Looking into 6 ICOs of 2019

What is an ICO?

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) typically act as fundraisers and these are launched when a company is looking to develop a coin, an application or a digital service to the Blockchain.

Investors around the world may be interested to buy into the offering, with fiat currencies or with pre-existing digital coins like BTC or ETH. The investors will then receive as an exchange, the new cryptocurrency token of that ICO. These investors will hope that the ICO will perform well in the future, whether long or short term and provide them with a return on investment (ROI).

Why were ICOs created?

ICOs are currently one of the best methods for start-ups to raise funds or companies to expand to a Blockchain network. Whatever the motive is, ICO combines the opportunities of Blockchain, automated crowdfunding protocols and benefits of initial public offerings (IPOs) to attract investors.

Just like fiat currencies, cryptocurrency Blockchains need different forms of currency in order to operate. Blockchains need to have coins to incentivize participants to join their network.

Furthermore, since ICOs have become a trend and standard method of raising funds, it has become challenging to analyse, review and even rate the authenticity of these programs. There are no strict regulations which guide investors in an ICO and these programs have failed without guaranteeing ROI, in effecting making investors lose a lot of money.

What ICOs are investors looking at in 2019?

ICOs dominated back in 2017 and the year 2018 it was thought that they would have the same effect and that investors would see greater ideas.

The ICOs that investors are looking at are the ones that have already gathered a large sum from their crowdfunding and have sold a large value of tokens during this time. See a list of them directly below:

1. TrueGame is a product that gained much favour from the community, by attracting investors from the gaming and gambling industry. It’s a platform that most users are actually playing on already. They raised the value of $3.4 million and launched their product with a team of specialists from the gambling industry and now are looking to expand into the market.
2. TimeBox uses decentralised storage technology with a smart contract. Blockchain keeps digital assets on the internet forever and a smart contract guarantees the stored assets are delivered on time, whenever that may be. TimeBox according to their Whitepaper is the key to the needs of the people. Ultimately, it will focus on building an advanced blockchain for digital assets like passwords, banking documents, cryptocurrencies.
3. Lition is developing the next generation Blockchain infrastructure designed for business to bring applications on the Blockchain from their current proof-of-concept stage into commercial products with mass-market adoption. They’ve raised the value of $4.9 million during their crowdfunding period. It’s designed with Lition’s live P2P trading use case and co-innovated with SAP.
4. IOU recreates existing loyalty systems in order to provide more flexibility, control and other benefits for merchants in order to guarantee the best level of consumer satisfaction for the incurred marketing expenditures. These loyalty systems provide the opportunity for consumers to freely exchange their purchased IOU coins with other consumers alike for other IOUs which are needed even more for those trading parties. This ICO gathered a sum of $11.7 million during their crowdfunding period.
5. Eternal Trusts is a product that raised close to $6.2 million from token sales and is the world’s first fiduciary crypto protocol for creating decentralized applications that securely and safely administer crypto assets through collective decision making. The ET protocol replicates the traditional purpose of trust with crypto technology, making it transparent and affordable for the user.
6. Elrond Network, a secure and public blockchain ecosystem that is based on the state-proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Scalability, security and cross-chain interoperability have been a major issue for years now and this is where Elrond Network comes into play, to overcome these problems and offer an adaptive and fully decentralized ecosystem.

The above 6 ICOs are projects that investors are taking interest in and looking at in 2019. These same individuals have taken the time to do their due diligence and assure themselves that these investments would not be a loss. Due to the fact that the crypto universe is volatile, investors must have faith that these products will soon reach, complete their objectives and finalise their product for everyone to begin using them.