ICO insights. Part 1. Money compensation for the team and board

Being involved in the blockchain and crypto world as a practitioner and speaker since 2016, I was refusing to join any token-based project for a long period of time because of the following reasons:

The most common conditions (let it name «the market») today for involving «advisors/partners» into any ICO project include the following terms:

These facts (in addition to other expenses) make project teams allocate for bonuses/rewards up to 30–40% of the total fundraising budget which is a sort of criminal from my perspective. Just imagine: 3 out of 10 mln. USD are gone immediately which means for the project execution only 7 mln. USD are left in the best case scenario. The undervalue of own tokens makes them «yet another one coin» without a solid business model and economy having over-flooded free float just «because we can print own money».

All our stakeholders have a previous business traction and can’t understand the sense of such practices described above.

Money, taken from investors, are in fact «a loan» and a piece of trust investors give to the team but not even for the project idea: the right team may pivot many times during the project execution. In addition, we completely changed the token distribution strategy without any bonus given for free because we value our tokens even more than fiat money: they are under everyday inflation while our tokens are a strictly limited thing.

In our opinion, money must be spent on the project execution but not for scouting. So what are our rules (which are even stated mostly in the project White Paper)?

Of course nobody, who expect to take money out of the pockets of project investors and run away exactly when the token sale is ended.

That is why we are taking people on board who share our values, have real business experience and understand these concepts. They understand that it is better to have a small share in something real and perspectively «big» rather than having a huge piece of nothing which is difficult to sell to anybody even with 30% reward.

Their projections are for 3–5 years and such investment of time will definitely pay off during the long distance.

These people trust in the team, trust in themselves, trust in the business we build.

In DIAMCO and my other projects (Yorso, Innosoft) we really believe that people are a key success and the key investment for the project to grow. Of course, we break up sometimes but definitely, it doesn’t change the whole long-term business strategy implementation.

DISCLAIMER: everything is written above is just my personal point of view and personal insight and can’t be threatened as an official DIAMCO project opinion

Originally published at medium.com on July 27, 2018.

Related posts:

The common belief is that, a growth mindset helps a person to learn new capbilities and grow. But, there is a twist to this, learning comes later-It is "Unlearning" that comes first!

Most of us would likely have a simple conversation with a chatbot in this technological age. But, from automated discussions and interactions to telling jokes, the rise of transformer-based language…