Coinstarter Review – A Great Idea or The Next Big Scam?
Coinstarter.com has a brilliant idea – bring together thousands of ICOs under one website with a Kickstarter-like presentation. Coinstarter is the convergence of crowdfunding and cryptocoin ICOs in a similar fashion to what Indiegogo has cooked up. The first thing that got me curious as I started writing this Coinstarter review are the numbers; Indieogo has just one ICO listed while Coinstarter boasts 3,861 ICOs signed up as we go to press.
The ICO on Indiegogo has been vetted, curated and checked out from every possible perspective. The thousands of ICOs that could appear on Coinstarter don’t seem to be scrutinized nearly as much if at all. Kickstarter can’t promise or guarantee that any given crowdfunding campaign listed is legitimate or honest but there is a vetting process and not all Kickstarter projects make the cut. I’d like to know more about the Coinstarter equivalent to this process. I have to raise a caution flag in this Coinstarter review for this reason alone.
Curiously, Kickstarter has 3,846 live projects right now — just about as many as Coinstarter advertises as being submitted ICOs. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are THE NAMES in Crowdfunding and have built up a solid reputation over the course of years. How Coinstarter was able to attract so many ICOs in such a short period of time (just nine months) is another caution flag anyone reading this Coinstarter review should take notice of.
A discussion thread on Bitcointalk.Org also raises a lot of questions which need to be satisfactorily answered in any Coinstarter review such as:
Some of the LinkedIn accounts of people claiming to be involved with Coinstarter are questionable.
Their website domain name registration is anonymous – this is a bit worrisome for a company raising millions on an ICO of their own.
Why is Coinstarter registered in the British Virgin Islands? This raises some alarm bells for me vis a vis Tether/Bittrex.
All told I think the Coinstarter concept is pure brilliance with building an ICO as easily as a Kickstarter campaign. I see vast potential for fraud on the part of the people launching an ICO through Coinstarter and there are lots of unanswered questions about Coinstarter itself. If Coinstarter becomes more transparent and institutes a quality-control process for the ICOs they plan to list while providing assurances and accountability to ICO investors it could very well be that Coinstarter is the next big thing. In the meantime, I can only advise cryptocoin investors to proceed with caution.
