What is an ICO

ICO, Initial Coin Offering is a crowd-sale effort made by Cryptocurrency startups to raise money for their project. It starts with the whitepaper that details the purpose of the project, financial plan, team, the methodology for fundraising and ICO process. This is to educate investors and increase their confidence in the project, which is crutial as many projects rely heavily on these investors to even get off the ground.

How To Profit From ICOs

There are numerous ways an individual can profit from ICOs.

The most straightforward path is being an investor. Once an investor obtains the tokens that have been released by the project’s team after an ICO, they will hold the tokens until it is listed on an exchange. From here, some investors will choose to turn a quick profit by “Dumping” all their tokens which they obtained at a fraction of the price during ICO.

This is a probable reason as to why there is such a heavy sell side action during exchange listings.

Illustrated by the chart below (WPR on the day of an exchange listing ).

What is a Bounty

A “Bounty” is a reward mechanism initiated by an ICO project to incentivize Individuals to perform specific tasks. There are two types of bounties

1. Pre-ICO Bounties

2. Post-ICO Bounties

These two Bounties have different objectives as they are at different parts of an ICO campaign. However, both kinds of bounties revolve around the concept of community building and leveraging the strength of communities.

Pre-ICO Bounties

The objective is to gain as much marketing buzz as possible for market penetration and increased sales. For Pre-ICO bounties, Individuals are usually rewarded with token to perform task under three broad activities. Namely, signature bounty, social media campaign and content creation campaign.

*1. Signature Bounty

In a signature bounty, the project engages users from prominent forums such as “bitcoin talk” or “Crypto coin talk” to promote the ICO. To avoid spams that could tarnish the reputation of the projects, those users usually need to achieve a minimal amount of social ranking within those forums (junior member or higher) to be eligible for the role of promoters.

These promoters will then be issued a signature with a unicode tag embedded in them to associate them with the project. The rewards for such promoters are usually the project tokens.

*2. Social Media Campaign

The purpose of having a social media campaign is to create buzz and hype around a project at low cost before the start of the ICO. The project will engage promoters to share and retweet promotional materials for the ICO on different social media platforms. These materials include but are not limited to interviews with the developers, articles and reviews with the most popular social media platforms being Reddit, Facebook and Twitter.

Once again the project’s token are used as reward payouts for the promoters. So if you think you have what it takes to spread the word out and create sales conversion, social media campaigns are a great way to use your existing social media influence and network to earn Crypto tokens without actually putting money in to invest.

However, this is not without its downside. If the project fails, your reputation will suffer. So be careful not to mindlessly promote projects, instead do your own research and find projects that you truly believe in.

*3. Content Creation Campaign

Ever considered the side hustle of being a YouTube star with your own fan base or have a website with thousands of readers? Well, being rewarded with Crypto tokens could be an incentive to start those side projects.

Youtubers and influencers are definitely a priority for projects that aim to effectively tap unto small private communities. These communities already have trust built around the source of content, be it a YouTuber or Blogger. As such, they will be less skeptical and more likely take action base on the content creators recommendation.

However, with notorious scandals involving YouTubers shilling scam coins and Crypto pyramid schemes, i.e the Bitconnect case, people are catching onto creators that publish content that have biases. Not to mention legal ramifications if the project you support turns out to be a ponzi or pyramid scheme.

So while there are huge rewards for being sponsered by a project, there also exist risks if a content creator behaves unethically.

Post-ICO Bounties

After an ICO, a project needs to continue building a community around it and make improvements. This way, the project vision can progress while the value of the tokens appreciate as investor confidence grows over time.
During this period bounties usually fall under two categories, a translation campaign and technical bounties.

*4. Translation Campaign

This is a cheap and effective way for projects to get basic translation for their whitepaper and website. The more languages the project support the greater the reach in spreading its vision and use case.

Therefore, if you are proficient in more than one language, translations are yet another way to earn tokens without actually financial investments.

*5. Technical Bounties

This is by far the hardest bounty to earn without technical skills.

Technical bounties involve the reporting of bugs and improvement to the overall framework of the project’s blockchain infrastructure.

While being difficult, the need for improvements is always there, so if you have the technical know-how, why not give it a shot!

^{This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, so you should conduct your own research when making a decision.}