Blockchain developers recommend to avoid the hype to successfully use tokens to raise capital and incentivise users.
Entrepreneurs, investors, finance professionals, lawyers, fund managers, regulators, and business executives have gathered in New York to participate in the conference focused on the economics, regulation and best practices around blockchain-based tokens, protocols, and crypto-assets. Participants of Token Summit have studied new use cases for cryptographic assets and realized that blockchain-based applications can successfully serve current needs.
It is time to pay focused attention to the emerging token-based economy that might compete with the web in terms of potential innovation, new business models and entrepreneurial ideas to be deployed. Token Summit is that very event that united best minds in this sphere.
Industry insiders who are building new networks and using various forms of tokens to raise capital and incentivise users shared their experience at Token Summit. The most precious advice from blockchain developers and engineers sounds like “always avoid the hype”.
Since it is hard to say how much money exactly is pouring into ICOs now, many projects with investments of millions of dollars made I minutes will ultimately fail.
Richard Craib, CEO of Numeria, a hedge fund that uses a token to encourage data scientists to do machine learning and predict stock price movements, said: “I think it’s great to have things instantly funded and finacialised. I think it’s the investors who should get smarter.”
Ankur Nandwani, CEO at BAT, enumerated several things to be very careful with. There are projects that have more advisers than developers. Typically, startups will search for an adviser within the Ethereum community to make their proposal look more serious. In general, adviser will get 3 or 4% of the tokens for his services. “And if someone is offering to be an adviser to your project, say no; you don’t want those type of guys,” Nandwani said.
Reservation contracts can be one more challenge. This means that some tokens of the whole amount billed for a sale might be already reserved for people in the crowdsale. “I think continuous distribution of tokens is important; you can sell a fixed amount and then slowly distribute the rest”, said Nandwani.
Juan Benet of the iconic IPFS decentralised storage platform and his team have thoroughly studied the legal landscape around token sales, which resulted in the launch of SAFT (Simple Agreement for Tokens), and Coinlist that will allow startups progressing with a sale. Earlier this week at Consensus, Anthony Di lorio, the CEO of Jaxx, unveiled the grading system for ICOs with three tiers that will be announced soon in collaboration with Bitcoin pioneer Charlie Shrem.
The panel at Token Summit agreed with Andy Milenius, founder of Maker, that Reddit is probably the most appropriate place to find out about interesting projects to do a crowdsale. Anyone project that is tweeting aggressively at the early stages, you should be sceptical about; the likelihood is that it’s a bot.
Milenius underlined that Maker chose not to do a crowdsale as much of the speculation that comes with sale is not about the underlying technology. “It’s important to be sure the right sort of people are attracted to technology, and not the hype. For us, lack of hype was a deliberate strategy. I think it’s important that people are in this for the long haul.”
This week, Bitcoin jumped more than 12 percent to an all-time high of $2,791 before plunging. The rise is seen to be based on strong demand out of Asia. As for now, the cryptocurrency price makes up $2,520.
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