Blockchain proved to be an outstanding invention but as it is “nothing is perfect in this world”, this technology too comes with its own flaws. From 500 million-dollar hacks to ICO frauds, safety is possibly the most apparent of them all.
As per the Ernst and Young report on ICOs, more than 10 percent of funds raised from this are either whipped or gone in frauds. Almost $4oo million of $3.7 billion that was raised was whipped, without any guarantee that it can be retrieved by any means.
The most usual approach for stealing ICOs is phishing; it is an exercise of sending deceitful emails with the optimism of fooling investors to share their personal details like account number, passwords, codes etc. Most often, the hackers set up fake wallet address as “on behalf of” the ICO company and pursue the investors to direct BTC or ETH to that address in support of the offering. Investors don’t get the wind of frauds until they miss the boat.
ICO scams are on the rise hence it very important that you launch your ICO without making any mistakes. Are you launching an ICO? Have you done your homework to understand the most important and common mistakes that can be avoided? If you want to successfully launch your ICO, following are the precautions that you should take.
Incorporating a well-defined, clear plan for successful ICO launch:
Do you think that any industry, any organization or any project can succeed if there’s no well-drafted plan for launch? No, they won’t, right?
This applies to ICO as well. An out of order vision statement, no perception of direction and zero planning will lead to the failure of your ICO launch. This is the silliest and common mistake that persuade investors not to invest in your ICO.
Crisp, well-defined operation steps and a good vision to define what you want to achieve is very important to successfully launch your ICO. If you define your goals and vision statement good investors will be attracted to invest in a good ICO. Hence the following are some points that you should well define in your plan:
- How you plan to carry out the activities?
- What’s in it for the investors?
- What are your ICO product offerings?
- Etc.
The role of Marketing, PR, and Sales:
Every industry be it farming or e-commerce or IT, all need the right marketing, PR, and sales team to promote and sell their products. The same is true for blockchain and ICO also. Once the infrastructure for the ICO is in place, you must do your best to promote, market and sell your ICO at the right time and not a month before your ICO’s release.
If you don’t do the marketing at the right time, your ICO will fail miserably irrespective of how extraordinary the platform is. Marketing your ICO on all social and digital platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc. will help you get the good number of user registrations. Hence, it is very important to find the right team for these activities because it directly affects the fundraising.
Not all organizations understand this, they keep on working on their ICO platform’s development and forget to start the marketing activities. Usually, it happens that most organizations do not feel the need in investing for marketing, PR, and sales and think of this as an expensive activity.
Introductory arrangements with funds and big investors:
The absence of introductory arrangements with funds is a can of worms for organizations. It is a challenging task to get a 100% investment from the right investor. Organizations who are very serious about their ICO, get the funding arrangements done well in advance and these can account for the complete amount of targeted fundraising.
Hence, before even starting work on your ICO, you need to finalize your target fund and the plan for arranging for the funds. For this, you must have a very strong and experienced member in your organization who can find the 100 percent funds, this can be done by organizing events. This opportunity can be used to connect with big investors and make your sales then and there.
Letting the security audit slip:
This is another big mistake that organizations make – failing to do appropriate security audits. Organizations can take palpable actions to prevent the hacks and deceitful attacks by checking the ICO space for impressionists and copycats. Not having a security audit team as a part of your organization is not an excuse.
For launching your ICO, it is very important that you carry out this audit. You can hire independent audit companies for this. These companies provide penetration testing, smart contract audit and bug tips to help you get ready for your ICO platform promotion. These organization are well trained and can expose the vulnerabilities of your system and can save millions of dollars and hours of time that you will have to waste otherwise.
Blockchain application development and ICO companies often forget that compliance is different from security and think that as long as they follow the compliance regulations, their data is systematically shielded and safe from theft or hack. Hence, make sure that you don’t assume that taking care of compliance covers security.
Final Thoughts:
Cryptocurrency ventures and initiatives are now flourishing, thanks to ICO. Precisely formulated ICO, well-performed plan, rock-solid smart contract design and trustworthy token economics are peculiarities of a successful blockchain coin offering. With a properly planned, well-defined goal and an experienced team, you should be able to raise the necessary funds for your launch and thus successfully launch your ICO.
