With the birth of the blockchain movement it seems new companies are popping up everyday in almost every sector of the digital world. Companies have an idea, draft a white paper, and spring into action with their initial coin offerings. But the question arises that too few people ask; is this a creation of necessity? Or am I being sold vaporware?

There are 4 types of ICO’s in the market today:

Turn and Burn: A group of individuals create a pseudo company (or no company at all), scrape together a whitepaper (or copy another) and go straight into a token sale launch with a basic idea. The issue is they either don’t have the knowledge to pull it off, don’t need blockchain to build their product, or have no intention of ever delivering a live product.

A group of individuals create a pseudo company (or no company at all), scrape together a whitepaper (or copy another) and go straight into a token sale launch with a basic idea. The issue is they either don’t have the knowledge to pull it off, don’t need blockchain to build their product, or have no intention of ever delivering a live product. Riding the Wave: A legitimate company goes into a token sale built upon a popular blockchain (i.e. Ethereum) with the full intention of switching to another blockchain after the token sale. This allows them to ride the wave of popularity around the distribution of a specific token (higher token sale result) while knowing full well that it will never go into production use.

A legitimate company goes into a token sale built upon a popular blockchain (i.e. Ethereum) with the full intention of switching to another blockchain after the token sale. This allows them to ride the wave of popularity around the distribution of a specific token (higher token sale result) while knowing full well that it will never go into production use. Young & Dumb: While this group does have a chance at succeeding, they have rushed into a token sale to chase the money. They have placed thought into their idea and their white paper, but it’s based on hopes and dreams with nothing built out. There is full intention of bringing a product to market, but conceptualizing it into reality is beyond their current motives.

While this group does have a chance at succeeding, they have rushed into a token sale to chase the money. They have placed thought into their idea and their white paper, but it’s based on hopes and dreams with nothing built out. There is full intention of bringing a product to market, but conceptualizing it into reality is beyond their current motives. The Realist: This group has the best chance of succeeding. They have either started to build or have built out their blockchain-based application, they are organized, and have a full plan on how to take their product to market.

The problem is that no one has a giant sticker on their forehead. On the website of these ICOs you won’t find statements that say “We are Riding the Wave!” Unfortunately, nothing is black and white and you have to read between the lines.

THE LINES:

There is much discussion at the moment around which blockchain is going to rule them all in the future. Some say Bitcoin, other’s say Ethereum. Without understanding the fundamentals of a blockchain, I can easily see how someone can take a side purely based upon popularity or name recognition. However, blockchain is a type of protocol in which a computer does actions based upon pre-defined rules. Similarly, you can compare this to a programming language in which a programmer writes a set of instructions (code) and a computer performs actions based upon the pre-defined instructions. When we begin to switch gears away from popularity and focus our attention on functionality, reading between the lines becomes clear. Today, developers around the world use a plethora of different programming languages to build highly scalable applications. There is not and never will never be one blockchain to rule them all. Blockchains themselves become tools for us to utilize in which each has its own distinct utility.

Ethereum is great for building within applications, but is horrendously costly and slow for volume transactions. Stellar is great for payments — transactions are super fast and super cheap. However, it lacks the functionality that would be required within an application setting such as smart contract’s.

Many ICO’s will fail because they don’t have the basic understanding of the reason for the use of blockchain. If you don’t know the reason as to why your application is utilizing blockchain and how to choose the appropriate framework for the task, you will fail every time. Reading between the lines is seeing what technology is being used. Why and how it’s being used? Was it chosen appropriately or did this company hurriedly go for popularity over functionality?

At Ternio, we know the advertising industry well and know the problems that the industry faces. After months of back and forth and trial and error, Ternio’s blockchain system was born.

By understanding both the functionality and utility of blockchain Ternio is the first solution to support programmatic advertising and be able to manage the high volume of transactional impressions that are required. By seeing blockchain as a protocol, we accomplish this with a chain of multiple different blockchains communicating together in tandem.

Like the dawn of the internet and the dot-com online business era, we are just now learning the power, utility, and feasibility behind blockchain itself. We are in a moment right now that generations after us will look back to as a time in history. A key point in which the internet around the world changed forever.

Ternio is at the forefront and leading the charge in this digital revolution by introducing blockchain to mainstream advertising. It will affect everyone in the supply chain from advertiser all the way down to the publisher. Ternio will offer a number of services for advertisers, publishers, and ad tech companies such as Net0 payments, supply chain transparency, transparent auditing, invoiceless payment processing, free ad fraud detection, and more. Through a simple integration, Ternio resolves many of the problems plaguing mainstream digital advertising without requiring anyone within the supply chain to make dramatic changes to their code or infrastructure.

Learn more about Ternio here: https://ternio.io

As always, be careful when trading, do your due-diligence research, know what your risks are, and take everything with a grain salt. There are those who are growing a business, and those who are growing their wallets.

’Til next time, happy trading!