The ICO Rules to Live, by Luca Cotta.

So, you want to create an ICO for your company and take advantage of blockchain technologies? Sure, that is great, but your product is helping people to track their activity to lose weight? Do you honestly think this would be useful for blockchain tech? Wake up people, the days of asking for $60 million dollars for a ridiculous ICO are over. That train left the station 3 months ago. The only reason a company would do an ICO like this is to scam people!

I get emails all the time asking me to join their ICO as an advisors or manager. People offer me big money to put my name on their product, but I don’t! It is not about the money, it is that the company themselves do not know what they are doing, and many common investors do not know what they are doing either! There is no way I would partner with a company that I think is a scam.

I only advise for and partner with legit ICO companies, such as ETHLEND.io. ETHLend has a real product and uses it to solve real world problems in the Peer-2-Peer lending markets. This is an example of a real company that I would help with advising.

My first job involved fighting scams, and helping people to learn how to identify scams. I continue to fight against scam ICOs and wrote this article to provide some of my tips to help protect yourself against scam ICOs.

The ICO rules to live by:

1. The most important aspect of a project is the team. Make sure to understand the team and see how they can develop and implement their project. Is their team very small? Just one or two people, even four or less, and I believe it will be a scam project.
   

2. Don’t follow glammer ICOs that are all hype and have no real product. If the platform does not exist, and the technology does not solve real world problems, then stay away!
   

3. Multi-million dollar ICOs are something to be avoided. If an ICO is planning on raising more than $15M it is likely going to dump quickly once it hits the exchanges. In the real world, a few million is more than enough to get a working product deployed. The ICO market is changing, it is completely different than it was 6 months ago.
   

4. If an ICO is promising to be listed on big exchanges right after a launch it is a lie. Exchanges will ban ICOs from their listing if the ICO uses their name to draw hype. Don’t fall for it.
   

5. If an ICO has a picture of Vitalik Buterin, who is the creator of Ethereum, it is 100% a marketing scam. They are using his name and influence to trick users into investing into their scam ICO.
   

6. If the team does not have a community driver and pusher for the project then it is a scam. Real companies with real technologies and platforms will market their product and want to create long-term value and customers. Fake ICOs want to sell tokens and then dump when it hits an exchange.
   

7. Venture capital and Angel investors are another sign that an ICO may be a scam. If an ICO had to raise funds through VC, then most likely they are going to be dumping coins immediately. There is no need to have VC when doing an ICO. An ICO with a legit team, and sound product will raise the money it needs to succeed.
   

And, do not believe to ICO whitout full, deep, completed white paper and timeline maybe done by someone economical guru...

I hope this list helps you identify scam ICOs from legit ICOs. Thanks for reading, bye!

Tnx Andreas Achleithner for support!