Trade GNO - GNO Markets, Exchanges, Broker
If you want to give the current gold rush in the ICO business a name, I would recommend Gnosis.
Gnosis is a project that aims at an easy to use Prediction Market. Ultimately, the intention is in stark contrast to the rating it received: It didn't take ten minutes to eclipse the result of last year's DAO Token Sale.
It was interesting: Since the amount of saleable tokens was limited to 9 million GNO tokens, an incentive for a prudent investment strategy was created: The price of a GND token falls with time. This concept was developed together with Vitalik Buterin and Alex van de Sande and is based on the so-called Dutch auction, in which a starting value for a sale is quoted, but which declines over time until a buyer is found.
Typically, ICOs do not limit the number of tokens and the value of the tokens increases over time - creating an incentive for early investment. The idea behind GNO's concept was that people should balance the limited number of tokens against the degressive price development.
Instead, investors jumped up at the first opportunity and bought extremely quickly 5% of the available tokens for about 12 million dollars.
Gnosis-ICO - a sign of great demand or a speculative bubble?
Well - and now the community is divided about it: Proponents and investors think that this historical result would show the great demand for such a blockchain-based project. Critics see it as the latest and biggest bubble in the current ICO frenzy.
Demian Brenner is Project Lead at Zeppelin, where he assesses ICOs from a due diligence standpoint. In his opinion, the result of this crowdsales shows what a current trend topic prediction markets are.
However, the high market capital generated by crowdsales is also viewed critically. Many see this as confirmation of the irrational behaviour of the crowd in ICOs. Accordingly, the comparison with the South Sea bubble was also made here some time ago.
Further criticism came in the context of an analysis of the ICO: according to this, the distribution of the purchased tokens should be concentrated among a few big players and correspondingly little decentralised.
Christoph Jentzsch and Peter Borah were also very critical, in their opinion the crowd proved that they did not understand the principle of a Dutch auction.
Riccardo Spagni, one of the heads behind Monero, is generally a critic of the ICO principle. In his opinion, the developers behind Gnosis could have foreseen that the token sale would run like this, regardless of the degressive principle behind it. The principle of greed strikes and people absolutely want to be those who want to buy the currently virtual, but nevertheless limited tokens.
But what advocates say in defense is that the Gnosis project wants to keep at least 99% of the acquired funds for at least one year. Other people have even changed their mind about their own business model: Ryan X Charles is the CEO of Yours, a project to promote blockchain-based content. So far he thought he was building his project around the Bitcoin blockchain, but this funding could change his mind.
ICOs - continue to invest wisely
So far some voices from the crowd. What do I say to all this? I have to admit that the whole thing reminds me of both the DAO and ZCash ratings before the launch. Let's look back: ZCash was partly traded for more than one Bitcoin - and is now trading at around 67 dollars.
I deliberately chose the example of ZCash, which is still in the top 20 and has found its place through its acceptance of Apple and its liaison with Ethereum. Accordingly, I wish the people behind Gnosis every success and will continue to pursue the matter. But the prudence of the ICO intoxication I recently advised is confirmed.