Does anyone know how much $$ the ICO of Ark.io will raise? I don't know enough details to say whether that coming Steem clone is worth making a speculative investment. They seem to rather serious, but I don't think they've really improved anything over Steem's broken model at least in terms of the onboarding and rewards payout mechanism (and math!). They may be correcting the whale concentration with a more fair ICO than Steem's sneaky "premine". Devil is in the details.
Also remember you are investing in the capabilities of the lead developer to a large extent unless the project is entirely complete and no future forks. Even then you are sort of investing in the lead developer, because it is assumed he will work on the ecosystem development. So you need to know very well the technical and marketing capabilities of the development team, especially the lead developer.
For XMR, you have fluffypony. For Bitcoin, you have Gregory Maxwell. For Zcash, you have Zooko-Wilcox. Etc...
Looking at Ark.io again. The (presumably French speaking) CTO from studying
his LinkedIn appears to be from the Lisk project and before that from working with the government of Europe. Typically these sort of people are weak on technology skills and strong on creating wasteful bureaucracy. Has he spoken in English any where? Is eloquent and inspiring like Vitalik?
I very, very much doubt this guy is as technically strong as the guys I mentioned in my prior post.
I also remember Charles Hoskinson saying in his exposition about Lisk, that their core team is lacking in technical skills.
Looks like Ark.io will raise a minimum of 2000 BTC (and probably much more since Lisk raised $8 million) with 25% of the ICO for themselves and they are apparently holding 7% of the money supply as well? Details are sketchy for the moment.
The name is Ark is reasonably good. But I have a better name.
As I said, they appear to have the similar broken model for onboarding and rewards as Steem (but I only briefly scanned the whitepaper). I don't know if they copied Steem's 2 year lockin and inflation model.
This might end up being a reasonable speculation, if they can hype it out at some point. Or maybe somehow they are able to pull it all together technically and also improve on flaws of Steem over time.
But for me, I am doubting whether Lisk, Waves, and now Ark will ever amount to anything significant. I have some technical reasons which I am not going to detail, because they are for my project. Actually Waves is somewhat unrelated concept to other two, but the way it was launched claiming to be affiliated with Charles' IOHK has made me think it is not an ethically run operation.
Any way, I always get people angry at me when I comment on other projects. So remember these are only my opinions. And I will STFU.
Disclaimer: the project I am working on is a competitor to Ark. So I am biased. But I better be objective, else I am wasting my time with my project.