Di Iorio and Shrem to offer token rating service and Jaxx Unity reward coin

Anthony Di Iorio, CEO of multi-platform blockchain wallet Jaxx, and Bitcoin legend Charlie Shrem are close to launching a rating system for initial coin offerings (ICOs) and a rewards token, the Jaxx Unity Coin.

One of the founders of Ethereum, Di Iorio's Jaxx wallet supports a number of popular cryptocurrencies such as Zcash and Dash, and recently Jaxx added to its existing partnership with ShapeShift, some 70 other leading crypto companies including Coindesk, Bitrex and BitPay.

In the ever expanding world of ICOs, Di Iorio said the new ratings system will be a way to prioritise which projects to integrate into the Jaxx ecosystem. Shrem, who helped devise the system, is a Bitcoin pioneer who founded BitInstant and was a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation. He recently joined Jaxx as director of business and community development.

Di Iorio said: "The system we developed looks at many areas of the project: technical competencies, visibility of the founders, transparency of the project, where or not they have done something before that has been executed and done well. There are many different metrics that keeps a score and we can rate against other projects."

He said the teams behind projects that are ICOing will be interviewed as a podcast, so what they are doing and who they are will be transparent and the legal status of what they are doing can be examined; and the chances that they will execute their goals can be judged. Projects will then be placed in one of three tiers according to how well they scored, and thereafter will then be incentivised to move up a tier.

Di Iorio believes ICOs have become too easy a way to make money and, like many others, he thinks there are too many legal risks. He said the release of the Jaxx Unity Coin to power the Jaxx ecosystem and keep account of loyalty points will be distributed quite differently from the average coin offering. "We have figured out eight different ways to distribute the coins so that it doesn't look like an ICO at all," he said.

The exact details could not yet be divulged but Di Iorio guaranteed none of them involve buying anything for an investment. "We are not selling anything at a rate that you are going to get something at a certain rate of return.

"We will be giving some out to the VC round to get all the VC communities on board. We will be giving a percentage to our company too. We are also going to be doing bounties for doing work to promote our project – so for people that don't have money. We want to get people who don't have money also into our system as well.

"They can do it by promoting our project or setting up meetups. We have also got a number of other ways, including hardware, that are going to be distributing our coin and we got a very unique way to get people with money into the system without actually giving them a fixed amount of any investment or any return. It's about a specific physical product."

Di Iorio said the Jaxx Unity Coin is all about uniting the whole ecosystem behind one coin. It is part of a raft of innovations to be outlined in a forthcoming orange paper, alongside Jaxx Liberty, the new web-based platform.

There will be a focus on delivering a good user experience, so that the masses can be educated about this technology, he said, and rewards for people who learn about different cryptocurrencies.

"Jaxx Liberty is going to be our flagship product. There will be fully functioned block explorers, price charts and graphs, the rating system - and the wallet."