The following article was written by Adinah Brown, content manager at Leverate.
With the world’s attention firmly focused on the machinations of Bitcoin and other famous cryptocurrencies, the world of virtual money is likely to continue to capture investors’ imagination. To add to the intense interest in this financial sector, keep your eyes on the following Initial Coin Offerings that are likely to attract further global attention.
trade.io (TIO): There’s a new kid on the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) block – trade.io, based in Switzerland. What has really caught investor interest to this ICO is the appointment of Mr. Chien Lee to the Board of this peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platform. Mr. Lee, a Chinese-American billionaire with over 30 years’ experience as a global entrepreneur, was appointed to trade.io’s Board of Directors back in October 2017. This company, which uses P2P platforms to enable trading in a variety of assets, has launched its own cryptocurrency—275 million USD worth of TradeTokens (TIO’s), which has been in circulation since late November 2017. Chien Lee, the CEO of NewCity Capital, a private equity company is also the co-owner of OGC Nice FC, a French football club based in Nice on the French Riviera.
Mr. Lee’s wily move nicely sidestepped recent Chinese regulations banning Chinese involvement in ICOs. While Lee’s involvement in trade.io has not be disclosed, it is likely to be substantial, generating interest and speculation that TradeToken may become a key player in the cryptocurrency market. P2P solutions are considered as instrumental in maintaining Chinese involvement in ICOs that are launched outside of China—a practice that the Chinese authorities have not blocked. Prior to the Chinese ICO ban, Chinese companies were recorded raising over 750 million USD in July and August 2017 alone. Trade.io’s move in bringing blockchain technology into the P2P marketplace is revolutionary, and extremely positive for the cryptocurrency market.
NaPoleonX (NPX): With visions of short French generals astride oversized battle horses, NaPoleonX, launched by French investment company Napoleon Capital, is another new cryptocurrency scheduled to hit the markets late 2017. This launch features Decentralized Autonomous Funds, or DAFs, which are smart contracts that enable investors to participate in financial markets using specialized trading programs, or “bots”. Buying NPX tokens entitles you to participate in the first cryptocurrency asset manager that links fiat and cryptocurrencies. This provides a scalability that has been lacking to date in many historical ICO launches.
The trading bots that a DAF employs are intended to produce a positive return, 25% of which is considered as performance fees that reward the successful performance of the trading bots. The bulk of these fees are then fed back to NaPoleonX, with Napoleon Capital retaining the balance. The DAF investor therefore receives the difference of performance minus performance fees. Details of this mechanism are clearly described in the NPX White Paper.
Bancor Network (BNT): Bancor is another decentralized network mechanism that enables investor holding Ethereum cryptocurrency to convert it into any other cryptocurrency token that is held on the network. This transaction is conducted using a pre-determined rate using a standard cryptocurrency web wallet. In this way, smart contract holders can effectively make their own market prices on “Connector” tokens that are then recirculated within that decentralized network.
The Bancor Network team comprises a group of Israeli blockchain developers who only recently made their appearance on the cryptocurrency stage. The project is led by Eyal Hertzog, a serial tech entrepreneur with a 20-year track record. Bancor’s main drive is to resolve the issue of low liquidity of other digital asset exchanges such as Poloniex. The smart tokens generated by Bancor contain “reserves” of other tokens. Bancor wants these smart contracts to be viewed as having their own intrinsic value, which is not associated with the reserved token. The company’s ultimate objective is for Bancor to become a decentralized exchange—one with high liquidity, yet low, or zero fees. Bancor’s technology is iconoclastic, and likely to disrupt the market in a significant way.