ICOs are the Buzzword on the web and have been so for the last 12 months. There are news about people getting insanely rich over night, as well as the opposite: obscure groups luring millions of investors with big promises into their projects only to disappear after a successful ICO-campaign. Naturally, there are a few burning questions, that come to one’s mind before betting money on an ICO. What is the purpose of an ICO? What is in for me? And why should I put my money on such a bet? And what exactly is an ICO?

Basically an ICO is a way to crowdfund a company without giving up the ownership. Instead of real shares, you give out Tokens, based on a blockchain. You simply describe your company goals as good as possible in a so called white-paper, set up a shiny website, do some online-marketing and sell out as many of your tokens, as you can. With the income you can now fund all your activities and face a prosperous future. But what about the tokens? Well, in exchange for a token, the token-holder is entitled to some sort of product or service you offer with your now flourishing company. It can be anything you can imagine — oil for example, as so did the state of Venezuela in order to overcome it´s currency-difficulties. And if let´s say you do not need any crude oil yourself, you can trade your tokens on coin-exchanges for other tokens or sell them off for Money.

So here we come to the next big question: why should I put my money on such a bet? You can see, that some ICOs do have quite a sensible offering — crude-oil is a very sought-after commodity in our world. The risk of buying a PetroDollar (that´s what the coin of Venezuela is actually called) can easily be calculated. Given, that the supply of oil on the PetroDollar is 100% secure, you can say, that a PetroDollar has exactly the same worth as the corresponding quantity of crude oil of the agreed quality minus a little discount, as the one buying the coin will do so in order to earn a little something. So that case is quite easily calculated. In other cases (most cases) the intrinsic value of coins is a little obscure. Some projects even only promise to emit a coin and that is that. The sole use of such a coin is a payment-transaction, which — as you would guess — is a question of acceptance. A good currency is universal, which means „accepted by everyone everywhere“.

And here it comes to pure speculation, which unfortunately is the larger part of the market. Still, nothing can be worth something, if only there is someone willing to pay for it. Obviously there are many participants in the crypto-market to do so and so you never know. A dodgy-looking coin might go „to the moon“, as the crypto-crowd puts it.

As you easily see, it comes to the right choice of project, if you want to take part in an ICO. In order to go safe, you might consider a project as the equivalent to a real firm. Ask yourself if you would like to work there, if anyone would be interested in their product, if their solution is better than something you know in the conventional market, if the company has any chance to earn profits with their product now and in the future and — most importantly, as we speak of internet-business — if the product or service has any global relevance. The last point is an important point, as funds collected in ICOs are usually quite big sums and if they are invested wisely, they can scale a project from small to global player in just a few years, which is what you want. Because in these cases the tokens you hold, will be very popular among other participants in the market and the value is likely to rise. Maybe even to the moon.

To give an example for a good ICO take a look at PECUN.IO. A company with a real record, an office (in Dubai and Vienna), tangible people. That means, it is obviously a real project and not just another vague promise. Secondly, there are up and running sources of income, which seem to be easily scalable — namely some high-rated funds (the PCC, the PICO, just to name the two). Then they offer something, that could be of good use to everyone — easy access to the market, easy exit from the market and a Debit-Card for spending your Crypto-Money on real things, e.g. your grocery. They do have some interesting projects in development, one of them being an asset-backed token, actually backed with real gold, which is a bit like crude oil, but it is solid, does not stink and everyone in the world will accept it. It is in fact an universal currency. And that is in fact easy to scale and quite promising. You can also consult blockchain-sites on the web, as they offer evaluation of ICO projects, some of which are done by experts in the field (see: icobench.com). All that means, that the likelihood of someone being interested in your tokens after the ICO and even at a higher price-tag is quite aloft. You might notice, that these general criteria are in fact the same as in the stock market. It all comes down to rational decision-making.

www.pecun.io