Ian Ballina Gives ICO Advice To CNBC’s Ran NeuNer

Crypto investor Ian Balina was one of the special guests at the International Blockchain Congress held in Hyderabad, India. He sat down with Ran NeuNer of CNBC's Crypto Trade to discuss his recent hack, ICO and more.

Given below are the highlights of the conversation.

Ran NeuNer: Have you changed the approach between last year and this year in buying ICOs?

Ian Balina: Everyone or two months I make changes to the way I invest or the way I do my research. The main thing now is that I focus more on blockchain projects, especially in the bear market. You have to be more aware of the protocols even more than last year.

Ran NeuNer: How do you decide what you are going to invest in? What’s going to give you the maximum returns?

Ian Balina: If the product of the ICO is launching a year after the ICO, I tend to avoid it. What’s going to keep the price up for one year? I am basically a late stage investor. The next step is that the project should have an all-star team. I look for people who have worked for a well-known company in their space. The advisors have to be also credible. Then I come to Token metrics. An important part of the token distribution is the token volume. If you are printing the excessive amount of token, you are devaluing it.

Ideally, there shouldn’t be more than 150 million tokens. Anything between 65-73% of the tokens should be given to the community. Hard Cap is another factor to keep a close look. Anyone raising more than $12 million USD for a dApp project is generally not justifiable. As a rule of thumb, stay away from projects that give a high bonus. In an ideal world, there will be no bonuses.

Ian Balina: Wabi has to be the first one. It reached an all-time high of 170x. ICON reached an all-time high of about 100x and Dragon Chain was evaluated at over 50x.

Ran NeuNer: When do you know is the right time to take profits?

Ian Balina: My policy is that I like to take profits after 3x return, thus protecting myself from losses. Then I take 10% off every time it crosses 5x, 10x, 15x and so on. If there an unusual spike, I tend to take more profits.

Ian Balina: Out of all the projects right now, ChromaWay looks the most promising. Multi Black is also great and even valued higher currently but ChromaWay is certainly ahead of the pack.

Ran NeuNer: Full disclosure, I am an advisor on ChromaWay’s board. Why are you so excited about the project?

Ian Balina: Solid product. Once again it’s not just an idea, they have something tangible. It’s very innovative too as its a hybrid between blockchain and databases, getting the best of both worlds. Additionally, they have an all-star team.

You can see the full video here:

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