Even as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) — an unregulated manner of crowdfunding new cryptocurrency ventures — fight a warfare of legitimacy, with a record claiming 80% of them are fraud, here is a solution that would redeem the risky fundraising mechanism.
Accubits, a Washington DC-based totally blockchain and AI answers company, has provide you with Coin Factory, a unique concept primarily based on a smart settlement, which defines milestones for crypto startups trying to raise funds, and lets in traders to control the discharge of finances as each milestone (goal) is completed. The entire manner is moderated by a champion from the investor network.
“The idea of our solution Coin Factory arose from the want to deal with the increasing cases of fraud in this area. Fraudsters host an ICO, improve budget from a variety of cryptocurrency investors, and then they disappear,” stated Aharsh MS, CMO and co-founding father of Accubits.
ICOs have seen a surge in recognition as they may be initiated by using anyone and require appreciably low advertising and transactional costs in comparison to other fundraising strategies. When a cryptocurrency startup desires to raise cash via an ICO, it generally creates a plan on a white paper pointing out what the undertaking is about and what it needs to finish the task in terms of finances or what number of tokens the founders will take and what number of tokens the startup will provide out. It is a chunk like a kickstarter or crowdfunding.
According to CoinSchedule, 539 ICOs have raised $11.93 Bn to this point in 2018 in comparison to $three.9 Bn within the previous yr. The marketplace is growing at a rapid pace because of the boom in blockchain and cryptocurrency startups, a fashion that is expected to hold.
But amid this optimism, ICOs have also come underneath scrutiny from regulators due to the fact that they are are unregulated in India and in many nations around the sector. Countries like China have banned ICOs at the same time as the United States, the UK, Russia, and Switzerland are a number of the top nations for ICOs.
The lure of creating big cash via ICOs and the truth that they’re nonetheless unregulated in India has additionally attracted a big range of fraudsters. Even as regulators don't forget the if and buts of ICO regulation, it has come to be imperative for the industry to give you approaches to make sure legitimate ICOs can easily be recognized from fake ones.
And Coin Factory is a step on this route.
“If fraud ICOs preserve to proliferate, the distance goes to die. And if ICOs die, it will spell doom for the goals of numerous true cryptocurrency startups and their founders,” says Aharsh.
Coin Factory: A Smart Contract-Based ICO Platform
Coin Factory is an ICO platform that allows Accubits’ customers to launch their ICO campaigns readily and without the worry of being perceived as fraud. Accubits’ method to this trouble is encompassed in a characteristic referred to as the “milestone agreement”.
Under a milestone agreement, the founder has to define the roadmap for his/her task and the Coin Factory platform creates a hard and fast of milestones based totally on that roadmap. All the milestone conditions are defined in a clever settlement. When ICO token income happen, all the raised funds are saved in the clever contract, and get activated simplest while the startup hits a selected, pre-described goal.
Basically, think of the clever agreement as a handbag. Now, let’s say, your mother collects INR one hundred out of your relatives and saves it inside the purse. She then asks you to do a little chores and says she will be able to give you the cash from the handbag in instalments as you progress along with your chores.
In Coin Factory, the position of the “mom” (so to say) is taken up via “champions”, who are chosen from the investor network by way of its contributors. They are the intermediaries between the founders (you) and the investors (your loved ones who gave the cash for your mom).
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“The election process (of the investor champions) can fluctuate based totally on the challenge. Investors from the network can follow to take part within the election to be selected as a champion. Other contributors vote for the candidates, based on their deserves and qualifications. Voting strength can be primarily based at the stake they’ve offered within the startup or be on a one-vote-consistent with-investor foundation,” says Aharsh.
The elected applicants will get hold of reviews from the startup’s management on its overall performance info — a situation that can be obligatory for the finishing touch of the milestones codified inside the smart settlement.
When the investor champions all agree, or if most people agree, that a milestone has been finished by way of the startup in question, the clever contract will be induced to release the price range for the following milestone.
Aharsh says Coin Factory has received a promising reaction and that it has been “genuinely going proper, to date”. Accubits claims to have completed 15 ICOs that have helped customers increase a complete of $2 hundred Mn over the past five months.
Accubits doesn’t virtually see any competition for the offerings it gives in India and maximum of its clients are global. Outside the united states, there are a few services that offer a similar answer like Dubai-based Blockgemini and Singapore’s Blockstar.
Accubits: Starting Early And Finding The Solution To ICO Frauds
Accubits became based manner returned in 2012 with the aid of Aharsh, who was pursuing an engineering degree from Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) in Kerala, and in conjunction with 5 different co-founders. The startup turned into incubated underneath the Kerala authorities’s Startup Village programme; it moved out of incubation and opened its first workplace in Bengaluru around 2015.
“When we started out, we have been an AI product-based agency. It is sincerely hard for a product agency to reach India… none of our merchandise became finding any traction,” says Aharsh.
The turning point, he says, came only some years ago whilst the startup decided to offer services parallel to its product offerings. “We got the early-mover benefit in the blockchain offerings space. From there, the group grew rapid and the employer extended to different nations as well,” he explains.
From then on, there has been no looking again. In the remaining years, the startup has seen substantial increase and has been worried in some massive-ticket projects.
One of the feathers Accubits has in its cap is its involvement inside the development of the Giracoin, the most important cryptocurrency in Switzerland and one of the fastest-growing in Europe.
Accubits’ answers have also been used by Lexus and the Toyota group of their dealerships within the US and Canada, and a pinnacle ecommerce web site within the US makes use of Accubits’ AI solution for product categorisation.
In 2016, Accubits raised a seed funding of $30k from a US-based totally investor, got itself included in Washington and opened its 2d office in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram. Towards the give up of last 12 months, the startup opened its second workplace, an AI-blockchain studies lab, in Technopark, and also improved its Bengaluru workplace. Today, Accubits has places of work inside the US, Dubai, and Hongkong.
Accubits’ growth tale saw any other milestone whilst it lately received the Frost and Sullivan Award for the Most Promising Blockchain Consumer Application of the Year (Logistics/Supply Chain).
Although Accubits identifies itself as a blockchain-first startup, Aharsh believes that blockchain is of no use with out the application of IoT.
So, do blockchain startups by using default additionally want to specialize in AI, according to Aharsh?
“My opinion is that when it comes to blockchain-based totally organisation-stage solutions inclusive of deliver chain management or smart tutors, the software of IoT is without a doubt had to communicate with the real world,” says Aharsh, including that this could not be the case for small-scale answers.
Accubits: Fostering A Culture Of Contribution In Blockchain In India
Aharsh is a believer in the high-quality impact of AI and blockchain in the long time. He, like many others, believes that the value of AI lies inside the reality that it could automate all the monotonous jobs that also require manual labour, from records access to enterprise system outsourcing.
“The hole among the wealthy and the poor is big and electricity is centralised inside the arms of a few, however this has to alternate. I assume this is going to show up, that is why blockchain is getting so famous,” says Aharsh. He also predicts a destiny in which, due to automation, human beings will want to be more innovative to find a living.
In line with Aharsh’s philosophy, Accubits is trying to convey collectively a network targeted on AI and blockchain with the intention of fostering a contributory subculture to help provide India a legup in technology advancement.
“We have a web platform for AI-primarily based open source APIs that may be used in software program to solve issues ranging from detection of liver issues and signature forgery to the prediction of motel room occupancy.
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Accubits launched an AI and blockchain studies lab four months in the past where the startup conducts network meetups. Aharsh believes that India ignored the blockchain wave (builders from Russia and Israel took advantage) and that’s why we ended up being purchasers as opposed to members to the developer network.
“We want to exchange this subculture. We are establishing hackathons and meetups in which humans catch up on the latest news, improvements and speak how we will make a contribution (to blockchain development). We have also opened up our studies lab to human beings from outside — we actually have a child from the tenth preferred who's analyzing machine getting to know at our lab,” adds Aharsh.
The aim for Accubits for the subsequent years is to construct certainly one of the most important and excellent AI and blockchain development groups inside the global.
Aharsh’s belief in AI and blockchain comes from his self assurance in our capacity as a species to solve troubles. He provides that the manner forward is to be extra creative in our solutions while leaving the less difficult, mundane, or monotonous problems for machines to remedy.
“Since human history, on every occasion we’ve had a disaster, we’ve survived, and that is how we’re designed by nature. If people need to be creative, they need to be liberated,” Aharsh says emphatically.
There is some thing approximately young startups in India that is remarkably specific from their predecessors — their aims are unhinged. Accubits is surely one such startup which is ready to leap inside the blockchain-IoT space with its unhinged pursuits.
