Crypto Academy Season 2: Week 1 – ICO (Initial Coin Offering) – by @imagen

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Hi everyone, welcome to this week’s season 2 class. In this homework task post, I will be answering the task on writing about ICO (Initial Coin Offering), a task by @imagen - I will be giving my opinion about ICO, comparing it with IEO and writing about the advantages and disadvantages.

ICO (Initial Coin Offering) and What it is all About

ICO is simply one a fund raising or crowd funding initiative in the crypto world. It is simply a process which a cryptocurrency project uses to raise funds to build the project based on the white paper. We saw the rise of ICOs in 2017 where there was a lot of projects springing up with ICOs to raise funds to build the project. Since ICOs means initial coin offering, it basically means that it only take place in the blockchain world and uses cryptocurrency as the asset to sell to raise the required funds needed to build the project.

The ethereum blockchain was the main host of a lot of the ICOs that took place back then when ICOs was the major subject matter, due to its ability to create ERC-20 tokens easily and using that as the ICO token for sell. Once an ICO has begun, investors can purchase the coin or token based on the minimum investment rules of the project doing the ICO. Investing in ICO can be a very risky venture because of the high risk of scams or projects not meeting up to expectations, but at the same time, investing in ICO can be a very profitable investment as well… There are a lot of projects who did ICO back in 2017 and have gone on to become successful.

What is the Difference Between ICO and IEO?

ICO	IEO
In ICO, investors purchase the coins or tokens directly from the project doing the ICO	In IEO, investors purchase the coins or tokens directly from the exchange that is involved in the IEO
In ICO, it is decentralized	In IEO, it is centralized because of the centralized exchange involved in the IEO
In ICO, investors have control of their cryptocurrency in their wallet immediately after purchasing the cryptocurrency from the ICO	In IEO, the cryptocurrency are in custody of the exchange involved in the IEO for a certain time frame
In ICO, you do not need to perform Know your customer (KYC) verification before purchasing the cryptocurrency from the ICO	In IEO, know your customer (KYC) is mandatory before purchasing the cryptocurrency from the IEO

Advantages and Disadvantages of ICOs?

Advantages of ICO	Disadvantages of ICO
One of the advantages of ICO is that investors can purchase the cryptocurrency directly from the project doing the ICO	Purchasing the cryptocurrency directly from the project doing the ICO becomes a high risk of falling victim of scam ICO
Another advantage of ICO is that it is decentralized	Because of the decentralization, ICO is not regulated
Another advantage is that, investors have full control of their cryptocurrency in their wallet after buying in the ICO	Purchased coins can become worthless in a very short time
Another advantage of ICO is that there is no KYC which means that no verification is needed to buy into the ICO	Because of no KYC, it increases the risk of scam

What is ARK?

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ARK was one of the projects that did their ICO back then in 2016 and was successful with it ICO fund raising. The ARK development team handled by Ark Ecosystem Scic, which is an international software development company with their headquarters located in France.

ARK is simply a blockchain based platform with its cryptocurrency known as ARK. Its goal is to become a development platform that anyone can create their own blockchain that is interoperable and fully customizable. The ARK ICO took place in 2016 and it raised about $800,000 in funding for the ARK project. The main focus of the ARK team is to create solutions with use cases in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. The executive team consist of François Thoorens as president, Rok Černec as vice-president, Matthew Cox as chief strategy officer, Brian Faust as chief technology officer… and the development, senior managers team.

As always, every blockchain project that holds an ICO tries to solve a problem in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space and ARK is definitely one of them. One of the main problems ARK tries to solve is the problem of difficulty working with blockchain technology… And ARK aims to reduce that difficulty to make it easier to work with blockchain technology. ARK also aims to develop meaningful solutions that have uses cases.

The ARK Ecosystem

• Framework
• ARK desktop wallet
• ARK mobile wallet
• ARK explorer
• Deployer.io
• Marketsquare.io
• Nodem
• Platform SDK

ARK Current Statistics

The ARK cryptocurrency currently has a market capitalization of $281,454,654, fully diluted marketcap of $343,128,628, circulating supply of 128,586,647 ARK, total supply of 156,707,544 ARK and is listed on a number of top exchanges that includes Binance and OKEx.

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@steemcurator01
@steemcurator02