In some of my previous cryptocurrency posts I talked about Pre-ICOs. Pre-ICOs are a great investment opportunity because they often offer a bonus and/or discount.
When you first start with trading in cryptocurrency the most common thing to do is to buy existing coins and “gamble” on an increase of value to earn profit.
However buying coins through a Pre-ICO can be even more rewarding.
A Pre-ICO is a way to get some initial funding for a project. Often the project is still in the early stages of development and the developers need some early investors to get things going. To attract investors the people behind the project offer bonuses or discounts to sweeten the deal.
Pre-ICO can be very rewarding for investors for a number of reasons.
Short term value
You can buy coins at a much lower price than the people who buy the coin at the public sale or ICO. This means that you have a bigger chance of earning a nice profit. If the coin is distributed on exchanges before the ICO you have good opportunity to sell the coins for much more than what you paid (easy money me thinks!)
Long term value
Imagine that you are a Hodler and you bought some ethereum in the Pre-ICO (don’t know if they actually had one but let’s pretend for arguments sake). The price of Ethereum at the time of the ICO was $0.31, now let’s say that the Pre-ICO offered a 15% discount. So an investment of $100 would mean that you got 384 eth from the Pre-ICO. Those same 384 eth would now be worth $409,366.
Better opportunities
When buying existing coins chances are that they have already increased in value, they probably have had some “going to the moon” moments. But Pre-ICO coins are less(er) known and you are able to buy in before they gain fame and everybody jumps on board.
On the other side there are also bigger risks involved with Pre-ICOs. You run a bigger risk of investing in a scam project or a project that can not achieve its goals.
The project in the Pre-ICO phase still has to deliver its products or services and there is no guarantee that they will succeed.
Pre-ICOs in particular are very hot at the moment and this has some consequenses.
The whitelist
Because of the enormous interest in Pre-ICOs a lot of the projects have been using whitelists. A whitelist means that you will need to get approval from the project to participate, if don’t make it on to the whitelist.... guess what? Try again when the ICO goes live.
The approval of the whitelist depends on the demands of the project. They tend to favour people who have an wide range of active social media accounts where they promote the project.
Have your Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Medium and Steemit accounts ready and be sure to write something about pending Pre-ICOs that use a whitelist.
If you are planning to buy coins at a Pre-ICO it is important to check the conditions, chances are they have both a whitelist and a KYC procedure. You will have to be fast though and note the date and time in your calendar because Pre-ICOs are selling out fast.
KYC
KYC stands for Know Your Customer. This basically means that you have to verify who you are so that the people behind the project know who they are dealing with. You are probably already familiar with KYC because a lot of exchanges also have a verification procedure.
Now Pre-ICOs and even ICOs are also using KYC verification to weed out money laundering and other nefarious practices.
It’s sellers market as they say, popular crypto projects don’t have to actively attract investors anymore, instead they are in a position to up the prices and be very selective with who gets to invest in their projects.
If you want in on a promising Pre-ICO you will have to be prepared and fast.
Some of the advantages of Pre-ICOs have diminished somewhat because of the ever increasing demand. The prices of the new coins are going up and the conditions to enter have become more strict. However it can still be very rewarding to buy new cryptocurrency when the prices are still at their lowest.
If you want to stay on top of things, there is a great Steemian that you can follow, TheGobone has all the inside info you need about upcoming Pre-ICOs and ICOs and a terrific spreadsheet to boot.
