Monthly Archives: September 2016

Project Updates

The Value Proposition of ICONOMI

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iconomi-value

Note: ICONOMI ICO is ongoing

ICONOMI is generating a lot of buzz, but sometimes the true value proposition gets hidden under all the spam that you see on Twitter and Bitcointalk (to their credit, the ICONOMI team is really serious about not rewarding spam, and I commend them for that). So here’s the value proposition of ICONOMI for investors. Please remember that any ICO investment is risky, and you absolutely should not invest more than you can afford to lose.

Real Business Proposition

ICONOMI isn’t yet another altcoin. It has a real business behind it. Real businesses make profits, have earnings and revenues. Altcoins don’t. Therefore ICONOMI, even though it is a token on a blockchain, is much more than just an altcoin.

Therefore, investing in ICONOMI is very different from investing in all these other ICOs that are going on. You will own a piece of a business that generates profits.

Investor Dividends

There are no cryptocurrencies today that give regular dividends to holders. The first time this was really put forward was with Augur. However, Augur isn’t launched yet. ICONOMI is doing the same with its token – giving monthly dividends to investors. This can be quite variable I know but it is a pretty good value proposition.

If you make a stock market analogy, you get both dividends and capital appreciation (increase in share price). Over the long-term, dividends can be a very important component of returns. In fact, for stocks, they have been the dominant source of returns over >50 year holding period.

Disrupting a Stodgy, Old Industry

ICONOMI is in the fund management business. That’s a multi-trillion dollar industry right there. It is also old and stodgy and hasn’t seen innovation in decades. It is ripe for disruption by a startup. The existing players sit on a gold-mine, and investors are forced to use the existing systems because there is no competition.

ICONOMI has come out of the blue, and is sure to kick the incumbents into action. However, it will likely be too late for them by the time they realize its potential. Fund management is huge. Even if ICONOMI is able to obtain a very small piece of this pie, like 0.01%, it will end up being very large, in the order of billions of dollars. That’s a huge opportunity right there.

Platform Economy

This is a less-often discussed aspect of ICONOMI, but is a powerful tailwind going forward. In addition to the 2 funds – INDEX and PERFORMANCE, ICONOMI will also launch a fund management platform. This will allow other crypto investors and traders to offer their own funds to their clients. It is like a platform that allows anyone, even with $0 in their bank account, to start a hedge fund. Let that sink in for a moment.

We have seen how tech companies that build platform economies can be massively successful. Uber is a $60 billion company. Airbnb is a $25 billion company. Even if ICONOMI becomes a $1 billion company, it will be a huge part of the crypto ecosystem.

So there you have it. These are some of the value propositions for ICONOMI. What other killer features did I miss? Let me know in the comments.

Check out the ICO here. 

Bounty claim code: ICO3T68g7bnfDVOnqbjlk7ZqdXYnP7fPYNHICONOMI

Photo Credit: Chicago Man

Project Updates

ICONOMI ICO Continues to Impress: 15 More Days to go

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iconomi-15-days

ICONOMI continues to perform an impressive job at its ICO. Check the latest ICO stats here. At the time of this writing, over $4.5 million was raised by ICONOMI. That’s an impressive number, even in today’s environment when there are so many ICOs that are competing for investor attention and dollars. If you want to be a part of this ICO, you have just about 2 weeks left now until the ICO finishes.

Changes to total Bitcoin raised in ICO

Originally, ICONOMI started with just a floor on the ICO of 2000 BTC. To be sure, that is also a fairly significant number, since very few ICOs will be able to raise 2000 BTC  (about $1.2 million). However, ICONOMI ICO blew past that number very easily in just a couple of days of the ICO being open. There was no cap on the ICO initially, which meant as the number of investment dollars (or Bitcoin) increased, each person’s share kept decreasing.

Listening to community concerns around this, the ICONOMI team decided to put a cap on the money raised in the ICO. This was a smart move, as they show they are willing to learn and change direction for the betterment of their project, aka they listen to the community that is heavily invested in this project.

So the new limits are as follows: 21,000 BTC hard cap on the ICO. Any amount raised over 10,000 BTC will be invested in the ICONOMI.PERFORMANCE fund.

iconomi-total-raise

Right now, the ICO stands around 7600 BTC.

This is a very smart move (although in my opinion, it should be a small percentage even if less than 10,000 BTC is raised) because it gets the flagship fund, ICONOMI.PERFORMANCE off the ground with ready investors – investors that have already shown a willingness to trust the team. This is like a prop-trading account – essentially, a hedge fund investing its own money in one of its funds. That’s exactly what is needed.

So with this one change to the ICO, the ICONOMI project has gotten far more interesting than it was at the beginning. It is not too late for you to invest – here’s the link.

Bounty claim code: ICO3T68g7bnfDVOnqbjlk7ZqdXYnP7fPYNHICONOMI

Introducing Altcoins

Introducing ReturnBit: Proof of Work with ICO

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ReturnbitThere are lots of new ICOs at the moment. This usually happens after a few really successful ICOs and then everyone wants to jump on-board (Lisk and Waves in this case). ReturnBit is a bit different from all other ICOs at the moment, firstly by using proof of work (scrypt algorithm, same as Litecoin). Not many new ICOs are using proof of work, instead opting for proof of stake. Also, the number of coins at ReturnBit will inflate, as opposed to many of the other ICO coins that have a fixed supply (mostly because they don’t need to pay block rewards for proof of work).

Secondly, the coin is creating an “rTrust” which will receive 50 coins per block. This is an opportunistic fund that will selectively return these ReturnBits to holders, but does it differently than proof of stake systems. This way, the money is returned to all holders indirectly (as opposed to direct rewards with proof of stake, which many forego because their coins are sitting on an exchange). So you just send some money to the “rTrust”, wait for about a day, and you get more ReturnBit out of this.

The problem with proof of stake’s ‘dividend’ is not so much that the rich get richer, but that many people hold their coins in an exchange and not in their own wallet, thus becoming ineligible for these ‘dividends’.

It is an interesting experiment. We’ll see how the investor returns now and in the future will be for the investors. Should be an interesting experiment to run though. Quite different from the many other ICOs that are ongoing at the moment.

Here are some details for investors:

Bitcointalk forum thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1596327.0

ICO Website: http://www.returnbit.com/