-ICOs are a high-risk way of fundraising. Don't invest anything you can’t completely afford to lose and keep in mind that due to a lack of regulation in some countries, you will have difficulty getting back your lost money in case of any failures.

-Find out everything you can about the team, especially the development team and the advisory board. Look up each team member for relevant experience. Google their names, LinkedIn profiles and Facebook profiles.

-A good starting point and thread on BitcoinTalk, as Bitcointalk is the biggest forum for Bitcoin and crypto related issues. It is strongly recommended that you read the messages carefully.

-Investor’s concerns will be answered (or may be unanswered) in this thread. It is a bad sign when the developers avoid answering certain questions or aren’t collaborating. Sending devs a personal message to see how responsive they are is also a good idea.

-Evaluate the stage of the project if it only have a whitepaper? A beta version? Is there a launched product with limited functionality? Prefer projects which have “some lines” of working code, however, many ICOs have proven they can become success stories without any code written.

-It is crucial to have a wide open supporting community like a public Slack for all investors and openness is as crucial in gaining your trust as the Github code. Try to grasp the atmosphere within the community. Consider at the size of the community and its activity regularly.

-ICOs mean the creation of a new dedicated token for the project. One of the most important questions each project needs to answer is what is the token for? Why isn’t Bitcoin or Ethereum enough to serve as the project’s token? an ICO can’t be an ICO without a dedicated token.

-Crypto ICOs, the difference between open and hard cap didn’t have the same impact as today’s ICOs. An open cap allows investors to send unlimited funding to the project’s ICO wallet. The more coins are circulating, the less unique your tokens become for the trading afterwards.

-A good project will link its token distribution to the roadmap. Because each phase or milestone of the project requires a certain amount of funding.

-Evaluating the Whitepaper as most investors actually don’t read through the whitepaper, even though it contains all the necessary information about the upcoming project and the ICO. Don’t hesitate to read it, or at least the majority of it. Note the strong and negative aspects and add in some of your own research.

-If you have a little bit of programming experience, then the quality of a developer can be understood by analyzing some of their code. As a non-techie it is still possible to evaluate their quality by looking at the consistency of the code.

-Crypto projects tend to have open-source code. This creates trust among the project’s community, encouraging devs from the community to make suggestions or improvements. An open-source project provides the opportunity to look at the commit logs.

-ICOs will become more and more mainstream as a method for raising funds and there will be plenty of projects to choose from, hence it will become even harder to assess these projects.

-It is key to investigate and read as much information as possible and write down all the important aspects both positive and negative before making an investment decision! You are also advice to drop some line below to guide all investor to avoid choosing the wrong ICO.

@udibekwe

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Open Source Contribution posted via Utopian.io

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