Article Original Posted April 7th 2018

InvestFeed

With this special Saturday edition of Altcoin Appreciation Month were going to be taking a look at the social media platform InvestFeed ($IFT). If you have ever wanted your crypto talk, Facebook style profile, and Twitter account all in one place then look no further. InvestFeed aims to be the user’s one stop for Crypto news, data (charts), and social activity. Oh and they have a fully up and running website right now that you can go ahead and use. The platform is available via web or via an app on your iOS or Android phone. With today’s article were going to be taking a look at the history of the company behind InvestFeed, where InvestFeed is today and where its going with a follow up of my own review of the website based on my personal use over the past month or so.

The InvestFeed platform originated in 2014 as a social media platform for discussion of stocks. In 2017 the team announced that it would be switching its focus over to cryptocurrencies as they believed long term that it was the best choice for them and their platform. The team’s ICO began July 23rd 2017 and ran until August 7th 2017. In that time, the team’s goal was to raise a maximum of 28,000 ETH and a minimum of 1,000 ETH. ETH was the only currency accepted in the ICO. The ICO price of $IFT was 10,000 $IFT per 1 ETH. IFT is an ERC20 token and is called FEED. Most importantly, the supply of IFT available created from the ICO (see below) is the total amount that will ever exist. No further generation of IFT will occur.

IFT is another low cap token here for Altcoin Appreciation month. The total market cap of IFT is just over $7million. The circulating supply of the token is 191 million and some change. The current price of IFT is $0.037, 533 sats, or 0.00009536 ETH. With the market cap of $7 million, IFT sits at rank 477th on coinmarketcap’s rankings. As stated above, the Investfeed team pivoted their platform to go full crypto, they made this decision based on a series of problems they saw in the crypto space.

One thing that can be said crypto is obsessed with is decentralization. It’s kind of a big deal for crypto to say the least. InvestFeed looked at the crypto space and saw that this decentralization was also prevalent in how people received news, charted, and engaged in discussion. From there they came up with a series of problems in crypto and what they wanted to fix. Those issues they identified are a lack of centralized hub for news, data, and chat regarding crypto, a lack of exposure for new projects, and content creators are not “rewarded or incentivized” for providing value on a platform. The InvestFeed platform aims to solve all of these issues and be your one stop shop for all things crypto.

To solve those issues on InvestFeed the team has devised a series of goals and features to have on their platform that they believe will make InvestFeed that centralized crypto hub. The primary goal is to “create a single gateway to the market that is open, transparent, and rewards-based for all users, contributors and financial institutions…”, and that goal will be accomplished through several features on the platform including social networking, streaming feeds and channels, crypto market data, trending assets and watchlist signals, wallet and exchange integration, and trading tools. A final key feature is the tipping ability that is on the website. That feature is discussed in the review portion at the end of this article.

The roadmap for the release of these features goes through 2018 with the team currently in the final phase referred to as their “scaling” phase of their roadmap as defined on the team’s white paper (the white paper may be found here https://www.investfeed.com/upload/investFeedInc.TokenSale.pdf. It is quite hard to find as a lot of links such as the one on CMC and their ANN are broken). The scaling phase involves a focus on user acquisition, additional functionalities of core features (nightmode for example was just released on iOS), and the launch of their merchant platform. For Q1-Q2 2018 releases the team has planned to release their trending assets and watchlist feature, wallet and exchange integration, FEED token marketplace launch, and support for more languages with Russian and Chinese mentioned specifically.

The trending assets and watchlist feature will be designed to show a user what is “trending” in the crypto world at that time. The watchlist is currently out on the app, but I don’t know how to access it via web. The trending feature will make use of sentiment indicators and alerts based on platform and order activity. Furthermore, the team states that users will be able to import their portfolios (exact mechanism not described) and create watch lists to keep an eye on their coins/tokens and those they want.

Next the wallet integration will involve the adding of a multi-currency and digital asset wallet (currently their is a feature to link your IFT wallet for tipping). Additionally, this feature will also have connectivity with multiple exchange accounts and with that connectivity the team wishes to have order execution, order management, and portfolio sharing capabilities available. The goal is to accomplish the exchange and wallet integration with the use of existing APIs and the building of partnerships with exchanges to produce the best quality product.

*Update-April 9th 2018*
A feature discussed here that I neglected to expand upon was pointed out to me in a feedback post back on InvestFeed by Union Jack. He also speaks about other important factors of InvestFeed that will not be added here. His post may be found at this link and I highly suggest taking a look at it as it takes a much longer term look and perspective on InvestFeed as a platform and cryptomarkets as a whole that I had no considered. Now without further ado, back to the feature.

InvestFeed partnered with Enigma back in October of 2017. What this partnership entails is the use of InvestFeed as a data provider for the Engima Catalyst system that takes data from sources and may suggest or make trades based on that information. Furthermore, InvestFeed plans to offer exchange support with multiple exchanges. The opportunity for arbitration will be massive as traders will be able to exploit differences in price between exchanges and may be able to do so manually or even through algorithms that react to data collected on the InvestFeed platform itself.

Union Jack brings up other points regarding Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), the impact of high volume algorithm trading on the scene, and how InvestFeed is already acting as one of the platforms that helps to begin the shift over to the “attention” economy. As for the “attention” economy, I have already touched on it ever so briefly below with the tipping feature, but as InvestFeed adds its marketplace (discussed two paragraphs below) there will be options for those with information and knowledge of the scene to charge for their expertise (more paid groups inc).

Overall, the critique and suggestions provided by Union Jack over on Invest Feed are fantastic and I highly recommend that you give it a read, even if not for an interest specifically in InvestFeed as the points brought up are further reaching than this one project. Link to Union Jack article.
**End of Edit**

Lastly, the team aims to release their FEED token marketplace. Some features mentioned that will be added include: the purchase of an ad-free experience on the platform, accessing of premium content, content promotion, and access to the advanced trading tools. More features and options are possible, but those are the only ones stated so far.

One of the latest developments around InvestFeed is a partnership announcement with dock.io. With this partnership InvestFeed is looking to give users more control over their information using blockchain technology. What dock.io does is allows users to aggregate all their personal information into their system and then control how that information is distributed to various social networking websites. dock.io uses their own dock.io protocol built on top of the ethereum blockchain and IPFS to accomplish these goals. To read the press release from InvestFeed please see the link here. Full information about the dock.io project may be found here.

IFT can be traded for on a total of 6 exchanges with around ~97.5% of the volume taking place on Cryptopia with its BTC/IFT pairing. Volume at the time of writing is $21,000. Two other notable exchanges that support IFT are CoinExchange and YoBit with BTC pairings. IFT recently launched a BTC pairing on HitBTC too.

CoinExchange — https://www.coinexchange.io/

For my review of InvestFeed I’m going to keep this relatively brief and speak about some of the features I enjoy and dislike as well as my general experiences on the platform. This review will contain my own personal experiences and is not meant to be comprehensive, I’m going to talk about the things I use and see everyday and will be missing a ton of things that the platform can be used for at this moment.

First off, I have had an overall enjoyable experience on the platform. I have had nothing but positive interactions with those in the community and the community is a different grouping (as far as I can tell) from that of CryptoTwitter. Because of that fact, its nice to interact and get opinions from other sources.

I use InvestFeed daily and have been getting better (almost perfect) with making sure everything that I tweet I also repost to InvestFeed. InvestFeed does have a feature for automatically posting to Twitter when you make a post on their platform, but out of habit I usually post on Twitter first, so that largely goes unused by me. However, when it is used, only part of your original InvestFeed posting is actually sent to twitter and contains a link back to your InvestFeed post. For those that are trying to focus on InvestFeed as their social media platform but still wants a Twitter presence that feature is great. As someone who aims for equal use of both it represents a dealbreaker for me using it, but lets talk about something I do like.

The ticker on the bottom of your InvestFeed menu bar is awesome. It’s a really small feature but its something I’m looking at or using any time I’m on the site on web (how I primarily use the platform). It’s nice to be able to just look up and see what total market cap is, BTC dominance, or the price of BTC, ETH, and LTC. I would like to see the ability to customize that bar to show different currencies as opposed to just those three, but overall this small feature is one of my favorites.

In addition to the ticker, another small feature I love is the ability to log in with my google account. It makes the log in to the website very quick and easy for me as I’m starting to forget some of my passwords and have to write them down (crypto making me have too many for security).

Posting on the site is akin to Facebook and has a character limit of 500. New posts show up in real time on your feed and default to show all posts as opposed to who you are following. At first I did not like that default, but I have grown to like it more and more as I am exposed to new opinion and people on the platform.

For longer posts, there is the article feature. The article feature basically makes it so you post your own article on the website. They show up on the main feed when they are released and there is a side bar showing the most recent ones posted. Articles have a 10,000 character limit and offer a full set of text editor options for their formatting. I use this feature for posting articles such as this one. The only downside I have found for this is that the editor for changing a post has not been working. The editor saves your work as you go along, but each time I have tried to edit my articles it generates an error. I actually am not able to post this on InvestFeed as the article exceeds that limit. The irony.

The last feature I want to discuss for the website is the tip function. This tip function allows for users to “tip” other users an amount of IFT for their post or article and is one of the most important aspects of the platform’s vision of rewarding or incentivizing for the providing of value on the platform. The tip function is linked to your IFT wallet that is linked in your profile for both sending and receiving, so for me to send a tip would involve clicking on the button and selecting an amount, the IFT is then sent from my wallet address to the receivers. It’s a great feature and will encourage more participation and quality posting on the website itself. I want to take this opportunity to again thank all of those who have tipped any of my posts over the past couple of weeks.

For negatives of the site, overall interaction with the interface can seem unresponsive at times. This unresponsiveness makes my experience slightly less enjoyable but is noticeable after using Twitter or FB. I’m confident that will be improved as time goes on. Additionally, please give us the option to reposition our cover photos like on Twitter or FB or all the other websites. Mine is off center right now and looks absolutely awful, but I’m too lazy to crop the image so right now that’s on me.

I almost never use the mobile version of InvestFeed, I have it downloaded and have used it maybe a total of 5 times but I largely prefer to be using the website on my laptop or desktop computer.

If you would like to join or learn more about InvestFeed please see the links below!

Main site — https://www.investfeed.com/login

Coinmarketcap — https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/investfeed/

ANN — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1989821.0

Twitter — https://twitter.com/investFeed

That wraps up this article and review and the first week of Altcoin Appreciation Month. Next week’s coins/tokens will be announced tomorrow on Twitter and InvestFeed. I am not associated with the InvestFeed team. I am a user of the platform and bag holder of the token.

If you would like to stay up to date on the articles posted here please follow me here on Medium, on twitter @thant1194, or on InvestFeed @thant11. Thank you and good luck trading.