As we watch the price of Bitcoin sore over $20000, breaking old records, people are often looking for the next big opportunity. It’s hard to say if or when existing coins will ever see anywhere close to the gains we’ve seen in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others, and chances are they’ve already had their price spike (many followed by a crash) or they may never see another significant price spike. ICO’s seem to be the next venture for people looking to make a quick buck.
Although many, if not most, of the current and upcoming ICO’s will likely fail or simply not deliver what they claim in the future, there will be some that will rise to a great store of wealth and those who got in early will reap quite the reward.
But with the hundreds of new ICO’s popping up how would one know which ones are worth investing in? There are of course several key things to consider when choosing an ICO to invest in, such as: market buzz and pre investor excitement, positive and abundant press, a solid whitepaper, credible business or partner affiliations, a competent development team, the total amount of circulating coins and how those coins will be distributed and used, and the ability to illustrate that they will actually solve a real world problem with their vision and technology.
Researching these factors can be a daunting task when considering how many ICO’s are currently in the works, how many more are upcoming, and how many more will spring up over the next few years. Much like the dot com bubble in the late 90’s which burst a few years later, the ICO market will almost inevitably experience the same type of collapse. However, just like before the dot com bubble burst, a lot of people made a lot of money, and ICO’s are no different in that way. It’s hard to say exactly when the ICO bubble will burst but for now it can be a good place to speculate and invest to make some incredible returns.
So, for those who wish to gamble in the ICO market, make sure to do your research and never invest more than you are willing to lose. And with that said, I’ll mention from my research my top picks for upcoming ICO’s and which ones I’m still on the fence about.
Top 5 ICO Picks:
#1 - Flixxo
https://www.flixxo.com
I first heard about Flixxo from a Coinspeaker article. They also just had a nice write up in the Huffington Post Technology section. Since I’ve always been very much into large scale video sharing platforms, including apps like MovieBox and Popcorn Time, etc., the project quickly caught my attention. And once I learned they were partnered with Popcorn Time I was sold. But I had to keep an open mind so I kept reading.
Essentially, Flixxo is looking to disrupt the YouTube virtually monopoly on video sharing by offering more incentives to video creators through their platform that will have a better reward system than YouTube currently has. The idea is to build a decentralized video sharing platform that will hopefully attract more quality content and built a community around that. The users can use the FLX token to gain access to the content they want and contributors can be rewarded for helping to seed content. Users can also obtain FLX coins by viewing ads to support the advertising aspect.
There will be a total of 1 billion FLX tokens that will be issued, which usually for a coin is quite high when looking to see large returns on investment, however, considering the nature of this product and how the FLX tokens will be used within the community, having a relatively large amount of coins like this isn’t necessarily a bad thing since, it would seem to me, that there will be a lot of transactions happening on this platform so the need to keep costs and fees low will be important.
The ICO will begin on Oct 24th and there is a day one bonus of 30% extra coins. The base cost is: 1 ETH = 4000 FLX (or 1 FLX = 0.00025 ETH). They are hoping to at least raise about 7,500 ETH to get their project on its feet. The ICO will run for 30 days, and if you’d like to contribute, you can check out the ICO page.
#2 - Winding Tree
https://windingtree.com
Another passion I have is travel so Winding Tree also peaked my interest. Winding Tree’s mission statement is to make travel cheaper for travelers and more profitable for the travel providers. They plan to accomplish this by using a decentralized blockchain distribution platform to reduce fees for the industry which savings should be passed onto the consumer and end the price gouging by middle men. Here you can read the Winding Tree whitepaper, which says that the market will decide the number of tokens generated, which is a bit of a rare concept in the ICO world, but should prove to be interesting.
The price of the Winding Tree token or LIF will range from 9-10/LIF per 1 ETH depending on the price of ETH on the date of launch, which will begin Nov 1st, and end November 15th. Not only has Winding Tree been mentioned in major press publications like Nasdaq and Forbes, but they have official partnerships with several airlines including Swiss International, Australian Airlines, and Lufthansa (who was also an early investor).
This project has a lot of potential, and if successful, can target a real world issue within a very large industry. If you want to keep updated on the upcoming ICO you can visit their token event page, and signup for their mailing list for emerging details.
#3 - Universa
https://universa.io
Universa is a new blockchain platform built on their own network that will attempt to compete with the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, and boasts much higher scalability (20,000 transactions per second), and lower transaction costs. Their ICO is set to launch on Oct 28th and are hoping to raise $100 million to get their project off the ground.
ApexFree will invest $7 million in the Universa platform, and their initial target market seems to be for businesses.
And the most notable thing about Universa is that John McAfee is not only one of their listed advisors, but will also build his own coin called McAfee Coin on their blockchain platform:
Another cool thing is that for simply signing up to their platform they are giving away 50 free coins; you can register for your free coins. This ICO is sure to attract a good amount of investors and may be quiet successful in the near future.
#4 - Dether
https://dether.io
For many crypto traders we know how difficult it can be to convert between crypto currency and fiat currency. There are not as many avenues for converting fiat to crypto as there are for converting crypto to crypto, so this is a definite marketplace need.
According to the cofounder, you can buy ETH using the Dether app with your fiat currencies and of course sell ETH back to fiat as well by utilizing a system similar to UBER that allows you to see who is buying and selling ETH in your area. But apparently the transactions will happen much like a craigslist transaction, in that buyers will have physical meet ups to swap currencies. The buyer will be able to use Telegram to communicate with the seller to organize the transaction, and to essentially meet up in a public place to make the swap.
Although there are plenty of things that can go wrong with such a transaction like theft or hacking, the app uses a rating system, much like an Ebay profile (or Uber driver rating), that rates users based on their successful transactions. So if you get robbed I suppose you can give your robber a bad review, but unless there is wide scale use of this app it may not have much of an effect on deterring theft initially.
There is an extensive Dether whitepaper, and they say the purpose for the Dether tokens (DTR) will be to help gain more Dether map visibility for trading zones. This however begs the question: will the large stake holders dominate the seller market leaving the smaller stake holders holding the their bag of ETH? I suppose time will tell but they will also offer a DTR buyback program to help regulate the amount of circulating coins on the market.
Users can also use physical locations as a selling shop, similar to a crypto ATM. By staking larger amounts of DTR coins a user can take advantage of their already existing business, like a pizza shop, and sort of advertise their business via the app which will also make their physical business a sort of exchange teller, much like how certain convenient stores offer other services like money transfer (Western Union).
They will “mint” a max of 100 million DTR tokens and the actual crowdsale doesn’t appear to have been announced yet but could likely happen later this year or during Q1 of 2018. All in all Dether seems to be an interesting idea and, if adopted successfully, could promote a whole new approach to expand the mass adoption of Ethereum and the overall OTC marketplace of crypto currency.
#5 - Hacken
https://hacken.io
Another interesting project I came across is Hacken. Hacken wants to create an ecosystem where white hat hackers can keep up with the ever expanding world of cyber security to help their clients prevent exploitable vulnerabilities by using the blockchain and smart contracts. Here are some good articles about them here and here discussing their partnership with Neuromation to help prevent blockchain cybercrime.
Although they seem to be in the early stages of their road map plan, they definitely have potential and are trying to address a legitimate use case. Another interesting method they will use for their tokens is the Burning Principle, which you can read about in the Hacken whitepaper.
Their total supply of Hacken coins (HKN) will not exceed 20 million and the initial price according to their website will be: 1HKN = 1USD. The token sale should start on Nov 1st and you can signup for more information.
