Back in June 2017, I posted about Antshares/NEO. I was (and still am) a NEO “whale.” That post will forever be the most upvoted post in the r/Antshares subreddit — sure, it’s a dead sub now after the rebrand to NEO, but don’t take this one away from me. Muchas gracias.

In September 2017, I wrote a follow-up post on why I still love NEO. Towards the end of that post, I responded to a number of questions I had been receiving after my posts received tens of thousands of views. The most common question was “Is Jimmie your real name?” The answer to that is no. The second most common question was “What else are you investing in?” Here’s what I wrote:

US equity ETFs, municipal bonds, large-cap dividend stocks with mid-range yields and steady growth, and some riskless stuff (CDs, treasuries, high-yield savings accounts). But that’s not what you wanted to hear…

I hate giving “picks” in crypto because of the insane volatility and the real chance of losing 80% of your value over night. Some advice: Be careful. Don’t put in more than you can lose. Don’t listen to what people say in forums. Read source material for yourself. Take out your principal and play with house money. You won’t regret it.

Specific stuff? I don’t think Bitcoin is going anywhere. It is, however, becoming harder and harder to realize large upside returns from Bitcoin — the current market cap is just too big to see massive percentage swings. But that’s OK. I think everyone should have some money in Bitcoin. It’s seemingly immortal given what it’s been through. The same goes for Eth.

Looking at the top 100 coins, there are a few in there I’m holding. The vast majority are legitimately absurd. There are many painfully obvious trash coins that are worth hundreds of millions. I’m not naming names, but please do your research people. And stop listening to 14-year-olds on Reddit.

One coin I’ll mention, because they have a fair ICO process that hasn’t happened yet and I like their vision, is a coin out of Korea called ICON. Not sure how the regulatory environment is shaking out in Korea but I’m watching that one very closely. They may be the first major Korean-born crypto to hit exchanges.

After mentioning ICON in that post, I spent weeks doing additional primary research and came to the conclusion that ICON was perhaps the most obvious ICO to participate in I’ve ever seen. I was the tenth person to join the r/HelloIcon subreddit. Both during and after the ICO I have established a significant position in ICON.

Here are a few of my very scattered thoughts on the project.

Subreddit / Telegram / Social Media

Let’s start with a negative. Much like Antshares in the early days, the ICON subreddits are mostly (but not completely!) void of valuable content. They will continue to get better as the community grows. Thankfully they aren’t as bad as the Telegram which is complete and utter garbage. Memes, 14-year-old “day traders,” and insecure adults that have likely invested an irresponsible amount and want reassurance of where the price is going every hour of every day. The 14-year-olds are happy to inform them at every turn that we’re going to “hit $100 dollars by the end of 2018!” I got off the Telegram pretty quickly once I saw it was a festering cesspool. (Sorry, not sorry. The truth hurts.)

In Icon’s case in particular, there are, for some reason, two subreddits. The official one appears to be r/helloicon (for the non-programmers among us, “Hello Icon World” is a clever homage to this) and it appears to be largely abandoned by the Icon team. I get that Icon is a Korean product and thus, Korean social media venues are the most important, but it would take literally 5 minutes a day for someone — anyone — at Icon to answer some questions and delete the trash posts. I’m not sure they realize how important Reddit is for most crypto communities. Vitalik, as an example, is very active on Reddit and that has done wonders over the years to calm speculation and fear as well as educate the masses. I strongly recommend that the Icon team hire someone to manage their social media accounts religiously. They have the money, and this is a non-technical hire — it shouldn’t be that hard to find someone great. I’d give Icon’s community communication a (generous) 3 out of 10.

I have a feeling this will get better with time. All blockchain projects start off like this. In my first post I called the Antshares sub trash. And it was. The community has flourished since then. Icon will follow suit.

Partnerships

I won’t list them all here. They’ve been listed many times before. (Some of my favorites: 1 2 3) Needless to say, Icon’s partnerships are absurdly strong compared to almost everything out there. Better than most coins trading with higher market caps — and most of those coins have been around for much longer. I’m not sure people that are “new” to crypto have the historical context necessary to appreciate how much Icon has done in such a short span of time. This isn’t some crappy vaporware. This is a real business with real customers and real employees. They turned out a working product faster than any blockchain project I’ve ever seen. They have scores of developers and a war chest of millions of dollars and they’re not slowing down.

Managing 50+ employees, hitting development deadlines, and communicating with an oftentimes mob-like public isn’t easy. It’s f-ing hard. I’ve worked for startups in the past. If those startups were held to the same level of public scrutiny that Icon and other cryptos are held, they would crumble under the pressure. I mean that. Shine a bright light at any startup and you’ll see — they’re messes. Like adolescents going through their awkward stage, businesses take years to mature and find their sea legs. Min and team have done a brilliant job navigating the pressures that comes with being a protocol/crypto startup. They’re tuning out the noise and they’re thriving. Can they communicate better? Sure. But I’d take bad communication over bad product or bad partnerships any day. If I wasn’t so nice (lol), I’d list off ten projects currently in the top 50 that have great communication and blatantly horrible products. But I won’t. Because I’m a good person, dammit.

Long-game and Price

I need to write something about price. Some general advice:

• If you’re terrified that Icon dropped from $12 to $7 and elated when it pops back to $9, then you’ve put too much in. Don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose. Watching the recent videos about Bitconnect aren’t funny, they’re heartbreaking. Don’t put your life savings into Icon or Eth or Bitcoin or the stock market or tulips or ANYTHING. EVER. Don’t be dumb.
• Stop sweating the little swings. That’s the nature of the game. Go to the Antshares sub or the Ethtrader sub or the Bitcoin sub and look back a few years. I remember very distinctly when Antshares/NEO “mooned” to $14 or so and then crashed back to $5. Those who put in more than they could afford to lose were rightfully devastated and scared. The rest of us were mad but comfortable — along for the long-term ride. Try to stop checking the price so many times per day. You aren’t going to make money from day trading. And if you think you are, I want you to compare what you “made” day trading to what you would have made had you just held whatever your initial position was long term.
• Whales. I keep reading comments that Whales are keeping the price low to buy more. That’s not true. I’ve been there. The price stays down because whales (in Icon’s case, large institutional investors) are taking profits. You can literally watch this happening in the wallets. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s normal for this stage of any crypto. These folks put lots of money in at something like 11 cents. They’ve made ~80x their money. Trust me, they’re taking some chips off the table. AND THAT’S FINE. It’s a good thing. Check out what I believe to be the Icon Binance wallet here. What do you notice? Lots of transfers out of the Binance wallet. Fewer transfers in. The total number of wallets is growing fast. A few weeks ago I checked and it was at 20k. Now it’s approaching 30k. This is a great sign and healthy for the network. (To see the number of ERC20 wallets, look for “Token Holders” on this page.)

Real-World Use

There’s a very clear difference between speculative and consumptive demand. Almost all cryptos, including Ethereum, are still firmly in the speculative demand bucket. People are buying, not to use (i.e. consume) the token, but to speculate on it’s future consumptive demand. Undoubtedly, these networks have the potential to generate MASSIVE consumptive demand, but that demand may still be years away. In my opinion, that timeline is much, MUCH shorter for Icon than any other crypto I’ve seen. Icon had functional products up and running that rely on their ICX token months before they launched their mainnet product. Most projects haven’t even begun to actually implement real-world use cases. Sure they talk about them, but talk is cheap, especially in cryptoland.

Why does this matter? Let me use San Francisco as an example. Being a “sales guy” in the Bay Area is a borderline derogatory term with techies. Developers oftentimes start businesses with the mindset that “if we build it, they will come” — “they” meaning customers. Startup after startup learns the hard way that this is almost never the case. Business development is never as easy as technologists think.

In one of his many interviews on Youtube, Min Kim, one of the founders of Icon, mentioned that while they have an incredibly strong tech team, they realize that blockchain technology is still rapidly evolving. We’re still in the early innings of blockchain and, much like the internet, the tech will rapidly improve. Icon’s approach is to develop real world use cases today given the technological constraints we’re operating under. As the space matures technologically, so will Icon. As someone who has worked in tech as well as private and public market investing for many years, I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear him say this. This approach has been the winning approach in industry after industry after industry for decades. Technology and business development go hand in hand.

Predictions

I won’t predict price because I don’t know — and neither do you. I don’t care about short term fluctuations. I also think it’s disingenuous to tell people that the price will explode after some specific event or announcement. No one knows.

I will make this prediction: I think that Icon will be a dominating force in the Korean blockchain industry in the long term. In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss why I don’t think there will be one global blockchain network. I believe blockchain networks will evolve in a similar fashion to cellular networks. They will be regionally run and regionally regulated. More evidence for this in a future article.

Needless to say, I think Icon will be the dominant network in Korea. And I’m almost positive that Korea will be the first country to adopt blockchain into real-world use cases — meaning consumptive demand for tokens like ICX will hit Korea before anywhere else. Why? Because that’s always the case. See a few non-blockchain examples here and here and here and here.

So what’s the summary: Don’t invest more than you can legitimately afford to lose. Act like you can lose all your money tomorrow, because you can. That being said, if you’re looking for an interesting investment with some money you can afford to gamble in the crazy crypto markets, I would take a nice long look at Icon.

I’m getting tired so I’m calling it quits. I’ll post another article soon with more ramblings on Icon. I love healthy debate, so please post your comments and/or gripes in the comments or PM me on Reddit. Feedback welcome.

Jimmie S.

It’s been a while since my first post. At the time, Antshares had just launched their rebrand. The price was around $7 and I was ticked off. Despite my frustration, I held my full NEO position and supported the NEO ecosystem. That post is still read close to 500 times per week. No idea why. Given the switch to the r/NEO subreddit, it remains the highest upvoted post on the original Antshares sub. My rant is preserved for future generations. My grandma would be so proud…

Along with my frustration, I expressed hope. There are a handful of reasons I was bullish on Antshares back then, and why I remain bullish today. Given recent events, I thought it might be helpful to outline some of those reasons. None of this is “new news” to anyone that frequents NEO forums, but, perhaps for my own benefit, I’d like to spell them out here.

I love Da. His AMA was nearly flawless in both tone and content. That’s not easy to do. Being an entrepreneur requires a certain ability to instill confidence in investors and core stakeholders (e.g. employees, customers, etc.). He’s got it. Even his response to the recent China ICO news was perfect. Calm, slightly humorous, supremely confident. He doesn’t play scared and I love that.

I love the vision. For those of us that have been around for a while, we remember that Antshares didn’t start as a smart contract platform. It started as an asset digitization platform. I love this vision because it has obvious, immediate use cases and it lends itself well to government cooperation. On that last point, the vision from the very beginning was to play nice with regulators. As someone that has some experience in the world of China and regulation, they couldn’t have been more spot-on in their approach.

There’s been quite a bit of chatter recently about how incorporating outside of China (e.g. Singapore, Switzerland) is somehow a way of going around the Chinese government. Not a chance in hell. Zero. If you don’t play nice with the Chinese government, you’re toast within her borders. Da knows this. Other projects don’t.

(And yes, I know NEO does smart contracts. Leave it to the Chinese to try and do everything — see my next section. I still like the original vision best. Smart contracts is a nice bonus.)

China likes China. This point has been made ad nauseum in public forums and in my personal crypto circles. Indulge me for a second.

A few years back I took a business trip to China and visited a number of large tech companies — both Chinese companies and their (usually struggling) American counterparts. We visited Uber’s HQ in Beijing. They mentioned, casually, that they were burning $1B US per month in the country. $1B per month. Let that sink in. Next we visited DiDi, the homegrown Chinese competitor. Similar cash burn, completely different vibe. Replace the pretentious black granite of Uber’s HQ with bright colors and anthropomorphic car toys. DiDi wasn’t just attacking the taxi market, they were attacking the entire transportation sector. In typical Chinese fashion, DiDi wanted to do everything even remotely close to their core mission.

After walking through a few of DiDi’s floors filled with veritable armies of developers cranking 9–9–6 and listening to our translators tell us that they only use DiDi, my colleague whispered in my ear: “Uber’s screwed.” His language was a bit more crass. He was right. Uber eventually “merged” with (lost to) DiDi in China. No amount of money could compensate for simply not “getting” the Chinese market.

History repeats itself and, at this point, the track record of American business failures in China is well established. Just do a quick search for “China’s Amazon”…or “Facebook”…or “Google”…or “Ebay”…or anything. Why has this happened? Understanding the unique Chinese market is certainly a huge part. That being said, government intervention is an equally important factor. The Chinese government doesn’t screw around. They like to control their economy and they do so with an iron fist. Play nice with Chinese regulators or be damned.

I won’t continue to belabor this point. If you’ve read this far you don’t need me to draw the obvious conclusion regarding NEO. Needless to say, I don’t believe for a split second that a Western made and controlled technology will dominate the Chinese crypto space. A huge part of being a good investor is judgement and pattern recognition. The pattern here is undeniable. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. But the evidence is on my side.

4. First! Antshares / NEO is China’s first significant public block chain. No matter what happens, 100 years from now when our children are using tokens to buy their iPhone 86's on Mars, Antshares/NEO will still be China’s first crypto. Normally I wouldn’t care this much about first-mover advantage — but look at Bitcoin. The tech used on the Bitcoin network is, at this point, horribly outdated. It needlessly wastes exorbitant amounts of energy. Far better solutions exist. But here we are. Bitcoin’s price is crazy high and will remain so, in my opinion, for as long as crypto is a thing. The network effect is, at this point, far too difficult to unhinge. Bitcoin has become the “flight to safety” for the crypto world and that faith and network effect isn’t going away. I believe NEO has a chance of developing a similar, albeit regional, dominance as Chinese regulators realize the control they’re forfeiting by allowing Bitcoin/Ethereum to thrive in their country. (Evidence: I’m pretty sure Facebook and Google are both still blocked in China.)

I’m tired of typing. The moral of this story is, I still like NEO. Time to sprint through the finish with some questions…

Questions

I posted an email address after my last post (neochain3@gmail.com) and received tons of questions. I tried to answer most if not all of them. Here are some preemptive answers:

Have you sold any NEO?

Absolutely. I took out my principal. If you invest in something — anything — and it 20x’s in value, you’re an idiot if you don’t take out your principal. Sorry. Taking out the small amount you put in will do effectively nothing to your total returns. The peace of mind is worth it, not to mention, from a portfolio theory perspective, it’s the smart thing to do. I still own a ton of NEO — the vast majority of what I purchased originally — but yes, I’ve sold a little.

What do you think about the subreddit now?

Got lots of hate for taking the subreddit to the woodshed last time. I still kind of hate it. I don’t spend a ton of time there. It has gotten better. I just get easily annoyed by insecure 14-year-olds trying, and failing, to subtly (and not so subtly: Hodl!) manipulate people into not selling. Just a quick tip — it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to the price one bit if a bunch of kids with 10 NEO decide to liquidate their holdings. I’m not trying to be a jerk here — it’s the truth. There are lots of people out there making moves in terms of 1,000 NEO or more, and those folks (at least the folks I know) aren’t being swayed in the slightest by poorly worded Reddit posts. This applies to pretty much every coin of significant scale.

Da called you out on Twitter. Did he give you a reward?

He did! Well, someone did. I forgot about it for a while and checked the account recently to find 100 NEO. My plan was to give that back to the community for quality posts / projects. That’s still the plan.

Shoot me an email if you see something awesome that you think deserves some free NEO.

What other stuff are you investing in?

US equity ETFs, municipal bonds, large-cap dividend stocks with mid-range yields and steady growth, and some riskless stuff (CDs, treasuries, high-yield savings accounts). But that’s not what you wanted to hear…

I hate giving “picks” in crypto because of the insane volatility and the real chance of losing 80% of your value over night. Some advice: Be careful. Don’t put in more than you can lose. Don’t listen to what people say in forums. Read source material for yourself. Take out your principal and play with house money. You won’t regret it.

Specific stuff? I don’t think Bitcoin is going anywhere. It is, however, becoming harder and harder to realize large upside returns from Bitcoin — the current market cap is just too big to see massive percentage swings. But that’s OK. I think everyone should have some money in Bitcoin. It’s seemingly immortal given what it’s been through. The same goes for Eth.

Looking at the top 100 coins, there are a few in there I’m holding. The vast majority are legitimately absurd. There are many painfully obvious trash coins that are worth hundreds of millions. I’m not naming names, but please do your research people. And stop listening to 14-year-olds on Reddit.

One coin I’ll mention, because they have a fair ICO process that hasn’t happened yet and I like their vision, is a coin out of Korea called ICON. Not sure how the regulatory environment is shaking out in Korea but I’m watching that one very closely. They may be the first major Korean-born crypto to hit exchanges. I’m also really interested to see what happens with Filecoin once they launch.

Now it’s your turn. What ICO’s / young coins do you like?

Is that your real name?

Nope.

Do you still have the same gripes about NEO?

Lots of them, yes. But not all. Didn’t want to dwell on the negative here. Overall, I’m still more excited than concerned. I won’t be selling any more NEO. But while we’re on the topic: Da — hire some damn developers. You have more community managers on your website than developers. And toss the community a bone occasionally. We want to hear how things are going.

Alright that’s it! Hopefully someone reads this ramble. Happy to take questions in the comments. Attaching my address in case Da or anyone else wants to give me free money again. I like free money. But you should probably sell 1 NEO and treat yourself to a movie or something instead. I’ll be OK. AUGHphJGnvZP7vS2WJ6gePbcCk69xa2qk1

— — — — — — —

First, about me. I’ve been investing in the crypto space for years now and I’ve been incredibly lucky. I bought in to Ethereum on a whim after a friend of mine in CS mentioned it was “like Bitcoin but programmable” — whatever that meant. Since graduating from Stanford, I moved to NYC to work in finance. I’ve been a consultant and buy-side analyst in both the public and private markets. I am not a technologist.

Despite not being a techie, I have been around the crypto space for a while. I get some things. I don’t get others. With that as context, I want to offer my opinions (operative word: opinions) regarding one of my favorite and most intriguing crypto investments, NEO (AKA the artist formerly known as Antshares).

I, like many folks in the burgeoning NEO community, have been frustrated with what’s happened over the past few days. I’m worried that the NEO team is going to needlessly fumble an amazing opportunity. So I’m going to armchair quarterback a few things. Apologies in advance.

Without further ado, I’d like to offer a few pieces of non-technical advice to the NEO team. Take it or leave it. But you should take it.

Market Talk

Don’t talk about price. Don’t mention subreddits or message boards. Don’t talk about “hype-y” things. At all. Don’t say things like this, even if it’s in jest. Focus on the tech and only the tech. The devs of Ethereum rarely comment on the market. It’s the reason there’s a separate r/ethtrader subreddit. The better the tech, and the better you communicate the benefits of the tech, the higher the share price will go. And the higher the share price goes, the more money you have to hire developers and strengthen the tech.

I mean it. Stop. It’s in your best interest. The second you start looking like a pump and dump, you’re dead in the water.

English

English is your best friend until you get broader Chinese adoption. All that money tied up in Ethereum is scared right now. I know, I’m part of that crowd. Scaling issues, etc. They’re looking for reasons to diversify into alternative assets. Most of these ICO’s are not good long term investments. We want platforms, dammit. And a platform (a good one I might add) is what you’ve got.

So back to the English. Hire someone — right now — to proofread every English thing you write. That includes your tweets (“rehearsaling” isn’t a word). But really, every single tweet Da Hongfei tweets has some grammatical issue. I get it, it’s not his first language. I don’t care. I’m not saying that it’s fair to expect perfection, I’m saying if you want the price to rise (which will lead to more money and more developers, see above) then cater to English-speaking Ethereum whales and come across as a polished, thoughtful, put together, leader. We need a safe pair of hands. Case in point: Everything Vitalik writes instills more confidence in Ethereum. Even his Reddit posts.

This applies to your website too. It’s horrendous. I’m not exaggerating for impact either. It’s really that bad. Please have a native English speaker just read through it once. I’m happy to do this if you’d like.

Team

List your team on your website. If it’s there already, it isn’t easy to find. Make it easy to find. Be sure to include your educations and prior projects. List your advisers. List everyone involved. Strength of team is a HUGE (all caps!) deal to the smart money in crypto.

Developers

Priority number 1: Hire the best damn developers you can find from the best schools in China. Go to Tsingua, Peking, and Fudan, take the millions you’re currently sitting on and pay top dollar for some phenomenal devs. And then put them on the team page on your website. Because team, share price, money, more devs, etc.

Gimmicks

Your rebrand…heaven help us. Don’t do things like have everyone push a button that triggers a NEO logo reveal or whatever horse crap that was. It was gimmicky and cheesy and all around didn’t do anything to make anyone feel better about the team or the tech. It made you look like amateurs. Stop that. I think the share price dropped 10% at the exact moment you pressed those buttons. Don’t do gimmicky things.

Community

Shots about to be fired. The English-speaking Antshares/NEO community on Slack and r/antshares is a burning pile of rotten garbage. You need to take control and put in moderators that have technical chops. You need to delete all the mumbo-jumbo technical analyses and “moon talk.” It’s all worthless and it’s all garbage. I’ll say it one more time — if you want real, sustained price movement then you don’t need market talk (“OMG, we’re going to get a new exchange on board!”), you need technological improvement updates and actual use cases for the platform.

As much as I hate to admit it, this market and every other crypto market is largely based on speculative bets. And you know what drives speculative bets? News. And you know where people get their news? Reddit, Bitcointalk, Slack, Twitter, etc. If I’m you, I would be extra careful to make sure that the news people get isn’t typical pump and dump bullshit. That’s basically all we’ve got at this point.

Rebrand / Website

One more thing. You rebranded without rebranding. Your website didn’t change. Not sure who thought that was a good idea…but it wasn’t. It was a bad idea. You should have had a landing page for neo.org that was fresh and full of new, well written, information. Instead we see this, the old site with “NEO” and the subtext, “A distributed network of intelligent economy.” It should come as no surprise that the subtext is, in fact, not proper English. Perhaps “A distributed network for the intelligent economy” or “A distributed network for an intelligent economy.” Those are two options. They “read” correctly. Your version does not.

CTO

The CTO is the star here. He’s the Vitalik. He should speak more. Well, he should speak more if you want the price to rise. So you can get more money. So you can hire more devs. But I digress.

Let’s wrap this up…

I’m going to catch a lot of hate for this. I don’t care. You may think I’m being unfair. Fine. All I’m saying is this: if you do these things, even a few of them, you’ll see price appreciation which will dramatically help your long term prospects as a platform.

I have real money invested in you. Why? Because you’ve built a great platform with novel technology and tons of potential in a massive tech-savvy market that builds everything in-country. Even now, as the price plummets, I’m buying more. So I’m hoping for a massive outcome and I’m hopeful that you and your team can turn the ship around. I think you will. At this point, I’ve never been wrong on a big bet. Maybe this is my first big loss. I doubt it.

Jimmie S.