This is an article to continue my series on the topic of #ICO industry improvements. I decided to make it as an answer to recent challenge of fake reviews, bad data consistency and overall bad investors experience in the ICO field. There are many people in the community doing one or another thing about it. The BullToken project is one of these developments.
First of all, here is their motto:
The PEOPLE-driven Investment community
Invest in Blockchain, Invest in the Future
OK, makes sense to me considering the facts below. This is indeed a community driven platform with a mix of pure professional investment approach and the use of the #expert crowd wisdom and the crowd data-sourcing. It has several motivation techniques to bring and retain experts, to motivate them to contribute information and to review facts provided by others.
The Problem:
My take on the problem formulation: Currently can see a huge raise in the ICO-related websites and experts. Most of them as no or very little trustworthiness, a very little experience and/or skill in the filed of startup audit, reviewing and advisory, and a very deceitful picture of such websites and advisors are drawn on purpose. Most of them are coming from marketing, sales and business development positions (and make no mistake: if someone was an investment banker or a fund manager, it might be the case of 90%+ of their time was allocated to actual sales or customer relations, so those people know, how to sell an asset or an idea, and used to mask or disregard problems for the sake of sale. ICO industry needs more real professionals with a background or real business experience in the areas of IT, audit, legal and financial services (not FX, not sales of financial products, but the real finance - I will elaborate on this in a future article, since it is actually a very big topic). Most of such experts are used to be paid in real money (BTC or ETH would work, but the ICO tokens won't be perceived well at all fro a whole variety of reasons - this will actually be a topic of separate article as well).
Here are 3 problems, which BullToken emphasizes at its website:
Problem #1: The number of ICOs are way too high for an individual investor.
Solution : Hundreds of cryptocurrency-professionals help you find the best investments!
Agreed. No one sole person can pay attention and conduct a satisfactory research even of a fraction of ICO projects popping out at an hourly rate.
Problem : Biased or untruthful statements for personal gain. Like people in short-positions
Solution : A shared interest in the success of the platform. Everyone is invested
That's also a very obvious problem. The solution looks a bit oversimplified, however BULL has even more to offer on this problem. There is Karma involved, which is an internal value for the BULL and can be exchanged for the BULL to be monetized. There is a strong incentive not to submit wrong information or bad ICOs to the platform, since it will actully lead to financial loses for the submitter. On the contrary, the high quality information will end up paid for, if it will create value to the platform and will lead to better investment decisions. I actually encourage everyone to follow the link https://goo.gl/RrFg7q and take a look into the Beta-platform of the BullToken. It is not fully functional until the end of the ICO, since by design it has to use ICO funds to conduct investments. But you still can get a taste and understanding of mechanics.
You can find the ETH20 BULL overview and essentials here:
https://etherscan.io/token/0x6b1ee79efae2939a2c84c9d681442cf669c9fcac
I've failed to review the contract, it is in a bytecode, no ABI Code accessible. It is said, that the contract has some proprietary ideas in the management and distribution parts.
You can check the bytecode here:
bzzr://c52434ea2c8a24795ffc61722801fdc76a2ebf6a077d435866a2247321450a68
Currently, the BullToken (https://goo.gl/RrFg7q) project looks very promising (I actually follow it for several months). It is actually quite exciting from the very beginning. It is currently in a slow ICO stage offering a very nice opportunity to invest in an expert-community driven investments vehicle to take get better deals on the ICO investments.
Strong team:
It is well diversified now, they have a huge progress here since the December, when they were localized in Norway.
The core management team is based in Norway and shows a good character (no known business fails, no felonies, vast experience)
One last thing I want to mention is the very strong Advisory Board. Mostly it consist of pure professionals in their domains, not just in ICOs. I found the the A.I. expert, the fianncial expert, the cyber security expert, the experienced crypto and blockchain developers, the very prominent crypto enthusiasts with a vast community-driven projects building expertise. There are the top tier guys like Ian Scarffe and Simon Cooking, who are simply great for every crypto-community project now.
BULL has a mixed model of IDMP.
Partially centralized decision making model looks like a proper compromise. It contains all the necessary mechanics to make each decision informed, calculated and reasonable, which is the goal for every investment.
There is now extensive power concentration in anyone's hands, which is a vast difference from the most exsting ICO co-investment projects.
TO BE CONTINUED
