When someone wants to invest in an ICO most of the telegram groups around suggest things like checking if the blockchain is usefull for that kind of project as first parameter, then checking that they have a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) and read the Whitepaper and check whatever they are doing on Github. This may be a correct approach for projects aiming to compete with Bitcoin as a digital currency or public distributed ledgers, but when it comes to the token economy (Being based on ETH, NEO, EOS or whatever you want don’t change the concept of Token vs Blockchain) everything is different.
You should think it like investing in shares of a company with much less rights, much more risk, and if things goes well (98% of the times they don’t go well) a crazy high profit over the initial investment. Admit it or not you are here because you actually want to make money, not to support some niche project that will never reach mass adoption.
The ICO is a relatively easy way to get money, the easiest way for companies with good fundamentals to get money is still Venture Capital. VC is extremely costly for the company but chances of failure get lowered by the VC firms entering with experienced people checking that everything goes well. An ICO have nothing like this, you are giving money to strangers that write something on a whitepaper they will probably follow for 2 weeks after the ICO and then completely disrupt that fishy text with new things making contributors unhappy because bug changes or because of crazy out of schedule times.
So we can conclude that the Whitepaper yet helps to understand something and it lets you trash 50% of the ICOs but for the rest it’s useless, a good whitepaper won’t lead to a good token economy because the whitepaper should be followed and there is almost no ico that really did what they stated.
The same goes for the question is the Blockchain usefull for this project.. Except some particular things like games why would someone do a token instead of registering transaction directly on a main blockchain? Simply because you don’t need them, the tokens are made for investors as a way to collect money, not because there aren’t actually better tech solutions.
Checking if they have a MVP is actually one important thing instead, tons of projects have failed because they have no prior money management experiences and they wasted the money raised in the ICO very fast, a MVP helps to find out if the final release will be actually delivered or not.
But the most important thing that no one generally state is ** the team and the community around the project **.
If you find a good team with a good community you have found a successful product: the project team will benefit from the community with exchange voting competitions, product testing and later actually using the product. The most active users in the community the biggest is the starting userbase when the product is ready.
The absolutely best example of community you will find right now is MUXE Project, you can read more about them on https://muxe.io but let me explain why this particular project is different from the most shitty tokens around.
First of all the company exists and it’s located in the Netherlands, this is already a big point against most of the ICO.
Their team is actually unique, in any platform where the project appears they are available to answer questions at any time, also out of office hours (they answer any doubt like 16hours a day). It’s not only on telegram but everywhere someone is talking about them, an excellent public relations management. The best thing is that they answer also “hard” questions being completely honest: you’ll never find an answer with something like “We are not legally bound to answer this kind of thing, but…” from them. If any project stats stating something like this (and most of them do it in case of hard questions and they just partially answer) it just means that they are going to grab money and they won’t give a shit about the people that put cash inside it.
The most important thing is that they actually mind about their community and they don’t want to lose any user, contributor or not, anyone can talk with them and they are always available.
This means that they won’t run away with money or waste people’s money, they have strict budget organization and for now they are doing every single thing they stated before, never a broken promise.
There are some risky aspects from the MUXE project too, but if you want you can demolish any ICO, no one can be saved. Risks are about the high supply without burn prevision and without time locked smart contracts, so you have to trust the team in any case. But I am sure of a thing, they are never going to sell a coin on exchanges to dump the price, this is the most impressing team I ever saw.
The project is already listed in some minor exchanges (Idex, Ecex) and they are going to win the 5th Shardax voting competition without any rival.
So remember that the most important thing of an ICO is actually the people that are around the project, it’s not how they use blockchain, actually many technologically good projects fail because of bad management (money and general organization too) and people not being able to maintain their promises.
Another extremely intelligent thing they did is distributing the Bounties/Airdrops through external platforms like Lomostar (if you are not registered on LomoStar use the code 15G3SG as invitation code, it’s absolutely worth it for the airdrops inside this app!): they can save to them the gas fees for sending out to many address few coins and this avoids fast dump on exchanges when the token is listed because a lower number of users will withdraw to dump them, they need to collect a decent amount first because the fee is set in the coin you need to withdraw and not in ETH. This combined with the loyal community will assure a long term HODL until the platform is ready, the people in the community won’t dump because they are involved in the developing product, this is an unique example for now in the ICO space.