The Advisers Structuring RootProject’s ICO

The author, Dr. Nicholas Adams Judge, is a political economist and cofounder of the nonprofit RootProject. The other cofounder, Chris Place, is a Y Combinator Fellow. Their pre-ICO achieved 512% of its initial goal.

The details of ICOs create success and failure. The underlying business or organization is important, but tactical questions like hard caps, offer schedules, individual investor caps, marketing strategy, ICO dates, and so on can make or break an ICO. Token purchasers need to know who is making the detailed decisions that create that post-ICO “pop.”

RootProject has stayed quiet for a month or so, doing the hard work of organizing… Growing our telegram group to 2.2k members, building partnerships with world-famous nonprofits — announcements coming soon! — and hiring some great team members.

It’s a New Year, and it’s time to start showing the world what we’ve been up to. We’re starting by letting them know who has designed our ICO.

The first is Chris Miess. He was the CFO of TenX when they raised over $80 million, in Asia’s largest ICO in history. He is now the CEO of Iconic, the Singapore & Hong Kong-based ICO advisory board. Literally every ICO they’ve advised has more than doubled in price right after listing. Gifto was the most recent example of their extreme success.

Next is Tom Graham. Tom is a cofounder of TLDR, an ICO advisory and investment fund based in London. Tom was a cofounder of MapD, has a law degree from Harvard, and most recently was critical to the success of Quantstamp. He’s advised dozens of ICOs, and has really educated us on the ICO process — hence why you’ve seen so many changes, such as our new $13 million hard cap. TLDR was also RootProject’s first large, strategic investor.

Tom speaks Mandarin, and when I was looking on LinkedIn to find a link for this article, I see that he has shaken the Queen’s hand. I’ve yet to make fun of him for this, but rest assured. I will.

Tom (Lancelot) also sits on the same five person investment committee as I at a hedge fund that we’re launching this month. It’s the world’s first up-and-running, fully regulated social impact crypto asset fund. (I will recuse myself from any votes on the investment committee involving RootProject. More on the fund next week.)

Third is Garrett MacDonald, who founded Cognitive, the first company to develop field programmable gate array technology for hash validation in the blockchain space. During its operation it was one of the most well-known and respected mining companies in existence. Now he helps run Cryptodex, which helped structure some of the very largest ICOs of 2017. Garrett brings a depth of blockchain technical experience second to none.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Tom and Chris over the past five months. I’m more proud to call them friends than advisers. More shared conference Airbnbs than I can remember. I met Garrett more recently, but he’s a damn cool dude, as well as being smart as hell, and I can’t wait for RootProject to do lots of great things with his help.

Next week we’ll announce another three advisors, along with some big announcements about strategic partnerships. In the run up to Davos at the end of January, when we’ll announce the ICO dates, we’ve got a lot of powerful announcements to make. Stay tuned. And don’t miss out: Our public sale is only $4 million.