A must watch. I saw this video a week ago on Telegram but couldn't be bothered to watch it. Now I'm glad I did. Not sure if it's been posted already.
Very interesting to see how Crypto is in Asia compared to the west.
When Crypto and blockchain becomes mainstream in the west, us early adopters will take off.
One thing I've added to my research toolkit for ICO's are VC's. These are the guys that get the seed rounds and private sale before us peasants can have a sniff at the ICO or Pre-sale.
I've seen Hashed before watching this video but I didn't know how big they were. 600K to 250 Million net worth in a year and a half
They accelerated ICON and participated in Ontology amongst other projects and looking at their portfolio they will hit the billion mark no doubt.
Other VCs I look out for when grading ICOs are:
Fenbushi Capital - First China based VC. Vitalik was part of the team but left to focus on Ethereum. He's still on their website though. They also own one of the NEO Consensus nodes. They've invested over 50m in blockchain projects.
YCombinator - Not strictly blockchain products but I don't need to say much, just look at a segment of their portfolio. First line alone killed it.
When these guys are investing in a crypto project then you know there's a good chance of it being good.
Torque Ventures - These guys are strategic partners for Zebi, Matrix, PChain. They invested in ICON too. They have a blog on Medium which has good articles.
They have a big following because they wrote an article on Certik, a project similar to Quantstamp and their telegram group exploded with new users after.
NGC (NEO Global Capital) - Not owned by NEO but strategically affiliated with NEO, basically the invest arm of the NEO foundation.
GBIC - This one is new to me but I've heard good things and their portfolio shows that.
Only downside is VCs are taking over ICOs. Loads of projects are being sold out privately because not only can VCs provide lots of money early on but they can also be strategic partners.
As said in the video, they can help with the whitepaper and marketing for a massive discount in the token price and that's what Hashed did for ICON and look at where ICON is now.
Not only that but ICO's are hard because of distribution and in the case of ERC-20 tokens, you need Gas to cover the distribution which is also money. Then there's regulations and opposition from governments as we know.
Our only hope is the fact that crowdsales build up a community which is a must in the crypto space for loads of obvious reasons.
Still, even if you invest in projects post ICO, they are still helpful when doing research.
Obviously DYOR still applies, don't go all in on projects just because of VC's but use their knowledge and capabilities as a tool.
It's a good idea to follow these VCs on twitter, telegram, medium, reddit etc just to see what they're up to.
