It’s now as easier to invest in ICO platforms as it is to buy shoes on Amazon. Your journey into blockchain cryptocurrency investment doesn’t need to be complicated and is now safer than ever.
(Check out our offer here.)
Invest in ICO Events Directly (More Risk)
This is the first way people got into cryptocurrency and is less safe than investing via an offer that is registered or regulated by authorities.
So if you’re game to invest in ICO offers, you’d do well to have some BTC and ETH which are now well-past their ICO phase and into later stages of maturity and wider-spread adaption. Those can be purchased on an exchange. Here’s a list of exchanges:
https://blockgeeks.com/guides/best-cryptocurrency-exchanges/
You’ll often find Initial Coin Offerings stages asking you for a deposit of other cryptocurrency coins – usually the major ones, like Ethereum or Bitcoin. Among the benevolent reasons to fund an offer that way are to expedite transactions and keep costs lower because wallet-to-wallet transfers (of the right kind) are among the easiest to make in the cryptocurrency world. That’s one of the great benefits to the world of cryptocurrency: cheaper financial transactions.
You’ll want to check our other articles about investing in ICO’s. In the USA the Securities and Exchange Commission says they consider most token offers as securities, not just utilities, no matter how offerers may describe their token. Due to the nature of these transactions, our opinion is they would appear to carry more risk due to the anonymous nature of blockchain.
Reading around cryptocurrency forums can help you get a sense of investor sentiment.
FINRA-member Platforms (Less Risk)
On the other hand, it is very possible to get in on PreICOs with normal money or, fiat as it’ss called. One way to do it is to use a FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority)-regulated platform such as Start Engine (where we have an offer: www.Startengine.com/sun-fund-dc). There, investment is pretty simple with normal payment mechanisms like bank cards.
While there’ss no big Invest in ICO button at these platforms, per se, a little hunting around can reveal which offers are ICOs and which are other security instruments like stocks. (Ours is both preferred equity shares AND tokens via SAFT in one investment placement. We think we were the first-to-market with such a hybrid offer.)
Here is a list of platforms that FINRA regulates: https://www.finra.org/about/funding-portals-we-regulate.
This list does not mean these platforms are live, or even good. It just means there is some transparency into who is responsible for handling your investment money and that they haven’t proven themselves to be entirely untrustable.
These FINRA-regulated portals allow you to click through to documents and filings that can disclose really important details about the people you’re handing your money to give to someone else, such as (not exact transcripts of questions or comprehensive):
- Whether any applicants or any have been convicted of, or charged with any felony
- Any of their associated persons been convicted of misdemeanors regarding investment related businesses, fraud, or false statements
- Whether any domestic or foreign court in the past 10 years enjoined the applicant or any associated person in connection with any investment-related activity
The SEC also has a lot of useful guidance, here.
These will also address many of your concerns about offering terms that may not be readily apparent in discussion boards, white papers, ICO listings, and other such secondary information sources. But don’t discount those, either: They can help you with useful information on the analysis side, and discussion boards can alert you early on to problems that other participants may be having with offerers.