The ICO market is still facing a few months long bear trend, same as the cryptocurrency markets. So, let’s step back and checkout the market itself and afterwards dip into few ICO projects that might be interesting.
In a study published by Statis Group – an advisory firm for ICOs – claims that almost 80% of ICOs are in fact scams. The current ETH balances of the top 10% of ICOs is equivalent to 50% of the total funds raised to-date, while the top 2% of ICOs hold 10%. Over 70% of ICO funding (by dollar volume) went to higher quality projects. Through their analysis, they found out that 78% of all ICOs were identified as scams, 4% of them had failed, 3% had completely gone dead, and just 15% managed to successfully be traded on exchanges.
What we can learn from this is that it is important to be both careful and skeptical when it comes to investing into the blockchain sector. Along with highlighting how important it is to carry out due diligence before investing in any given project. As a consequence of insecurity for investors, cryptocurrency is tangled up in complex regulation in some jurisdictions and is also subject to questionable developing regulations in others. However, the ICO market still managed to raise 20% of the total US IPO market this year, compared to being nearly non-existent a few years ago.
On top of this, public ICO investors have to be very careful about the series of investment rounds that are more “exclusive,” with higher discounts for earlier investors, such as family, friends, crypto whales, venture capital firms, and so on. The figure below shows approximate ICO discounts and returns per investment rounds.
To sum up, we can say that the growth of fundraising into ICOs has slowed. This is due to regulatory uncertainty (primarily in the US, where SEC is very aggressive with regulative policies), concerns about upcoming technical changes on major networks that most ICOs are built on (such as Ethereum and NEO), and lower enthusiasm from retail buyers.
Moving on to the list of ICOs that you should be aware of. Since our last update there aren’t many changes, as some of them are still not finished – such as Origo (community sale ongoing now), Block Cloud, Aergo, and Ankr. You can check our last ICO report here.
Without any more delay, let’s jump into the hottest ICOs that the crypto community will likely be talking about this August.
MultiVAC
Hard Cap: TBA
Whitelist Date: TBA
Total Supply: TBA
Total Supply Designated for Investors: TBA
Official Website: https://www.mtv.ac/
ICO BACKSTORY
The MultiVAC ICO and MTV token are raising funds for a high-throughput, flexible blockchain platform based on trusted sharding computation, storage, and data transmission. Using sharding (similar to Zilliqa and Quarkchain) MultiVAC aims to produce high TPS to enable decentralized applications. Differentiating itself from competitors, MultiVAC adopts Verifiable Random Functions (VRF) for its consensus mechanism and shard selection. Projects such as Dfinity and Ontology introduce similar randomized methods to elect block creators. Flexibility in shard selection for dApp developers could be an enticing and novel approach to bring in builders.
MultiVAC operates on the MultiVAC Virtual Machine (MVM), which includes the Blockchain Instruction Set Computer (BISC). The BISC is the key feature of MVM that allows developers to decide how many nodes are required for each dApp, selecting a large number for better security and a smaller number for higher throughput.
The MultiVAC developer team is relatively new to blockchain, yet their experience at leading tech companies and universities is strong. Members of the development team include former Senior Engineers from Google, Tencent, and Alibaba, as well as researchers from Harvard, Nanyang Technology University, and the University of Sydney. While the MultiVAC team has at their disposal a number of channels through a network of advisors to establish partnerships for dApps, no announcements have been made to this effect.
Product Roadmap:
• Q4 2018 scheduled for testnet
• Q2 2019 scheduled for mainnet
Key Points:
• Next-generation public blockchain platform designed for large-scale and complicated decentralized applications
• Token metrics not available yet
• Strong team
• Using sharding similar to Quarkchain and Zilliqa
• Gaining attention on social media, at the time of writing they have 22.200 members on Telegram, without any specific crowdsale info
• 50% bonus for the seed round could cause dump on exchanges despite lock up
• MVP hasn’t been released yet
• No partnership announcements so far
ChromaWay
Hard Cap: $15.000.000
Whitelist Date: TBA
Total Supply: TBA
Total Supply Designated for Investors: TBA
Official Website: https://chromaway.com/
ICO BACKSTORY
ChromaWay is the blockchain technology designed for the pioneers of the modern world. Since it has been established as a cryptocurrency/blockchain based platform back in 2014, they’ve been developing and refining their approach to help improve the industry as a whole. ChromaWay works with public and private sector participants to build and support applications that run on the system. Real Estate and finance are the two principle avenues operated on the blockchain technology software.
ChromaWay, the parent company of the platform Chromapolis, aims to create a platform allowing decentralized applications with scaling and ease of development in mind. The role of Chromaway blockchain when developing dApps is to store data and ensure all updates and modifications can be monitored. The system is tamperproof, cannot be shut down, and services can be monetized without sacrificing the privacy of users.
Main features of the Chromapolis platform are:
• Relational model so that the data can easily be accessed by an application programming interface (API) and indexed and queried without performance degradation.
• The platform is scaling is solved horizontally so that each dApp gets its own blockchain, run by its own nodes.
• Chromapolis does not charge transactions fees, but instead collects fees from a dApp as a whole.
• Uses the PBFT consensus algorithm
Chromapolis wants to be a database for all decentralized applications built on it and offers a simpler way to create and use the blockchain to develop dApps. Platform providers will run nodes and get rewards not from transactions but instead from dApp profits.
The Chromapolis team is experienced with blockchain developing and has been working in blockchain space for a while. Its team also worked with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at some point. 70% of tokens are unlocked outside of sale, 40% for promotional, and 30% for VC/Marketing.
Product Roadmap:
• Testnet planned in September
• Full platform release in Q1 2019
Key Points:
• They have a prototype, MVP release in September
• EOS competitor
• Project is still in stealth mode
• Database for all dApps
• CHROMA tokens are used by dApps to pay hosting fees and to peg dApp tokens.
• Charlie Lee is an advisor
• Enterprise-driven
• No whitepaper available at the moment
Jura
Hard Cap: $20.000.000
Whitelist Date: TBA
Total Supply: 1.000.000.000
Total Supply Designated for Investors: 200.000.000 to 250.000.000 (20% to 25% of the total supply)
Official Website: https://jura.network/
ICO BACKSTORY
Jura Protocol aims to design the next generation of blockchain ecosystem, thus laying the foundation for the new emerging technologies designed to facilitate the transfer of goods or execution of smart contracts in a decentralized manner.
This vision is possible through the four interworking technologies that Jura develops, all helping the emergence of a new class of DAG type protocol, the Fusus, and a novel consensus mechanism called PoU (Proof of Utility). These innovative technologies, coupled with the DMDS (dynamically monitored and distributed sharding) and the AI security layer, create an ecosystem that is fruitful for the development of dApps and a decentralized governance.
Jura enters a space that is oversaturated with projects, aiming at improving scalability and providing a fast, secure and, feeless network. Their proposition is also relying on a DAG architecture, where there are a lot of competitors both established and new, like Nano, Iota, Constellation, Fantom, Vite, and Hashgraph. Although the space is crowded, there is still room for innovation, and Jura’s proposition brings to the table a lot of novel mechanisms to improve the scalability and security issues.
Jura makes use of a native token, but the whitepaper does not clearly state the nature of the token. There are examples given of how the token works and how it will be used in the PoS stake mechanism to incentivize users to run the network. This is along with how the voting on the network will be taken into account based on the amount of token staked, and the amount of time the tokens were staked.
The JURA team brings together top-notch researchers, engineers, and industry experts. All of which collectively have backgrounds ranging from software engineering and applied mathematics to financial management and business development – hailing from world-class universities such as MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Peking, LSE, and Columbia.
Product Roadmap:
• Q4 2018 scheduled for testnet
• Q2 2019 scheduled for mainnet
Key Points:
• Strong team
• New promising approach to solving the blockchain scalability issues
• Very competitive market
• No MVP yet
• The whitepaper does not include a business plan
Computable Labs
Hard Cap: TBA
Whitelist Date: TBA
Total Supply: TBA
Total Supply Designated for Investors: TBA
Official Website: https://www.computable.io/
ICO BACKSTORY
Computable Labs aims to create a platform where any type of data will be privately and securely managed with blockchain and AI smart contracts – allowing it to utilize data for multiple applications. Here are several of the proposed characteristics of what looks to be an exciting development:
• Monetize by selling Data
• Create and manage data cooperatives
• Get data on demand
• Validate and designate authorship
• Power application with constant access to data
Computable Labs’ creation is a new kind of decentralized network that crowdsources data and makes it available for learning agents – whether human or autonomous. Their protocol token design economically incentivizes one group of participants to supply data to the network and another group to curate data for relevance and quality. Network data will be organized so that everything can be queried, transacted, and transmitted within a single coordination layer. In particular, all data on the network will be algorithmically accessible, enabling a future in which computational agents can autonomously request and procure data required to meet their objectives.
At Computable Labs, the team is working hard to make data a shared resource that is as openly accessible as possible. The team is building an open source technology to make it not just possible, but also profitable to trade and exchange data. With the right trustless Internet infrastructure in place, Computable Labs believes an entire industry will be created around an open global marketplace of data and algorithms.
Key Points:
• Large investors on board including Pantera, Blockchain Capital, SV Angel, Amplify Partners, and others
• Strong founding team with startup experiences
• Active GitHub with constant updates
• No public whitepaper yet
