In a world driven by hype and FOMO [Fear Of Missing Out]every day it is becoming more and more obvious that the ardent crypto-enthusiast must have a litmus test to choose a token to support in a world where real viable projects are hard to find, and good projects with long-term prospects are even harder to distinguish from money-grabbing “shitholes”.
Due to recent events, where most new cryptos reach record lows and new ICO projects fail to live up to the post-Crowdsale hype, now often frustrated “investors” go around blaming the ICO promoters on social media, rather than blaming themselves for their failure due diligence to select the most likely winner after the crowdsale before purchasing the token during the ICO.
From my extensive observations, it appeared that most crypto buyers simply bought coins during the ICO based on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) created by the masters of the hype behind these coins. Many simply bought without understanding the purpose of the coin after the ICO or what the token was supposed to do after the Crowdsale. When nothing happened after the ICO, as is often the case with many ICOs these days, they jumped on social media and screamed bloody murder.
Recently, my team and I just finished a tour of Africa and parts of the US to promote the Nollycoin ICO. We have organized and sponsored various conferences, held AMA (Ask Me Anything) press conferences and held many one-on-one meetings with crypto whales, small investors and crypto millionaires of all stripes.
What struck me the most in all of this was that MOST token holders had NO IDEA of the core business or project behind the token sales they were participating in.
Even more surprising, in my observations, was the surprising fact that many couldn’t tell you the value proposition of the project, its goals, or the company’s plan to disrupt the market and capture some of the buyers in their industry. They just bought the ICO because the few Telegram or Facebook pages they visited kept telling them to “Buy”. Go and buy some more.’ Most simply acted on herd instinct, not objectively.
Now, if most of the people I met were just teenagers or uneducated people, I wouldn’t be so surprised at the level of ignorance of many of the crypto investors I met. In contrast, many of those I met were college graduates and people of some means. However, less than 10% of them could easily articulate why they bought a coin in the expectation that its value would increase over time. Wherever I went, very few people in the crowd could tell me the name, experience, and abilities of the corporate executives of the company selling the coins.
The only thing most of them could point to was that the coins were recommended by “respectable” influencers, when the facts proved that most of them were being paid the shivers to create FOMO and respectability for otherwise useless shitcoins.
Apart from the so-called fake influencers, many crypto buyers only knew that the names of the team leaders were Russian, Chinese or Korean, although they knew absolutely nothing about them. As if all you need for a successful ICO is to list the names of people from Korea, China or Russia that no one could verify even with a simple Google search.
While I agree that there are certainly many things to consider when deciding whether to increase the value of a project’s tokens over time, I believe that the acid test and most immediate evaluation criteria should be the utility of the coin itself beyond what will happen on crypto exchanges.
Although most crypto token holders I’ve met don’t even know it, the reality is that when you buy a token in most ICOs, you’re not actually “investing” in that company. You would not buy shares in a company or buy a security in a company.
And at best, what you were doing when you bought tokens during most ICOs was “donating” to the project in exchange for receiving a useful token or coin that legally has no real value outside of the business ecosystem controlled by the issuing company .
In short, apart from your hope that the price of the tokens will decrease or increase and you will become a millionaire, there is nothing you can do with the token except enjoy the utility added to it by the ICO, if any.
Since no one could predict with certainty how Crypto will perform on the crypto exchange when it finally gets there, and recent experience has shown that the prices of most tokens are likely to fall in the first few weeks after listing ( due to large speculator sales), it would make sense for you to see what other value or utility you can get from your token other than the expected “month” on the exchange.
As the crypto revolution has continued to grow, morph, and adapt to various market developments, the only way to make sure your money doesn’t go down the drain is to be sure you can still use these tokens to get great value and benefits. even though you could sell it at a profit immediately on the stock market.
When making this decision, you should ask yourself the following basic question: What value, product or service does the token sale company create that will give me enough value for my money to make this purchase worth my time?
In a world of collapsing token prices on various exchanges, the more opportunities you have to actually use your token outside of the expected listing on a crypto exchange, the more likely you are not to be disappointed and run out of a token that is useless to you.
So you have to ask again and again: IF this coin had never traded on an exchange, would I be happy to have supported the vision? If this token has lost 70% of its value on the exchange, can I still use it and get value from it for my money elsewhere?
If you couldn’t answer these questions in the affirmative after reading the WHITEPAPER and investing the company’s claims, then you should think twice before buying this coin.
A recent case study
Take the current ICO such as Nollycoin, which is a token that powers a Blockchain-enabled movie distribution ecosystem. The coin’s promoters have created various utility scenarios for the coin’s buyers to ensure that no matter what happens to Nollycoin on the crypto exchange, their supporters and token hodlers will be smiling.
Some of the great utilities associated with the Nollycoin token in the Nollytainment ecosystem include
• Ability to use Nollycoin tokens to watch exclusive movies in theaters and cinemas
• Ability to use Nollycoin tokens to access 1,000 movies on the Netflix-on-steroids blockchain.
• Ability to use Nollycoin tokens to purchase products and services at NollyMall, which is similar to Amazon’s platform for entertainment products.
• Ability to use Nollycoin tokens to pay school fees on the NOLLY Academy platform and partner companies
As you can see, apart from the usual expectation that tokens can be listed on a crypto exchange platform, you need to look not only at the ico hype, but also at the immediate and future utility of the token and the viability of the underlying project behind it.