ICONOMI is Doing what Bitshares Was Supposed to do

ICONOMI, with its ongoing ICO, is doing exactly what Bitshares was supposed to do 3 years ago although in a more centralized way than what Bitshares originally proposed. ICONOMI is a fund platform where investors can gain exposure to a bunch of different crypto assets by investing in a single token, ICONOMI.INDEX (and a more custom, actively traded token called ICONOMI.PERFORMANCE but let's focus on the INDEX asset for now).

Now why does this sound familiar? Because Bitshares set out to do exactly this! The idea with Bitshares was BitAssets would actually track the price of the underlying. There would be enough liquidity and participation in the system to ensure that prices don't go out of sync by too much. Once these parameters were in place, anyone could buy fractions of BitAssets - say 50% BTC, 50% LTC back in the day. This is trivial on Bitshares. Depending on what other markets are active, on Bitshares you could also add 'real life' assets like Gold and oil.

The appeal, from an investor point of view, is to look at crypto as an asset class. To gain exposure to an asset class, the simplest way is through an index. Bitshares could have built such an index on their platform using BitAssets. Unfortunately, for so many different reasons, Bitshares couldn't do half of what its potential really is.

So here is ICONOMI. It is taking a different approach - there are no market-generated assets. The funds are going to be held in custody, not lent into existence. This is more centralized and less ambitious than what the Bitshares team set out to do. But perhaps that's the right way forward?

From an investor perspective, you just care about the fact that your asset should appreciate along with the underlying. That seems to be simpler to guarantee with the ICONOMI model than Bitshares model. I think Bitshares lost a market here, and ICONOMI is right to capitalize on this investor appetite. You can be a part of ICONOMI ICO as an investor and gain from fees in the form of dividends. Sound familiar? BitAssets were supposed to give you that yield as well!