Security Token Offering (STO) statistics

Security token offering (STO) is a type of fundraising that is performed with a company offering tokenized securities. The defining feature of security token offerings is in its definition. Stocks, bonds and managed property trusts are another examples of securities.

Stablecoins: Crypto’s Holy Grail or Fools’ Errand? by Dr Garrick Hileman

I was attending the interesting LECTURE “Stablecoins: Crypto’s Holy Grail or Fools’ Errand?” by Dr Garrick Hileman – Head of reseach at Blockchain – London School of Economics – United Kingdom at hashtag#ETH hashtag#Zurich and here is a copy of the slides Introducing: 2019 State of Stablecoins The 2019 report builds on its predecessor to provide an updated and expanded look at the current state of the stablecoin market – a space where we expect to see significant innovation in the coming years. It includes:

• New research primers on three leading stablecoins: Paxos Standard, Stasis and Reserve
• A new in-depth comparison of Paxos Standard, USD Coin and Gemini Dollar
• Expanded data profiles on 34 stablecoins, including many new stablecoins (the report is twice the size of its predecessor!)
• Refreshed data and analysis across the full report to reflect the substantial changes observed over the last six months; and
• An overview of how to gain investment exposure to the growing use of stablecoins

Get the report and slides https://www.blockchain.com/research

ICO TOKEN DISTRIBUTION & ECONOMICS

Usually, a percentage of the tokens is sold to ICO participants and a percentage kept for the company’s needs. The token distribution and allocation of the token is usually a chapter in the future company whitepaper. A pie chart displays how and to whom tokens will be allocated. But how much tokens are allocated (amount) and what are they used for? how much token should I spend for advisor? is 15% of all tokens too much for founder? How many company use reward pool and what is the best size?

I’m trying to answer all these questions at https://ico.tokens-economy.com/distribution/ You can discover how much token are given for pre-sale, main sales, or reserved for particular needs across a bit less than 900 ICO!

 

After analyzing 896 ICO, up to 24 main categories used to describe token distribution have been identified:

advisors, airdrop, bonus, bounty, burned, community, company, crowdsale, ecommerce, foundation, founder, investors, legal, lockup, marketing, operations, pool, premined, presale, referrals, research, reserves, team

The tedious work was to get the data and map categories (people used a huge amount of synonyms: up to 1936 unique words/sentences, including typos) down to 24 categories!

Some examples:

• crowdsale: ico, sales, crowd sale, crowd-sale, free sale, ico round, main-ico, coinsale, coin sale, ico token, public, …
• bounty: ico bounty, bug bounty, gift, bounties
• frozen: frozen, lock-up, vesting, lockup
• and the list goes on….

After that, graphing all these values was easy thanks to #google charts API 

I will update the data regularly, so keep visiting this page in the future.

How it was done

• Data are stored in Google Sheet, 2190 ICO, read from Whitepapers using PDFBox.
• A category parser read and match token distribution categories (> 1936 unique words/sentences) and their respective values
• A category reducer reduce the number of categories to a more manageable number by mapping similar category together. E.g. Early Bird investors -> preico
• A category analyzer can query these data using multiple category selector strategies.

What’s next?

I will improve the category reducer over time to catch more and more synonyms and increase the coverage of ICO taken into account by the category analyzer.

I plan to export the rules used in the category reducer and display them beside each pi chart soon.

Feel free in comments to give me your feedback

Initial Coin Offering security checklist

Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have revolutionized the way companies raise capital but at the same time are bringing their own sets of challenges. To ensure that your startup will go through that (ad)venture in a safe manner, you should always adhere to best security practices, for your company AND your investors. 

This mind map will present you in a visual way lots of valuable information like:

• A compilation of the most dangerous threats to the ICO industry and how to mitigate,
• A set of best practices to protect your ICO from hackers,

Due to the nature of the ever-changing ICO landscape and the never-ending hackers creativity, this document will ALWAYS be a work in progress. I will continue extending it for the years to come, as long as there are interest and a value for the Blockchain community.

Feel free in comments to give me your feedback 🙂

2751 coins, 47 Consensus and 82 cryptographic algorithms

The innovation speed in Blockchain landscape is just breathtaking and being able to (or to be honest trying to…) follow all these rapid changes is a chance for all software engineers.

At the core of the Blockchain disruption are consensus algorithm:

Consensus algorithms enable network participants to agree on the contents of a blockchain in a distributed and trust-less manner.

And the consensus algorithm plays a crucial role in maintaining the safety and efficiency of blockchain. Using the right algorithm may bring a significant increase to the performance of blockchain application.

But do you know how much consensus type are out there? or where they are applied? my new Consensus Map may help you there exploring the always evolving landscape:

Here is the actual Consensus list: DPoR, DPoS, DPoS/LPoS, FBA, HPoW, LFT, Limited Confidence Proof-of-Activity, Ouroboros, POBh, PoA, PoB, PoB/PoS, PoC, PoI, PoP, PoP/PoV/PoQ, PoPP, PoR, PoS, PoS/LPoS, PoS/PoB, PoS/PoD, PoS/PoP, PoS/PoW, PoS/PoW/PoT, PoST, PoSign, PoW, PoW/DPoW, PoW/HiPoS, PoW/PoM/PoSII, PoW/PoS, PoW/PoS/PoC, PoW/PoSC, PoW/PoZ, PoW/nPoS, PoWT Proof of Believability, Proof of Existence, Proof of Ownership, Proof of Time, Scrypt-adaptive-N (ASIC resistant), TPoS, Tangle, dPoW/PoW, mFBA 

You can filter by any type of Consensus and zoom, learn more about them by hovering over the menu.

The map also feature a mode selector at the bottom, if you switch to Algorithm Map you’ll see where each of the 82 cryptographic algorithm are used!

The Map will be auto-magically regenerated every week on Sunday evening. The tedious task of maintaining the list of all Consensus algorithms (I’ve documented 60+ but only 47 are represented) and their descriptions are (still) maintained manually.

More filters will be added soon (showing for example only the top 100 by market cap, consensus by date of creation, and so on…), and your feedback is always welcomed.