Fund your project or invest in ICOs on W12's human-powered platform
Cryptocurrencies are an increasingly popular form of digital asset. However, they are held back from even greater and more broad-based success by a number of factors. Perhaps the most important one among them is their reputation for unreliability. ICOs are notoriously risky and unpredictable. Even those of them that do not turn out to have been scams are susceptible to simple failure due to ill-considered plans or unexpected technical or personal difficulties. Those of them that do succeed might deliver considerable profits to their investors – unless their price collapses due to manipulations, leaving insufficiently nimble traders out in the cold.
The current model is not very healthy for the industry, and its disadvantages are starting to outweigh the benefits of the anarchic blockchain culture. It is off-putting to most mainstream investors and therefore also undermines the projects' ability to raise funds. To address this issue, W12 proposes an alternative model for cryptocurrency investment, to be implemented in its dedicated platform. It combines smart contracts with human decision-making to create a number of possible solutions that would make investing in cryptocurrencies a much safer option.
How can you use W12?
Any project that aims to raise funds by means of an ICO could be registered on W12's website by a member of its team who would need to fill out basic project information. The team will be allowed to choose its preferred approach and level of engagement with the platform. The project could issue its original tokens by itself or through the platform. In either case, it will be able to decide how many tokens it wants to allocate for sale through a W12 smart contract and how many it wishes to sell elsewhere. All allocated tokens will be duplicated with identically priced secured W-Tokens issued by the smart contract and made available for purchase. Buyers will acquire W-Tokens which they will be able to exchange for the project's original tokens. The platform will accommodate many possible sale options, including discounts and sale round intervals. It will also add options of its own, including a Token Hold mechanism that will temporarily prevent the exchange of W-Tokens for original, tradeable tokens (otherwise they could be exchanged at any point) and a validated stage funding method that forms the centrepiece of W12's design.
If that method is chosen, buyers will place their funds into a smart contract that will release some part of them to the project when it reaches certain promised milestones or suspend them and allow investors to withdraw their unspent funds if it fails to do so in time until this remedied. Milestones being reached can be confirmed in three different ways determined by the project. Firstly, it could be left up to individual token buyers, who will be given the opportunity to withdraw at any milestone. Secondly, it could be done by a 51% buyer vote (with the weight of each vote tied to the number of tokens held by the buyer and the minimum requirement of 20% of all buyers participating). Thirdly, W12's “oracle” system could be used. In that case, a jury of 12 randomly selected “oracles” from the platform's network of financial and legal professionals will appoint a qualified auditor and then vote based on the audit's results to decide whether the project reached its goal or not. The “oracles” will be paid in W12 tokens allocated by the project. In the event of any withdrawals, the tokens could be returned to the smart contract, given back to the project or burned according to the team's preference. The project can also decide what amount of raised funds it wants to store in W12 tokens, with inversely proportional commission fees. If all funds are stored in the platform's tokens, there will be no fee for this at all.
W12's ICO marketplace will have full information and ratings for all projects involved. Eventually, it will also have a service marketplace for projects, helping them get in touch with rated contractors in all necessary fields. Legal document templates will be made available free of charge. W12 will provide paid promotion services as well, giving projects great prominence in their catalogue and hosting banner ads. There will be a sandbox campaign to give entrepreneurs the chance to test out their ideas and receive input from community members who will receive token rewards for helping. Additionally, W12 will set up its own decentralised exchange and PAMM accounts which will allow users to transfer their funds to professional traders to trade or invest with, for a small commission fee.
What benefits does W12 offer to the cryptoindustry?
Taken together, the platform's functions allow it to perform two important functions for the industry and its stakeholders. Firstly, it brings projects, investors and assorted service providers together on one platform with heightened standards of transparency and reliability. Secondly, it gives both cryptocurrency startups and their potential backers a superior degree of flexibility. While the options it offers to the projects are just that, using them would allow them to attract many more investors who will have more reason to believe that the projects will deliver on their promises or that, at least, they will not lose all the money they invest to scammers or incompetents. The Token Hold option is a valuable tool against early-investor price manipulations. The addition of PAMM accounts means that users may not have to do anything at all to make a passive income provided they find a trustworthy trader. Meanwhile, startups will be able to save themselves a lot of time, effort and money by running their campaigns entirely or partly through the W12 site and recruiting all the help that they need in the same place. The “oracle” system might even be able to replace the need to engage auditing services.
W12's team has a ready MVP and several ICOs are already listed on its site, so it is possible to see how the system is meant to work even now. The team has an impressive business and finance background and considerable familiarity with and support in the cryptoindustry, which would be vital to its success. It also pays the appropriate amount of attention to legal considerations, keeping a close eye on any changes in regulations. Above all, its product addresses a number of very urgent and frequently decried problems in the industry and offers what appears to be a viable approach to solving them.
Token sale details
A new model for cryptocurrency investments?
Although W12 offers a number of possible funding options to its stakeholders, the one that deserves most interest is its (slightly confusingly named) “oracle” system. An expert jury that could monitor the execution of an ICO's promises could revolutionise the industry – or it could prove to be a dud. For that even more than for any other aspect of this project, W12 will need to attract the dedicated support of a very particular target market. Even if enough such experts could be recruited, they will also need to have the trust of a sufficient number of investors and entrepreneurs both. Of course, there is nothing impossible about this, given that cryptocurrencies are attracting more and more mainstream interest, but neither is it a foregone conclusion.
Naturally, the rest of W12's proposed features should not be overlooked either. Taken together, they could at least partly mitigate the cryptoindustry's potentially crippling reliability issues, which could be critical to its continued success. In the best case scenario, the platform could both champion a new way of investing in cryptocurrencies and become a central hub for the industry, in which case its ecosystem should become self-sustaining. As it has a lot to offer to everyone involved and already has generated some amount of enthusiasm (as demonstrated by the ICO's generally high ratings and positive buzz), perhaps that scenario will come true.
Links:
Website: https://tokensale.w12.io/
WhitePaper: https://tokensale.w12.io/W12-en.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/w12_io
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/w12.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/w12_io
Medium: https://medium.com/@w12_io
ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3220425.0
Author: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=980049
Disclaimer
This review by Bonanza Kreep is all opinion and analysis, not investment advice.