What is Top ICO List?
Since 2017 Top ICO List has offered cryptocurrency investors all the newest, hottest and best Initial Coin Offering (ICOs), also known as ICO Coin. There are lots ICO listing websites available in the internet but most of them are not regularly updated. Top ICO List collects all the quality Active, Pre & Upcoming ICO’s, and thus we ensure that you won’t miss out on the chance to be apart of the next big thing.
Our ICO listings calendar is curated and informative, which is why we believe investors will have the best chance at finding the ICO that is right for them. Top ICO List is updated multiple times per day so it’s always up to date and has the best NEW initial coin offerings in 2018 and beyond.
Our ICO analyst team searches the internet constantly for new ICO so investors don’t have to! We consider our Initial Coin Offering list to be of the highest quality.
Gold and silver ICO listings are sponsored placements offered to selected high quality ICOs, but just because an ICO has a Gold or a Silver status doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better than the other ICO coins in our ico listing.
The “HOT” tag is an indicator of how popular the ICO is in the marketplace. These could be considered as “best ICO” that belong in the top 10% of current token sales. So if you’re asking yourself what the “best ico to invest” into is, start doing your due diligence on these.
What is Initial Coin Offering?
Initial Coin Offerings - abbreviated as ICOs - are virtual token or security offerings from early stage blockchain projects. The development team usually pre-sells platform access, dividend or security tokens (or coins) during the early development phase of a blockchain service. The idea is to raise development funds and to roll out the project to the interested early adopters. Simply put an ICO is a modern cryptocurrency fundraising (crowdfunding) mechanism for blockchain startups.
Blockchain projects usually have a few things in common; they have a distributed ledger for token accounting, a limited supply of tokens and a designed platform that provides a service against the spent or owned tokens.
Initial Coin Offerings are a good chance for early contributors to support the project ideas they like, buy discounted access-to-service tokens for their own business purposes or invest into promising projects hoping the token value will increase during the development of the service.
It’s an unregulated (for now) way of raising funding for a new venture (i.e. start the business). In an ICO the startup will issue out their own cryptocurrency coin in exchange for legal tender or cryptocurrency, usually Ethereum or Bitcoin. To learn more about ICO investing check out Guide to ICO Investing and the ICO Basics Guide.
How to find the best ICOs and blockchain projects?
Initial Coin Offerings can be very beneficial deals for the early contributors but they come with huge risks. Even if the best return of investments from certain ICO projects have been nearly a million percent, over 90% of the ICOs launched so far have not been able to keep up with their milestones or make profit for the early contributors. Since the organizations and the whole business logic around digital tokens are so new, it is sometimes difficult to identify the reliable and skilled early stage blockchain teams and projects.
Top ICO List exists to help ICO contributors to find the best open ICO offers by actively screening through hundreds of proposals and choosing the best ones to be presented on our website. To make it even easier, we prepare a rating and a written review for each ICO listed on the site to give in-depth insight about the strengths and concerns about each ICO proposal. This saves our readers a lot of time and lets them do their own research on the most appealing and interesting projects - all for free.
We also provide you with a list of some of the most reliable blockchain partners. If the ICO you are looking to invest in is working with some of our partners it is definitely a sign of professional industry collaboration.
How to invest in ICOs?
Most of the ICOs are built on the Ethereum platform using the ERC20 protocol. There are also other platforms such as NEO, Qtum, Lisk, Komodo, Strat, ICX and many others that some ICOs use as their transaction network. ICO projects have their contribution dashboards that people looking to participate in the projects can utilize to submit and receive relevant information. Many times contributors need to sign up for the ICO whitelist to reserve their share of the generated token pool.
Know Your Customer (KYC) documentation is usually also required from the contributors. Each person submitting digital assets to the project need to confirm their identity to the project by sending over scans or photos of official Identification Documentation (ID). Whitelisted and KYC document submitted participants need to have a suitable transaction network wallet and tokens that the ICO accepts as contributions against the token generation. The contributor submits the compatible wallet address information to the ICO and sends a desired amount of accepted tokens into a designated wallet address provided by the official communication channel of the ICO.
After the ICO technical team has confirmed that the incoming contribution matches a verified KYC document related wallet address, the contributor wallet gets rewarded with the promised amount of the project tokens. Sometimes the process from the end of the ICO to the date when the tokens are transferred to the contributors might take several weeks due to the programming work required in between.
How to review and analyse an ICO?
Evaluating the viability of the ICOs is in many ways very similar to traditional venture capital investing. The project contributor needs to evaluate many traditional aspects of the project and it’s team. On top of that a risk aware investor studies in great depth the token economics model viability of the project. Since the price of the tokens are usually defined by the supply and demand on the token markets, the team’s marketing skills and efforts may play a big role in the project rating as well.
One of the most important things in any development project is the expertise and commitment level of the team. We recommend only investing in ICOs that work transparently by introducing their team and their skills. Even though many great projects such as Bitcoin have emerged from anonymous teams, the risk of an exit scam in an ICO with an anonymous team has actualized so many times during the recent year that for example us will not be listing any projects that are not revealing at least their project management team. The presented team should have relevant study or work experience, good networks, colleague or client endorsements and they should indicate clear commitment to the presented ICO project. The whole team should have diverse skills represented, and a decent size for project implementation.
The presented solution to be funded should clearly solve at least one customer segment’s everyday problem. The solution should preferably be related to a growing business sector and be very scalable in design. The sector development should also indicate that the demand for the presented solution is growing. If the project does not face much competition or has clear competitive advantages that can be seen as a good indicator of the project potential. The token model needs to fit in well for the service provision or otherwise the ICO should be looking for traditional types of investments instead.
If the ICO has passed these stages of the review the most complex evaluation stage begins. The token economics of the proposal need to make sense just as any traditional investment project. The contributor needs to dig out the information about the total amount of tokens to be generated, the mechanism of how new tokens are created, what is the end of ICO price of the tokens, how big share of the tokens are sold on the markets and what is the total initial project valuation. These figures need to be reflected to the turnover potential of the service - if the potential turnover is clearly higher than the initial project valuation, the tokens might have good value increase potential. This section is many times the weakest performing attribute of the ICOs, since the initial token supply valuation usually exceeds the potential turnover of the service in the first couple of years. It is usually a good sign, if the team will release their own tokens gradually over a couple of years - this is an incentive mechanism for the team to stay committed to the project and develop token value over a longer period of time.
Overall the token model must bring some concrete benefits for the end users and early contributors to make it a justifiable funding model. The team needs to have the required design, implementation and marketing skills to produce the described service. The project roadmap has to be fast to bring quick returns for the early contributors and the plan also has to be realistic so that delays will not cause losing of community confidence.
The last thing to evaluate is the current visibility of the project. Is the team putting in professional effort to engage with its community and to promote the service on the relevant industry sites, blogs and forums? This can be validated by visiting the project’s social media groups, looking at the sizes of the communities, how often the team is updating the channels and how much community engagement do the updates receive. It is good to check through the articles and reviews of the project to see if it has some expert endorsements.
All these bits of information create confidence or suspicions towards the ICO Coin project. It is good to know as much as possible before contributing valuable assets into any project.
The different ICO stages
1. Seed funding round
In this stage the project is usually in its very early steps refining the idea, gathering the team and preparing the white paper, website and strategic approaches. The seed phase is usually not very public and the team aims to raise the initial funding from their own networks. This is a good opportunity to get the maximum bonuses from very early stage projects that have a lot of potential. The risk is that many of the seed round companies never make it all the way to ICO stage.
2. Private Sales
In the private sales stage the project usually has its basic materials such as the white paper, landing page and social communities established but there is yet very little visibility for the project. People participating in the private sale have to get tipped about the project from their networks since otherwise it is unlikely to find so early stage projects. Private sale can still provide good bonuses for early contributors but this stage still carries the big risk of the ICO marketing campaign not succeeding.
3. Pre ICOs or pre sales
In pre-ICO and pre sales stage the project usually has secured sufficient funding for a full size ICO marketing campaign rollout. The pre-ICO gives still the last chance for active industry experts and well networked people to invest into the project with discounted token price. The most endorsed projects usually get sold out at this stage already.
4. Upcoming ICOs & whitelists
If the project has not sold out during the pre ICO phase, there might be a time window form a couple of days to a couple of weeks when the project is usually allocating a lot of resources to roll out marketing campaigns and to show that their actual ICO phase is starting soon. Whitelisting (pre-subscribing into the ICO) is usually done to collect a newsletter list about the interested contributors to provide the community with relevant updates about the progress of the crowdsale. The whitelists are usually limited in size to
5. Active (ongoing ICOs)
The actual ICO is the main crowd sale of the project tokens. Usually most of the tokens are left to be sold on this stage, since the marketing momentum has reached its climax and most of the potential investors have received information about the ongoing crowdsale. The investor confidence is at its highest level since the project has survived through the earlier stages and raised significant funding already, most of the time reaching over the soft cap at this stage already. The main sale of the ICO usually does not provide any discounts any more for the tokens, since the campaign is already in a more advanced stage and seems like a lower risk for the contributors.
6. After markets
After the ICO and the token generation event are finished each contributor should receive their share of the total token pool. The tokens are transferred or programmed by the project technical team to be allocated according to the contributions, KYC acceptance and wallet addresses collected during the previous stages. The ICO project management starts at latest at this stage to setup a favorable environment for the token after markets. This usually includes a lot of negotiations with different token exchanges that host platforms for the crypto currency and token peer-2-peer trading. Usually every finished ICO has to start from smaller exchanges to accumulate the required daily trading volume to be eligible to be listed in the more popular exchanges. Choosing the right exchange partners and having collaborative marketing efforts with them can gain a lot of traction to the trade of the tokens rising the demand, increasing the token market value and ultimately making the early contributors happy.
The markets do not end there; when an ICO project has matured into the stage of being listed in the exchanges, the project has to start focusing on delivering its development milestones promised in the roadmap. The project has to focus on improving its product, gaining more users and utilizing any token value increase mechanisms at use to keep the project attractive for new users and investors. A project surviving through all of these steps as a winner is a rare success story which makes identifying the right projects in the early stage challenging and rewarding for the early investors.
What is the Active ICO List?
In our ongoing ICO list you can find all the invest in today. These ICOs are offered for a limited time only, so you have to hurry before the ICO period ends. You can see the ending date for the ICO listed for each ICO.
What is the pre ICO list?
Pre ICO token sale is somewhat a newer phenomenon in the cryptocurrency world. From the word itself, pre-ICO gives investors the ability to buy tokens before the official crowdsale begins. Usually, the pre-ICOs raises a much lesser amount of fund and it also offer tokens at a lower price with an essential bonus. The fund-raising target of the pre-ICO sale is often lower than to the main ICO.
Basically, pre-ICOs make use of separate smart contracts from the main ICO event. This is to avoid the mixture of pre-ICO funds with the main ICO funds to enable proper and easy account reconciliation and audit. Several projects are running Pre-ICOs to collect funds to finance the expenses incurred on launching the main ICO. Paid promo ads, strategic recruitment, and meet-up costs to awaken the interest of investors.
In launching pre-ICO token sale, transparency about the money raised and the number of tokens issued is the most important. A pre-ICO is a great investment opportunity for a quick buck, but it can still affect the project’s appeal and credibility when large amounts of tokens are at dips.
Our pre ICO section is probably one of our most exciting sections! And that’s because the pre ICO allows investors to buy tokens before the official crowdsale begins. It’s not all that uncommon to find a new pre ICO with a bonus of 40% or more.
What is the Upcoming ICO list?
In the upcoming ICO listing you will find all the quality upcoming coins that will be launching soon. The “Upcoming ICO” status means you will not be able to invest on their token sale yet, but that they are creating hype and a community for their pre sale and official token sale.
If the one or more of the upcoming cryptocurrency ICOs looks interesting to you, join their telegram group and whitelist in order to ensure you place in their ICO. By joining the whitelist you will be notified of the token sales (usually even before the general public).
How does Top ICO List measure up against the competition?
We might be biased - But we believe we have the best ICO list for crypto investors.
Other popular ICO listing sites include Top ICO List, Coin Schedule, ICO Alert, ICO Hot List, ICO Drops, ICO Bench and ICO Watch List. Test them out to see how we compare, Top ICO List is different from these because of rigourous curation which makes it easier to find the best ICOs, in depth ICO analyses and reviews.
What is cryptocurrency and why is it important?
Cryptocurrencies are a new thing and are looking for their etymological position still. The term might mean different things for developers, investors, economists, legislators, journalists and for the common public. What seems to be common for the digital assets considered as cryptocurrencies is that they all are built on distributed ledgers and traded openly in various platforms and exchanges. Some parts of the community need to value the traded digital asset and accept it as a payment for service or as a good to be exchanged to another usually digital asset.
The classification of cryptocurrencies, various types of virtual tokens, digital coins, securities and digital assets is not very clear, since the legislation and the definitions for various terms are not yet solidified in the international markets and courts. We can expect more clarity on the definitions in the near future when the developer communities and regulators start publishing official guidelines for the asset classification. Before that the field of cryptocurrencies is an ongoing nearly philosophical debate with plenty of misunderstandings and potentially malicious misinformation.
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain is a protocol for managing a distributed ledger, meaning usually a cryptographically secured decentralized accounting system which operates through a network of computers in various locations. The network of computer confirm transactions in the system and cross refer the information to each other to keep a reliable, unforgeable and transparent records updated. The effort of providing calculation power to the maintenance of the network calculations is generally called “mining”. The blockchain systems usually reward the mining by generating or providing transaction tokens to the network supporting operators.
The blockchain protocols with cryptographic hash blocks, which contain relevant information about the previous transactions in the system.
Looking to list your initial coin offering?
Please submit your ICO for review at: https://topicolist.com/submit-ico
