About Crypto Asset Rating
Crypto assets are an evolving asset class and ICOs as investment tool are in the infancy of its life cycle. The decision of where to obtain funding plays a crucial role for the early stages of a projects development. An Initial Coin Offering (“ICO”) is a way for start-up companies to raise capital by selling tokens. ICOs are quickly revolutionizing the fund raising model and becoming a preferred model of fund raising among issuers vs. traditional methods like VC funding due to the rapid turnaround time and lower cost due to the lack of a middleman along with the direct reach to investors. But due to the same reasons, for an investor ICOs are high risk propositions as there are no trusted middlemen and time to take a call on a particular ICO is fairly limited.
In spite of this stage and nature of this class, there is already a huge interest among investors towards crypto assets due to the potential disruptive nature of the underlying technology and the related value unlocking in the near future.
But most of these investors are multi-asset institutional investors who don’t have the particular expertise or are non-sophisticated retail investors, who don’t have the resources to do thorough research on crypto assets. Unlike traditional investors in the public market, who have access to countless resources for measuring their risk, ICO investors have very limited information they can rely on about the project or company in which they are investing. Deciding which ICOs are worth investing in becomes very difficult for the investor. All of these factors necessitate a
comprehensive rating framework to analyze the variety of crypto assets, which is developed by experts. Not only selecting more attractive investment options among the various ICOs is a challenge, but also due to the unregulated nature of the industry fraudulent ICOs have also been prevalent and to identify and avoid those become critical for an investor. According to E&Y, of the first $3.7bn raised through ICOs, 10% were frauds or scams perpetrated by ICO issuers which prima facie seemed genuine.
In this scenario, a structured rating system developed by a team of subject matter experts helps the investors navigate their way through the clutter of ICOs and identify suitable investment opportunities. Crypto Asset Rating Inc (CAR) or AND has designed an objective analysis of the underlying business (along with various other factors) and hence a fraudulent ICO with a frivolous or non-existent underlying business gets filtered out and can help investors separate the wheat from the chaff.
Lastly, according to various estimates, there can be an average of 5-6 ICO issuances every day in 2018. This sheer volume of ICOs makes it impossible for a diversified investor to analyze each of those ICOs properly. In this scenario, with a dedicated team and an analysis engine powered by a robust algorithm, CAR can analyze all the ICOs with a consistent framework defined by similar parameters.