Comment by christianbryant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christianbryant | Hacker News Reader

christianbryant

In contrast, the ICO for SingularityNET has actually done quite well and received 5 times the amount of demand expected for their token sale; they postponed the end of their token sale date to properly handle the overwhelming demand. Feels most ICO sites are giving them 4/5 rating on average, but we'll how that goes. I think the reason this one in particular is doing so well is that the purpose of the sale feels useful, which is "to let anyone create, share, and monetize AI services at scale". According to them, the world’s first "decentralized AI network" has arrived.

Anyone have thoughts as to why this ICO could be different? ICO Drops says it was a whitelisted ICO:

https://icodrops.com/singularitynet/

Interesting note from the website: "While we are aware that the AGI token is currently being traded on some exchanges, we do not encourage or facilitate this exchange trading in any manner. Speculative secondary trading is against the spirit of the AGI token and SingularityNET project. We strongly discourage speculative secondary trading and officially ask AGI token holders to act accordingly."

> I think the reason this one in particular is doing so well

What makes you think it is doing so well?

If one compares IPO->ICO, in that context then the SingularityNET ICO may not seem to have to forecast of "profitability" that one would usually associate with a successful public offering. However, in the context of the purpose of the AGI Token they offer, the initial demand was high and in fact overshot, pointing to anticipation (or hype, but I believe it was genuine anticipation) for the coin. It sold 500 million tokens, reaching the ceiling in 24 hours. Sales dates were pushed to allow more sales due to overselling. That points to an initial success, I think.

Looking at the purpose of the AGI Token which is to create an open AI exchange (if I understand it correctly), where AI developers use their services in exchange for the AGI token, or for other services, then looking back at that anticipation and over-sale of tokens, it appears there are interested and active investors who are looking to make this coin work. To me, that is successful in comparison to simply having a Public Offering where lots of people invest, often to only lose that money later. This seems to have a purpose.

What points to current success, the "doing so well", is the more than decent ratings a large portion of ICO watchdog sites are giving it for now (although many ICO watchers acknowledge the level of hype to date has been high).

Looking at the current numbers, you're probably going to say "meh"; especially considering the ICO hype pushed the price up, then it dwindled down to a low ebb and flow. But that isn't why I see high expectation, still, for this coin, right? It still has intentional use built into it, and according to the website the Platform Beta Release is coming in the next month or so, at which time the coin will begin to do its work.

So, for me, "doing so well" means there was meaning behind the ICO beyond just economics, the interest was there and was overwhelming, the project has code tied to the coin that is going to go live soon and (from what I read) anticipation is still there within the AI community and the investors.

But again, I ask the question here because compared to the statistics in the article above, SingularityNET appears to be... doing well.

Do you own some of this? Are you associated with the project in some way?

I'm in no way whatsoever connected with the SingularityNET ICO or project. I actually couldn't get on the whitelist but I'm curious if the underlying point of the ICO is why it "appears" to be doing better than your average one. Could it be a model for future projects and whether they decide to go IPO or ICO. Clearly more successful ICOs are good for the model in the long run.

There have been hundreds of ICOs and some of them are actually trying to make an interesting product. I'm guessing this one is above average though the return has been unspecatcular. It says 1.08x on the website in USD terms.

Zil is an example of one building something with a real purpose and non trivial technology - a sharded blockchain that should be able to scale indefinitely which is up 20x in USD. Built by university researchers rather than obvious scammers https://icodrops.com/zilliqa/

There are some interesting things out there amongst the silliness.

Zilliqa is pretty cool, actually. I read the whitepaper and found the pieces on Zilliqa consensus and incentivizing miners based on their sharding architecture that "allows the mining network to process transactions in parallel and reach high throughput" very interesting. A great example of tech that presents solid algorithms or functions that do real work, or that could set the stage for new future work, within the context of cryptocurrency.

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