ICO Transparency Document – Questions to Ask Founding Teams Raising Via an ICO

ICO Transparency Document – Questions to Ask Founding Teams Raising Via an ICO ( work in progress )

ICO’s ( Initial Coin Offerings ) are a step between a private company and a very public one, but currently there are no regulations in place to protect the public, so the public need to find as much information as possible prior to investing into an ICO. For such a reason I have created a list of questions (ICO Transparency Document ) that a founding team can answer and make public:

  1. How many years has this company been live?
  2. How much money has the company raised before?
  3. How much money are your raising via the ICO
  4. Which country is the company registered in?
  5. What is the citizenship of the founding teams? Please supply names and citizenship.
  6. Has legal council been sort on whether this will be deemed a Security by the country of registration of the company? Can we see a letter to state this?
  7. Has legal council been sort on whether this will be deemed a Security by the country of citizenship of each of the founding team? Can we see a letter to state this?
  8. If you received investment before but could not get a product market fit why do they think you will get product market fit with more money?
  9. Is this ICO just an easy way to raise more easy capital as you could not raise more venture capital money?
  10. Has the share table been restructured in the past 12 months? If so what happened and why?
  11. How much runway do you have left before you run out of money?
  12. If you have venture capital funding before are they participating in the Token sale and buying Tokens at the full price? How many tokens are they buying? If they are not buying why not?
  13. How many Tokens are previous investors being given?
  14. How are company shares and Tokens to be distributed among founding team?
  15. Can you share the names of every person who has signed the documents to agree to the ICO happening?
  16. Who was and is on your board now?
  17. If there has been a change on the board, who changed, when and why?
  18. Do you have any board members who are not management but external to the company?
  19. Are these board members incentivised based on the price of the Tokens or via some other mechanism? What are the incentivizes?
  20. What lock ins are in place for all coin holders, so as to not allow anyone to to become rich without any value being added to the world?
  21. Has the founding team changed in anyway in the past 24 months, ( ie anyone resigned or been fired from the team ), if so who and why?
  22. Do the founders have any involvement in any other Token companies, if so which ones, what is your role and why are you involved? Are these Tokens in anyway a conflict to your own Tokens?
  23. Do any of the founding team hold any other Tokens? If so which ones and why? Are these Tokens in anyway a conflict to your own Tokens?
  24. Do any of the founding team have any involvement in helping raising finances for other Tokens? If so which ones and why? Are these Tokens in anyway a conflict to your own Tokens?
  25. If you have helped,or are helping other Tokens to raise finance do you need regulatory approval to do so in the country you live in, the country you are a citizen in, the country the ICO is registered in?
  26. What will money raised in the ICO be used for?
  27. What are the deliverables of the project? Can we see the project plan?
  28. What controls are in place to prevent misuse of the money raised via the ICO? Can we see any documents?
  29. What data will you produce to your community and when?
  30. Who is promoting your ICO? Are they regulated to do so?
  31. What criteria do you believe the project should be deemed a failure?
  32. If the project is deemed a failure what are the process’s to return the funds to anyone?
  33. DistrictOx have already started to offer complete transparency on what they are doing as a company, salaries etc and making the data public on how money is being spent (). Will you do this? If not why not?
  34. Blockstack, a $50,000,000 backed ICO with many established players investing and advising has created a Token sale mechanics where Tokens are released depending upon deliverables of the project. Are you going to do the same? If not why not?
  35. Aragon has a transparency model and each quarter produces reports ( https://blog.aragon.one/why-transparency-matters-d6f9e6e10985 ). Are you going to do the same? If not why not?

This is not a definitive list of question but should give investors in Tokens some extra information to go along with any documents the ICO team produce.

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