ICO City #1 - ZenGold

Welcome to ICO City, where I try to give you a quick rundown and rating of the next upcoming ICO and the idea behind it!

For anyone not "in the know", ICO stands for "initial coin offering" and is a way of crowdfunding Alts and solving the problem of intitial coin distribution.
The devs sell coins (basically shares) of their project to fund it, and the backers invest their hard earned crypto either b/c they believe in the project's future or b/c they're trying to flip their shares as soon as the coin hits exchanges to (hopefully) make a quick buck.

In our first ICO City post we will be talking about ZenGold.

Before we start, a short disclaimer: I'm merely a trainee in the financial sector NOT a financial advisor, so take everything you read here w/ a grain of salt and do your own research before investing. That said, even if I WERE an actual financial advisor you should STILL do your own research!

1. What is Zengold?

Zengold claims to be a "smart asset system backed by physical gold" . It aims at creating a crypto asset w/ less volatility and higher reliability by backing the coins w/ gold. This furthermore enables holders to buy and sell even tiny amounts of gold almost instantly, making gold as an asset more accessible.
Zengold is based on the METAVERSE blockchain.
The ICO starts on Friday, the 26th of May, at 3 PM sharp (GMT +8) and ends 15 days later on Friday, the 9th of June, 3:00 PM (again, GMT +8).
The aim of the ICO is to raise 2.000 BTC to fund the project.

1. First Impressions?

The site looks very slick, nice color scheme and does not seem like it was thrown together in the matter of a few hours; project seems ambitious to say the least.
The team is largely unknown, no big names like some other ICOs.
Whole endeavor seems very transparent, a few spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are excused.

1. What info does the Whitepaper provide?

The project tries to couple new tech (the Blockchain) w/ one of the oldest and most trusted of assets, gold.
1 ZenGold token (ZNG) will have a fixed value of 1 gram of physical gold. All the gold will be securely stored in the Shanghai Gold Exchange, new ZNGs can only be created w/ gold of the same value being added to the vault. Users can "burn" their tokens at any time to get their gold delivered to them (prices for transportation will be charged to the receiver of the gold).
ZNG transactions cost 0.1% of the worth of the whole transaction; costs are capped at 1 ZNG (so 1 gram of gold).
ZGC (ZenGoldCoin) holders profit from these transaction fees by receiving a share of the generated profit of the network.
Audits are done every 3 months, w/ the auditor being assigned by the ZenGold foundation. Also, a real time public audit system will be implemented to achieve maximum transparency.

1. What are the potential uses of ZNG?

The whitepaper mentions three main uses, all achieved through the low volatility/ high stability the tokens have, thanks to their worth being tied to gold:

As a credit system;
Using gold as a form of global payment;
ZNG as the perfect token to finance other ICOs

1. How are the ZGC tokens distributed?

100.000.000 ZGCs will be distributed; 63.000.000 of those will be sold during the ICO, giving 1 ZGC an initial worth of approximately 0,000031746 BTC. These ZGCs can be traded immediately after the ICO ends.
10.000.000 will be distributed between the founders and the development team and frozen for 3 years.
7.000.000 will be used for a Bounty program and the remaining 20.000.000 as a means to finance various development and organizational costs.

1. Last but not least, how does ZGC create value for its holders?

Money is earned through the fee system and distributed amongst ZGC holders; so the worth of ZGC depends in a huge part on the prominence of the system and wether gold will be used as a currency in the future.

So, this is it for our first ICO rundown! I hope the information in this post was of value to you! Next time we are going to tackle Aeternity.
Feel free to share and comment, and if this was of interest to you please consider tipping!

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Thanks for reading and see you next time!