched the lightning network, which significantly sped up transactions and reduced the abhorrent miners fees the ballooned over the last quarter of 2017.

While Canadian courts fined his company $100,000 for contempt of court and a two-month jail sentence, the US and SEC are still trying to get a piece of him, however, still held up in court.  

3. Bitcard $5 mln

It is hard to say whether Bitcard had malevolent intentions when it launched all the way back in 2014, with big promises to completely overhaul business, government, trading and transaction software.

While it had a good hook to catch and reel in investors, it was lacking a way to go about doing what it promised.

There was no white paper and inconsistencies on the website. When complaints started to appear, the team vanished and so did the $5 mln they raised after the ICO.

4. Opair and Ebitz $2.9 mln

These are two ICOs that were launched by one clever scammer, only knows as Wasserman to defraud investors not once, but twice in a unique scheme that tied the two together via domain rerouting.

Opair was to be a decentralized debit card system that ran on its own token. Ebitz was rerouting its domain though Opair. Opair was shut down after some investors doing their due diligence found out LinkedIn profiles were fake. But Ebitz, which billed itself as a better Zcash, ran a bit longer before shutting down and vanishing with almost $3 mln total between the two.

5. Benebit $2.7 mln

Benebit was going to offer a way to get more points, similar to credit card rewards with tokens through this scam. However, fake LinkedIn profiles did these scammers in, too.

They stole photos from an all-boys school and used the photos to create the team on LinkedIn. I guess some investors were tipped off by how young the team was and that they all wore the same clothes. Nice try, but the scammers did not think that one through very well.

6. Bitconnect $700,000

While Bitconnect had been accused of being a Ponzi scheme a few times before, it finally stuck when the SEC moved in ordered a cease and cease and desist against the company. Users of the platform were able to lend and make interest on Bitconnect tokens, which had a Ponzi-based referral system.

Since its closure, Bitconnect is facing a class-action lawsuit from users who were duped out of their money.

7. REcoin and DRC $300,000

Two coins one creator, sound familiar? Real Estate Coin and Diamond Reserve Club (DRC) were supposed to take the next step and be backed by real-world assets, real estate and diamonds, respectively. However, founder Maksim Zaslavskiy overclaimed too much and the SEC came in shut him down and arrested him because his two companies were, in fact, empty shells, and the ICOs were considered securities and not related to the blockchain. Zaslavskiy was arrested in late September 2017. The SEC has an ongoing investigation into this case.

8. Confido $375,000

Not much to report on this “smart-contracts” based hoax, which never came to fruition because the founder said that he was in some legal troubles, which were unmanageable and that he had threats on his life.

Perhaps the two are related? If you steal other people’s money there are bound to be legal implications and threats of death. Think twice before you commit fraud!

9. PonziCoin $250,000

Why on earth would you invest in a coin that bills itself as “the world’s first legitimate Ponzi scheme?!” Well, there were enough duped investors to dump a quarter million into this Ponzi scheme.

This was intended as a joke and perhaps a hard lesson to those out there who don’t do research on what they invest in. According to the website, the show is over and the money has been returned? For a while it was funny.

10. Karbon $200,000

Karbon was supposed to be a decentralized social marketplace. Is that similar to the Facebook page where you and buy and sell things with your neighbors?  

However, what it turned out to be was just a poor folk depositing money into an account with no hope to receive anything in return, little did they do.

More details on ICO HERE

DomRaider is a no Bidder: Past ICO Review



The auction is over for domain auctioneer despite a well-funded ICO

Who doesn’t love a live auction? Items up for bid on stage, the auctioneer is intensely scrutinizing the crowd for the next bidder. A hand goes up. A bid is taken. The price increases. The intensity thickens as more and more people compete for that desired item, whatever it may be- a golden Bitcoin perhaps?

France-based DomRaider (DRT) is seeking to disrupt the auction world for domain names but has run into trouble as its token price slides and there seems to be no one at home updating the website or sending out communications.

Financials

DRT’s month-long ICO from mid-September to mid-October 2017 raised $41.8 mln, a hefty sum. The token entered the market at $0.049 and at time of writing is trading for $0.016, a major fall of 67 percent. It is not looking like a very good sign for DTR. Additionally, there is a circulating supply of 591,500,000 DRT and a total supply of 1,300,000,000 DRT, which will dampen the price further. 

Red flags

ICANN is a very centralized system of controlling domain names and DRT is seeking to disrupt it.

How? Well, it’s hard to say because there is no white paper on their website and the link, if there ever was a link there, to the uses of DRT is also non-existent.

You can, however, search it and you are linked to DRT’s blog to access it. But that is a rather unprofessional manner of constructing a website for a company, as potential investors should be able to find things such as a white paper and how a product works without much effort. A final red flag is the poor use of English grammar. DomRaider is looking like no bidder.

Significant risk admitted

If you do manage to find the white paper and read it, you will see that the company has gone to great lengths to protect itself by stating the following:

- The Initial Coin Offering (“ICO”) project presented by the company DomRaider is an unregulated fundraising operation. It poses several risks to buyers, in particular, that of losing all amounts traded for tokens issued by DomRaider.

- DRTs will not be reimbursed in the event that the DomRaider Auction Service is not ultimately developed or does not operate on a permanent basis. DRT owners acknowledge that this is a significant risk that they accept

The developers are aware that this auction house could go up in smoke and that if it does, with a downwards trending token it just might, they have taken the precautions to protect themselves legally if anything were to happen.

No news for months

The most recent news item on the website was from Feb. 22, 2018 and in addition to that there is a “coming in April” banner still up.

It appears there is not much going on at DRT headquarters as the token price slides and the spider-bots are spinning their digital webs around the corners of the site.

While intentions might have been good, this is looking like another failed ICO.

(Gavel strikes table) This auction is over.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Fitness Monetized: Past ICO Review



Fitness tracker monetization attracts investors and Dallas Mavericks for partnerships

Lithuania-based Lympo has developed an app to monetize fitness tracking and create an ecosystem around it where all participants are fairly compensated.

This sounds like a dream come true on paper, but will the app be able to work as promised?

Not so sure, as the app is slated to be ready in 2020. With a long wait time, fitness enthusiasts may look somewhere else.

Financials

The 11-day ICO ran between Feb. 17 and 28 this year and raised $16.8 mln. The token entered the market at $0.02 and at the time of writing is trading at $0.114 an increase of 450 percent in only four months, impressive!

There are one bln tokens in circulation and it has a market cap of $88 mln. A recent price surge is due to it recently being listed on Bitfinex and Ethfinex and signing deals with the Dallas Mavericks.

Love/hate

Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban said to Bizjournals "the Mavericks found clear alignment with Lympo’s mission to create a healthier world by utilizing the latest technology to encourage fitness and healthy living in a whole new way."

The Mavericks deal is ironic because of Cuban’s stance against cryptocurrency. However, it was announced last year the Mavericks will begin accepting crypto payments for thing such as tickets, and merchandise. This an ironic turn of events coming from a guy who hates Bitcoin.

Fitness monetized

According to the website, Lympo is building an ecosystem that allows for users to be rewarded with Lympo tokens for healthy lifestyles and achieving fitness goals.

Additionally, Lympo wants to ensure that all data is used by all industry stakeholders and everyone is rewarded fairly. Lympo’s goals are the creation of:

1. a Lympo Fitness Wallet
2. a Marketplace
3. a Lympo crowdfunding platform

The wallet would be used to store users’ rewards, which they could later spend in the marketplace on things such as hiring personal trainers and health service providers. The crowdfunding platform exists to serve as an investment platform for which new data-driven companies could invest into new apps to upgrade the Lympo experience. While this may sound great, and all stakeholders will be fairly rewarded, there is no definition of what that means?

How many tokens will a user get by running a mile or going to the gym? How much it cost for an hour of personal training?

This information is not available and it is reminiscent of a credit card points scheme, where $1 equals one point, but when you go to put that towards your balance, 100 points equals $1. Marketing ploys at their best.

Time is not on anyone’s side in crypto

While this is still a new app, there is still some time required until the technology goes lives and it can be used.

The recent add on some exchanges and the announcement of their first partnership are some major milestones for this startup.

However, the company must get their app up and running or all these big partnerships and announcements will be for nought.

The full release of the app and software is slated for 2020; a long, long time away in the cryptosphere.

On one hand, this gives them time to get the project completed correctly, but on the other hand, it puts investors on edge; seeing things happen so quickly in the cryptocurrency world, 1.5 years is a lot of time to wait.

Time is of the essence with crypto. If you are unable to maintain positive attention, then you will not be able to succeed.

By saying things will be ready to go almost two years later, leaves questions in many minds. In the meantime, investors could lose faith, competition could push Lympo out, lack of communications to the media makes people wary: is the company still working towards goals? Is there infighting? Is this a scam? Many will ask these questions. 

Lympo.lt was founded by Ada Jonuse, which was the initial platform to bring together individuals with personal trainers in Lithuania.

Jonuse is the founder and CEO of Lympo. She leads a team of 11 others that make up the base of the company.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Basic Attention Token Fails to Get Full Attention: Past-ICO Review



Basic Attention Token garners just that, basic attention as it fails to follow through on technological developments

May I have your attention, please! That worked, didn’t it? Are you still reading? Good. Then you might want to hear a bit more about how Basic Attention Token (BAT) would like to disrupt the traditional advertising market.

However, has not nearly captured, forgive the pun, it’s just too easy, the attention of the market to do so. Before we get into the technical aspects, let’s have a look at the books. Now, this next section should have your full attention, because it is about money.

!Attention! Financials

BAT had its ICO on May 31, 2017 which lasted for one day brought in $36 mln in funding. The must have gotten some people’s attention to raise that kind of money.

The token debuted at $0.36 and one year later is at $0.28 a loss of 22 percent, ouch! It seems it lost almost a quarter of the initial attention it had received; the excitement dwindles away.

BAT has one bln tokens in circulation with a maximum of 1.5 bln, and there is 500 mln currently uncirculated. It is also an ERC20 token based on the Ethereum Blockchain. It is ranked 58 by Coinmarketcap.   

At this point, 25 percent of you stop reading

But I hope you will continue as I hope this next bit gets your attention, it sure did for the middlemen that are to be cut out of the advertising cycle of BAT gets its way.

It won’t, however, so don’t worry. What it would like to do is create an ecosystem on the Internet where users and publishers can reward each other for either looking at advertising or supporting quality content.

The system is essentially three parties: advertisers, publishers, and users who can directly affect each other based on advertising or content.

Users can block ads or they could get paid in BAT to view ads by publishers or advertisers. In turn, the users could reward the publishers with BAT for quality content.

According to the website: “Digital advertising is overrun by middlemen, trackers and frauds.” The site goes on to list why the publishing industry is dying with the following points.

- Google and Facebook take 73 percent of all ad dollars and 99 percent of all growth.

- Revenue is recently down 66 percent.

- Bots inflicted $7.2 bln in fraud last year.

- Over 600 mln phones and desktops run ad-blocking.

- Publishers cannot seamlessly monetize value-added services.

They have some points, but they have some flaws

Sure, publishers suffer a lot in the wake of the digitization and automation of their trade, but creating a limited ecosystem, where users have the option to block out all the ads is not going to help.

Even still rewarding them with tokens is not going to be the answer either. If getting likes on Facebook and Instagram is hard, imagine how much harder it is going to be if you want someone to pay for your content or in this case give a “tip” for great content.

In reality, it is just not going to be as good as it sounds on paper.

Then there are the technical problems, too. As part of the system, you need to use Brave Browser, a lot of people are not so easily swayed to switch browsers, especially if it is not one they heard of. Does anyone remember Opera? I used it for about a week before going back to Chrome. If they want to succeed, then they need to be able to operate plugins.

You had my attention at… but lost it quickly thereafter

It is a really well-meaning idea, but it only works on paper, sadly. I think we are going to see BAT fall into competition with other coins that do similar things and other advanced ad blockers out there that block ads, delete cookies and, and keep prying eyes out of your browser.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Status, a Community Project That Raised over $100 mln: Past ICO Review



Blockchain OS is on its way. Are you ready for the next level of computing?

Status OS  is a lite client of Ethereum. It is a small operating system that has encrypted services such as web browsing, chat, and payments - in Ether only.

The ICO raised $102 mln during a one day only sale on June 14, 2017. The entry price per token was $0.0366 and it is now trading at $0.95273.

The platform is based on the Ethereum Blockchain. This means that users can design their apps via smart contracts. Status is thus also connected to the Ethereum peer-to-peer network and can exchange data via the decentralized network.

Status’s Light Client offers a good opportunity for many users to work with the Ethereum Blockchain without having to download it completely.

The Status platform sees itself as a community project that functions via an open source system. Anyone who wants to participate can work on the platform. This ensures that users ensure the network design. Interestingly, Status sees itself as a new form of social media platform.

Seven dapps and more to come

That sounds like a lot of functions, so what can Status do for me?

There are seven dapps on Status so far, with more to come in the future. First, it is possible to receive, send and save Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies. Status has an eWallet built into the dapp so you can use it for payments, sending or receiving money.

Also, users can also trade in Ether or use it as a means of payment in shops, provided that that store will accept payment in ETH.

The app provides the service to use its own encrypted and mobile identity to make digital interactions more secure. When you visit the site, you can download many different dapps which are all associated with Status and can be used within the Status OS app.

Messaging, payments, smart contracts and more

Additionally, there is an encrypted messenger, such as telegram, which can be used to send or receive Ether, complete Smart-Contracts and simply chat with friends.

In regards to payments, the Status Hardwallet is a particularly innovative solution as currently no other hardware wallet or mobile wallet in the industry supports transaction settlement through NFC.

Since the wallet will be compatible with all major cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ether, and ERC20 tokens, users outside of the Status network will be able to use the Status Hardwallet to store and transact using other cryptocurrencies.

Seven dapps within the OS:

uPort
Declare digital independence. uPort is a self-sovereign identity system.

Gnosis
Crowd sourced wisdom. Make complex predictions on the go with an easy to use prediction market.

Oasis Exchange
Enjoy a near-instant decentralized digital asset exchange between ETH and ERC20 tokens.

Ethlance
The decentralized jobs marketplace. Hire or work for cryptocurrency, with no fees.

Aragon
Create unstoppable companies and organizations, and value without borders.

Etherisc
A decentralized insurance platform. Buy a policy on the go, and be paid claims automatically.

Ujo
Ujo is a home for artists. Create and control your creative content, and share it with the world.

The low down

This is a new take on the traditional OS for sure, but what we won’t know is how it will be received when it launches. When it comes to any product or service, it is the metrics and the number of units sold that matter to the market and to, most importantly, the investors. While the token is not worth much, it does not mean that the company is not worth anything. Until then, investors and users alike are awaiting the release of the software. Only after that point will Status be able to prove its status.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

Now we are trying to explore big projects, how much did it collect?
I will take it to notes..

Did you find anything about Crederoom? No one have heard from the team since last January.

Past-ICO Review: Kin the One You Didn’t See Coming



Seeking to take over the crypto economy with a messenger app, Kin is coming

Social media plays a major role in the modern lifestyle and since the creation of Facebook people are trying to find ways to monetize the interactions on social media, either by selling users’ information to advertisers. This has become the world we live in with the Internet being an intermediary for almost everything we do now and social media plays a big part.

Enter Kik, a Canadian social-chat app that runs on Kin to create an ecosystem that rewards developers and creators on its platform with valuable incentives leading to a quality user experience without using advertisements. Let’s look at the financials before we dig deeper into the technology.

In Black or Red it’s Hard to Tell

Kin ran a 14-day ICO from Sept. 12-26, 2017 and amassed an astounding $98 mln! It has a market cap of $144 mln and circulates 756 bln tokens out of a limited supply of 10 tln tokens. The current price per token is $0.000191 up from the introductory price of $0.0000093, which is about a 93 percent return on investment if you would have bought during the initial release.

ERC20 to change to Stellar

In an interesting turn of events, the ERC20 Kin token will be shifting over to the Stellar Lumens Blockchain. This was announced late in 2017 by CEO, Ted Livingstone. The changes have already started to appear. Kik Messenger has moved to fork Stellar while also developing its own Blockchain that would combine the best of Ethereum’s Blockchain as well as Stellar’s Blockchain to come up with a scalable proprietary network for Kin.

Trustless system to evolve

By using a permission-nodes based system, Kik has established a zero-fee Blockchain network that will eventually hand over control of the network to the users. This will be done by working with partners who will eventually own a large percentage of the trusted nodes. By this design, the development team at Kik hopes to develop a trustless ecosystem that truly decentralizes control of the platform. However, it should be noted that there is still room for error because if becoming a partner is based on holding a large amount of Kin tokens then there is a chance that only the rich. In terms of Kin token holdings, will be able to control the system and that is putting too much power in the hand of only a few which is a dangerous situation.

Goal to be most used crypto

The Kik messenger app debuted in 2010 and has some 300 mln registered users, of which 40 percent are US teenagers, according to TechCrunch.  With a group of people that large, it would be easy for Kin to become the most used cryptocurrency, if you have 300 mln users interacting with each other every day.

It will be interesting to see how younger users use Kik and Kin in conjunction with the messenger app, as most younger people don’t care about crypto, they just want a cool messaging app so they can chat with their friends and send goofy dog-face photos. There will, of course, be some major usage but if the majority of the users don’t care about Kin, does this become an all-for-nought enterprise? Time will tell Kik and Kin make the changeovers from Ethereum to the Stellar Lumens Blockchain. Moreover, the rewards engine is a big factor that can have a major impact how people will interact with the app. When the rewards start getting doled out in Q3 2018, behaviors may start changing when users start making some money.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE