Any business or service is aimed to grow and expand to reach success, and the way we see to realize a big part of it is through constant development and modernization. We have gone a long way in analysis, project assessment and market research and we have witnessed and encountered the market full of scam and irresponsibility. We could see the community’s uncertainty and realized there had to be significant changes implemented to our platform in particular and ICO market as a whole. KICKICO is now glad to announce our first major round of updates, in this particular set regarding the Community Choice structure and process. In a few words, not to protract the message anymore, we have changed the way the game is played. We have brought the new rules to make the big difference between what everyone has seen before and what we have designed: from now on, the KICKICO community will have its Big Say in what projects to launch and which way the platform shall develop. You define the future of KICK.

First time the update was vaguely mentioned a while ago during our ICO, when we declared our goal and priority to focus on establishing and developing a trustworthy and reliable environment for crowdfunding that would minimize any potential scam project’s ability to infiltrate the platform. To filter out unsatisfactory or dishonest campaigns, pyramid schemes, scam and low-quality projects KICKICO provides the members with the Community Choice Voting: the more votes a campaign receives, the higher position it gets in the platform rating; once received a certain number of votes, the project is then redirected to the moderating team to verify legal and term compliance. Besides, each campaign shall designate the smart-contract or the wallet for ETH and KICK collections. The projects that successfully meet all the requirements are then displayed on the front page, fully exposed to every visitor. All a project has to do after that is pay the KICK launch fee.

Many of you have seen and used our previous rating system, but it has turned out vulnerable to manipulation: we couldn’t rely on it to launch top campaigns because there were various vote boost mechanisms used by dishonest projects.

We understand it is presumingly natural for a crowdfunding platform to rely on its community in the process of rating and admission and it felt reviving to see the first campaigns join the rating and have the community rank each project. Nevertheless, the earlier voting system had its drawback since it remained vulnerable to fraud or manipulation: the voting mechanism could be affected by various vote boosting that would scheme the backers’ community. Originally, to prevent such deceit from infiltrating the community and lessen its effect on the tokensale process, we designated a moderation department to sort and filter projects, but it also was a temporary solution with its flaws: even professionals are subjective, which resulted in several good campaigns not being allowed to launch, unfortunately. It has taken us a lot of work and thorough monitoring to design a new system to meet the necessity, since it is never a walk in a park for any crowdfunding platform to provide a genuine independent voting solution that would prove sustainable to possible malicious operation. The new phase will create a real DAO voting process, with its updates to follow. This way, we will give much more control away to our community in order to make the anti-scam policy efficient and scalable.

Obviously, this entire announcement is made to introduce everyone to our next generation of Community Choice Voting: the structure we have designed and implemented is rather different from existing mechanism, so there is an outline to highlight the major aspects:

First of all, to participate a voter needs two things: a verified account, for which one can either use the email address or a social network account, and then a verified ETH wallet. The wallet verification requires a fee to prevent bots from boosting the vote count. Besides, it is likely going to deter those community members who prefer to guess picking a random campaign they have no interest in: again, we do not intend this voting to promote or boost campaigns in the first place — our primary target is to see what projects our community values rather than impose our own vision. In addition to that, each account will have a new parameter: the voter’s “weight”, which now depends on several factors that in combination deliver highest efficiency and reliability.

One of the values included into the weight index is the volume of KickCoin stake held at the user’s account: the more KickCoins, the more significant and powerful the vote. For instance, a voter with 1 KICK will have lower voting weight as compared to a voter with 1 million KICK. Of course the spread of weights will stay within reason and the maximum possible multiplier a voter can have is 30. Thus, a KICK millionaire’s vote is going to have no more than 30 times more weight than anyone else’s. That does not at all mean anyone is required to hold a lot of KICK in the wallet: any voter with a verified account and wallet is eligible to vote, regardless of the amount of KICK; a voter can have 0 KICK and still cast a vote, in this case their voting weight is not going to be affected by the KICK stake multiplier. The KICK stake multiplier will be constantly updated to prevent cases in which one user could cast his or her vote with a big volume of KICK in the wallet, thus having an increased voting weight, but then transfer the KickCoins to another account and cast a vote from there: in our design, once having decreased the total sum of KICK held in the wallet, a user also decreases the voting weight of the account, which results in lessening the voting influence on the campaign’s ranking.

Another important parameter taken into account to affect a voter’s weight is the account lifetime. This one is quite simple — the older the account the higher the weight — and here we also preferred to balance it out in the same manner: the maximum multiplier is limited, so the older the account becomes, the slower the weight increases. Again, that shall not be read as “a new member cannot vote”: it simply means a freshman will have no multiplier to increase the weight.

And of course we believe anyone would agree that the more motivated the backer, the higher his or her voting weight shall be, and the best determiner of one’s motivation is his or her activity: the more a backer has pledged to campaigns in the past, the higher the current. Thus, the more support one shows to various project at KICKICO and the bigger one’s total amount of funds spent to support projects, evidently the more significant one’s participation in the life of the platform is, and, therefore, the higher the weight multiplier. The minimum vs maximum weight limit follows the same logic, as with previous parameters: the highest value of the multiplier will not exceed 30x of the minimum value.

In order to participate and have an access to the process every user needs to pass verification. Thus, the given mechanism can both elevate or decrease the project’s rating, directly influencing the campaigns’ progress, so that will also complicate fraudulent activity.

As you can see at the picture above, in the Community Choice Section there will be campaigns with their rating in accordance with the users’ vote count and their voting weight: you see the total count of “thumbs-up” and the total volume of “thumbs down”, so the number of people who voted for or against, then on the right you can check the resulting vote count.

Here is how the ranking system will work:

The Top Highest Rating Projects will have their position marked and will be moved to the main page once processed by the moderator

The campaigns that will have already proceeded to their tokensale stage will be moved to the Explore section of the platform to allow approaching projects and campaigns participate

Besides, one year will be the maximum participation period, past which the campaign will be excluded from the ranking and moved to Drafts

Campaigns non-complying with the KICKICO policy, displaying or having explicit or illegal content will be banned

And a couple of disclaimers for both followers and campaigns:

We will sure keep collecting data to analyze the voting impact on the platform and re-adjust it, probably many times in a row, adding more parameters and balancing them out in order to make the voters’ participation most efficient and influential and leaving no chance of fraud. Various parameters, such as KYC or the total count of votes cast by a user.

Currently a user to participate and vote for or against the platform campaigns only has to link the account with the e-mail address and verify the account wallet. The wallet verification process includes a charge of 100 KICK by the platform, regardless of any other parameters: this little fee is charged not for the sake of profits, of course, but in order to prevent any bot activity in the voting process. The voter pays this price only once in a lifetime, but we all get secure and fair campaign rating for everyone: with this small fee one individual will not even bother, but a trickster with an army of bots will simply lose too much money trying to boost the voting results, since every new vote will require a new account verified and a new fee paid over and over again. So, in other words, we are asking everyone to sacrifice a small bit for the bigger good for the entire community. Furthermore, in the future, when we incorporate the KYC procedure for everyone, the verification fee will be either minimized or simply replaced with a requirement to store some volume of KICK at the wallet — in the latter case nothing will be spent but it will be enough to verify the voter. As for now, we have to charge that fee, but there is little to be upset about: since the verification fee will be burnt at the platform, the total volume of KICK will slowly, a small bit by another small bit decrease, which in return might cause the price to go up a bit. This is the case when paying for your interest you are actually increasing the total value of what you have left.

Now in order to join the rating with a campaign each project will pay a fee of 2000 KICK, so that the dubious projects are filtered out. Considering the fee will be paid in KICK and burnt by the platform, the total supply of KICK will decrease and consequently the market price of KICK will rise.

To allow these changes have their full functionality, we made all the currently running or drafted campaigns at KICKICO vote to decide whether the existing rates shall remain or not: the result of the vote is the current rating is now null and void to give all the authors an equal opportunity at KICKICO. As a result, we minimize the risks of vote cheating, put all the projects in the same conditions of equal opportunities and let the projects play fair and fair only. Naturally, we will carefully monitor how the rating system will work and make sure anyone trying to find and use potential loopholes to their advantage will only get there campaign banned forever at KICKICO.

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