About us

At ICO List, we work diligently to bring you a curated catalog of the most promising Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). This FAQ aims to explain how and why we do what we do.

The rush to create the next big decentralized tech company is more intense than ever. As the frenzy grows, it becomes essential to maintain an up-to-date list of ICOs worth following. ICO List serves as a premier source for insightful editorial on the topic. We hope to offer valuable guidance to those navigating this exciting space.

Our goal is to feature only ICOs that make sense. In any field, it’s important to avoid wasteful investments. ICO whitepapers, while technically advanced, can sometimes be overhyped. Many industry figures may overestimate their understanding of this complex technology.

It’s important that all our readers understand that ICO List does NOT offer investment advice. In certain markets, like the US, investment advice is a regulated service, which must only be provided by licensed advisors.

Our site simply offers a catalog of opinions, reviews, and historical data, which should not be mistaken as encouragement to buy or participate in anything. While we aren’t underselling the skills of our partners and expert contributors, our editorial content is offered for information purposes only. For investment advice, please seek a duly licensed professional.

We do understand and take seriously the ethical, professional obligations implied by the content we provide. If any of the information on our site appears dubious or false, please let us know. Seriously. Email us at [email protected].

At ICO List, we understand that legislators everywhere are feeling the pressure to make good decisions to protect the public’s interests, without stifling innovation. ICOs are a type of open crowdfunding, and a new field that uproots a lot of established practices and interests. Hence, messages on the benefits and challenges of ICOs may be very conflicting. Please be cautious.

Our service operates in good faith. While waiting for the regulative chips to fall, we’ve adopted stringent self-regulation, based on signals from US legislators and existing securities regulation. We will let you know when the content we share is paid for.

We highly welcome any feedback that can help us understand the implications of this sensitive issue under your local legislation. If your own due diligence reveals things we’ve missed, we always appreciate more intelligence on our listings.

Let’s start with the term itself, Initial Coin Offering. “ICO” leans, misleadingly, on the term IPO, Initial Public Offerings. First off, it’s more appropriate to compare ICOs to crowdfunding campaigns where early birds get special access to a new product or platform.

To get involved in this type of crowdfunding, it’s critical to understand that ICOs rarely, if ever, offer any kind of equity in the companies providing them.

The currency, also called tokens, functions within the emerging platform of the ICO startup. We find it useful to compare tokens to gift cards issued by establishments like Amazon.com or iTunes. Except, iTunes and Amazon are massive, profitable businesses. Most ICOs are not – nothing guarantees that your involvement or purchases will even have a platform to serve.

Speculators bet that the tokens will skyrocket in value when the application platform grows. This is an unknown.

Even ICOs brought forward in good faith operate in a largely unregulated market, introducing vulnerability to risks like pump and dump schemes. Compare this to stock markets and other trading of securities, which have been under the lens of regulators for centuries, following painful lessons learned under cycles of booms and busts.

These are some of the reasons why anyone interested in ICOs should act with a healthy dose of skepticism. We also want to remind our readers that tech startups tend to be high-risk targets for speculation as it is.

Stay informed and proceed with caution!

ICOs are possible thanks to smart contracts, a subset of the interesting new things companies can build on blockchain technology. This type of mechanism is a potentially revolutionary step forward towards building decentralized, trustworthy information exchanges and apps.

We encourage you to read on. If you understand the topics below, chances are you’ll come to share our mix of excitement and caution.

Future networked applications and online commerce may be built on smart contracts, an offshoot of the blockchain concept.

This type of tech usually has the foundation in some kind of cryptocurrency, sometimes referred to as App Coins, or tokens. If based on the ERC-20 standard under the Ethereum blockchain, tokens are convenient and compatible with many existing wallets and exchanges.

However, in the case of regulated securities, investors own a small slice of a company. App Coins on the other hand are not that. Instead, they’re nutrients, sunlight, and atmosphere in which individual blockchain platforms operate. As interesting as it is to own a slice of the tokens being exchanged in every transaction on the network, it’s healthy to never forget that tokens may end up as nothing more than “Itchy & Scratchy money”. Basically, don’t be like Homer Simpson in the linked clip.

That said, we live in fascinating times. Tokens are part of a machinery, which, in simplified terms, can fund services and commerce in ways that uproots current standard internet business models.

The new and exciting world of ICOs is now sufficiently established to spin off new concepts and phenomena. Pre-sales are such a novelty.

Pre-sales offer tokens before the official crowdfunding, or crowdsale. This approach is usually more modest in its funding targets, often offering tokens at rates reduced by tens of percent. Different smart contracts are employed to separate funds from pre- and crowdsales, for accounting purposes.

The purpose of presales is often to fund the marketing and other preparations of a bigger ICO campaign. Advertising, hiring, and arranging events are necessary to gain traction in an increasingly crowded marketplace. These prerequisites for a successful ICO project cost money.

Of course, for projects, there are risks associated with presales. The image and long-term valuation can become tainted by a perception of pre-sale bargains.

Digital currencies are not new per se, but cryptocurrencies are still a relatively recent development. Cryptocurrencies implement advanced cryptography. The blockchain is one such thing: immutable ledgers which usually create proof of value by imposing computational expense and confirmation of other network events. In other words, the blockchain offers a trustworthy, network-wide transactional history, forming an immutable, permanent record.

Cryptocurrencies got off to quite the start when an anonymous programmer created Bitcoin in 2009, the first and most famous currency of its kind. Building on p2p networking, previously known in forms like bittorrent, cryptocurrencies are Rube Goldberg machines of state-of-the-art cryptography. Participants can put computers to use for “mining”, performing advanced calculations, proof of work, to create coin.

Bitcoin is a deflationary currency, with a limited amount of coin being intended to be mined. As the supply grows, calculations for generating coin increase in difficulty. As the currency can be split into tiny parts as the value grows.

Naturally, everyone wants to hop on “the next Bitcoin”.

Crypto, as a term, has been hijacked by cryptocurrency jargon. However, cryptocurrencies are really built on decades of work in modern cryptography.

The word cryptography stems from the Greek language, κρυπτός or kryptós, meaning “hidden, secret”; and γράφειν, graphein, “to write”, or -λογία -logia, “study”. Based on the ancient and civilization-forming need to pass along secret messages, cryptography is defined as the study of ways to create obscure, unreadable versions of information, using methods known as ciphers. “Ciphertext” can be “unlocked” and turned into “cleartext” by special instructions known as “keys”.

Built around extremely complex applied mathematics, modern cryptography in the hands of the layman is a very new thing. Before the exponential growth of secure network communication in the nineties, cryptography was mainly available to nation states and militaries. Governments even tried to keep cryptography out of the hands of citizens.

However, as basic human transactions moved online to a global network, a need emerged to protect information that previously was stored in ledgers, sealed envelopes placed in locked file cabinets… or bank vaults. Therefore, any attempt to regulate the use of cryptography itself should be considered an authoritarian attack on civil liberties.

Mainstream media reporting would easily lead you to believe that Bitcoin is all about hopping on the darknet (usually the Tor network) to shop for whatever is deemed unsavory by the State at a given time.

That’s far from the entire truth. Bitcoin is revolutionary because the blockchain offers a decentralized ledger of transactions. Every fully participating node on the bitcoin network grabs a list of transactions from its peers. Transactions are verified in an immutable record, by being wrapped in cryptographic signatures, making it extremely hard to mess with any piece of Bitcoin history.

This takes us from illicit goods to huge potential world-improving scenarios for the blockchain. Human civilization needs permanent records and enforceable contracts. As humanity takes leaps into digitizing and automating everything, it becomes very attractive to remove trusted intermediaries from the mix. Nobody wants to reward banks and credit card processors for their rent-seeking behavior, they’re just useful service providers… for now.

The technological details of smart contracts can be hard to grasp. Luckily, the tech is actually extremely fascinating, regardless of the level on which you understand it.

With smart contracts, blockchains are built to perform computer programs. Smart contracts are programmable in the sense that transactions can check for conditions and trigger events when things line up.

Imagine a world where life as a grown-up is way smoother in every way, from lending money for education, cars, or real estate, to just getting a smartphone with a data plan. That’s what smart contracts potentially offer. Blockchain events become a shared interest, making it possible for credit records and similar things to be approved quickly when conditions match up.

Sadder parts of life, such as dealing with last wills or dissolving marriages, could also become simpler, as would change management in affairs like corporate mergers.

Ethereum is a complete computing platform built on blockchain. Being a decentralized network, Ethereum can facilitate almost any kind of transaction, along with the required computation and verification, with great geographic distribution.

Imagine a blockchain for keeping track of all kinds of deals involving goods, services, and records on individuals.

The system comes with its own currency, Ether. This compensates device owners who contribute computational resources and network bandwidth.

Just like an iPhone from 2009, Bitcoin is starting to show its age. Creative types have been working on all kinds of improvements to the original concept, or new, alternative cryptocurrencies. These are referred to as Altcoins by the larger scene of cryptocurrency forums and ICO lists.

So why exactly is everyone waiting for “the next Bitcoin”?

Well, Bitcoin constrains itself with its base around computationally expensive proof of work, and the whole deflationary aspect.

Furthermore, despite what some people insist, Bitcoin is absolutely not anonymous. Coins are wired between wallets in a way that goes on a public record. Certain altcoins, like Monero, are trying to solve problems like these.

Bitcoin is also becoming slow, and the community with its vested interests shows little consensus in how to improve the code. Verifying transactions is on the brink of being extremely taxing on hardware, with enormous energy consumption.

So, naturally, people are looking for options.

Since the turn of the millennium, corporate behemoths have combined user content and effort to create the internet landscape we use and love.

Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Twitter, YouTube, Cafepress, Stack Overflow, and Airbnb are just some different examples of how user effort can be turned into world-transforming phenomena. But these applications, even Wikipedia, a non-profit, are highly centralized.

Diverse interests can sometimes work together and create impressive results (maybe except for Yahoo Answers). But the logistics of these services are heavy. Building web services and apps that can withstand the load of global audiences involves owning servers, buying bandwidth, and paying staff. And the only feasible way of making money off of any of this, except donations, is through creepy tracking and ads.

What if the next Wikipedia or Uber could be built on open-source software, where transactions are bounced around and verified on a p2p network? Funding could be based on Bitcoin-style currencies, deriving value from proof of work or other methods.

What do these ideas have in common? They’re funded by visionary individuals who take the plunge and put some money into Initial Coin Offerings. The payoff for owning “the air” breathed by a decentralized application could be mind-boggling.

At ICO List, we embrace the competition and understand that we are part of a larger ecosystem providing valuable insights to “tokenistas.” While we stand by the accuracy of our own content, we encourage readers to explore and critically assess the findings shared by our hardworking peers in the industry.