Introducing TokenData
Friday, July 14, 2017Séamus and the Giant ICO Peach: Our journey to get all token data.
‘Man, this ICO sh*t is out of control’, has been the modal phrase uttered at TokenData for the past several weeks. For anyone interested in technology and finance, who has been even half-sentient this year, this sentiment should strike a chord.
We created Tokendata.io out of some nouveau sense of civic duty. After our latest: ‘So what do you think of these coin things?’, encounter with a group of quaintly-naïve Baby Boomers, it became self-evident: the time for transparency is now.
In prior lives, we at TokenData held various roles in the shadow banking system — once upon a crisis, the media’s favorite target in demonizing modern finance. Never before though have we witnessed anything cast shade remotely as parabolically as today’s ICO market.
We’re talking insanity, folks. We’re talking about about ex-bankers setting up crypto hedge funds when they don’t know what Github is. About pump-and-dump discussions and scams in official ICO channels that make our old LIBOR fixing chats on Bloomberg look like jaywalking.
It’s as if someone opened the Tesseract three months ago, and only the geeky kids feel compelled to stop the Demogorgon (Netflix & chill — Google it).
We ❤ Tokens
Still reading? Good. It’s not all doom and gloom. We love the ICO market as much as anyone — not in the: ‘Let’s throw up a WIX page tonight and raise a buck selling ClitCoins (borderline NSFW) tomorrow’ kind of way, but in the: ‘Wow we’re witnessing true innovation in capital raising and business models’ kind of way. The TokenData team uses Basic Attention Token’s Brave browser and we can’t wait to put our emotional hedge before the next U.S. election on Augur or Gnosis.
Put more eloquently by our Twitter hero Naval Ravikant we believe that ‘We’re going through a phase of irrational exuberance, but long-term rational exuberance.’
Sometime after this frenzy, out of the ashes of failed projects, in a place that most certainly won’t be the “distributed ledger” / “blockchain working group” / ”innovation lab” of a bank, token sales and ICO’s might emerge as a monumental paradigm shift in the financing world. Why? Because we, and many of you, have taken the leap and believe that blockchain protocols and decentralized applications are useful and will lead to new, innovative business models. Tokens and ICO’s are essential to that future.
TD’s Modus Operandi
Our mission: Full transparency. For now, that means a complete^ and free repository of data. TokenData.io, in its current form, is the optimal entry point in our efforts to pull back the curtain for an audience of varying levels of sophistication and give-a-sh*t-ness. No matter where you fall on the spectrum, TD has something for you:
- Completely new to cryptocurrencies?
If you’re browsing through more than 10 of these ICO’s you’ll probably go down the rabbit hole of browsing through all 250+ ones that we’ve listed. - Blockchain-focused VC?
Check fundraising stats and relative performance measures for 75+ and counting projects. - Crypto diehard since pre 2010?
Find all upcoming ICO’s in one place and at the same time look at why you HODL. - Blockchain skeptic?
Read some of the ICO descriptions and you’ll find what you’re looking for.
‘But TokenData, there’s much more to this than simple returns.’
Yes, of course. The devil is in the details, after all. One nefarious line of code in a contract is enough to make any attempted calculation of returns an exercise in absurdity.
That’s why we will be publishing a constant stream of content, developing easy to use analytical tools, and conducting interviews throughout the token space. Lofty goals, indeed. But for now, at a minimum, we’ve done the grunt work to get the ball rolling for everyone.
Simple Insights Derived from our Data
$1.5 BILLION has been raised through 91 ICO’s year-to-date. That’s more than all VC investments in the blockchain space in 2015 and 2016 COMBINED*. At time of writing, there are ~70 upcoming ICO’s, and this number is growing by the day.
We’ve estimated the (simple) average return of our complete universe of traded ICO’d tokens to be 16x, versus 13x for Ethereum and 2x for Bitcoin**. Of course, in calculating relative returns, you can datamine and use different methods however you want. That’s why TokenData provides you with prices, absolute and relative returns for every single token, and you can draw any conclusion you want.
On Due Diligence, Accountability
Most projects and investors tend to have concerns about pricing, thresholds, and trading liquidity. We’ve dug through all token sales websites, white papers, blogs, chat rooms and Twitter feeds to collect the data. Following this due diligence we believe that there are essential best practices only few token sales follow:
- Be Fully Transparent:
Transparency goes beyond showing fancy pie-charts of token distribution, usage of fiat funds and an overview with people’s LinkedIn’s pictures. - Provide Regular Status Updates:
Evaluate and document progress (or lack thereof) towards promised goals & milestones. One of the early landmark token sales, Augur, has done a great job at publishing a weekly update of the development work and an updated masterplan/roadmap of what’s to come and what might fail. - Open Your Codebase to 3rd Party Auditing:
Tokens == Code. Open-sourcing the codebase for your tokens is essential to gain trust. Respond to any findings that point at flaws in your smart contract code, and address the necessity for such terms before raising funds.
For example: Storj, Golem, and the Basic Attention Token projects all had their smart contract code reviewed and publicized by an independent third party (Zeppelin). - Stick to the Plan:
If you say that a token sale will take two blocks, two hours, or two months, stick to it and don’t change it during or after a sale. Bancor raised $153M in an afternoon, but not without disputes when the sale window was extended. You’ve set a fixed token:crypto exchange rate? You should stick to it and hedge accordingly. Civic did a great job with their transparent exchange rates and ‘take it or leave it’ approach.
Yes, we can hear the footsteps of the impending wave of trolls. No, we’re not that naive. We understand the intricacies and difficulties involved in reforming the ICO market as much as anyone who’s read this far.
But rather than passively observe a slow-motion train wreck, we want to help lay out a path forward of common sense.
TokenData’s Favorite Due Diligence Blunders
Lest we take the windfalls and tribulations of building TokenData.io too seriously — we tender for your enjoyment particularly noteworthy moments of astonishment on our side:
TenX — https://tenx.tech/
TenX wants to bring crypto to the masses through a wallet and debit card solution. They’ve raised 80M USD in their ICO, provided development updates, launched an early release of their wallet app and worked with different exchanges to create a liquid market for its PAY tokens. This is more positive development than 90% of the projects out there.
But when we see a Twitter feed insinuating that PAY will go to the moon once trading starts and a subsequent blog post which states that “holding PAY was by far the best option compared to other cryptocurrencies” and that “we want to congratulate everyone who bypassed the massive crypto hit over the past few weeks by being in PAY”, we’re simply dumbstruck.
It gets worse, TenX even has the audacity to quote Warren Buffet in the blog post. We thought TenX was a blockchain company focused on developing a consumer application, and not a fund-selling Cryptocurrency Portfolio Insurance. The Sage of Omaha would not approve…
Veritaseum — http://veritas.veritaseum.com/
P2P Capital Markets platform meets personal blog meets random images of golden coins. Can someone please explain to us what they do, and why the website asks us to “imagine having the keys to the Internet in 1994”? The only image this conjures to the frontal lobe is Mother picking up the phone in the middle of an angsty AIM chat, as the ol’ 28.8k modem gives out. *DAMMIT Maaaaa, come on..*
Paquarium — https://ico.paquarium.com/
SPOILER ALERT: Finding Nemo fans, avert your eyes as we find it fitting to quote the most memorable line of the latest, upcoming episode in the blockbuster trilogy, Finding Nemo 3:
“Everyone on the planet understands the nature of water and fish.” ~ Dory
Profound, isn’t it? Only kidding — this line was pulled verbatim from the whitepaper accompanying Paquarium’s ICO! Paquarium is looking to build the world’s largest aquarium. In an effort to raise $120M through an ICO, we were less surprised by the proposed functionality of the tokens (fancy souvenir vouchers with a coupon) than we were by the fact that the executive team lacks actual professional aquarium management / construction experience. Have we mentioned that the goal of this ICO is to build a f**king aquarium?!? Please tell us this is a prank-ICO.
That’s All Folks!
If you feel slightly incensed after reading those last blurbs, it’s likely because you either:
- invested in one of the aforementioned issuances, or
- you’re behind one of them.
In either case you’ll want to cruise on over to our Returns page, to keep tabs on how your guac’ is faring relative to the market.
Just remember: We all make mistakes
— and, after all, isn’t failure the key to success?
Whether you find these anecdotes worrying or hilarious, you’ll want to check back with TokenData regularly. The site and forthcoming content will make our journey down the digital currencies rabbit hole easier and just that much more fun.
Necesitamos Feedback
If you like what we’re creating here, please spread the word, sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Twitter: @tokendata. If you want to help us with any form of content creation or data collection hit us up on: [email protected]. If you think some of the data is incomplete, or that certain calculations or commentaries don’t make sense, feel free to do all of the above.
Cheers & Good Luck,
TokenData
Endnotes:
^We do our best to keep TokenData.io as encompassing as humanely possible — but these issuances are coming at warp speed!
* https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/bitcoin-blockchain-startup-funding/
** Simple average of individual returns, where an individual return is measured as investing $1 in tokens/ETH/BTC at time of an ICO
Disclaimer: In the spirit of full transparency, the TokenData team have invested and/or participated in the following tokens and token offerings: BTC, ETH, GNO, BAT, BCAP, STORJ, CIVIC, ARAGON, TEZOS, BANCOR, STATUS, AUGUR (REP)
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