Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) or Token Sale Offerings (ITS) have significantly changed the landscape of start-up financing. ICOs are a new method of raising capital, where start-ups issue digital tokens to investors and/or users, in exchange for virtual or fiat currency. By capitalizing on token economies, young innovative companies can raise seed and growth capital in a much easier way. Almost 5 billion USD were raised by about 440 ICOs in 2017, according to a PwC report1 , almost 20 times the amount of 2016.

But this extraordinary development has also raised significant concerns about quality of projects, investor protection, money laundering and tax evasion, first and foremost among regulatory authorities, central banks and governments. A few countries (e.g. China and South Korea) have banned ICOs completely, while authorities in other country (e.g. in the European Union) have issued warnings to the public.

For winning back regulators’ trust, start-ups planning their ICO have started to include KnowYour-Customer (KYC)/Anti-Money Laundering (AML) processes and to restrict access for token buyers from certain countries, e.g. China, South Korea and the US. Those processes are in many cases highly manual, time-consuming and costly. There are no standards yet and each jurisdiction has slightly different requirements whether a token buyer is eligible for purchasing,
up to what amount and how he must prove his identity. Furthermore, the KYC/AML checks are typically done after the investment, making them a requirement for issuing the tokens to the buyer.

This results in significant uncertainties for both sides, the buyer and the start-up and a lack of investor protection, a commonly raised point of criticism from global authorities.

HELIX Orange is targeting the massive need to fulfil the regulatory requirements for any ICO and is building up a platform to give start-ups a head start in token design and sales. By using HELIX Orange, each token buyer needs to pass through the KYC/AML process only once and can use his trusted identity repeatedly. In this course, a community of token buyers is created on the HELIX Orange platform which continuously increases the value of the platform for new
ICOs.