ICO Watch — CanYa Coin: The ICO you’d run, if you were running an ICO!

I’ve checked out hundreds of ICOs and read over hundreds of whitepapers outlining projects which would magically appear out of thin air once the ICO ends. And while I’ve invested in several visionary, early-stage projects looking to disrupt entire worldwide systems— Horizon State for voting and Bloom for credit— I’ve passed on nearly all of the rest.

A few months ago I came across CanYa. I checked out the website, I read over the whitepaper. Short summary: just like Fiverr, TaskRabbit, or eLance, and other task-based applications/platforms, the CanYa platform enables a peer to peer online marketplace of services, but they've added the extra layers of security and trust that come from a blockchain-based token (CAN). Plus, they already have a functioning mobile app.

I put the ICO sale date on my calendar and set my alarm clock. But I woke up only to find out that the date of the sale had been changed. I was crushed. I assumed a big investor had swooped in or that several whales had negotiated massive 100% bonuses and that all of the smaller investor bonuses were gone. Boy, was I wrong! Instead, they set up a single bonus structure they called the Dolphin Tier, rewarding participation in the ever-growing CanYa community.

I’ve been trying to find something that I don’t like about CanYa. But when I think I’m close, they post an update, change the project for the better, or announce a new partnership. Last week, with so many good things happening, I couldn’t wait any longer, and decided to write a blog to promote CanYa because, amazingly, everyone on the planet hasn’t heard about it — yet! Steemit should be full of people who want to hear about crypto projects, right? And in the interested of full disclosure, this blog is part of a one of the most generous bounty campaigns I've seen. I am not ashamed to share with you what CanYa is giving me for writing it:

Even their rewards system is all about quality. This isn't a Charles Dickens' serial novel where the author is paid by the word!

And contrary to every other ICO bounty campaign I’ve seen this year, even the social media bounty campaign is based on quality. I get ONE tweet on Twitter and ONE Facebook post per week. They aren’t counting how many times I repost their content or how many times you favorite their posts— it’s about how much engagement and impact I generate. For example, if you click on the image below and favorite my tweet, you’ll help me earn a bigger reward this week:

Why does that matter to you? Well, rewarding things normal people do — sharing information with their social network— is what you would do, right? You wouldn't pay people to spam their friends and followers or to paste endless links into Bitcointalk posts for a reward, would you? While that's what every other ICO does, CanYa is different than every other ICO.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was CanYa’s latest announcement — they updated their asset contract to give 10% of their platform fees to charity:

Are you seeing a pattern… ICOs don't do that sort of thing, but CanYa has done it! And I’d need another blog to tell you about all of the great partnerships they’ve been building. (For example, just last week, they announced a partnership with Gladius, another ICO offering DDoS protection). And about the revolutionary HODL club, rewarding long term investors and protecting against bounty hunters dumping tokens post-ICO, their team's responsiveness to feedback from the community at large as well as within the CanYa Telegram channel, or what I discovered just recently — several of the founders have committed to take 100% of their next year’s salaries in CAN tokens. So I will just say the CanYa Coin ICO is live— they may still have a 20% bonus for early investors, and regardless, if you use my link we’ll both get a 5% bonus: https://sale.canya.io/r/329c4.

But, what I’m NOT going to do is make you any wild promises about the CAN token going to the moon or even speculate as to whether the CAN token will sell out by the end of the ICO, because I simply don’t know the future, but one thing I can say unequivocally… this is the way I’d want to run an ICO, this is the type of decentralized community that I’d want to be building, and this is the team that I’d want to build it with.

So I’ve got a new slogan for the CanYa team: