In a world driven by hype and FOMO [Fear Of Missing Out]every day it becomes clearer that the hardworking crypto enthusiast must have a litmus test for choosing a token to support in a world where real sustainable projects are hard to find, and good projects with long-term prospects even harder to distinguish from money grabbing ‘shitcoins’.
With recent developments in which most new cryptocurrencies hit record lows and new ICO projects fail to live up to their post-Crowdsale aspirations, it is now common for disappointed ‘investors’ to blame the ICO promoters on social media rather than blaming themselves for they didn’t do proper analysis to pick the most likely winner after the crowdsale before buying the tokens during the ICO.
From my extensive observation, it seemed that most crypto buyers simply bought the coins during the ICO based on the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) created by the hype masters behind those 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 now for many ICOs, then they would jump on social media to scream bloody murder.
Recently, me and my team just finished a tour of Africa and some parts of the US to promote the Nollycoin ICO. We have organized and sponsored various conferences, held live AMA (Ask Me Anything) press conferences, and held many one-on-one meetings with crypto whales, retail investors, and crypto millionaires of all stripes.
With all that, one thing that amazed me above all else was that MOST token holders had NO IDEA about the underlying business or project behind the token sale they were participating in.
Even stranger to my observation was the incredible fact that many couldn’t tell you the value of the project, its goals, or the company’s plan to disrupt the market and grab a share of the customers in its industry. They simply bought the ICO because several telegrams or Facebook pages they visited kept telling them to buy. Hodl and buy more’. Most simply operated on herd instinct rather than objective deliberation.
Now, if most of the people I met were just teenagers or people with no education, I wouldn’t be so surprised at the level of ignorance of many of the crypto ‘investors’ I met. On the contrary, many of those I met were university graduates and people of some means. However, less than 10% of them could easily articulate why they bought the coin in the expectation that its value would increase over time. Everywhere I went, very few people could tell me the name, experience, and ability of the corporate managers of the company selling the coins.
The only thing most of them could point out was that the coins were recommended by ‘respected’ influencers when the facts proved that most of them were paid to create FOMO and reputation for otherwise useless shitcoins.
Apart from the so-called fake influencers, all that many cryptocurrency buyers knew was that the names of the team leaders were Russian, Chinese or Korean, even though they knew absolutely nothing about them. As if all you needed for a successful ICO was to list the names of people from Korea, China or Russia that no one could verify with a simple Google search.
While I agree that there are certainly many things to consider when deciding whether a project’s tokens will grow over time, I think the acid test and most immediate evaluation criteria should be the utility of the coin itself beyond what would happen in crypto exchanges.
Although most crypto token holders I’ve met didn’t even know it, the reality is that if you bought a token from most ICOs, you weren’t actually ‘investing’ in that company. You would not buy shares in the company and you did not buy any securities from the company.
And at best, what you were doing when you bought tokens during most ICOs was ‘donating’ to a project in exchange for providing a utility token or coin that legally had no real value outside of the business ecosystem controlled by the issuing company.
In words, apart from your hope that the price of the token will ‘replace’ or rise to make you a millionaire, there is nothing else you can do with the token other than enjoy the utility attached to it by the ICO company, if anyone.
Since no one could predict with certainty how Crypto will behave on the crypto exchange when it finally arrives there, and recent experiences have shown that the prices of most tokens would most likely jump in the first weeks after the exchange opens (due to heavy selling by speculators), it would have it makes sense to look at what other value or utility you can get from your token, other than the expected ‘mooning’ of the stock market.
As the crypto revolution has continued to evolve, reshape, and adapt to different market developments, the only way to ensure that your money doesn’t go down the drain is to make sure you can still use those tokens to get great value and benefits even if you could immediately sell it for a profit on the exchange.
In making this decision, you must ask yourself this primary question: What is the value, product, or service generated by the token sale company that will give me enough value for my money to make this purchase worth my time?
In a world of falling token prices on various exchanges, the more opportunities you have to use tokens in real life outside of the expected listing on a crypto exchange, the better the chances are that you won’t end up frustrated or stranded with tokens that are useless to you.
So you have to ask again and again: IF this coin was never traded on an exchange, would I still be happy to support the vision? If this token has lost 70% of its value on an exchange, can I still use it and get value for my money elsewhere?
If you couldn’t answer these questions positively after reviewing the WHITEPAPER and investing the company’s claims, then you should think twice before buying that coin.
A recent case study
Take the current ICO like Nollycoin which is a token that powers a Blockchain powered film distribution ecosystem. Coin promoters have created various utility scenarios for coin buyers to ensure that no matter what happens to Nollycoin on the crypto exchange, their sponsors and token holders will continue to smile.
Some of the great utilities related to 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 1000 movies on their Netflix-on-steroids blockchain Movie distribution.
• Ability to use Nollycoin tokens to purchase products and services in NollyMall which is like Amazon platform for entertainment based products.
• The possibility of using Nollycoin tokens to pay school fees on the NOLLY Academy platform and partner companies
As you can see, beyond the usual expectations of tokens being listed on a cryptocurrency exchange, you have to look beyond the hype ico, the immediate and future utility of the token and the viability of the underlying project behind it.