3 Signals: What’s Next on the Token Clarity Product Roadmap
By: Gary Macdougall
Tags: Blockchain, Investing, ICO, Ethereum, Smart Contracts

The growth in initial coin offerings (ICOs) has been staggering. With this much activity comes a daunting amount of information that ICO investors need to parse through, distill down and comprehend.

There are no shortcuts or cheatsheets and few industry pundits you can rely on to steer you in the right direction.

The ICO investing market also reminds me very much of the technical aspect of handicapping thoroughbred horses. As someone who follows horse racing closely, I love the math and probability of the sport, but also recognize the inherent volatility.

As a handicapper, you’re looking for any piece of data to give you the edge: you’re reading past performances (the founder’s history), analyzing the trainers’ success (the advisors), surveying the track’s conditions (the ICO’s marketplace), and even comparing to the other horses on the field (competition) in order to gain a competitive advantage. The one thing with ICOs that is not like horse handicapping? Horse racing already has a rich system in place to obtain all of this data, including scoring on race speeds (Beyer number).

Researching an ICO in this market right now can be akin to walking into a racetrack, buying a program and playing the horses based on their names and colors.

High quality and consistent data on ICO tokens is hard to find. It takes a voracious reader of white papers, blogs, Reddit and Telegram to wade through this quagmire and discover that information signal that will give you an edge.

But there’s good news if you’re an ICO handicapper.

The Signals are in The Data

At Token Report, we’re solving this research problem with a product, Token Clarity (TC), and a research platform, Token Tracker.

We’re here to damper the noise. We’re doing the hard work of data collection and doing the analysis on that data for you. Massive amounts of data. We break it all down to simple “alerts” that you can receive through signals we can detect. These “signals” are indicators about an ICO which are going to help you decide on where to invest — or more importantly, where not.

Our 2018 Roadmap

Token Report is also an ICO project, so like other ICO projects we’re going to be open and transparent about the progress of our product. I’ll be posting regular updates to the Token Report roadmap to our site to inform the ICO community.

These updates will provide insight into our development process and what we’re doing behind the scenes.

This roadmap will show our progress as we roll out new features and functionality. The goal of the roadmap is to show progress as we hit our milestones and also to show where we are headed. We believe this helps us build trust and confidence with our customers and investors. It’s also going to allow us to get valuable feedback into the product from you, the investor and customer.

Where Are We Now?

Currently Token Clarity (TC) puts information about every new ICO at your fingertips. No more time spent hunting for the white paper or scrolling through ICO listings.

Token Report ICO Listing in Token Clarity (TC)

With TC, you can list out and search ICOs we have in our database, “Follow” them for alerts on changes to team, terms and token, download their White Paper, see information about their open and close dates, and other vitals. A wealth of valuable information is already being served today.

We are expanding these signals to more complex patterns and information which will drill deep into the data to help you make better informed decisions.

We’re super excited about this because as we collect the huge amounts of data, we’ll be able to offer unique signals that you’ll want to know about an ICO in a timely manner, right to your phone.

J an. 15: Liquidity Momentum Signal

A huge part of a token’s value is in its liquidity — the holder’s ability to exchange it for other currencies, including fiat. There are well over 100 cryptocurrency exchanges supporting this value, but with 224 ICOs closed to date in Q4 alone, most are consigned to lower-tier exchanges with limited liquidity.

We’re tracking the post-ICO coins that are gaining momentum on those lower-tier exchanges. Users are getting alerts for signals such as:

New listings

Delistings

Volume momentum on low-tier exchanges

Now that’s pretty cool. We’re building our list of exchange integrations, starting at the bottom. Are there small exchanges that you scour for new coins? Join our Telegram group to tell us what they are. We’ll do the legwork for you.

Jan. 31: Sale Momentum Signal

When an ERC20-compliant token opens its crowdsale or presale, we’ll be able to predict in real-time whether it is going to sell out. Imagine getting an alert about an ICO you’d read about, but hadn’t prioritized, and being among the first to know that this project is on track to reach its hard cap before the sale’s scheduled close.

Or, perhaps you’re looking for a threshold: Only show me ICOs that are on track to raise at least 5,000 ETH. I’m not interested in anything smaller.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback on what thresholds and momentum signals are meaningful during active sales, as we hone this offering and ready it for release. Join our Telegram group and tell us.

Feb. 15: Forum Signal

Because ICOs operate in a transparent way, public chat forums are used to discuss all facets of the ICO to the general public. Most ICOs host at least one semi-public forum, themselves, in addition to those hosted on Reddit, Steemit and Bitcointalk. These proprietary forums contain a wealth of information that we believe as an ICO investor is vital to understanding the temperature of an ICO. They’re also a noisy place crowded with fake users (bots), uninformed questions and trolls.

Spending time in one forum can be frustrating and unprofitable, but necessary. Most crypto investors are monitoring several. We have developed the ability to track every post and every user in every single one.

This means as people are actively talking about ICOs in public and proprietary forums, we’ll be listening, capturing, processing and analyzing that activity, and putting it in one place, at the fingertips of sophisticated investors.

Token Report (/EDGE) forum alert

Our first user interface with this data will be an alert that signals when a project is picking up momentum, adding active users for its Telegram group. Imagine knowing that an ICO is gaining momentum for its crowdsale, well before the first ETH in. Imagine getting an alert when that momentum falls off abruptly, signaling sock-puppeting or other means of manipulation.

Again, we’re posing the question to you in our Telegram group: How would you use this data? What signals are meaningful? If you could search it, what would you look for? And, what are the ethical boundaries of scraping text from what some would consider semi-public forums?

Conclusion

The information we’re consuming and processing helps investors better understand the ICO marketplace as a whole. Amid the noise, you’re spotting the projects that stand out. The “signals” in Token Clarity help you handicap the ICO investment space better.

Starting with this post, I’ll be providing weekly updates on our progress on this blog and in our Telegram group. And, I’ll be looking forward to reading your comments and feedback to help guide us to developing a better signal for you. Find me on Telegram, I’m in our forum on Telegram, where my handle is @BostonAccent.