Today I decided to check some ICO's and went on ICO-Bench "Hot and trending ICOs" section. I picked project called "Acorn collective". Here is my brief overview after going over their team, business model and token economics:
What is Acorn collective?
It's a blockchain based crowdfunding platform that's the first to be free and open to any legal project in any country.
Token name: #OAK
Exchange Rate 1 OAK = USD 0.70 (Pre-Sale price)
1 OAK = USD 1.40 (Main ICO price)
Final OAK vs ETH exchange rate will be fixed on ICO begin, to protect intended USD raise target.
Pre-Sale 7,000,000 OAK (50% discount)
Main ICO Soft Cap 3,500,000 OAK
Main ICO Target 35,000,000 OAK
Main ICO Hard Cap 65,000,000 OAK
Total Public Sale 72,000,000 OAK
MAX Total Supply 90,000,000 OAK
Strong Sides:
Big team and competent advisory board;
Bancor is listed among partners;
Token allocation. 80% of the tokens will be distributed among market participants.
Weak Sides:
The Acorn Collective will have to compete with existing and popular platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as new digital currency based platforms such as
KickICO and FundYourselfNow;Weak management team. Their founder has LinkedIn profile with only 2 job places: Resident of the Hospital (from 2014) and Acorn Collective since June 2017. Quote from CEO profile: "Having launched web businesses and run successful digital marketing campaigns for a decade, Moritz believes technology brings business within reach of everyone, everywhere" - it's unclear what businesses he has "successfully" run;
Absurd price of 1.4 dollar per token during ICO, and 70 cents (50% discount) during pre-ICO. Considering that they have total supply of 90,000,000 tokens, they plan to start with 90 million dollars capitalization. Even if we will assume that their token capitalization will ever go to 1 billion USD, then the price will go only 10 times higher. While it might sound good for some people, there are dozens of projects which have more potential for growth;
Mediocre product. They claim the service will provide "free and open to any legal project in any country" which is deceiving in my opinion as every country has absolutely different laws regarding crowdfunding and investments. It's simply impossible to make it work in every country;
Horrible introduction marketing video;
Currently their channel has around 2 thousand people. Of course, hype is going to increase amount of people in this project, but I wouldn't expect significant changes;
Product: : 3/10
Team: 4/10
Token economics: 4/10
Hype: 3.5/10
Growth potential: 3/10
Overall grade: 3.5/10
Summary: I regret spending my time on reading the white paper of this project but perhaps I saved the time of my subscribers. Wouldn't recommend investing in this project, especially when there are projects like Bee Token, BankToTheFuture, Medical Chain are running at the same time.