ICO Champs has, and will, never do any kind of paid ratings.
Of course, this doesn't imply that you should always blindly follow our ratings and invest in any ICO without doing your own research before. In fact, we strictly advise you not to.
We strongly recommend doing your own audits and only invest in ICOs that you really understand and have confidence in.
For the calculation of an ICOs overall rating, three different aspects are taken into consideration:
the hype score, the risk score and the profit potential.
Each of these factors are determined seperately and can rank anwhere from "very low" to "very high".
These rankings all stand for different values/points.
The "very low" rating for example gives an ICO five additional points if given as a risk score. However, if the ICO has a "very low" rating as hype or profit potential, it will get zero points.
After giving a value to all hype score, risk score and profit level, the overall rating is determined as follows:
(Hype Value + Risk Value + Profit Value) / 3
Example for an ICO with the rating:
Hype Score: High
Risk Score: Low
Profit Potential: Medium+ (3 points, "Medium-" would be 2 points)
The calculation would be:
(4 + 4 + 3) / 3 = 3.7
Meaning that the ICO would have an overall rating of 3.7
We try to be as accurate as possible with our evaluations and have therefore defined many different criteria for calculating the profit potential of an ICO.
Most important aspects:
- Token Metrics: how is the bonus structure (too high bonuses with a lot of tokens being available to that bonus are a really bad indicator)& how many tokens are sold at all
- What is the hard cap? Is the funding amount reasonable for that kind of project or is it set too high in our opinion?
- Usage of the Token: Are they a Utility, Security or Equity Token and how exactly will they be used? (e.g. if Utility, will the product really create a demand for these token?)
Other, less important aspects that mainly only become important if we stand between two ratings:
- the unique selling point
- lucrativeness of the market/product
- SWOT analyses (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
We try to be as accurate as possible with our evaluations and have therefore defined many different criteria for calculating the hype score of an ICO.
Considered for the hype rating of an ICO are among others:
- number of social media followers (we do audits that they are real); not all social media accounts have the same impact with the same amount of users. Facebook and Twitter, for example, are less important than Telegram or Bitcointalk.
- activity of the followers/members on social media/telegram/bitcointalk - again, we check that everything is correct, not written by some type of bots. On Bitcointalk you could often see newbies comment something like "cool project" with no real relation to the ICO - mostly like 20 times or more with different accounts. While that in theory may be real persons, we consider it unlikely and do not take such posts into account at all, actually, we even give the ICO a worse rating as such behaviour is just scammy.
- the general mood towards the ICO:
Are most of the people rather critical and ask double and triple questions, or is the community more hyped on the ICO?
We try to be as accurate as possible with our evaluations and have therefore defined many different criteria for calculating the risk score of an ICO.
Considered for the risk rating of an ICO are among others:
- has the team successfully passed KYC so one can be sure they are not fake?
- are legal issues resolved as good as possible? (e.g. investor KYC)
- is there a soft cap so that investors get a refund in case the ICO is not successful?
- is there an MVP, maybe even paying customers, already?
Do people get to know full information about
- the team/the developers
- the product/idea
- the smart contract (on GitHub)
- business strategy
- partners/advisors
and how reliable is all that information?
