What happens with your money after ICO? KICKICO case ($KICK)

If you read my article about spotting scams here it is, you may know that working prototype is what always must be presented by projects before initial coin offering. It shows how serious team about what they want to develop. If they only have some highly non-definitive drawing, something is not right. The more ICOs I see, the easier it is for me to distinguish between high-quality projects and scam-like shitcoins nobody will ever use. Does it have working prototype? Is it usable or just $5 interface? Will anybody ever use this? Is there demand for such things? Usually, it doesn’t take much time to see if this project is perspective or just another money collecting wallet on Ethereum blockchain.

Even though KICKICO showed signs of life in June 2017, their working prototype already helped another project to get funding in August 2017. That is an example of high quality ICO with short period of real product delivery. Nevertheless, some time passed after initial coin offering and I really wanted to make some interesting materials about what happened to KICKICO after ICO.

I have never made a review on this project so I will cover some important points about what this KICKICO is all about, how its token economy works, why KICK token is of interest for investors and what has been done since July. Also, I will mention how this project’s community reacts to what is happening with the platform and to KICK tokens’ price change. I hope it will be interesting for you. Let’s get going!

I would like to start by mentioning why this project is needed in the crowdfunding industry. To be able to do this, we need to take a closer look at the main problems of this sphere.
As you may already know, there are two main players in this sphere, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Both of them share four significant problems that undermine growth of crowdfunding market. Do not take it as if there is no growth in this sphere, there is, but the underlying problems simply slow down the market.
First problem is that the main platforms don’t accept projects from countries where they have no presence. Launching a Kickstarter campaign requires a resident to be present in one of the countries of official work.
Secondly, platforms charge high commissions , which can eat up to 20% of collected money ( if we include taxes, pr, and other costs).
Another big problem is high percentage of failed projects that didn’t deliver anything in the end. In March 2016, professor Ethan Mollick concluded that only 65% of respondents agreed with the statement that the product was delivered on time. Due to this fact, a lot of people lose their faith in crowdfunding.
Now, it is much more important to have huge marketing budget than a bright idea to collect money. Needed significant funds on advertising really limits number of projects that can afford their placement on Kickstarter.

What this project is all about?

KICKICO is a Ethereum-based KICKSTARTER-like crowdfunding and initial coin offering platform. It collected 84 635ETH during ICO. One of the main advantages is the commission of KICKICO, it only takes 4% of collected money, half of what Kickstarter and IndieGoGo take. In reality, crowdfunding projects spend much more than 8% on fees, just remember about taxes, marketing expenses, and other costs).

Project has created platform where backers/investors and creators/founders cooperate with each other.

Platform provides a range of services that is needed during the period of crowdfunding/initial coin offering. For example, automated bounty engine that offers projects all the necessary skills during crowdsales.

KICKICO platform is powered with KICK token. Token economy of this project is quite complex.

Their main product is already operational. And it is already being used for different initial coin offerings. Recently, two projects successfully conducted presales on KICKICO platform. Storiqa, local business powered by blockchain, collected 1 209 ETH and Magisters of Magic, multiplayer online game, collected 280 ETH.

Now let’s closely examine how KICK token works. In other words, we will find why investors are interested in holding this token.

Tokenholders will receive bonus KICKs for 2 years after the KICKICO crowdsale. It is bonus emission done by KICKICO team to incentivize tokenholders to hold KICKs long-term. If you are tokenholder, each month you will be rewarded from 0,5% to 6% additional tokens until September 2019.

Platform charges 4% of collected ETH by projects for continuing support of KICKICO development.

Also, 4% of projects’ tokens go to KICKONOMY Reserve Fund, which belongs to KICK token holders. From 2018 KICKONOMY’s reserves will be probably used to buy back tokens and burn them. In my opinion, it is really great idea. If some projects, which raised money on KICKICO platform, become really popular, KICK tokens could gain a lot of value because of that.

Each contributor to successful ICO on KICKICO platform will get cashback up to 8% from what they pledged. Cashback will be made in KICK tokens.

Cashback exchange rate depends on how much was pledged and current rate of KICKs on digital exchanges.

So, bigger KICK price = less new KICKs which are issued per project. What it means? If the price of KICK is high and you purchased some project’s tokens through the platform, you will receive low number of tokens. And vice versa.

Currently, only Etherdelta listed KICKs on its platform. Starting from 15th of October, you will be able to trade tokens on EXMO exchange, the biggest exchange in Russia and CIS countries. And from 22nd of October, you will be able to trade KICKs on HitBTC. Founders are in negotiations with Bittrex administration to list tokens, but I do not know when negotiations will come to any fruitful conclusion.

Developers prepare to leverage usage of KICKS to the fullest on their platform. What are they promising to do to increase the value of tokens?

• KICKs will be used to pay for ICO services

• Some used KICKs will be burned

• In 2018, KICKs will be used to participate in ICOs

• KICKONOMY agreements will force companies to accept KICKs as payment method for their services. I think it is one of the great ideas by KICKICO team to boost value of their tokens.

What did it all start with?

June 2017, the founder posted announcement of the KICKICO project on medium blog. In this post he described the main flaws of crowdfunding platforms and enumerated reasons his project will not be affected by these flaws.

July 2017 was the month of successful presale of KICKICO where they collected 5 000 ETH.

August 2017. First ever project, Magisters of Magic, used KICKICO platform for presale. Presale was a success, game developer collected 280 ETH.

August was also marked by collaboration between KICKICO and BANCOR. Starting from this time, KICK is a smart-token on Ethereum blockchain and has 5% of reserves in ETH.

September 2017. That is exactly the month when initial coin offering was concluded. The project collected 84 635 ETH.

October 2017. That’s the month when KICKs will get listing on three exchanges, Etherdelta, HitBTC, and EXMO.

Another big event of October is the start of ICOs of many different project which will try to use KICKICO as the platform.
Currently, FLIP, digital marketplace for video gamers, is conducting presale. I think it is an interesting project but with a very overused idea of virtual goods market. If you are interested in this topic, just check my previous videos. I made a ton of reviews on projects with the same exact goals. Also, there will be initial coin offering of MicroMoney, credit bureau on blockchain, on 18th of October. Check it out, it looks like humaniq to me (the project that conducted crowdsale half a year ago My review on Humaniq).

Finally, they plan a very cool update in October that will greatly improve KICKICO platform. It is called Community choice. Basically, you will be able to choose which project should have a chance at collecting money on the platform. BTW, design looks very user-friendly. It will greatly improve the quality and quantity of projects on KICKICO.

December 2017. They plan to finish the year with the $200 mln portfolio of projects. I wish luck and advice tokenholders of KICK to actively participate in the life of their platform to reach the target number.

June 2018. This time the reserve fund will be able to buy tokens out of exchanges and burn them, thus, decreasing number of available KICKs. This will increase value of each KICK token.

With the help of gloc extension in my Google chrome browser, I counted more than 41 thousand lines of code. Quite impressive.

After the ICO ended. What is up with the community of this project?

First of all, the project deleted its slack channel due to the fact that they couldn’t stop the never-ending stream of spam to users. I also experience it all the time on other projects’ slacks. It is very annoying and I support the decision of KICKICO to start completely rely on Telegram and Reddit. Even though telegram has some problems with spam, it is not that critical like in slack.

So, I inspected their telegram and was pleasantly surprised with the fact that it is very active, there a lot of members in the chat. The support team is very responsive. Well, only positive emotions about that. Members also seem to enjoy fast replies of the support.

Generally, I see that investors of this project are generally very happy about the KICKICO’s team efforts. But as in any other project, investors have some negative points. Let’s see what we got here.

Price. As in any other project, the investors care a lot about capitalization. Here they are unhappy that current market price is only a little bit higher than the ICO price.

Another thing is that tokenholders want projects to start accepting KICKs as fast as possible. KICKICO team promises to integrate KICKs into payment mechanism only in the beginning of 2018. They need more liquidity and more exchanges to start accepting KICK tokens.

Finally, there are a lot of questions about emission mechanism. Investors are afraid of inflation. If you listened to my presentation carefully, you may understand that inflation is not than significant and backed by tokens. I think investors can sleep well and do not be too overwhelmed with possible dilution of their share.