The ICObench contains very few ratings followed by comprehensive reviews. When assessing projects experts just give them marks without explanation or analysis. I write a review for those people who would like to understand the main idea of a project, get to know the key features, pros and cons of the White Paper, website, benchmarks and indicators of the ICO. If after reading a review you get interested in the project you can make a thorough study of it.

Crowdfunding is a form of alternative finance, a practice or method to raise a desired sum of money from a large group of people via the internet, utilizing the social media version of fundraising. This model is typically helping businesses, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs and many others to raise a large amount of money by persuading individuals ito donate to their projects, products or services. Crowdfunding campaigns are more successful today as compared to the normal investment methods and have witnessed funds flowing in billions of dollars for crucial projects. Pledgers have been seen to donate anything between $1 to $10,000 for a project cycle. More and more people are turning to crowdfunding to raise small or large funds from donors online, growing into a multi-billion-dollar charity industry. With an approximate 600 crowdfunding platforms all over the world, crowdfunding raised an estimated fund of $530 million in 2009, $1.5 billion in 2011, $2.7 billion by 2012 to $6.1 billion by the end of 2013. 2014 saw companies and individuals raise nearly $16.2 billion through crowdfunding, which was 167% more than what was raised in 2013. The crowdfunding statistics for 2017 reports a global amount of $34 billion raised. The projection of the crowdfunding industry is expected to grow over $300 billion by 2025. It is really a whole new world of investment. With online crowdfunding platforms, entrepreneurs and small businesses can seek funding for various inventions and projects from unaccredited investors. This new fundraising model helps startups and entrepreneurs find the capital they need to launch a business. Moreover the crowd is actually a great option for people to raise money from. That is because when you convert the crowd into investors, they will automatically be your marketers, your evangelists, and will really do good work in terms of getting the word out on your company. Today, major crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter are widely popular, but they don’t operate worldwide. Acorn Collective promises to change the face of crowdfunding using blockchain technology. The Acorn Collective is seeking to raise up to $50 million (the pre-sale funding target is $5 million that allows to create an MVP) to develop a new platform which will make crowdfunding globally accessible and free to all legal start-up projects, irrespective of their geographical location. By funding through an ICO and utilising the Ethereum blockchain, the Acorn Collective will eliminate the traditional 3-5% transaction fees and 5% platforms fees normally associated with other crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo or digital currency based platforms such as KickICO and FundYourselfNow. Acorn will also contribute to projects by providing a selection of fee-based services. Those services include all of the following - legal assistance, marketing, sourcing and manufacturing, technical help including the development of web, mobile, and blockchain applications, accounting and taxes, translations. During the ICO, a fixed number of Acorn tokens, OAK (ERC-20 standard token), will be made available, which can then be used for all transactions on its crowdfunding platform or for exchange of additional value-added services such as the post-campaign marketplace, marketing support or point-of-sales payment application. The OAK token allows for cheap and fast transactions within the Acorn Collective ecosystem, including all transactions between backers, companies and consumers through a single token. There is a fixed supply of 90 million OAK tokens. 80% of the total supply is reserved for ICO contributors, 16.66% is reserved for the company (under time lock for up to 2 years), and 3.33% is reserved for bounties and community rewards. The OAK token will also have token growth and stability mechanisms. These tools are designed to support OAK prices. The WP is actually well written and does a good job in transmitting the main concept and there is a lot of background information to provide a backdrop to the reasoning behind this project. There are also shorter versions - “OnePager” and “Technical Paper” (19 pages) documents on the website, essentially explaining the problem and the solution proposed by Acorn Collective platform. It is worth noting that there are 135 registered project founders who are already waiting to be crowdfunded on the platform. The team behind Acorn was formed in Q3-Q4 2017. The WP lists a core team and advisors of 22 persons with finance, technical, marketing and commercial expertise. The project is backed by the community in the Telegram chat (more than 2,300 participants), Twitter (around 7000 followers), Facebook (more than 11000 followers). There are also threads in the Bitcointalk forum. Overall, it’s a good idea, nice vision and I hope that the project with this experienced team will be successful. Acorn’s ICO is underway until March 2018.