The explosion in ICO projects has made choosing which ones to participate in a very complicated task, and the competition between them extremely fierce. Back in 2015, the Lisk founders raised 14,000 bitcoin with a team of just 2 people! Doing that today seems impossible: teams are paying thousands just to get famous industry advisors, and all the noise while very little fundamental substance exists. Furthermore, it’s thought that perhaps 75% of projects offering token sales have ideas that are too convoluted to ever become tangible or real. Nor would their teams have the ability or means to implement such ideas into real-world use realistically either.

To help you out in this mess, here are a few ICOs that are raising their heads above the rest, and likely to deliver spectacular gains in 2018.

GoNetwork

This project could be a total game changer. The team is tackling one of the most crucial and interesting problems in the industry: scaling the Ethereum platform. Despite not having a background in crypto, the team won the ETHWaterloo, the World’s Largest Ethereum Hackathon, a 36-hour event where participants worked alongside founders Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Lubin.

Essentially, the GoNetwork is a fast, low-cost and scalable network that connects the Ethereum blockchain to other mobile, desktop and web platforms. It will be mobile-focused and uses a technology called state channels to minimize on-chain transactions by accumulating transactions off-chain before any output is given. This solution is particularly favorable to mobile, due to architecture and programming language, where the majority of internet traffic is taking place nowadays.

Now here is the deal: on top of this solution, the developers will build a decentralized marketplace for games and digital goods. Given that the CEO, Rashid Kahn, is also the founder of one of Canada’s largest game studios, their track record in this market works in their favor. If they use their scalable, mobile Ethereum network to create some real-world adoption, the possibilities are huge! ICO is open to accredited investors only and more info can be found at GoNetwork.co.

Neon Exchange

Despite the evolution of crypto in the last few years, it is still an industry in its infancy. A key part of it becoming mature is developing fully functional, state of the art decentralized exchanges to replace the centralized, non-secure gatekeepers that exist nowadays. There are many contenders for this position, but we would like to highlight one that is keeping out of the media spotlight while developing a very interesting solution.

NEX is cryptographic trade and payment service platform built on the NEO blockchain. It will offer a technical off chain matching verification for trading and will allow more complex trading such as limit orders, something that existing DEX’s cannot do. Another interesting idea is the development of a Chrome extension that will act as a wallet and still be connected to the exchange, effectively making it a Metamask for all NEP-5 tokens.

In general, the project has extremely solid foundations: the team is chocked full of talented programmers with a track record, who have literally not even opened a Telegram account in order to stay focused on delivering. The roadmap is very comprehensive and includes every detail needed in such a grand vision, including entry points for fiat purchases of NEP-5 tokens.

What is most interesting, however, is the role such a project will play in the development of the NEO Smart Economy, the amazing vision that sets NEO apart from the rest of the industry. It’s no surprise that NEO founders and core developers, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, both sit on the advisory board.

OptiToken

One of the most interesting projects in terms of possible ROI versus complexity is Optitoken, which has just recently come into the spotlight. It is the first ever actual hyper-deflationary currency, whose value is supported by an automated portfolio that uses professional trading techniques, AI, and machine learning. The portfolio will be bought with funds from their ICO, giving it serious value early on.

Their CEO Sean Donato is an old-school crypto trader and who was also one of the founders of BitHalo which was an early pioneer start-up in crypto and of which is a free software still active and available for smart contracting. His strategies tweaked in depth by the team are being coded into the “OptiX” which is an algorithmic swing trading engine. The project has a transparent portfolio demonstrating OptiX live on their website OptiToken.io which serves an MVP as it’s been active and also managed to outpace Bitcoin since November of 2017.

The gains made by the algorithmic trading will be used in part to buy back their own tokens on exchanges, creating constant upward price pressure and nurturing a market that has very strong buy support this is the function that seeks to massively drive the currencies value upwards continually. The rest of profits from buy cycles is reinvested to grow the initial holdings. OptiToken Interestingly also solves a common problem of new ICO’s, that can’t find any volume early on. CEO Sean Donato said, “Trading is perhaps 90% psychology and so often times people find themselves following trends after the fact as opposed to using solid fundamentals and then selling overbought and buying oversold based on traditional price fluctuations of the asset or perhaps RSI’s.” After the buybacks, 100% of the tokens purchased are sent to a transparent and verified unspendable address and thus destroyed forever in order to create value through scarcity. This combination is very innovative in the space and should attract serious organic buys on exchanges to partake in the price action.

What is great about this project is that can be immediately profitable. The technology is relatively straightforward to build, as the team is not promising a perhaps working product for a fantastic idea in Q3 of 2019 AKA “vaporware”. Rather, the product, already in Beta, will be in alpha in a few months, trading the proceeds from the ICO, and will hit exchanges just before or after this time frame according to projection. The ICO is open to Non-US and Non-China citizens now at OptiToken.io and is filling up fast.