🚀ICO Platform

TLDR

• Kinto is creating its own fully on-chain token Launchpad.

• Non-custodial and Sybil-resistant by default.

• Kinto will support non-US investors and US accredited investors.

• The first token to be launched is $K, Kinto’s own token.

• Available to users from +200 countries.

• US investors need to prove their accreditation status.

• Kinto Launchpad solves all the problems that plagued the 2017 ICOs.

• Gas-free, sybil resistant, compliant and fair for all participants.

To complement our offering, we are excited to announce the release of our very own token launchpad. Thanks to Kinto’s user owned KYC, Kinto is perfectly suited to offer sybil-resistant and KYC/AML compliant token sales that are non-custodial and happen fully on-chain.

🌱 Launchpad Principles

In web startups, teams and products take 7–10 years to reach maturity and create value before there is a liquidity event. Until there is real value created for real users, there is no exit for investors.

In crypto, everything is upside down.

99% of crypto projects extract value before creating it.

You see many projects with no product, no users and no revenue just raising on hype and vaporware “partnerships”. At best, they are disguised memecoins. At their worst, they are scamming retail without any plans to build anything real.

Why build when you can sell hype?

Why release a product when it is easier to sell dreams?

Why do the hard work of support live customers when you can invent stories of future clients?

To make things worse, they usually restrict the float to the smallest percentage possible to achieve a fake “high” watermark valuation and dump to retail on the liquidity event. It is even more worrisome seeing many investors playing along, investing in these projects just because they know they can sell it to retail months later. Cobie has talked extensively about these issues, which lead to the creation of Echo. In successful projects, the community has been able to get onboard early while the valuation remained low and be part of the value creating journey along with the team and investors.

From the beginning, we want to make it clear that the Launchpad will not cater to those projects. We will only list projects that focus on creating value first. The Kinto launchpad will only list projects that allow the community to join at a reasonable valuation to create a shared destiny and where investors, insiders and community are fully aligned. As the product is further developed, and real usage materialized, value is created and then captured by the network and all the token holders.

The launchpad will require the following criteria from any token that wants to be listed to ensure retail is prioritized over insiders:

• DeFi and RWA related projects.

• Product must be live with real users and TVL.

• Token needs to be majority owned by the community.

• Treasury owned by governance with revenue streams that flow to it.

• Low FDV. Provide a chance to enter at the same valuation as VCs.

• High Float. At least 30% of the tokens circulating post sale.

• Team needs to have standard 3/4 year vesting with 1 year lock.

Back to the Future

ICOs became really popular in 2017 as a capital formation vehicle. ICOs allowed crypto projects to raise billions of dollars from a global pool of investors directly and faster than through traditional venture capital methods.

However, they had many problems that ended up killing their viability.

• Legal Risks. After a few months, it became clear that most ICOs were violating existing securities regulations. The blatant scams increased regulatory scrutiny, effectively stopping ICOs due to legal risk.

• Lack of Disclosures. Projects raised millions and even billions of funds without having a product live and without even the most basic disclosures. Investors often lacked the necessary information to evaluate projects effectively, leading to poor investment decisions.

• No Real Products. Many ICOs did not provide transparent roadmaps or clear use cases for their tokens. Most didn’t make sense and a few of them were outright scams.

• Gas Wars. Many ICOs filled within the first few minutes and whales that were able to pay exorbitant gas fees were able to snatch all the token supply for themselves.

• Duplicated Accounts. Many users and whales could create multiple accounts to double dip and accumulate more of the token supply.

• No Price Discovery. The price was set arbitrarily by teams and there was no tie to fundamentals, revenue or growth projections.

What started as a new way to democratize access to capital formation to everyone quickly turned into a environment full of grift and where only a few people could participate.

Kinto fixes all these problems.

ICOs are back — The Kinto Way

First of all, because Kinto has native User-owned KYC (with is still decentralized and permissionless), is sybil resistant by default so every user is verified and unique.

Furthermore, KYC allows our launchpad to correctly identify non-US investors and US investors and use the appropriate securities exemptions for each (Reg S and Reg D).

Regarding fundamentals and business viability, in our last post, we detailed all the criteria that our projects need to meet to ensure only real products with a shot of creating value participate.

Finally, our action mechanics on the ICO launchpad ensure that there is real price discovery that is fair for the users, where all the users (retail, whale or institutional) end up paying the same price.

Run an ICO on Kinto

If you want to run an ICO for your token on Kinto, please start by filling our onboarding form (it will only take a few minutes).