Why an ICOs Ecosystem Built Through Decentralized Assurance?

The origins of Iconic’s strategic planning and Iconic Assurance

A couple of months ago, Roger Ilha Moreira, our strategic head, gave myself and our team a 2 hour presentation on the strategic guidelines that were to be followed from that moment on at Iconic (www.joiniconic.com). His study covered every aspect of Iconic’s positioning, from competitors to target-audience, basically designing what we have now as our own Bible.

That presentation was something I was expecting avidly for more then 30 days, as it would determine the ultimate design of what we have been working on for months.

Tons of data, research and thinking were then summed up in the following image:

Iconic’s strategic positioning

One of the things that interested me most of what I saw was something that I could not antecipate but was pretty obvious, having the blockchain universe properly considered: it is very difficult to have a precise profile of blockchain and cryptocurrency users and enthusiasts as most of the available data is anonymous — and supposed to be this way!

So how Roger pulled it off?

Behavior instead of people

We already knew for months that Iconic would have 3 different branches in its operation: Environment, where the initial coin offering (ICO) would occur; Trading, that would operate as the company’s own aftermarket; and Assurance, concentrating all the instruments to guarantee and enforce the fulfillment of the promises contained in the offerings.

Covering the 3 branches at the same time as a strategic guideline would be like firing a shotgun: altough we might be able to hit something, that would of course happen without any kind of precision.

But we had to be precise and fire at the right targets. So: which targets should we be shooting at? The blockchain and cryptocurrency community is not exactly known to be made up of people who like to publicly identify themselves.

Instead of looking at people’s data, Roger then focused all his attention of people’s actions within blockchain and cryptocurrency communities. As a deductive approach was impossible or ineffective, he then went inductive on our research and data gathering.

It turns out that it doesn’t matter who are the people within the blockchain community — whether men, women, young, old, etc.— if it is possible to spontaneously collect their wants and concerns.

The beginning of Iconic Assurance

The idea of Iconic Assurance, meaning a framework (through escrow, audits and arbitration) to allow ICOs to happen with an extra layer of security regarding the promisses and deliveries of the offerer, was a requirement for us, team, to consider the Iconic project valid as a whole.

How could an owner of 0.1 ETH worth of value token— USD 87 equivalent at the time this article was published — request and pay for an audit of a business established in a different country or even continent? In which scenario would this be worth it? How about a business that did not deliver anything, eliminating the market value of the acquired tokens? How could the 0.1-ETH-worth-of-value-token-owner even think about litigating about it? How much would it cost for even having a lawyer to analyze the whole case?

It seemed and seem obvious for us that blockchain investments shouldn’t be only about buying and selling tokens, but also about monitoring, certifying, auditing and sometimes, if necessary, even suing people. If it is to participate in the ICO universe, we though, we would like it to be to help mature the whole environment.

It would be very deceptive for us to provide the blockchain community with an ecosystem for ICOs without empowering this same community with the ability to have a rigid control on everything that is going on with the projects and companies offering their tokens.

Iconic Assurance is the way we figured to provide a solution for all those things. It was designed to address a solution to each of the aspects that could make an ICO unsafe, even after a successful offering.

Altough we believed in the importance of assurance for the construction of the whole Iconic project, this would not necessarily mean it to be a demand of the blockchain community as a whole.

So would Iconic Assurance be a blockchain community demand?

Assurance: the right way to go

There are two reasons why someone would probably participate in an ICO: to purely support a project or to profit or, in any way, benefit from it.

The vast majority of people participating in ICOs want to benefit in some way, mostly profiting from it. Nothing wrong about it, but the exact opposite: through selfish reasons, both parties involved in a voluntary exchange (and possibly a lot of people more) benefit from it.

And what could stop people from profiting? Either bad projects/ideas or bad people.

Choosing projects or ideas to invest is a matter of choice, ultimately a matter of freedom. So besides completeness of information to allow qualified decision-making, the decision to invest is a matter entirely private to the investor. No one should have anything to do with it, not even the middleman responsible for making the investment possible.

Altough one could argue that investing in projects led by bad people could be also a problem of freedom of choice, this can be different at least in a specific way: a skillful intermediary can project an environment endowed with the right incentives so that wrongdoing is not likely to occur. No harm to freedom involved, as parties are only given the right tools to create a healthy environment.

Regardless of gender, age or any other personal component of blockchain community participants, people would normally complain about losing money in ICOs where wrongdoing could not be predicted, discovered or even repressed. Not liking to waste money seemed to be as universal as something could possibly be.

So providing Assurance was not just our will, but a general demand of the ICO community.

Iconic’s strategic headline came then very easily: an ICOs ecosystem built through decentralized assurance.

It was the right way to go.