I believe, that the problem with ICO reviews is real, and we have to fix that.
I didn't review or rate neither of above-mentioned projects (savedroid, WellTrado), so there is no personal interest involved whatsoever. Yet I believe, that there must be justice in approaching those cases for the advisors' that did rate them. In case of savedroid the whole story unfolded fast and I can;t tell for eery advisor on the list, but just being a part of discussion with a couple of them, I can testify, that the first motivation to change rates was to reflect the actual change of status of the project. Although, I believe, that they had to keep their original rates and the original text of review an place them in their updated review. At least. That is also my suggested amendment to ICOBench: make the whole history of rates and review changes accessible.
I agree, that has to be a tracking system for ratings on the ICOBench (as you may assume for any blockchain-related service). I personally always keep the old text and just add update with a clear indication of the date of such update, if I discovered new information about the company, that made me to change rates.
The WellTrado case with "Invest and get XX% returns" - this is the clear indication, that they do not have their documents and promotional materials examined properly. However, it is not anywhere near a scam just from claiming potential gains "up to some %". There must be different wording, there must be appropriate disclaimers and explanatory links, corresponding legal work etc, yet that "up to 35%" alone doesn't make it a fraud.
I personally grade projects with such claims in 1-2 range for Vision and Product. Unfortunately, there is no standard for grading, only guidelines, and other advisors may tend to give higher rates just to get more "Agree" clicks, a higher ISS rating and more incoming requests for advisory positions. It is weird, but it is a flaw in ICOBench's design, which would be a 5 minute fix in the ISS rating calculation.
Unfortunately, the current state of ICOs is that there are mostly marketing or investor relations people approaching advisors, not the executive management or the strategy-responsible officers. For that reason some advisors fall to all those questionable at best practices of creating fake followers, And just the fact, that advisor's quality is assessed by his media influence is obviously very wrong and harmful for the industry. Because, there are different types of advisors. Even though it is normal to want advisor to bring a crowd to invest into crowd-funding project, it is alo not OK, to have only this type of advisors or their dominance in the project's advisory board. The same is true for rating platforms (like ICOBench.com): you do not want to have a dominance of pure marketing advisors, unless you want the project to be disproportionately rated for their marketing qualities, rather than rated for their different qualities. There must be expert in Finance, in Blockchain design and general IT experts, there must be Audit professionals and a proper Due Diligence experts, HR experts and many others. That will provide the necessary diversity and value to the aggregated rate and some other obvious improvements.
To make proper experts to spend their time on the platform, there must be a financial compensation model. It may be like a Karma and Token model (as it is the case of BullToken, yet that platform is designed for a private use and not created to publish all the information to the public domain) or some other discovery bounty program with payments from the ICOBench. Anything will work, but not the way it is now, when the general incentive to publish something comes from the project asking for rates or review, because in that case it is hard for expert to stay unbiased or to prove, that he did a proper and independent review.
This list is a work in progress. Share your thought and ideas in that regards, please. I'm asking for a discussion, it looks like we all can benefit from it.
This is a reprint of the original article by Evgenii Podkovyrov at LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ico-industry-what-needs-change-evgeniy-podkovyrov/