How to participate in an ICO! This ICO tutorial shows you how to buy ICO’s using Ethereum. I’ll show you how to buy Ether & use that ETH with MyEtherWallet for initial coin offerings.
Track current/ongoing ICOs at https://icotracker.net/current
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Script:
Most ICOs require your investment to be in the form of Ether, so the first step is to purchase Ether on Coinbase or GDAX, which I showed you how to do in my videos on how to trade on exchanges. You’ll wanna purchase an amount that’s slightly over the amount that you’re willing to invest, as you’ll have to pay a nominal amount in gas. So if you wanna invest 1 Ether, I’d recommend purchasing 1.01 Ether just to be on the safe side. Once you’ve acquired Ether, you’ll have to create a wallet for it. The most common place to do so is myetherwallet.com (also commonly referred to in the crypto-community as MEW). When you get to the homepage, create a custom password for yourself, then click “Create New Wallet.” You’ll then be taken to a screen where you can download what’s called a Keystore File, which is a file encrypted by the password you chose. Make sure to download this file & secure it in a safe place, then click “I understand. Continue.” The next screen that appears will show you your private key. As with the keystore file, write it down & save it in a secure place. Now there are two ways to log in to your MEW: your private key, or a combination of your password plus keystore file. Selecting “keystore file” prompts us to select the file we downloaded, then decrypt it using the password we chose. Selecting “private key” simply requires us to enter the private key assigned to us just a few moments ago. Once we’re in, you’ll see your wallet’s address that you have to send your Ether to at the center & on the right. Keep in mind that all Ether addresses will always begin with a 0x. Below your address is your account balance, & scrolling even further down shows you the balances of all the ERC-20 tokens you hold. Copy your address & go back to GDAX (or wherever else you purchased your Ether), then send the amount of Ether you want to invest into the ICO over to your MEW. The reason why we wanna send our Ether from our MEW to the ICO address--rather than from GDAX--is because you’re required to send Ether from an address to which you own the private keys; you do not own the private keys to an exchange like GDAX. Also, the token you’re purchasing will likely be sent back to the same address from which you sent your Ether. Unlike GDAX, MEW is able to recognize & differentiate one ERC-20 token from another. Next step is to open up the website of the ICO you’d like to buy into. You can track current, ongoing ICOs at icotracker.net/current . Let’s use Electron World Money as an example (or EWM). I have to note though, that I’m using EWM as an arbitrary example purely for demonstrational purposes. I have no plans on buying into EWM & none of what you see in this video should be taken as financial advice. Once you’re on the site, you’ll want to navigate to the section that shows information on where to send your Ether. Copy the address & go back to your MEW. Click “Send Ether & Tokens” (note that you’ll have to log back in again using your credentials) & paste the address into the “To Address” field. One way to verify that this is a real address is if a colored image appears in this circle. Do not send off your Ether if you don’t see this. Enter the amount you wanna send--and again, remember to have a little bit of extra Ether in your account to pay for gas fees--enter the gas limit as recommended on the ICO’s web page, then click “Generate Transaction.” Doing so will prompt a light blue bar to appear at the bottom like this. Tokens from the ICO can be distributed either instantly or may take some time, depending on how they’ve structured it. As I said earlier, your tokens will be sent back to the same MEW address that you sent your Ether from. Knowing this, you’ll now have to create a custom token in your MEW in order to view your token balance from this ICO. To do so, scroll down in MEW & click on “Add Custom Token.” Information for each of the fields that appears should be provided by the ICO; either on their site, their Medium blog, or even their Twitter. Going back to our EWM example, we’ll navigate back over to their site, copy the token contract address, use the EWM token symbol, & use 18 decimals. Paste the token contract address into their proper field, enter “EWM” as the symbol, enter 18 decimals, & click “Save.” You’ll now be able to view your EWM balance whenever the tokens are sent back to you, along with the balances of all the other ERC-20 tokens you hold. Keep in mind that the exchange that provides the most immediate liquidity for your ERC-20 tokens is Etherdelta, where the tokens are traded exclusively against Ether. It’s not until they’re listed on a major exchange (like Bittrex or Binance) that they’ll be available to trade against Bitcoin as well.
