For the last several months we have been working on reforming our expert community and on making overall improvements to our platform. We have carried out reforms with different directives, such as revoking the expert status of those who used it only as a label without being an active member of the community and the implementation of mandatory written reviews for ratings. The KYC procedure helped us to make certain who are the committed and conscientious experts. About 100 experts who didn’t go through the procedure lost their expert status last month.

We also use the KYC as a tool to detect fraudulent ICOs and to make the decision if the ICO should be listed on our platform or should be removed. However, the KYC procedure doesn’t guarantee that the team isn’t running a scam, or that the ICO will be successful. We strongly suggest to possible investors to not follow the KYC results blindly. Every investor is responsible to do his or her own independent research. It’s better to focus not only on the team members, but other aspects of the project as well.

If we receive a report about ICO project being a scam, we flag the project and delist it. In special cases, we will put a flag and a notification on the project and leave it on our platform, so that any legal authority representative will have access to the information that we have.

Being an expert brings a higher level of responsibility to a member of the community. Therefore, we want to thank our dedicated community members for the support and effort they have put in to help us identify those experts who have been abusing their power. As a result of the hard work of our community members and evidence that we have received from them, we have been able to determine a number of violators and revoke their expert status and delete all ratings from those experts. It is one of the small steps on our way to improving the system.

We will continue weeding out those members of the community who are causing harm to investors and reducing the credibility of ICObench as a rating platform until there are no more left. We encourage you to report any type of threats — hacking, fraud, scams, attacks, etc. — coming from ICOs published on ICObench. As always, If you have any proof of an expert blackmailing a project, selling ratings, or exchanging them for their services, please send it to info@icobench.com.

Also, to improve the quality of our rating system, we decided to limit the number of ratings given by our experts to 5 ratings per day and 50 per month. Along with this limit, Bitcoin Wiki, a new community resource, has been added to the rating system. We believe this will help our community become healthier and more reliable by educating those people who are new to this environment. Bitcoin Wiki is a public resource for the community of Bitcoin users, developers, and businesses as well as anyone interested in Bitcoin. It contains articles that serve as a good introduction to Bitcoin and also has exact specifications on service fees, product performance, how-to manuals, protocol specifications, etc.

Several other improvements have been made to our platform. Now project teams can find an advisor by going to the Advisors of Blockchain section. Anyone can agree or disagree with the rating given by an expert and share the project via social media. Our users can buy or sell tokens of the projects that have completed their ICO with “Changelly.” Users who are not comfortable with English can translate the entire website to their own language with the new Google Translate feature. We also launched a new blog section with the list of leading people and influencers of the crypto world — The Bench. There our bloggers are going to share their experience and knowledge about the industry and will talk about promising projects. ICObench Official Group on Telegram now allows our users to discuss all the latest news of the ICObench community with real-time support, where members of the group are free to ask questions about the platform’s work and policies.

It has already been 1 year since the first ICO was published on ICObench. Since then we have grown considerably! We have reached over 4,100 ICOs published on our platform and have about 60,000 users altogether. We are growing and moving towards the overall improvement of our system as the crypto market is growing exponentially.