The boom that the Initial Coins Offering – ICO – has had since 2017 is very significant. In the case of a crowfunding mode, the possibility of raising funds by placing your own token that will be traded on exchanges globally is tremendously striking. However, due to the presence of unscrupulous actors on the one hand, and due to the lack of adequate regulatory frameworks for the protection of investors on the other hand, and the lack of sufficient knowledge of these before the due diligence that should be done prudently to a project before investing in it, the fraudulent ICOs have been a worrying reality as well, causing millionaire losses to their investors.
ConcourseQ is the platform that is conducting a rigorous due diligence to many ICOs. It is doing this by encouraging the cryptographic community to know and evaluate the questionable ICOs when examining Qfellow’s reports. Qfellowship is the name of the program that ConcourseQ began in 2017, when through a selection process a contingent of candidates who previously applied to participate in the program was recruited. Applicants admitted to the program receive an incentive of $ 350 per month on Ethereum. The purpose of the platform is to provide investors with a solid analysis of the next ICOs for consideration at the time of investing.
The trajectory of the platform in the time it takes online is interesting: more than 170 ICOs reviewed, two cases of scams discovered – Moirai and Cvent – and its weekly publication “Terrible Token Tuesdays”, which takes more than 15 editions.
The history of cases of fraudulent ICOs is long, but it can be mentioned cases in which several companies that submitted their respective ICO lacked specific or structured commercial plans, and in some extreme cases, even lacked a work team on board.
ICOs scams quickly alerted regulators in different parts of the world. We have seen the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States (SEC), the Financial Services Agency (FSA), and the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA, just to name a few, intervene specifically in their areas of action.
The result of the actions of the regulatory entities could be summarized in alerting its citizens about the risks of investing in ICOs, recommending the investigation of those projects through due diligence and common sense.
The special characteristics of the ICOs, together with the fact that they refer to intangible assets in the first stage, such as their tokens, mean that there is still a kind of love-hate effect in the global market. While on the one hand it is true that tokens are inherently volatile and have no price limits as those observed in the traditional sectors of the economy, it is no less true that if an ICO does not reach its fixed limit to raise funds and begin to operate in your project, the company of that ICO can “burn” their tokens and drastically limit their supply in circulation, which would ensure greater value to their tokens.
Although the entire ICO framework is still incipient, it has been shown that scammers are considerably less in number than compared to genuine initiatives that strive to achieve platforms of innovative products and services that provide value.
