Andrey Sergeenkov

Investment Consultant

Having ten years of experience with permission internet-marketing, I decided to connect my life and continue my career with blockchain industry in two ways: 1) Publish articles to spread words about blockchain and cryptocurrency ideas to wide audience. 2) Evaluate ICO projects to help Investors to choose the best startups to support. Many people have claimed that they know how to evaluate ICOs. They assert that successful projects can be evaluated by reviewing their code and/or their team. Of course, both are useful. But people who look only at these things and have been successful have been successful because they invested when the market was frothy and everything was going up. There is still enough latency in this momentum for large projects to capture peoples' imagination, as we witness with EOS' raise of $4 billion. But this is not sustainable. And the current values of most tokens are destined to fall. Curiously, even many of the VC and hedge-fund investors have not gotten this right. But they are often buying tokens at a 50% discount so that they can cash out quickly at the public ICO price and still make money. To effectively evaluate an ICO, the technical solution and technical team are important. But equally important (and possibly more important) are the business model, the value proposition for the various stakeholders (users, investors, the project itself), and the operational capabilities of the team to create a sustainable solution. Good technology alone will not ensure success. But most ICO white papers do not include a business model, value propositions, or substantiation of the team's operations capabilities. This makes them hard to evaluate. I am working to establish a new standard for ICO that I call ICO 2.0. It supplements the traditional technical position paper with these important business elements to demonstrate to long-term sustainability of the project.