27.09.2017
This week turned out to be quite fruitful on interesting and technology-savvy ICOs. In a review that follows I’ll take a closer look at three of them: Storm, Cindicator and Icon.
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StormProject (USA)
Storm Market is a decentralized gamified venue aimed at performing Blockchain-based micro tasks. The project’s motto is “Earn anywhere, anytime, from any device”. Storm Market and Storm Tokens are based on their successful cooperation with Storm Play (previously known as BitMaker), a mobile application serving over 250,000 active users from 187 countries on a monthly basis, which has already made over 230 BTC payments to its participants.
The project’s success is because Storm users like mobility and the ability to earn easy money from their devices. Storm Market suggests three areas, in which participants can earn tokens: 1) Storm Play is an already existing popular mobile application remunerating users that manage to complete assignments; 2) Storm Shop incites users to make daily purchases by offering them bonus tokens; 3) Storm Gigs is freelance market platform based on gamification offering a wide range of micro task categories.
In our viewpoint, one evident problem is the outdated format of the freelance market still featuring a manual interaction mechanism between clients and performers, high commission fees and lengthy transactions. Storm Market aims to deal with this issue by using Blockchain technologies to automate the whole process. Commission fees for transactions will be only 1% instead of 10%-25% charged by the existing freelance portals; transactions will be instant, and relations between the participants in the freelance market secure and confidential.
The Storm Project is represented by a highly experienced team of specialists working together on the project for over 2 years and showing great results. The team’s key areas of specialization are engineering, design, data and marketing. The team’s leader, SIMON YU, has been successful as an entrepreneur, and the team members have worked in companies from the Fortune 500 list, have written over 25 academic articles and have registered 3 technology-related patents.
Well-known advisors, such as BILL SHIHARA, CEO of Bittrex cryptocurrency exchange, are supervising the project. TOM BOLLICCH is the founder and general manager of the company specializing in social gamification, a venue for employing seasonal workers. ANTHONY DIIORIO is CEO and founder of Jaxx, a cryptocurrency wallet.
Among the Storm Project’s strong points are:
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the solution is much needed by the freelance market,
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a ready product has over 1,000,000 downloads,
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it has the well thought-out whitepaper and strong and experienced team and well-known advisors.
Overall I tend to consider it a worthy investment.
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Cindicator Project (Gibraltar)
Cindictor creates a socio-technological infrastructure to make highly effective decisions given the new economics’ extreme uncertainty. By joining a multitude of varied financial analysts and a set of machine training models, the team develops a Hybrid Intellect infrastructure to effectively manage the investors’ capital in traditional financial and crypto markets. A same-name application, downloadable in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) Store and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Play, was launched at the end of 2009. The app features a game component, in which over 20 thousand analysts are making daily forecasts and getting points for right answers, and, what’s more, super forecasters get monthly cash rewards inciting them to a more thorough analysis of financial markets and the world of crypto assets.
CND is an ERC20 Ethereum-based infrastructure token required to create domestic economy in the Cindicator ecosystem establishing transparent and just relations between all the participants, including forecasters/analysts, financial investors, traders, data scientists and the Cindictor team. Future owners of CND tokens will get exclusive access to the Hybrid Intellect structure under development, namely, access to the traditional and crypto market indicators, ICO ratings, Telegram and Slack bots, notificators, products monitoring the current state of portfolios and other Cindicator internal analytical products.
Given much hype surrounding CND tokens, the Cindicator team had toabandon traditional ICOs in favor of the investors’ participating through the white list with a view to protect its ecosystem from speculators. Only 4,057 out of 33,000 applications for participation in the crowd sale have been selected, closing Hard Cap at USD 15,000,000. The token’s liquidity is also due to the fact that all the applications were submitted for the sum of USD 500,000,000 and not everybody was able to participate in the ICO.
For our fund we’ve decided to participate in this project as early as its Pre-Sale.
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ICON Project (Korea)
The Icon Project is, in our view, a unique project. It’s Korea’s first project that unites the activities of all major companies via their own Blockchain. ICON is creating an open source sorftware ecosystem enabling organizations, such as government agencies, universities, hospitals and financial organizations, to interact without using other networks that charge commission fees for transactions and hamper the whole process.
Icon aims to make users use ICX tokens to pay for products and services directly to the organizations cooperating with ICON Network. In fact, ICX will be a currency that will be used in real life to pay for various products and services; it’s the currency for the ICON blockchain, equivalent to Ether for Ethereum. ICX tokens can also be used to generate other ICON-based tokens.
Korea’sFinTech, estimated at $4Bn, launches the project. Currently, it is the leader of the Korean market with the largest Blockchain network, operating over 40 organizations in financial services, insurance, education and health care. The project has been under development for more than 2 years and has applications in real life. In August 2017, it launched its first Blockchain service, a KYC authentication platform with 25 securities companies; the project is currently operating. DAYLI Intelligence has over 100 employees, and most of them have largely contributed to the project. Inter-chain operations make ICON a Blockchin-agnostic platform. It will profit anyone, no matter which Blockchain will become the dominant platform in the future.
Despite ICON’s uniqueness and a number of positive aspects, it gives rise, however, to some concerns. It is not clear whether ICX tokens will be liquid before they transfer to their own Blockchain (to be launched supposedly in November 2017). Therefore, it has a longer block period compared to other ICO projects. ICON can face difficulties in going beyond Korea because of the language and culture barrier. In terms of regulations, there are some uncertainties in holding ICOs in Korea. If ICOs are banned in Korea (as it is the case with China), this will place some limits on the use of ICON. A maximum inflation amounting to 20% is rather high. Taking into consideration all of the above, I’d say there are some rather strong alternatives for the investment.