I’ve been passionate about crowdfunding industry since 2011. My craze towards the said sector has influenced me to get involved in thousands of Kickstarter campaigns. Moreover, I am also credited for creating the biggest community of Russian-speaking crowdfunding enthusiasts, Russians on Kickstarter.
Crowdfunding, to me, is all about community’s love and hope towards an idea that deserves to be flourished. With crowdfunding, any person has an opportunity to create a product and bring it to the market, whilst avoiding banks, cruel venture capitalists and communicational barriers.
The launch of Bitcoin as this revolutionary payment system changed the dynamics of economics. Speaking in the context of crowdfunding, the decentralized digital currency proved its mettle by destabilizing middlemen. A trust-based network, where only the participants of each transaction decide on its ownership and worth, is magical, to say the least. Bitcoin gives full banking capabilities to anyone in the world – whether you want to buy, sell, trade or transfer – eliminating all the geographical, financial and time limits.
Currently, those two of my favorite Phenomena are integrating into one – and that’s how the term Initial Coin Offering has appeared. Today any person is capable of launching its crowdfunding campaign backed up by cryptocurrency. It is a great leap from where we, as crowdfunding industry professionals, come.
Around $1.2 billion has been raised by the new cryptocurrency-based capital raising method from the beginning of 2017 according to Autonomous Next, a financial technology analytics service. Even the Wall Street wolves are now excited (in a good way).
One Step Ahead, Two Steps Behind?
Just like at the times of dot-com bubble investors don’t bother to go into the details of the project they are about to support – they just want to flip that Bitcoin, here and now. Therefore, for existing trading platforms, the main goal is not to support a great product but to achieve great financial metrics of an ICO.
Both traditional crowdfunding and ICO platforms have its flaws. The most important one – they offer no protection to the investors, and no refunds when expectations of the backers are not met.
Remember that Kickstarter’s disaster? Hip cooler brand – the Coolest – raised over $13 million in July 2014. They didn’t manage to deliver those on time.
Whether, it’s a Kickstarter campaign or an ICO – the success is defined just by the quality of promo materials. Often you don’t even need a product. It’s what I call a “Vaporware Attack”.
Another thing – security issues
Earlier in July 2017 an initial coin offering for a startup called CoinDash was halted as unidentified hacker managed to change the Ethereum address that was used to solicit the investments. The ICO was able to raise $7.53m before it was discovered, so all the funds were transferred to unknown directions.
Our main mission with launching KICKICO was to address all those issues by creating a workable economic and IT model to protect the investors and make all the participants of every business transaction happy.
Before creating the platform, we came up with its principles. We call them KICKONOMY, our ecosystem, based on KICK-coins, the tokens that the platform will issue during the ICO. Already starting from October investors will be able to use KICKcoins to support campaigns that are launched on the platform. Right now we have released two project drafts and dozens of them will come just in a month, after proper moderation.
KICKICO supports three kinds of campaigns: ICO, crowdinvesting, and crowdfunding.
Currently, there is no other platform that can provide the same number of options and flexibility. We care about the platform usability and the quality of the campaigns we are listing. That is why among our promises (and benefits) for the founders are consulting services for all the projects: general strategy advises, marketing support and all necessary technical solutions, including smart-contracts.
Platform development has started in 2014 and what we have now is the result of almost 3 years work done by an exceptional team of 10 crowdfunding and blockchain enthusiasts.
