There 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/

Hear it here first forks: For the second half of 2016, here’s how ICOs are done: Model ICONOMI. Let’s introduce ICONOMI here first, and hopefully, the first of many more to come.

Firstly, there is no dearth of ICOs at the moment. This seems like the hottest time of the year, right after the big ICOs of Lisk and Waves, each valued at over $15 million at the moment. The historic pattern is when there is  wave of successful ICOs, there are many that want to raise money while the market is hot. We are in exactly that phase right now.

But ICONOMI is different. Firstly, there is a legitimate idea, which seems like a rarity today in the turbulent crypto seas, ahoy! The project is aimed fair and square at investors. Whatever product or service helps you make more money is something to keep an eye out on. Those are big winners in the economy. ICONOMI definitely checks off that box. Basically, the idea is to bring financial services and products on to the blockchain. It is built on Ethereum.

So there’s the idea (yes, it is built on Ethereum which isn’t as hot as it was earlier. Thanks Stephen Tual and the DAO team) that is interesting not just as a stand-alone but as a way to make/earn money. The next step is, who cares? Well, if you run a great ICO campaign, you already have your earliest adopters. That’s a smart move that lots of ICO teams get wrong. If you are good with rewards and running good campaigns, you can generate a ton of more value than just the coins that you give out as bounties. So ICONOMI checks that box off very well too – great bounty programs, and good social campaigns like Twitter and Bitcointalk signatures.

And the market is reacting appropriately. Even though there are like a dozen ICOs ongoing at the moment, investors are taking note. There are the three-day stats: over $300,000 raised in just 3 days. And the ICO is ongoing for another month. Good luck to the team and the investors. Exciting project to check out for sure.

Here’s the ICO website.

And here’s the ANN thread in Bitcointalk.

Bounty claim code: ICO3T68g7bnfDVOnqbjlk7ZqdXYnP7fPYNHICONOMI

What does it take for a cryptocurrency to get noticed in 2016? There have been thousands of cryptocurrencies since Bitcoin, so what can you bring new to the table? Well, how about some good ‘ol fashioned tokenized fiat, mixed with a decentralized exchange on the blockchain, garnished with a scalability solution that will allow significant scalability. Well, that’s HEAT in a nutshell.

The ICO is currently ongoing. You can buy some HEAT tokens here before launch. I cannot comment on how successful the project will be, but the Finnish project looks quite promising, and definitely seems to have a better thought-out product than most of the pumps-and-dumps infecting this space.

Oh, and did I mention the 32 page whitepaper is also out (surprisingly, they released the whitepaper while the ICO was ongoing instead of before. That may have made some people gloss over this one). You can read it here.

The Bitcointalk thread is not too exciting in terms of numbers. Much less discussion than Lisk and Waves, but the discussion quality is much higher. No whiny “when is the price going to rise? this is a scam” type of post from ignorant newbies. They didn’t do a signature spamming campaign, which gets an A+ from this Crypto Captain for not spamming Bitcointalk.

All in all, promising ICO for sure. Raised a fair amount of money, but nowhere close to Waves for example. It remains to be seen how successful this will be in the marketplace.

MorCoin just launched today as a pure proof of stake coin (PoS) – see the official MorCoin ANN thread. The distribution model is interesting – everyone can get a free share, but people can purchase additional shares of 5, 15 or 40, by sending Bitcoin to the dev team, which will then use the money to further improve the coin. It’s an interesting distribution model, being a hybrid of free giveaways and IPO type of distribution to raise funds for future development. Since there are always free stakes available, if you don’t want to take your chances, you can just apply for one of these, and no harm done.

On the technical side, MorCoin has a total cap of just 5 million total, which should give each unit of MorCoin a high value. The PoS interest is 15% annual and stakes mature after a coin-age of 4 hours. The number of coins is interesting, as MorCoin is bucking away from the trend of having billions of coins, and instead focusing on the value of each coin by liming the numbers. This might prove to be a good move, since many coins that trade in the range of single-digit Satoshi usually end up dying.

The launch is on June 29, 2014. The IPO closes on June 28, 2014, so if you want to buy your stakes through the IPO as opposed to free distribution (to get more MorCoin), do it now.

With the coin launches cooling off in June compared to May, there aren’t that many new ideas around, and launches try to differentiate themselves from the crowd through other methods such as strong dev team, community, merchant acceptance, etc. MorCoin is one of the few coin launches this month, and it would be interesting to follow its progress.

A new coin, called CreateCoin just launched (see CreateCoin ANN thread) today on June 14th 2014, with no pre-mine and a pre-announcement a couple of days ago to keep the launch fair. However, there’s a 30% dev reward for blocks 1-500 and 2% on regular blocks. This is how bounties, etc. are going to be paid by the dev.

On the technical side, CreateCoin uses the currently popular hybrid model of X13/PoS. On the PoW side of things, there will be a maximum of 15,896,875 coins (43200 blocks) that will be mined. Blocks time is 60 seconds.

On the PoS side of things, there’s an annual interest of 8% which isn’t much (remember a coin like HoboNickel is going very strong with controlled inflation even with a 100% PoS interest) but is better than some coins which are in the range of 1%-2%. Higher PoS interest gives people a reason to hold on to the coin rather than dumping on the exchanges.

There are several pools already for those who are looking to mine this coin. Mind you, this just released, so it might be easy to mine some coins now as not many know about it right now.

There’s a new cryptocurrency in town, and this time, it’s MAGIC! Unlike the current flavor of the month in terms of PoW/PoS and instamining, etc. , MAGI/MAGIC follows in the footsteps of Litecoin, including its mining algorithm. Magicoin uses Scrypt instead of the other proof of work schemes like X11 which are getting more attention in the last month or so than simple Scrypt. In fact, Magicoin is quite similar to Litecoin, even in terms of the block target of 2.5 minutes and a total coin count of 84 million. This will probably make Magicoin easy to keep track of in the future, as its value can easily be compared to Litecoin.

The distribution of Magicoin however is different. There is a 0.95% premine which will be used to develop the coin and the infrastructure around it through bounties. I know pre-mine isn’t the most popular option out there in the community but if the funds are wisely used, the coin can quickly gain popularity and easily reach the crypto-masses.

Also, even though the coin is very new, Magicoin is already listed on SwissCex, one of the better exchanges out there and one that I have used quite a bit in the past for altcoin trading. Even though the volumes aren’t that great, the site and trading experience is excellent at this site.

There are many giveaways and bounties, to help spread the Magic of Magicoin all over, and to help as many people get their hands on some Magic as they possibly can. In fact, there is already a faucet that you can use to get some free Magicoin, to get started with this new crypto. If you want to mine some Magicoin, check out the MagiCoin Mining Calculator.

All in all, MagiCoin seems like an interesting new cryptocurrency that promises to be fun and inclusive. There is already a proposal for a MagiCoin online store. This might mean it could be a coin like NobleCoin which is gaining steady acceptance in the community and has an excellent online store to buy anything at a discount, like Amazon Gift Cards at 15% discounts.

There is lots of interesting information on the main ANN thread for Magicoin, so do be sure to check it out and follow it for regular updates.