Let’s face it — we’re experiencing a massive ICO bubble. The blockchain industry is unregulated and consequently littered with scams. Projects with no intentions of releasing a product are flooding the crypto space with extravagant websites and fluffed whitepapers. Attempting to distinguish legitimate projects is becoming increasingly difficult as a solid team, technical whitepaper, and informative website can easily be spoofed.

Investors are quickly realizing that the most effective way to legitimize a project and mitigate significant risk is to invest in projects with a proof-of-concept that indicates real, working evidence of technical aptitude and competency. Although the team and whitepaper are both very important, they take a backseat to a proof-of-concept.

A proof-of-concept provides real utility, and therefore demand, to a token and hinders speculative pressure on token price after its release on markets. Without utility, the post-ICO token price is likely to plummet into its own grave. A project being able to present a working, tested product is the best indicator an investor could wish for.

Apart from the obvious advantage of building trust with investors, an initial alpha version is one of the most important phases of the software development life cycle and serves multiple purposes:

Quality

An alpha allows evaluating the overall application experience from users’ point of view, makes sure all the features work as expected, and provides thorough feedback about the usability and user experience that developers can use to improve the application.

Performance

An alpha helps analyze the speed and performance of applications in the real world by producing performance benchmarks in a wide variety of environments and situations not possible to achieve in-house.

Bug Detection

An alpha is great for quickly discovering and fixing bugs before officially launching.

Early Adopters

An alpha encourages early users to spread the word to a wider audience and inspire other users to join.

Ideas Validation

An alpha provides a platform to test different features, alter functionality based on user reactions, and validate the product-market-fit.