Some Long-Term Speculations I'm Interested In: AcademyToken, CryptoHunt, and RavenCoin
Given the recent drama regarding SEC subpoenas (80 companies got hit, and yes, there might be some FUD involved), there's a lot of concern about ICOs. I took a break from investing in any of them because most of them did not allow for U.S. Citizen participation. I found a couple recently that include full KYC and do allow U.S. citizens to get involved.
This is not financial advice! I'm just doing this for entertainment purposes and telling my personal story on my blog. Please don't make financial decisions based on what you hear from me!
Academy Token
After Jason King's presentation at Anarchapulco, I decided Academy Token is something worth supporting. You can find out more here: https://www.academytoken.com/
It's one of the few ICO's that will allow US Citizens. It's half price if you get in before March 15th ($1 USD per token), but you have to already be on the whitelist for the "public pre-sale."
Here's the ICO site: https://ico.academytoken.com and here's my referral link, but at this time neither of us get any benefits as they aren't doing a token referral program (yet?). That said, please use that link in case they change this in the future.
They do full KYC (you'll have to upload government ID documents) via icosid.com which looks interesting.
The basic idea behind this one is the world needs a metric crap ton more blockchain developers and someone needs to train them all. That's what Academy is going to do. It's a real need, and they are going to fill it. As a developer, I may end up using these tokens myself to pay for additional blockchain development training.
If you're following me on Twitter, you already saw me mention it here:
Jason King is the guy behind Sean's Outpost and Unsung.org which tells me he actually cares about real problems and helping real people. I enjoyed talking with him when I met him in Mexico. This one might not be one of those 10X'ers but more of a long-term "We should invest in this to help the entire ecosystem" insurance buys.
I noticed this Facebook post from Jason this morning:
When I logged in to the ICO site, I saw this:
I think that means they've raised $24M in the private pre-sale.
If I was an enterprise company looking to get into the blockchain space, I might seriously consider investing in this token in order to get first dibs at the graduates.
You can read the whitepaper in multiple languages here: https://www.academytoken.com/whitepaper. In the whitepaper, it lists these token details:
Aw, shoot. This post is already getting long, and I have to run some errands. I'll follow up with parts 2 and 3 digging into CryptoHunt and RavenCoin in future posts. Let me know what you think about Academy Token in the comments. If you have questions, check the FAQ here.
Seriously, again, this is not financial advice. It's just for entertainment and informational purposes only. I don't know if this is a good investment or a terrible one. Make your own decisions and don't blame anyone but yourself for how they come out.
Edit: part 2 talking about Crypto Hunt is live!
I get that these projects want to be on the good side of the US regulators, but I'm very wary of uploading KYC documents due to the risk of data and identity theft.
Yep. It's a very valid concern to have and many see KYC as taking a step backwards when it comes to the goals of cryptocurrency to eliminate government involvement.
When I read the name academy token, my immediate thought was that it must be similar to BitDegree (the would-be blockchain based education platform). It is not. It is an academy to create more blockchain developers. It might mean a lot if the instructions come from known blockchain developers who have done exceptional work in the field already. People with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Steem and other notable blockchains background should be an important part of this academy in any capacity in my opinion.
Interesting project and the one that affects our future in many ways. I listened to @aantonop's Blockchain vs Bullshit keynote. I think the academy will help a lot in creating blockchains and not the BS consequence of this amazing technology.
I would keep an eye on what this project does. Seems an interesting one to me.
You answered my question apparently, what a coincidence :-)
I am so glad that I did. Thanks for acknowledging!
Here's what the FAQ says about BitDegree:
I agree, the real-world, hands-on development experience we're collecting should hopefully be part of how we educate the next group of blockchain developers.
Very thoughtful of them to clarify the difference in the FAQs. I was able to guess the difference from your post.
Exciting project!
I was here for the updates, even though I don't have enough money to spend on crypto these days (I say spend and not invest because the money I am spending on crypto can not be considered an investment since they are few than what I have made by writing here). The ICO seems very promising, maybe indeed not a 10x, but as you said it helps the ecosystem and yet 30 millions dollars is a great sum of money.
I just remarked that on your footer you are on 13'th place as a witness and I was really impressed, last time that I remember checking you on witnesses list you were on ~20'th place.
But now, checking the list again I didn't even had to scroll through the witnesses, you are on 12 position:
That's really amazing, congrats, you deserve it and even better!
Thanks Andrew. :) I try to update each of my posts with a current witness number in the footer of the post so you can kind of use that as a proxy to view the progress over time. I think at one point I got as high as 8 or 9. :)
Wow! Academy tokens. Way to go. I don't know @jasonking personally but you can be sure I'm doing a search on him pretty soon.
Thats actually very thoughtful. The future is blockchain. And if you can have a place to train them all then... just wow!
ACAD tokens.
This is why I always stress the importance of filling a need in the society. Its very easy to fill a need because there are so many.
My team & I have started filling the need of the world's healthcare via #Air-Clinic.
Thank you for delegating 1k SP to @Air-Clinic! We really appreciated you by encouraging our 1000+ member community to vote you and others as witness.
Here's the link
Thanks for sharing Academy token with us!
I think you tagged the wrong Jason King in your comment. :)
I'm glad you're excited about the Air-Clinic project, for sure. I hope it helps a lot of people.
The project looks very interesting and while there have already been some attempts and other ICO projects that wanted to create learning platforms, none of them have aimed to do this on that scale and with the sole focus on blockchain technology. It is expected that in the close future there will be a high demand for blockchain developers and specialists, therefore such platform and well-thought curriculum and teaching programs can be in high demand as well. Academy shows a very professional approach, the design of the site and content of the whitepapers are very well done.
Yeah, there's already a high demand right now and we're just getting started with the cryptocurrency space!
Very nice post Luke, until now I hadn't heard about the ACAD ICO;
I have invested in Bitdegree though and to me these platforms seem to offer the same services, only Bitdegree was first...
I might be wrong about the exact services these cryptocurrencies provide but they seem like the same thing to me, any comment on why ACAD is better or what's different?
From the FAQ:
good work. carry on buddy.
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