Early Look: Examining Coinfirm's Ongoing AMLT ICO

A general trend as of late in the cryptocurrency ecosystem is that coins in the top five projects by market capitalization are viewed as good stores of value, while it's Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) that are delivering x10, x50, and sometimes even x100 returns.

The pros and cons are clear; with top five coins, your gains might be smaller, but your risks are much lower too. On the flip side, with ICOs the gains can be explosive but risk is considerably higher.

If you're comfortable with the risks involved, then you have to start pouring the constant stream of ICOs -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- to find projects that might suit your portfolio.

Today, we'll be toking a closer look at Coinfirm's ongoing AMLT ICO and examining whether it'd be worth taking a shot on. Let's dive in.

"The token of compliance"

A powerful obstacle to cryptocurrency adoption so far? Regulatory concerns pertaining to Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) measures.

That's where the AMLT token aims to come in. In being the digital currency of the Coinfirm AML/CTF Platform, AMLT allows the users in its ecosystem, enterprise-grade and otherwise, to mitigate the aforementioned regulatory concerns by bringing even further transparency to the blockchain thanks to big data analysis.

At least that's the elevator pitch, right. If interested in digging deeper, give the whitepaper a look here or the "light paper" a read here.

As TokenMarket, partners of the ICO, put it:

Created by the recognized Blockchain Regtech leader Coinfirm, AMLT is the first dedicated token that will ensure transparency and democratization of the financial system by allowing market participants to help determine the potential risk of others.

Specs

First off, you have to be in an allowed country to participate in the AMLT ICO. If you're located in a forbidden nation like the United States, you'll see this screen upon clicking on the ICO link:

Beyond that, here are the actual specifications of the ICO:

Start date: Dec. 17th 2017
End date: Jan. 30th 2018
Protocol: ERC20 (Ethereum)
Rate: 1 AMLT = 0.0003387075 ETH
Number of tokens in sale: 210,000,000 AMLT
Rewards pool for network members: 120,000,000 AMLT
Total token supply: 400,000,000

At press time, the ICO had raised 11739.15 ETH.

Speculative play: yay or nay?

AMLT is a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to speculating on its potential.

On the one hand, it's undeniable that the cryptoverse, at least in this premature period, is still largely driven by privacy-minded libertarian types. That's why we saw privacy coins like Monero and Dash go on tears in 2017. And that's why these coins will probably continue to surge in the months ahead. Privacy dogmatists might look the other way on AMLT.

Conversely, though, as major firms like Goldman Sachs move into the ecosystem, regulators are going to want to regulate, and it will be a powerful trend to watch out for. To this end, AMLT could position itself well in such a "compliance" niche, and it might be an interesting play accordingly.

As always though, these are just our opinions. Be sure to do your own research.