iCumulate aims to make the crypto experience simple and social
There are always a few questions when a new project is launched. Some of the questions could be about the project addressing real-life problems, while others might pertain to sustainability and usability of the solution to the customers. But, most importantly, the question that strikes investors the most is if the team has the experience to adapt and address the unforeseen threats that inevitably appear along the way.
The Problem
The recent launch of distributed ledger technology and the concept of asset tokenisation has opened the gates to a new world with newly defined concepts and horizons. If we were to paraphrase the Star Trek moto, “the mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new trustless business routines and new technologies, to boldly go where no business has gone before”.
New technologies bring numerous opportunities but these are also often coupled with unnecessary complexities during the initial periods of growth.
Take this simple scenario below:
An investor [lets call him Bob], wants to access the cryptocurrency market and purchase ABC tokens that his friend often talks about. To do this, Bob will often have to follow a complex route and wait for a series of events to occur before even purchasing a single token.
First Bob needs to open an account with a cryptocurrency exchange, which will involve various document submissions and verification checks. These checks do not currently conform to an industry standard, but are instead driven by the requirements of the individual relationship that the cryptocurrency exchange holds with its bank in order to accept Bob’s funds. Due to the generic stance that many mainstream banks have taken on crypto businesses, the exchange’s bank is also often located in a remote part of Europe leaving Bob to be concerned about whether he should send his funds there at all.
If Bob takes the leap of faith and sends the funds he will have the anxious wait for them to be credited to his account. Customer services, should they answer his emails, will advise it could take anywhere between 3 to 20 days for funds to arrive despite Single Euro Payments Area [SEPA] bank transfers being one of the fastest ways to send money within Europe.
At this point Bob also has no idea whether his own bank is also “crypto friendly”, meaning there is also a chance the transfer gets rejected internally and never leaves his bank in the first place.
Assuming all goes well for Bob and he meets the minimum balance requirements that many exchanges are starting to impose, Bob breathes a sigh of relief because he believes his job is done. But of course it is not.
Once the funds arrive in Bob’s cryptocurrency exchange account, the puzzle continues. For liquidity reasons the ABC tokens that Bob wishes to acquire, can only be purchased with a main cryptocurrency, normally Ether or bitcoin. Therefore Bob’s next choice involves deciding on buying Ether or bitcoin, neither of which he wants or needs. The decision is important though, because in the time period between Bob buying Ether [for example] to when he eventually purchases ABC tokens with the Ether, he will be exposed to the price volatility between Ether and his base Fiat currency [US Dollars for example].
Bob has no idea or view as to whether Ether is weak or strong against USD at the moment but this movement could have a fundamental impact on the number of ABC tokens he can buy with it.
If Bob understands that he has unwanted risk exposure at this point, the natural thing for him to try to do is to shorten the time period between buying and then selling the Ether again to hurry the whole process up.
Unfortunately for Bob, he made the wrong decision as he now finds out that ABC tokens are far more liquid against bitcoin, than they are against Ether, so he is left with the terrible choice of selling his Ether again to buy bitcoin, or waiting much longer in the illiquid Ether/ABC market if he wants a fair price.
Bob decides to swap back into bitcoin, pay more transaction costs, and he goes on to eventually purchase the ABC tokens he wanted all along.
Bob is exhausted. He has been told that its safer to keep his tokens off-exchange, so he tries to follow the instructions for transferring the ABC tokens to his MEW wallet but in his haste he almost makes a mistake with the 40 character hexadecimal destination address field and nearly loses everything.
Bob doesn’t like crypto investing any more.
The next day Bob sets about trying to work out what price in US Dollars he paid for his ABC tokens. With the transaction path he had to take from USD to ETH to BTC to ABC, he is totally confused and eventually gives up and just ‘accepts’ the system.
Bob shouldn’t need to ‘accept’ this situation though, especially when all he wants to do is simply invest in a cryptocurrency or asset.
Much of Bob’s confusion is caused by him not being able to purchase and manage tokens in his native [base] fiat currency of US Dollars. This restriction not only adds confusion, but also time and unnecessary risk exposure. As Bob is a novice investor he may decide to follow the views of other ABC token purchasers online but the confusion then grows further as some of these fellow investors are recommending price support levels in Satoshi, Ether or USD.
The simple example above is all too common for new investors in the cryptocurrency market and we believe this to be one of the main barriers to entry for an industry seeking mass adoption. In short, it is impossible for Bob [and many more like him] to purchase, compare, discuss or even listen to advice on crypto asset investing, if everyone is not conversing in the same way. You need to compare apples with apples as they say.
Surely, there must be a simpler, safer more sustainable way for Bob to invest? Thankfully, there now is and it is called iCumulate
The iCumulate ecosystem is designed meticulously by industry professionals to address many of the inefficiencies and complexities surrounding cryptocurrency and crypto-asset investing.
We believe in the wisdom of crowds and plain common sense. Investing is a form of art, which demands the need to harness a variety of talents. Over the last twenty years we have been approached by many talented individuals who wanted to have a career in professional trading. Having completed several degrees, studied hundreds of analytical techniques and spent thousands on “unique” lectures, books and “robots”, covering everything from high frequency algorithm execution to market psychology, they find that there is no standard path to success. There are, however, methods to accelerate their learning curve and we are convinced that the fastest and most profitable way to achieve that is to invest within a society of like-minded individuals.
Social investing enables the flow of information between traders, promoting education and informed decision making. It provides the security and transparency industry newcomers like Bob need, allowing them to progress along the investment ladder through knowledge rather than through retrospective news articles referring to the movement of “smart money”.
With excellent resources and experience only few degrees of separation away from you, a profitable idea can come for example from India whilst you sleep, a risk monitoring model from Japan when you wake up and a position sizing algorithm from Korea by breakfast, all materialising into ideas you can use when building your own investment portfolio, a concept simply unachievable before joining our social trading ecosystem.
The iCumulate investment platform will be multifunctional, but its core function is to bring like-minded investors and traders together into one environment, within which they have all the tools and information required to build their own crypto asset investment portfolios, without the hassles, complications and drawbacks of owning and holding the underlying asset tokens.
By applying the many benefits of tokenisation, every user will be able to create their own portfolio of fiat products and cryptocurrencies/assets. The performance of these portfolios will be monitored and displayed using industry standard analysis and performance metrics.
Users will have the option of keeping the performance of their portfolios private or making them publicly visible, the latter of which [upon a minimum criterion being met] will mean the user will be classified as an “ICU Manager”, making them eligible to be “followed” by other platform users as well.
Following an ICU Manager allows users like Bob to tap into the expertise, knowledge and experience of the best investors in the whole community. In addition to receiving regular information updates from the ICU Managers, Bob can configure a portion of his own portfolio to automatically copy the ICU Manager’s real time trades, meaning he will achieve the same performance as the top investors whilst not having to worry about missing out on trading opportunities and signals.
If you are thinking that this all sounds like standard “copy trading” on a platform such as eToro, you would be wrong. This is because the power of tokenisation allows iCumulate to execute copy trading or “following” as it should be and in a way not seen before. Tokenised assets and portfolios give investors like Bob the confidence that he will enjoy the same performance as the experienced ICU Manager that he follows. Common copy trading issues such as slippage, insufficient funds, multiple exchange accounts are all now in the past.
In turn, copy trading principles can only be sustainable if they are founded on healthy motivations similar to models that are time tested in the fund management industry, therefore ICU Managers will be compensated, according to their performance and social interactions with their followers as well.
Bob can now follow other investor’s portfolios in the same, simple way that he can buy a cryptocurrency or asset for his own portfolio, with one simple click.
With iCumulate users no longer need to be concerned with the following:
- Holding multiple exchange trading accounts
- Balancing funds between accounts
- Working out where certain crypto currencies/assets are traded
- Purchasing intermediary base currencies first such as Ether or bitcoin
- Calculating which token pairs are most liquid for your entries and exits
All cryptocurrencies, assets and followable user portfolios will be priced in the same base currency of US Dollars, making everything completely transparent and instantly comparable.
Some users may want to trade all of these assets against other base currencies, so we are going to do that too.
To add to the product mix, we will also be adding commodities, such as Gold & Oil, and indices such as the DowJones, S&P500 & Dax.
Using the iCumulate configurator users will be able to construct portfolios from thousands of new products, many of which have never been seen before such as ETH/Gold or BTC/Oil.
The opportunities are endless.
Along with the investment platform, iCumulate will be building an ecosystem of information and content providers to which investors can choose to subscribe to if they wish. These providers will range from technical and fundamental analysis services to 3rd party signals, alerts and trading systems.
Social investing is the ideal environment for talented individuals to display their trading skills. The iCumulate platform will run a detailed, transparent ranking system which will showcase the best performing ICU managers, with regular prize competitions being held for different investment categories in which everybody can take part. Investors looking for ICU Managers to follow will be able to filter the leaderboards according to their own particular investing principles, such as portfolio diversity, trade frequency, risk/reward ratios or maximum drawdown for example, allowing a unique and tailored approach to building your own portfolio by using a combination of your own investments and/or the followed investments of ICU manager portfolios.
In order to promote platform adoption amongst new investors in the crypto asset space, simulated accounts will be available wherein investors can use the full functionality of the platform, without putting any funds at risk and there will be a community driven education portal which will bring value to investors of all experience levels.
A user friendly mobile app will allow users to build and monitor their portfolios from anywhere and at anytime.
iCumulate
A list of innovative software products for proprietary use have been developed throughout their careers, including advanced position sizing algorithms, risk protection routines, co-located high frequency models, data cleaning routines and backtesting solutions.
The platform will utilise a combination of efficient and trustless off-chain bidirectional state channels to ensure cost effective, high throughput transactions and blockchain technology to maintain transparency and security on the most important aspects of the platform, such as user wallets and balance information, giving the user complete control of their own funds at all times.
iCumulate is based in Gibraltar and will be one of the first companies to be fully regulated under the new DLT regulatory framework being established in the country. Regulation is a fundamental part of financial trading and therefore iCumulate will be fully compliant with regulatory, legal and licensing requirements for the countries within which it operates.
Over the coming days we will be releasing further information showcasing the concepts of the iCumulate platform further and explaining the sizeable benefits iCumulate will bring to users with these much needed industry changes. Topics to be covered will include areas such as fractional trading, copy trading & tokenisation.
The lifeblood of the iCumulate platform will be the ICU utility token, which will be used to pay for all trading fees, services, subscriptions and products. Due to having such a fundamental role in the iCumulate ecosystem, ICU could be compared to similar tokens such as Binance Coin [BNB].
iCumulate will be holding a token sale on 30th November 2018 for the initial distribution of ICU utility tokens with bonuses available for early contributors. We also have bounty and referral programs for individuals that wish to help us in our journey to support the project.
For more information follow us on Telegram, Twitter and read our white paper here.
Visit us at website for the ICO details and to try out the Demo App.
