Announcing Neufund’s ICO Transparency Monitor: An Analytical Toolkit for the Crypto Investment Space
With the new ICO Transparency Monitor, Neufund is launching a powerful toolkit for evaluating ICOs and other Token Generating Events. It allows to score past, present, and future crypto fundraising actions along a series of dimensions, each of which contributes to an overall judgment as “transparent”, “transparent with issues”, or “non-transparent”.
Our mission here at Neufund is to open innovation for good. We do this by providing a secure, legal, and blockchain-based mechanism for promising projects and companies to raise capital and issue equity tokens, and for their investors to benefit from funding them.
Towards a Real ‘Trust Machine’
While blockchains themselves have been cherished as groundbreaking ‘Trust Machines’, this only holds true if they are designed in a fashion in which one does not have to rely on the good intentions of their developers. Instead, one needs to build technical infrastructure and align the incentives necessary to sustain positive sum interactions. In that light then, how can investors and journalists be well-informed whether a given ICO is transparent and trustworthy?
So far, a deep literacy of crypto-economic details has been necessary to assess the fundamentals of ICOs, or to compare results between different projects. This has turned the professional scanning of the many emerging ICOs into a truly daunting task — or into a situation, in which one would still have to invest interpersonal trust. Additionally, the sheer number of ICOs announced on a day-to-day basis has made it ever more challenging to stay continuously well-informed on recent developments in the space.
The ICO Transparency Monitor finally facilitates this process for everyone, supporting an informed personal judgment. This allows everyone to invest responsibly and makes the space much more inclusive overall. It can do so by delivering an algorithmic evaluation of comprehensive blockchain-specific data. As opposed to personal investment advice, this rigid mechanism offers an unbiased metric based on decentralised analysis.
A Contribution to the Ecosystem
We firmly believe that crypto tech can be an incredibly strong tool for good in the world. For realising this promise though, securing the proper protection of all its participants must be the priority. With the recent issuance of its Token Investigate Report, the US Securities and Exchange Commission made it clear that we share this overarching concern with the regulatory side.
It is most crucial, however, that the states of law and technology must go hand in hand. Prompt and apt regulation is key for planning security and sure-handed conduct of technological applications. Only if modern overhauls of respective legal frameworks touch upon the novel features of blockchain technology can they do justice to the present era of the Internet.
At the same time, we are convinced that innovative peer-to-peer tools stemming from the community itself are the most practical means to catalyse a healthy progression trajectory of the crypto world. In order to reach its full potential, clear guidance is much needed for the ecosystem in order to prevent fraud and to promote future innovation.
We are eager to contribute to this advancement by facilitating an easy access to objective blockchain metrics. This addresses the concerns of protecting participants by fostering more transparency in the industry: What are the characteristics of the underlying smart contract? Are the rights of token holders protected in a trustless way? How are the funds distributed? Among many other parameters, the ICO Transparency Monitor makes such information now genuinely available for everyone.
At the same time, it holds crypto-economy entrepreneurs, just like us, accountable for their due diligence. In this spirit, we will invite crypto experts from the community to audit our own ICO code and then let the ICO Transparency Monitor scrutinise it for the public to witness.
Notable Features
The ICO serves as a universally accessible transparency benchmark for the community. As such, it constitutes an unprecedented effort with a number of special features:
1. The analysis is exclusively based on data from the Ethereum ledger.
The ICO Transparency Monitor does not aim to add another opinion on respective teams, token models, or their ecosystem impact to the discourse. Instead, code is sourced directly from Ethereum to verify that is indeed deployed on the public ledger. The whole blockchain is scanned to collect all token generation events logged by the ICO smart contract.
This does not constitute a typical code review — in fact, we can thereby detect breaches in trustless trust, i.e. designs in which essential terms are controlled by a person instead of a reliable and self-executing smart contract. A warning is triggered when cash flows are not handled in the way they should. One can recognise when a smart contract code is convoluted, or when it does something different than it should do. The analyses follow pre-defined technical categories and thus allow for interpretation and comparability at first glance.
3. The results are clearly displayed.
As this is a tool intended to inform the public, we have made it easy to understand the content presented. We use a combination of several types of charts, text comments, as well as simple checkmarks to provide maximum richness and context. This has two main dimensions: A thorough display of the analysed data on the one hand, and an answered questionnaire to crucial transparency-related questions on the other.
3. Any kind of Token Generating Event can be analysed.
By adding custom ICOs to the Transparency Monitor, all kinds of Token Generating Events can be analysed, including past, ongoing and upcoming projects.
4. Anyone can add ICOs for free.
The ICO Transparency Monitor manifests the community effort that is due today: Anyone (including project owners, fans, and investors) can add ICOs for free in order to assess them, and to make them accessible for others. Of course, we still verify the provided information (you can add a new ICO via a pull-request in Github). This inclusiveness results in a thorough proof of quality instead of mere marking. It prevents an arbitrary, hand-picked selection of displayed projects, delivering undistorted results without conflicts of interest.
Calling Upon the Community
We now invite you to try out the ICO Transparency Monitor yourself. Providing the initial details on an ICO is as simple as adding them to our GitHub. The more ICOs the Monitor depicts, the more powerful it becomes as a tool to make the entire crypto space a more transparent place. That’s why we warmly welcome you to join, contribute and benefit.
Our hope is that by offering this service to the public we will be doing our small part in exposing scams faster, helping investors direct their funds to honorable players, and just overall accelerating the maturation of this community that has treated us so well.
If you have questions regarding the ICO Transparency Monitor or Neufund, please reach out to icomonitor@neufund.org or hello@neufund.org.
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For a full technical explanation and usage instructions, please visit https://github.com/Neufund/ico-transparency-monitor.
All ratings are generated automatically and based solely on objective criteria that are available on our GitHub. We take no responsibility for the information published or data provided. We also do not assume any liability of their correctness. Positive ratings should not be misconstrued as investment advice!
Neufund is a community-owned fundraising platform bridging the worlds of equity investments and blockchain.
To learn more, check out Neufund’s ICBM page or the whitepaper for a deep dive. Questions? Ask us anything on Twitter and Telegram!
