ICObench Experts: New rules for a better community

As the ICO market starts to recover from the dramatical fall of January 2018 and the market size for March has beaten the record of December 2017, apart from the cryptocurrencies rates, a projects’ success or failure continues to rely a lot on the experts’ opinion. According to our data, the projects those have 5 and more ratings usually have better overall rate and are more successful in raising funds. We can also see the same situation about the projects that have at least one rating from an expert with the weight of more than 50 points. Unfortunately, many experts abuse their power as we can see from numerous complaints we receive daily.

Over the past few months, we have been gathering ideas about reforming the expert community in order to make it more transparent and avoid most of the misconduct.

We have decided to start these reforms with 5 new directives:

The expert status is not just a fashionable accessory. First of all, we have decided to revoke the expert status of those who used it only as a label without being an active member of the community. From now on every expert who hasn’t rated any project in the past 3 months would be downgraded to an ICObench user. Unlike the experts whose status was revoked for breaking the rules of the community, such users would be able to send an application and probably be granted the expert status in the future.
Being an expert brings a higher level of responsibility to a member of the community. We have noticed that a lot of experts don’t read the rules and don’t notify us about removing the rating once they join the team of an ICO they previously rated. On May 11, 2018, all such ratings will be automatically deleted, however, we cannot let the irresponsible experts keep their status and get away with it. Before this update goes live all the experts will be given one week to check the list of their projects and ratings and notify us about any ratings that were not removed yet. On May 10 we will revoke the status of all the experts who ignored this request.
A rating must be transparent and reasonable. We have been receiving a lot of complaints about the experts that never answer to comments of the team or explain their rating. Most of the time this miscommunication starts with a rating without a written review. That is why starting May 11 the reviews will become mandatory and all the old ratings without a comment will have only 50% of initial weight in the rating distribution. We believe that it will not only make the experts section of the rating way more informative but also let the investors see the real insights from the experts in blockchain and business.
Experience over being busy. One of the most important factors taken into account by ICObench when granting the expert status to a person is their experience. That is why we have decided to take into expert’s weight only the ICO Success Score earned for the past projects. On the other hand, many experts abuse on the number of the projects they work on at the same time not only in order to gain a higher place in People of Blockchain rating, but also to have a bigger expert’s weight. To avoid such situations the part of ISS in expert’s weight will soon be reduced to maximum of 10 points while the points for successfully passed KYC raised to 10.
Experts as the elite of the community. While the People of Blockchain rating shows the activity of the community members outside of ICObench, the expert’s weight and position in rating display their contribution into our community. That is why we will implement special badges for the experts, showing their place in the rating and special achievements as an active member of ICObench.
In our opinion, these steps are vital to start the rehabilitation of the experts community and ICObench rating system as well as weed out the members of community causing harm to investors and reducing the credibility of ICObench as a rating platform. This list is not exhaustive and more new policies will follow soon. As we have made our move, it is time for you to help the community. If you have any proof of an expert blackmailing a project, selling ratings or exchanging them for their services, send it to info@icobench.com. Together we will make the community clean, reliable and healthy!

Source: https://medium.com/@ICObench/icobench-experts-new-rules-for-a-better-community-d289903714dc