Which ICO smart contracts are legit? A look at the ICO Transparency Monitor

The ICO Transparency Monitor received a major update and reviewed some of the most recent ICOs. This seems to be a good time to have a deeper look at the tool and some of the newly reviewed ICOs.

What is the ICO Transparency Monitor?

On one had the service reviews smart contracts of ICOs and scores them based on their transparency. On the other hand you get a bunch of real time data on the smart contract like how much funding did it collect, when were the funds transferred or how are the tokens distributed across investors.

I took a look at the latest additions to the website and here is what I learned. 

ICOs smart contract which major transparency issues.

Coinlancer scored badly, mainly because the ICO is not controlled by the smart contract and the source code of the smart contract is not available. 

Genaro was classified as not transparent because  the deployed contract does not correspond with the source code available at Github.

According to ICO Transparency Monitor Ethlend seemed to be a good contract at first but because all stages of the ICO are triggered by the Administrator of the smart contract, the trust was entirely destroyed.

ICO smart contract with some minor issues

This category applies to Simple Token. Mostly a good and transparent token, the reviewer only pointed out that the end time of the contract can be extended if the token sale is paused. Fair enough.

Another one in this category is the mostly good smart contract of EOS. One thing that the review points out is that: "Mind that owners can take ETH whenever thay want - nothing is locked! ". Another interesting fact is that EOS already collected about 1 710 613 ETH as for today. Puh, this is about 750M USD at the current exchange rate.

ICOs rated as being transparent.

All this smart contracts received a green score, which means everything with the smart contract is good. Not much more to say on this category, you might want to check out the details directly on the website. Latest additions to this category are: Swarm Fund, Gladius and Neufund.

Conclusion

ICO Transparency Monitor is a great initiative which we need more of. A must-have resource for everybody who invests into ICOs and wants to understand if he can trust the smart contract he is sending his money to.