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Rich in cryptos, poor in fiat? This is something we observed quite often. Many people hold cryptocurrencies for thousands of dollars, but live a life with an average or below average standard, when it comes to their everyday needs. A general fiat-bridge into the real world is a demand. How about a fiat-bridge that enables you to spend your crypto funds as a kind of short-term loans without the need of selling them? On the other hand, there are many people just holding cryptocurrencies and while it is nice to have them growing in value in bull times, it feels like seeing your investment melt away in bear times. We found an ICO, starting soon, which addresses that problem in a smart way. HOLD is a progressive concept that should work out quite nicely, as it offers the ability to borrow money for short-term fiat purchases (with your crypto holdings as collateral), and to earn interest for your holdings as a lender – and all that with a prepaid credit card in-between as the connection to the real world's fiat system. In a nutshell, HOLD is a peer-to-peer lending platform that provides instant cash advances against cryptocurrency collateral and the option to earn quite competitive interest for lending your capital.

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HOLD ICO Facts Sheet

Website: https://hold.co/

Whitepaper: Whitepaper

Social Media: Telegram| Twitter | Medium

Info Channel: Announcement Channel on Telegram

KYC: Yes

Referrals: Yes, available – rewards with 5% of purchased amount

Excluded Countries: Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Macau, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, USA, Vanuatu, Yemen

Whitelist Process: YES, already started

Private Sale: Closed

Pre-Sale: 4th of May to 31st of May

Token Sale: To be announced

Pre Sale Bonus Structure: 20% Bonus while Pre-Sale

ICO Plattform: Ethereum ERC20 Token

Soft Cap: 3.500.000,00 USD – already reached with the private sale

Hard Cap: 11.300.000,00 USD

Individual Investment Cap: To be announced, but should be below 5ETH per Person

Maximum Supply: 1.3B HOLD Tokens

ICO Funds Allocations: 40% Engineering & Development / 15% Strategic Partnerships / 25% Marketing / 10% Legal /5% Operations / 5% Misc (e.g. Bug Bounty, Airdrop, …)

Token: HOLD (ICO price: 1 HOLD = 0.00004 ETH)

Solved Problem: HOLD enables cryptocurrency holders to hold their coins/tokens while a sell might not be wished, or simply not profitable. There are situations in life where you need an unexpected amount of cash and you would be forced to sell your holdings, not in your favor. HOLD offers instant cash advances for urgent expenses. Even tax problems might be solved in some jurisdictions as cryptos as collateral may not result in a tax event. HOLD is for true believers in cryptocurrencies, as it enables you to keep them, in situations where you need the money behind your equity and to earn competitive interest just for holding them on the platform.

Lending & Borrowing with the HOLD Credit Card

The HOLD ICO offers a unique platform to connect lenders, borrowers and to offer a fiat bridge (with their debit card). While lending itself is not new in the world of Crypto, the combination we see here and the rewards for holders/borrowers are. Furthermore, they seem to have a great tech behind (including HALT, a data-driven machine learning engine) and a rock-solid team. But let's get to the product first to make it crystal clear, what project you support with your ICO participation: As a lender, HOLD enables you to spend your money (with a HOLD App or debit card), which might be tied in coins/tokens without the need of selling them. As a borrower, it offers an incentive to hold your coins/tokens in rough times for interest.

The Features of HOLD

You will rarely find such an in-depth well-thought ICO. The features and the use case for an evolving crypto community are priceless.

A peer-to-peer lending/borrowing platform with cryptocurrencies as collaterals.

Instant cash advances against crypto collaterals (short-term loans with a period of 1-3 months) without the “usual bank checks”

Exclusive debit card and app for purchases with 45 million retailers worldwide and over 3 million ATMs.

An extensive membership level programme with several levels of status points for borrowers to increase the liquidity with incentives

Hold Token cashback for card usage

Very lucrative for lenders (4.5 to 7.5% p.a. interest)

HALT algorithm to secure your funds

HOLD offers a holistic, feature-rich concept based on a technically advanced platform. Lenders become incentivized with a standard-exceeding interest fee and borrowers get access to short-term loans against their cryptocurrency collaterals. The staggered membership levels ensure additional liquidity.

ICO Check – Is HOLD worth an investment?

How is the whitepaper/website?

HOLD offers a very well designed, crisp and clean website and whitepaper. This was not just punched out overnight, there have been much dollars/hours of work invested. While the website has almost all the information needed, sometimes you have to search a bit around to find the data you are looking for. Overall it communicates the sense of HOLD very well and if you enter with open eyes, you will get the concept quickly.

The whitepaper is presented in an excellent way. You will find all the answers regarding the HOLD project in a well-structured manner. All needed fields are right in front of you and the presentation is just awesome. We liked the whitepaper especially for being pretty detailed to a level, while you can still follow what the product is about, how it works and what shall come. Great job.

About the HOLD tokens

The token comes with several utility roles within the HOLD platform. The membership system is built on the base of HOLD tokens and they are used for the cashback program and to pay additional incentives to lenders through a status level program. Borrowers require the staking of HOLD tokens for a period of 6 months before they can make use of the advances. The allocation is 80% seed/pre/public sale, 10% company reserve (locked for 6 months), 5% marketing and 5% for strategic advisors/partnerships. We like that the company reserve is locked for quite some time, as this gives us some extra safety in regards to the legitimacy of this ICO. While the token supply with 1.3B HOLD tokens appears to be pretty much (it actually is), we think they have chosen this much for a reason. HOLD has well-thought plan to stabilize the value of the tokens with some actions, described in the next paragraph.

Why do we think the price of hold tokens will rise?

HOLD seems to have a clear strategy, how they want to contribute to a rising value of the token. To be able to achieve this, our guess is, that they issued a higher token supply in the first place. HOLD is going to incentivize the staking of their HOLD tokens by borrowers. To be able to get the short-term loan, you have to stake tokens for 6 months first. If they are able to acquire a large number of active memberships, this will automatically mean that fewer tokens are out in circulation. We might have a higher total supply, but we will have a lower circulating supply this way, which should stabilize the price. A 1% cashback program in HOLD tokens should increase the demand of making use of their card. And two of the best price drivers: There is a token buyback program to increase the overall liquidity and on top, there will be token burns to decrease the total supply over time – we have seen the positive effects of token burns in the past and if there is a demand for HOLD tokens, a decreasing supply should increase the value drastically.

Does the team have the needed experience?

The team is one-of-a-kind. One thing we don't like is to “buy” fancy names for the advisory board, just to appear more legitimate. We think this is not the route to go, as often these advisors get paid for nothing but being listed on the website. There are big names to be found in the board of HOLD, but you won't see the usual names, which you can find in the overmarketed/hyped ICOs. HOLD focuses to build a diverse team of rock-solid, experienced individuals that can achieve big things with the help of the synergy effect. One of the most important board members might be Dr. Albert Wahl, a well-connected financial advisor, might help with the issue this ICO gives us the biggest headaches – the debit card. We've seen it with several other projects, that Crypto and cards don't go well together yet. If you check the background and experience of Dr. Albert Wahl, you will get quickly why he might be the gate to make the card not an issue for HOLD.

Another very interesting part of the team is Dr. Joseph F. Borg as a legal advisor. With the pressure of the banks, his versed experience from the gaming and gambling industry might come in handy to set this baby on proper feet. Paul Evans is a serial entrepreneur and launched quite a few projects. The experience he brings is impeccable and we can see a huge value in having him. The one that brings quite some ICO/Crypto experience to the board is Nuno Correia, which some might know already. He is a networker to the bone and has been a co-founder of UTRUST, the PayPal of Crypto. While it is too much to go into each of the many team members, we checked each of their profiles and run a picture check, which they passed. Take a look what fields are covered with the HOLD team – you will surely understand why we are not in sorrow, that this product will be a great success.

Is there a clear roadmap and are the goals achievable?

The roadmap is straight to the bone. No fluff, no fillers. The public platform launch is in less than a year, so they have quite some work ahead. It is not undoable, especially not with a well diverse team like that, though as there are many external factors when it comes to issuing cards, there might be delays. We are sure HOLD will do everything humanly possible to keep up with their roadmap, though and a feeling tells me that Dr. Albert Wahl will make things happen at the fast pace. Another, and potentially even more important factor, is that crypto is never actually being sold to fund the fiat cards. Instead, lenders provide fiat liquidity which is being used, making this more of a fiat peer-to-peer lending platform that happens to utilize cryptocurrencies for collateralization. So this approach is quite easier to achieve than the one from other crypto cards.

How is their social following? Hype?

Recently there has been quite a bit talk about the relation of Telegram groups and the ICO success. The observations have been, that TG groups can have a tremendous impact on the success of an ICO. With the Pre-Ico not even started we are looking at ~21,630 people in the HOLD Telegram group. The support is helpful and the vibe is quite nice there. Furthermore, you can observe the many requests and one can sense that FOMO is cooking in the oven. Also, Twitter with 11,1K followers is above average and we can see the talk about HOLD growing already. Keep an eye on it – there won't be much time to join as HOLD already reached their soft cap with the private sale! The only thing we miss right now is the ANN thread on BitcoinTalk, but it might be in preparation.

To add up some extra hype, there is an referral programme available, which will reward you with 5% of the purchased tokens.

Conclusion

HOLD seems to be one of the really good picks nowadays – and a steal with the current ETH price. While the major amount of ICOs right now is somehow crappy, HOLD is a legit one in-between in our opinion. The project itself is very well thought and strikes on the competition matrix (see below this paragraph). It evens out, what others are missing. The team offers an impressive set of skills, connections, and knowledge.

While the total supply of the tokens is high, there are several measures that should move the price in the right direction. We guess this ICO is not made for the quick buck (like for selling directly once it hits the exchanges), but to hold for some time until the tokens are being staked, burned and bought back. Possible problems and risk are laid out in the whitepaper and gone on proactively, there are several plans for possible problems, which shows the mature foresight of HOLD.