IndieGoGo Brings ICOs to the People
SEC Chairman On ICOs: Be Very Careful When Investing in Them
Crowd funding is nothing new in the era of the internet, but ICOs are like crowd funding on steroids, combining the novelty of cryptocurrencies with the possibility for easy global investment.
So it is only natural that IndieGoGo itself would go the way of the ICO.
Indiegogo now lets you fund via token sale https://t.co/2E7AeIwwOeby@techcrunch
"We’re incredibly excited to announce thatyou can now investin the first Initial coin offering (ICO) pre-sale with Indiegogo and MicroVentures," the company announced in a recent blog post.
The major difference is that IndieGoGo would be fully compliant in launching token sales for investors who do not own cryptocurrencies and may invest directly in cash. IndieGoGo would thus become one of the biggest hubs for other projects to raise capital.
The Risks and Promises of ICOs:
SEC Chairman On ICOs: Be Very Careful When Investing in Them
One of the biggest problems of ICOs are scam companies or projects that have few resources to actually finish the product. Other ICOs, like Confido, turn out to be actual scams. For this reason, the experts of IndieGoGo would do a sifting of the projects and pre-select the best:
"With a combined experience of nearly 20 years and $1.5B in fundraising, we’re working with MicroVentures to source the very best token pre-sales. Investors can be confident we don’t let just any token pre-sale on our platform and companies can be confident that their pre-sales will be in good company on our platform."
The first project that IndieGoGo would sponsor is Fan-Controlled Footbal League, the ultimate fantasy football platform. The FCL project has already gone through a round of traditional crowd funding to test a fantasy football team and design its app ideas, and now the pre-sale is open for another ten days, followed by another token sale event. Participants in the pre-sale would receive a 25% early bird token.
Projects like IndieGoGo and Patreon have made crowd funding and micro investing mainstream, so some see it as the next logical step that ICOs would also be covered:
Indiegogo &@gogoSlavaare experimenting with offering almost every financial innovation for#startups: equity crowdfunding, reward crowdfunding, and now ICOs! They have been great about working with academics. We should learn a lot from these experiments.
Until now, token sales were mostly related to blockchain projects, but with IndieGoGo the funding may spread to other products or ideas.