Past ICO SCAM Analysis

[Dany44]

This thread is about past ICO.
We are reviewing blockchain projects that have already finished their coin offerings.
What were the great mission and purposes at the beginning and how the things are going on now?

Here you can find all our investigation reports

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[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Why You Can’t Take Polybius To the Bank



A banking project named after a video game of death, decides to become something else after raising $32 Mln

It’s in the name. The original dark meme that have given Polybius name its fame was indeed coin-related, but not the type of coins we are now accustomed to: not cryptocoins, but pennies.

Polybius, as urban legend has it, was a secret experiment of the US government, a coin-operated arcade game with a psychoactive and addictive effect.

First published on coinop.org (sic!), the creepypasta about Polybius, told the story of an obscure arcade game machine, regularly visited by men in black, who took note of high-scorers, is scary enough.

Players allegedly suffered from a series of unpleasant side effects, including amnesia, insomnia, night terrors and hallucinations, says the Wiki article describing this dark legend. Approximately one month after its supposed release in 1981, Polybius is said to have disappeared without a trace. There’s no proof that the game ever existed. I swear that I haven’t edited it to suit the story.

Our hero today is Polybius’ namesake. Seriously, the brave pack of adventurers behind the Polybius project named it literally after a legendary video game of death that never existed.

Despite this fact, the project raised about $32 Mln in 2017 on the promise essentially to be a bank. Now, the initial whitepaper isn’t accessible from the main website.

What the team forgot to mention

Let me spell it for you: Polybius’ team have decided they will not be a bank, but rather something else. After raising the money on the promise to be a bank, and not something else. Citing a EU directive that was adopted by the EU Parliament two years before their ICO as a new circumstance.

Delovõje Vedomosti, a respected business news publication from Estonia, where Polybius is incorporated, interviewed Polybius CEO a couple of weeks ago. The interview is a pure gem. Let me quote some, ehm, quotes.

Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition

When the project’s idea was being gestated, we thought to create a full-fledged bank that would offer all banking services from A to Z. But after having spoken with Europe’s regulatory institutions, we came to an understanding that from 2018 onwards, being a bank is not the most beneficial scenario. It is all about the upcoming changes on the banking market, and the data interchange - I mean the second payment services directive (PSD2), that will allow third-party agent access to european deposit-holders’ bank accounts.

Polybius CEO meant XS2A (Access to Account) set of requirements, a part of PSD2 directive. Of course it's adoption timeline  was known to be arcane and ever-changing, and still is. But, it was clear to anyone in the industry that PSD2 was going to become a law across the EU in the short-to-medium perspective.

Polybius token sale started on May, 31, 2017, and closed on July 5, 2017. PSD2 has been approved by the European Parliament in 2015. XS2A was being discussed in the banking and industry way before Polybius project was being “gestated”. It was a major point of interest way before Polybius  was even concieved. On June 5, 2017 it was even in the “Forbes” (US, not even European edition!) for God’s sake.

And Polibius CEO has a nerve to say that PSD2 have somehow changed the rules of the game for them. It was on the table all the time - not always clear, changing sometimes, but it was there.

Unidentified Fintech Object

Now, let’s see what is the team is up to. The interview continues: “Plainly speaking, with a window that big, we don’t need a door anymore, so we can concentrate on what’s important - on aggregation of payment and financial instruments”.

Basically, Polybius now is not a bank, but rather a service that allows their users to aggregate their financial products across various banks, using banking API prescribed by PSD2, - a single banking app for all accounts and services that person uses. This app will analise user’s spending habits, and offer them tips on how to acheive their financial goals. Essentially, a sort of meta-banking app comes to mind. Good, but does it worth $32M?

“How will you earn money?”, DV’s reporter asks. “Some services will be free, some  premium”, - reponds Mr. Turygin, before dropping a bomb that will surely send ice waves up their tokenholders’ spines. “Also, people’s financial information is a very powerful profiling source, that can be monetized by means of ad traffic.”

But the final chill is still to come.

“What kind of marketing needs tens of millions?”

”How will you spend thirty two million dollars?”, - asks the reporter. “On the team, IT support and development. But the larger part will be spent on marketing”. He said that. He said that. HE SAID THAT.

“What kind of marketing needs tens of millions?”, - the reporter is seemed to be clearly  stunned.

“The quality one. Conferences, television, Google, social networks. To run a successful ICO, hundreds of thousand dollars are needed. Funds are needed to develop the project, and make the world know about it, loudly. A successful fintech product launch, requires an enourmous expense, so millions are required to make a true quality product”.

I could rest my case here, ladies and gentlemen, but there’s the last one. Polybius website states that they are hiring the “Chief Legal Counsel”. Maybe, just maybe, if this was done 2 years before, things would be different now?

Looking into the crystal ball

What kind of future expects Polybius and the money of their investors? If we were in the year 2000, I’d look for Aeron chairs purchase for their offices - seeing that, I’d be sure the project was doomed.

I don’t know what’s the equivalent for Aeron these days, but if we somehow learn about lavish spending on office furniture, or even worse, the excited interviews in interior design magazines about how great and nice and easy and comfortable Polybius’ offices in Brussels (they have moved to Brussels, hell yeah) are, I’d be sure these people are done with.

Lessons learned

This market cries for regulation. What happened here? The team have changed the idea which they have more than successfully sold to crowd investors, after raising the funds. The effect of this change on the revenue is unclear. Token holders had no control over this decision.

ICOs: start regulate yourself before the government does. Make it a rule to have an independent director or two on your board with a veto power, to represent token holders. Voluntarily enforce corporate governance principles. Or daring expirementators and intrepid pioneers like Polybius will freaking drag us all to the bottom.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-why-you-cant-take-polybius-to-the-bank

[IconFirm]

Aaahhh yes - the polybius/hashcoins scam just goes on & on......

BCT moderators deleted the official polybius thread from the English section, so all that's left now is the russian thread which is full of shills or suckers who lost everything.....

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: How Anti-Stupidity Crypto Project Has Reached its Goals by Completely Failing



A failed crypto project that raised north of $19 mln, managed to increase the average IQ of the cryptomarket by removing a significant bunch of people too stupid to opera

I grew up in a plattenbau neighborhood, in a micro-district inspired by Le Corbusier. It is fashionable to despise this architectural style, but I must admit that I secretly love factory-built assembled plattenbau projects.

The thing is, I love them on the design sketches, on maquette miniatures, I love them in the imagination of their architects, I love them on 70s postcards of an idyllic, innocent urban landscapes of heartland’s France towns social housing developments (which we know ended up eventually converting into ethnic ghettos and welfare-subsidised slums).

They say mass-production buildings and vast spaces create ghettos. They blame Le Corbusier for their misery. Nonsense. Le Corbusier and his disciples aren’t to blame. The residents are.

Beautiful, well-thought projects of well-organized, frugal, cost-effective communal life was given to the people who weren’t enlightened enough to grasp the concept. They’ve brought their ignorance and prejudice to the bright world of the hopeful future, so that future never happened. If the same kind of people were given palaces as social housing, they would turn Versailles into a ghetto.

Well, 2017’s ICO rush have something in common with plattenbau. Technology isn’t to blame for humans’ stupidity. You may blame regulations, you may blame the lawlessness, you may blame whatever external factor there is, but sometimes, an ICO like that hype acts as a great equalizer, a machine to redistribute money between the stupid and the smart.

I have no pity whatsoever for the people who invested into the thing called BitcoinGrowthFund, that is said to have raised some $19 mln in May 2017, and is among the biggest ICOs of 2017. They got what they deserve.

A website with no information on the team, with a laughable white paper, no advisors got that kind of money.

The idea offered to the investors was essentially an investment fund: “you buy our coin, and we invest money into mining of cryptocurrencies with potential.”

They’ve had a wallet on the site, which showed the increase of the investment, but many people complained that when a withdrawal was attempted, the transaction simply did not take place. “Withdrawal of your money is more important than investing as if we cannot withdraw what is the sense of investing,”  asked one poor soul on bitcointalk. Mua. Ha. Ha.

Seems legit

Legally this is not a scam at all, and it took almost no effort to fool so many people. These people were quite straightforward: “MCAP tokens are not participation in the Company and MCAP tokens hold no rights in the said company. MCAP tokens are sold as a functional good and all proceeds received by Company may be spent freely by Company absent any conditions. MCAP tokens are intended for experts in dealing with cryptographic tokens and Blockchain-based software systems.”

They were telling the truth from the very start. BitcoinGrowthFund web is not updated since November 2017.

Even if sneaky Hindus behind this gig have spent every single penny they’ve raised on coke and New Dehli’s finest escorts, it’d still a better use for the money than it was in the hands of their so-called investors.

“Due diligence” wasn’t called that for nothing. Because it is a diligence that is due in some circumstance.

Criminally stupid

Normally, I’d keep preaching that ICOs should start adopting regulations, better corporate governance, and so on and so forth. Not now. No regulation wouldn’t have helped here. It is like blaming plattenbau developments for ghettoization. Technology and laws aren’t to blame. People who invested in this kind of crap have to blame only themselves.

Don’t be like these people. Invest smart.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-how-anti-stupidity-crypto-project-has-reached-its-goals-by-completely-failing

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Borderline Porn May Help Substratum to Bootstrap


This ICO is a good tech, but are perverts the only ones who are really willing to pay for the freedom of the Internet?

If Silicon Valley’s scriptwriters aren’t secretly paid by the Blockchain community, they should be. Look how many successful ICOs more or less replicate Pied Piper’s idea from the series- you remember that, hosting insurance company’s critical data on fridges worldwide, decentralized Internet and so on?

Filecoin. Storj.  And Substratum. The last one, a relatively modest player in terms of amount raised (about $13 mln), offers not a decentralized file storage, but rather decentralized hosting and content delivery network, with integrated cryptocurrency payment platform for the hosted services. This means one can host their content and receive payments for it in a decentralized manner.

Road ahead

Their concept seems to be well-thought, and the white paper foresees the most obvious questions.

Sort of Tor-meets-AWS thing, where anyone can host a portion of someone else’s content on a node run even on their PC, and earn money every time this content is served to someone. Accessible, unlike Tor, for non-initiated, from a normal browser, with no plugins or extensions. $SUB token is used to pay off people who provide CPU time and disk space for the decentralized network.

Screw the establishment! Hail Net Neutrality! Long live the freedom of expression! At this point, Silicon Valley set gradually transforms into Mr. Robot’s. Fade off.

Yeah, right. Well, now shake your head and try to breathe out the hypnotic atmosphere of official telegram groups; these mostly look like a boys’ band fan club chat.   

Make no mistake, Substratum is a good performer, and seemingly a good tech. It has more than decent team. They keep their roadmap ($SUB people expect the public beta this April). They maintain communication. They didn’t erase their whitepaper after the token sale ended. They don’t change the idea.

There are even rumors that the team intends to run ads on CNN, CNBC and Fox Business News soon (which may, in theory, attract users to the network and/or $SUB buyers). That’s all good, or as good as one can get in a market as immature and untamed as ours.

But how big is the market for the problem they offer to solve? Do they have a chance to become a global operator? Or will Substratum be confined to a niche, as a solution for the gray zone of the Internet? How many paying people are actually willing to pay for the Internet “to be a free and fair place for the entire world?’

“Your margin is my opportunity”

I’d respectfully disagree with Substratum’s white paper’s authors though when they say that “The primary issue with web hosting in its current form is that is incredibly expensive! It can cost upwards thousands of dollars per month solely to host the site files—this doesn’t include any maintenance costs or additional security. This makes it incredibly difficult for small or medium-sized businesses to have a strong web presence without incurring significant costs.”

Well, a small or medium-sized business normally doesn’t need “a strong web presence” that incurs that kind of costs. If that’s the market they aim for, well…

Substratum white paper claims that, since they will only charge for click, not uptime as AWS, they’ll be able to reach a level of prices “less expensive than current industry standard hosting.” Larger hosting companies margins are pretty high (Rackspace’s EBITDA margin was above 35% before it became private in 2016, and stopped publishing quarter results - the NOPAT margins were much lower, about 7.8% though), so, as Jeff Bezos said, “your margin is my opportunity.”

Individual nodes won’t have the kind of overheads, taxes,  infrastructure or costs of a hosting company, so the assumption of much lower price is feasible.

Another question is whether node owners would settle for that technically feasible lower price. They don’t have the scale of the large company, so they must be kept motivated.

Imperfections

Notwithstanding that, some users will install a node without commercial interest, to browse Substratum network (like they do in Tor) in a decentralized mode, especially in countries with a high level of Internet censorship and state control. It is unclear whether these non-professional participants will be enough to keep Substratum running. Substratum will install and run several supernodes to maintain the network to address this issue in early stages of network growth, though.

Neither it is clear how much resources one should commit to earning a meaningful income. It will be a function of the number of sites in the network and the traffic to them from the region which is close to the node. The latter is important because Substratum protocol attempts to provide data from the geographically-closest nodes.

Another possible problem that remains would be the volatility of the token, i.e., susceptibility to price manipulation, so that either hoster’s expenses may increase in an unforeseen manner, or, vice versa, nodes income may fall. Prolonged periods of token price instability may disrupt the network and make it unreliable. This is true for many projects, of course.

Also, the network architecture may be susceptible to fraud to a certain degree. If the node owner determines what content it stores (nodes aren’t supposed to know that, in Substratum architecture), a fraudulent scheme is imaginable: false bit traffic is generated, which is then “served” by the node, who then claims rewards.

If the node or group of nodes is big enough, it may theoretically accumulate enough content to be selected by Substratum DNS with a high probability, so this kind of spoofing operation is possible.

The Internet is for porn

All good inventions of the human race are first used either for killing fellow humans, or to distribute pornography or prohibited substances. There’s almost no exceptions from this rule, and Substratum certainly isn’t one of them.

I am sure that, the obvious market for Substratum services, that will help it grow in the medium term, will be specialty and fringe online porn, and illegal/fringe pharmacy/drug sales. Anonymous hosting + anonymous content delivery + anonymous payment platform = that’s practically an invitation for porn peddlers and drug dealers.

I am not a moralist, so I see these businesses as acceptable as any other unless someone gets hurt against their will.

Substratum’s team claim that there’d be an internal governance procedure of the network allowing to take down obviously malicious players (like child pornography) from the network. If that doesn’t happen, the network may attract the unnecessary attention of the state or states.

Many of the Hollywood celebrities were engaged in porn before they became famous. But many others never left porn, and never had the luck to enter the spotlight. What fate awaits Substratum?

The state and the states will be watching Substratum unless it is well-governed from within, or even if it is.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-borderline-porn-may-help-substratum-to-bootstrap

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Tezos, Crypto King for a Day



What happened with Tezos, one of the largest ICOs to date, which lost control of most of its funds due to infighting

The unlaunched token entered into CoinMarketCap on Oct. 2, 2017 at $1.66 per token and despite the failings of the rest of the organization, which is facing numerous lawsuits and serious infighting, the token is trading at, as of writing, $3.05, an 84 percent jump in value since its debut.

However, the token has still not been officially launched or made available to the public for purchase, so no one actually owns these unreleased tokens. It’s too bad that this infighting has kept investors from their money and earned gains.


Crypto King for a day

Tezos erupted onto the market with its astounding $232 mln ICO, but quickly lost control of most of its funds due to infighting and now trying to stave off pending legal cases. The biggest issue is the fact that the company is a Swiss-American cheese sandwich that is entangled in Swiss law.

According to Swiss law, the foundation is to be independent of the company and it holds the purse straps in this operation, leaving the other partners out in the cold. Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, the ones in the cold, are the holders of the Tezos source code via a Delaware-based company, Dynamic Ledger Solutions.

To gain back control of all the ICO-raised capital, the Breitmans have been trying to oust the head of the foundation, Johann Gevers. Of course, he was not having it and was fighting back, accusing the pair of character assassination.

Fighting for control

Since the start of February 2018, Gevers has restructured the board and added a new member in an effort to continue to fight. However, later in the month, it was announced that the entire foundation board, Gevers and two others, have voluntarily resigned.

This resignation has opened the way for Tezos’ community members to step in and take over. Under the assumption that the token could officially be released to the public and that the investors get back their contributions- remember that 85 percent gain!

According to the press release on February 22, 2018:

“The foundation is preparing itself to assist in the timely launch of the Tezos network.”

Radio silence on release

After all the shake-ups in February and promise by Breitman to “go rogue and release the token in the new few weeks,” Tezos tokens remain behind a thick wall of glass, tantalizing those who invested, only to see their investment grow but be unable to pluck it like a ripe green plum.

While there were many promises made to deliver, investors are growing tired of hearing excuses after a nine-month wait since the ICO closed. Usually, investors get their tokens within a month or two after the close of the ICO investment period.

Furthermore, there have been allegations made that technical progress has not been made, due to the fact that there are no funds to pay developers which have abandoned ship.


Silver lining: hope and appreciation

Despite the deluge of bad news, that would usually decimate a company’s stock price, Tezos token has appreciated, causing some to believe that it will actually be worth something in the end.

However, given the lawsuits and empty promises that Tezos was to go rouge and release the token, nothing has happened in six weeks from this promise. Leading many to believe, this token, like the many others before it and after it are destined for the ICO dustbin. 

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-tezos-crypto-king-for-a-day

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: What Remains From Bancor’s Initial Boom



Bancor offered greater liquidity to the cryptocurrency market, but did it live up to its promises?

The name Bancor is reminiscent of a large corporate bank, an institution that you could trust putting your savings into. But not everything is in a name. Big banks can go bust, too. Remember that diversification is key.

Big Bang

Bancor entered the market with a boom in July 2017 by raising $153 mln in only a matter of hours. Investors loved what they saw, a new ICO and a new kind of coin called smart tokens.

Eyal Hertzog, co-founder and product architect of  @Bancor, explained its approach to helping online economies scale horizontally:

“Since online economies use their own unique currencies, economic growth means that participating businesses will see the value of their tokens grow, enabling them to scale their operations as well.”

According to the Bancor website, the benefits of the so-called smart tokens are as follows: the Bancor Protocol is a technical revolution allowing tokens to be converted without matching two parties with opposite wants. The magic is in the math, with a simple formula balancing buys and sells so that every token in the network maintains a formulaic relationship to others. The result is continuous liquidity regardless of trade volume or exchange listings.

A “Smart” Token knows when to leave

Bancor protocol enables anyone to create a new type of digital coin called Smart Token, which can hold and trade other tokens. This allows the Smart Token contract to serve as its own market maker, automatically providing so-called price discovery and liquidity to other coins.

So effectively, Bancor has created an exchange that will automatically price and trade any cryptocurrency that the user wants to list with it, as well as tokens. The company says it will always have enough liquidity to make the market because the currencies have to build a reserve in Bancor tokens. Remember, new tokens are tied to Bancor.


Shower your neighbors with tokens

While it seems useful in some regard, the logic is still a bit fuzzy and lost when you get down to the matter. There is a reason why 50 percent of ICOs fail.

The website claims that you can issue token for your neighborhood. This would allow us to go back to medieval days where every town had its own currency, and that would not be too useful, considering how far we have come since that time. The exchanges would be kings with all the commissions and fees they would make from all the conversions to transact.

Sinking ships suck down survivors

According to Professor Emin Gun Sirer, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, Bancor will continue to trail the market and its lack of price discovery will diminish any smart tokens created from it.

This, in essence, will keep those coins from growing beyond that of Bancor’s price, remember they are tied together. In other words, the tokens created off Bancor have no chance to thrive. When the parent coin is going down, Bancor will take them down, too. Tim Draper, billionaire venture capitalist, and backer of Bancor argues otherwise that it will give liquidity to the market. If you bought Bancor, then liquidity is great, because you will want to sell it as fast as you can.

Boom to bust

When Bancor token debuted on July 17, 2017, it entered the market at $4.49 per token. By November 2017, it has crashed down to $2 per token losing 50 percent of its value in four to five months.

On January 17, 2018, the token price spiked up to an all-time high of $10.27 per token, only to suffer a major crash, as the whole crypto market fell to the bears later in the month and the entirety of February. As of writing, the token as sunk to lows in hovering around high $2, low $3 range, still below that of its initial-entry-market price of $4.49.

Source: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-what-remains-from-bancors-initial-boom

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: How $1 Worth Company Manages $50 Mln ICO

Even if this project is a Titanic, their comms team is not playing waltzers on the deck good enough

What if I told you there is an ICO with tokens whose utility was to facilitate online eSports tournaments and wagers?  A further discount in a discount crypto-based games store? In an unofficial Android-only store? What if the proceeds of their token sale were officially meant to support an ecosystem where the token publicly offered, wasn’t the center, but rather being “a close cousin” of the principal currency of the project? With a team that already have been involved in several other projects, and constantly adding new things?

Doesn’t sound like a treat for you? For me neither. How much do you think this ICO would score? Zero? Hundred Thousand? Million? Ten Million? Billion?

MobileGo, “The first crypto-centric Mobile Gaming Platform and store for in-game purchases,” scored more than 50 mln bucks at the time.

Let’s fast forward MobileGO year since the end of their ICO.

Share capital $1

According to the Corporate Registry of the Republic of Serbia, Gamecredits, d.o.o. (Serbian for LLC, limited liability company) has a share capital of 100 Serbian Dinars (about $1.04- that’s right, exactly one dollar and four cents). The company has been registered on June 06, 2017, a week or so after MobileGo ICO closing date.

Its founders are two Russian citizens: Mr. Sergey Sholom, presented as a CEO of Gamecredits (he isn’t officially), and Mr. Alexei Migitko. Actual managing director of Gamecredits d.o.o, as Serbian authorities are concerned, is Mr. Migitko.

According to the Serbian corporate law, unless there’s proven misconduct and misappropriation of company’s assets by its founders, they are not responsible for its debts. Coins and tokens aren’t even obligations.

Product

None so far. As far as the original whitepaper is concerned, the company is several months late to deliver. MobileGo’s community manager Jack Kuveke, when asked to comment on the issue, said:

“Our roadmap changed due to new partnerships. So we began working on a new store version to be released this spring which will have an integrated Unity distribution system to allow unity games to publish to our store easily. This spring to summer [2018 - Cryptocomes] is when first mgo features and our store will see releases.”

Mr. Kuveke refers to the deal Gamecredits stroke with Unity, the gaming platform, signed in November 2017. An important achievement for the company indeed. Yet, the roadmap hasn´t been updated since. “We will have a new timeline/roadmap released in the fast-approaching future,” said Mr. Kuveke to CryptoComes on April 19, 2018.

Questionable assumptions

MobileGo means to differentiate itself from the competition (at least two other cryptocurrency projects have issued Unity support after Gamecredits/MobileGo did) by offering a possibility to publish Unity games in their own crypto-centered store. MobileGo store is thought to attract developers offering lower commissions and quicker payouts than Google’s or Apple’s. Unity didn’t announce partnerships with other projects as it did with Gamecredits though.

So, MobileGo´s strategy is, apparently, to have gamers install an alternative app store, available, obviously, for Android only.  At least 50 percent of the funds are expected to be spent on marketing (i.e. acquisition of the user base).

The white paper says that in China there are more than 200 successful alternative app stores; that makes its authors think that there is a potential for alternative app stores in Europe, and North America, where currently 98% of play stores are monopolized by Apple and Google.

Well, the reason that alternative markets flourish in China is simple: Google PlayStore is banned, and the most successful alternatives are owned by Tencent, Baidu, China Telecom and other giants of the Middle Kingdom.

MobileGo’s white paper has made a questionable assumption. Specifically, they implied that it is as easy to acquire a user for a game as it is for an app store. It seems that they’ve omitted an entire stage of the sales funnel- their user acquisition costs would be higher than projected. And remember, even Amazon, with all its power, is barely visible compared to PlayMarket.

Present imperfect

Attempts of a cargo cult Elon Musk knock-off media appearances aren’t exactly playing out for MobileGo CEO. Mr. Sholom travels quite a lot, participates in forums organized in UN and UNESCO offices, mingles with Serbian Royal family (Serbia is a republic, and the descendants of the royalty are purely ceremonial figures) and delivers pretty much the same speech since the end of the ICO.

MobileGo´s community team stopped showing up in Bitcointalk thread of MobileGo where some participants have grown increasingly critical of the project tardiness and lack of communications. “We are restructuring our communications channels,” said MGO’s spokesperson when asked for the motive of the decision.

The main website of GameCredits has a prominently displayed link to a Chinese exchange that stopped operations late 2017. The team either don’t care or don’t know. A final touch is the motto that GameCredits’ PR person brandish on the official website:

“The less you ask, the happier I will be.”

Credit is due to GameCredits though, they were fully collaborative when I contacted them to check out a couple of details when preparing this article.

Anyway, despite all their desire to look otherwise, the overall impression of MobileGo is that the project is messy, riddled with imperfections and non-professional. The communication team seems to be seriously out of their league; during the first stealth phase, the communication is arguably the most important task and the comms team didn’t exactly match the challenge of doing that as one may expect from a company that worth 50M dollars.

Let me put this straight: even if this project is a Titanic (and especially if this is a Titanic), their comms team is not playing waltzers on the deck good enough. And only God knows what is happening in its engine rooms. 

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-how-1-worth-company-manages-50-mln-ico

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: EOS, an ICO Success Story

An ICO that has succeeded despite banned distribution in America is gearing up

Out of the many ICOs that fail, EOS is not one of them. The ICO is 345 days long and raised some $700 mln during the first phase of the ICO. The most recent reports indicate that the ICO raised 5,148,884.15 ETH, that is more than $2.833 bln, or 5.2% of all ETH currently available. That makes EOS the largest fund-rasing ICO to date! EOS token opened up at $1.03 and at time of writing is now worth $11.29 a gain of 996 percent.

If you invested $10,000 at the opening price, you would now have almost $110,000! Not bad for about a year’s wait.

What Drives EOS’ Success?

EOS has been successful due to a number of factors.

• It is an ERC20 compatible token, which is distributed on the Ethereum Blockchain pursuant to a related ERC20 smart contract. Ethereum’s smart contracts offer a lot of versatility for cryptos built on that platform, which lead to better business-related uses.
• EOS incorporates a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus protocol. This protocol is similar to a republic whereby members of the community delegate the responsibility of verifying transactions to elected witnesses. In other words, this is a crypto that is not mined but rather is based on producers, who create something.
  
• EOS can process millions of transactions per second through horizontal scaling. This is a major achievement over Bitcoin and Ethereum Additionally, this will make it possible to create Dapps that are indistinguishable from their centralized counterparts.

EOS Team, Rockstars of the Cryptoverse

Not only do the above capabilities help EOS to rise to the top, but there is also an amazing team of Blockchain and crypto professionals behind the company.

1. Brendan Blumer- CEO: Brendan Blumer is the Founder and CEO of block.one, the publisher of EOS.

2. Daniel Larmier- CTO: Launched Bitshares and Steem

3. Ian Grigg- Partner and financial cryptographer

4. Brock Pierce- Partner: Former child actor, he created the first ICO token, Mastercoin, aka Omni.

This C-Suite has been able to fund and drive EOS on the proper path and lead it to success. However, there have been some issues in distributing the ICO and token.

US Citizens are not allowed to buy ICO tokens

No ICO is perfect, in fact, there is a big problem for EOS in the United States. US Citizens and US. Entities are not allowed to buy EOS coins because the US is in the midst of trying to regulate ICOs, and for good reason, because many of them are scams.

Block.one does not believe that the distribution of EOS Tokens or the EOS Tokens themselves are securities, commodities, swaps on either securities or commodities or similar financial instruments.

The EOS Tokens are not designed for investment or speculative purposes and should not be considered as a type of investment. Nevertheless, US citizens, residents and entities should not purchase or attempt to purchase EOS Tokens due to the rules laid down by the SEC.

Author’s note: Being US-based, I went over to the EOS website and low and behold, it is true I am not allowed to click the link to purchase EOS tokens. However, you can easily get around this with a VPN.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-eos-an-ico-success-story

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: The DAO Split ETH and Subsequently Destroyed itself

The DAO: the Ethereum-based coin that hard forked Ethereum and blew itself out of existence

The DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization - was one of the spectacular ICO failures. After collapsing, it simply ceased to exist. It is not searchable on CoinMarketCap. An error in its software code was exploited by hackers and $50 million of its $168-million ICO-raised funds were stolen, leaving investors frenzied to sell and get out as quick as possible. The result was a massive price collapse, subsequent delisting from exchanges and eventual abandonment.

The short-lived DAO was a game changer, as it burst forth to introduce a paradigm shift in the way of thinking about finances in the digital age. The now-defunct DAO was meant to operate a venture capital fund for the cryptocurrencies and decentralized space.

The lack of a centralized authority would reduce costs and, in theory, provide more control and access to the investors. This is a massive benefit for investors who want to reduce trading and maintenance fees.

Smart complex contracts - maybe too complex?

DAO operated a complex Smart Contract code with many features. The contract system would have allowed companies to make proposals for funding. Once a proposal was white-listed by one of the curators, the DAO token holders, or investors,  would then need to vote on the proposal.

If the proposal got a 20 percent quorum, the requested funds would be released into the white-listed contractor's wallet address. This idea was revolutionary in the way that investors could make proposals and then be funded by democratic voting principles. This was great on paper, but when it came to coding it, problems arose.

Code carefully

When the DAO smart contract was created, the coders did not take into account the possibility of a software command known as a recursive call. The fact that the smart contract code first sent the ETH funds and then, only after sending the funds, updated the internal ledger balance, meant that the code could be exploited to drain accounts for more than the balance. In this case a recursive call could keep taking funds from the account before the ledger had a chance to reconcile itself. This is what allowed hackers to steal some $50 mln worth of Ether.

Soft Fork, Hard Fork, DAO is done

To remedy the hacking situation and correct the coding, action was taken by the Ethereum community with the use of a soft fork in the software coding that was designed to essentially go back and void all past transactions on the blockchain, including the hack which transferred the $50 mln worth of Ether.

The complex smart contract had what could be called an escrow account that all transactions had to pass through and wait 28 days before being allowed to be cashed out. While the hacker waited for his transactions to clear the soft fork took place and voided his withdrawal.

Or, this is what was supposed to happen, but did not. Further drastic action had to be taken and a hard fork was proposed. The hard fork would allow all the transactions to be voided and essentially reverse the withdrawal of all DAO back into Ether at 100 DAO to 1 ETH. 89 percent of the community supported the hard fork. With that step, DAO was done and Ethereum split into two tokens: the Ethereum we know today and what is known as Ethereum Classic.

While the DAO really had some great innovation behind it, its own coding and structure brought it down. The idea of an automated venture capital funding system is so so novel that it is bound to appear again under the guise of a new name and better coding.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-the-dao-split-eth-and-subsequently-destroyed-itself

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Mysterium, an ICO as Mysterious as the Name

Mysterium offers a decentralized VPN powered by users renting out unused network capacity.

Lithuania-based Mysterium is a decentralized, private VPN powered by Blockchain technology. It is an Open Sourced Network allowing anyone to rent out their unused network traffic while providing a secure connection.

Bubble ICO: popped quickly, bubbled up again, burst

The Mysterium ICO debuted May 30, 2017 and raised more than $13 mln in the one-day ICO sale. The Mysterium token entered the market at $2.45. One month later, at the end of June, it was down to $1.66. At the end of July, it was down further to $0.74, sinking to $0.48 by the end of November, before rocketing up to more than $4.00 in January!

The gains were brief, as it came crashing back down below $1.00 in January and has stayed there since that time. Mysterium was listed on Bittrex before it was removed earlier in 2018, possibly due to the crash in the price. According to the Mysterium team on the Reddit ADA in March 2018:

When the MYST token has been integrated in the VPN and nodes with the payments system we will be able to apply for relisting. We are also in the final stages of negotiations with several exchanges for listing. As mentioned previously we will be listed on at least one medium size exchange and a decentralized one. MYST is currently listed on: centralized- Liqui, BigONE; decentralized - IDEX, ForkDelta.

Additionally, according to the Mysterium Website, there will be a second ICO sometime in 2019. Perhaps, the second coming of an ICO will help lift the company back up.

Much potential, but lack of action scares investors 

It is rather surprising that Mysterium did not do better considering the privacy services that it offers to users:

- Focus on network participant benefits

- Private data is decentralized

- Obstructed access of your data for third parties

- Perfect competition sets fair price

- Essentially, you get paid to rent your unused network capacity

Since the first ICO almost one year ago, Mysterium has been pretty quiet about what is developing. A second AMA was held on April 19, 2018 on Reddit, but there have been no updates as to what questions were selected and answered. Investors need to see the progress of the technology to realize the potential to invest.

Possible prosperity ahead

While Mysterium might seem like one of the many ICO losers, it had a massive spike in January before falling back down. That spike makes it stand out in the crowd of failed ICOs. A second ICO on the horizon and a pending response to the Reddit AMA give hope that Mysterium will rise from the ashes like the Phoenix.

Furthermore, this coin was designed to facilitate more secure internet usage. Aside from working on establishing entirely private internet usage, Mysterium focuses on providing the users of its technology with an internet connection that is solid, stable and secure. Globally, the internet is challenged by many regimes and oppressive governments, and not everyone has an established fast internet connection, or any connection at all.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-mysterium-an-ico-as-mysterious-as-the-name

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Polkadot, Wait, What Does it Do?



A Blockchain that offers scalability and interconnectivity, but yet with no inherent purpose raised $345 in 2017 in an ongoing ICO.

It’s a rather curious case about Polkadot. If you ask around, not many have heard of the coin, which has raised some $345 mln! The ICO started on October 14, 2017 and was finished in just three days, on October 27, 2017.

This is a bit of a mysterious coin because its position is that it is a Blockchain designed to be just that: a generic Blockchain without any special purpose.

The following passage is an excerpt from the white paper:

Polkadot is a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain. This means that unlike previous Blockchain implementations which have focused on providing a single chain of varying degrees of generality over potential applications, Polkadot itself is designed to provide no inherent application functionality at all.

Rather, Polkadot provides the bedrock “relay-chain” upon which a large number of validatable, globally-coherent dynamic data-structures may be hosted side-by-side. We call these data-structures “parallelized” chains or parachains, though there is no specific need for them to be Blockchain in nature.

What Polkadot attempts to do is to take create the scalability and interconnectivity that is missing in the Blockchain sphere.

Three pillars of Polkadot

Governance

Polkadot holders have complete control over the protocol. All privileges, which on other platforms are exclusive to miners, will be given to the relay chain participants (DOT holders), including managing exceptional events such as protocol upgrades and fixes.

Operation

Game theory incentivizes token holders to behave in honest ways. This mechanism rewards good actors while bad actors will lose their stake in the network. This ensures the network stays secure. This ensures the network stays secure.

Bonding

New parachains are added by bonding tokens. Outdated or non-useful parachains are removed by removing bonded tokens. This is a form of Proof of Stake.

The founder

Gavin Wood is the co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum. He is also the founder, CTO, and Chairman of Parity Technologies Ltd, which is supplying the development team behind Polkadot. He is also the founder and President of the Web3 Foundation, which aims to nurture technologies that can benefit the envisioned Web3 ecosystem of a truly decentralized Internet.

Year-long ICO continues

So what we have here, is essentially a generic Blockchain that has not even had a genesis yet. The genesis block is supposed to occur in Q3 2019. Strangely, the website states there is an inherent risk that it might not happen at all:

Due to the decentralized nature of Polkadot, there is no guarantee that the Polkadot genesis block (to the extent that it is developed) will be deployed as intended or at all. As DOTs are native tokens to Polkadot, they will not come into existence, whether as part of the Polkadot genesis block or otherwise, if there is no deployment of the Polkadot genesis block.

Frozen funds lead to stalled plans

We might not see that genesis block after all.  The company developing Polkadot, Parity Technologies, reported that there was a significant vulnerability in the Ethereum parity wallet library contract and some 68 percent of the ICO-raised funds in ETH are frozen.

The funds were raised during an auction that took place for three days after the opening of the year-long ICO. At the end of the auction, the final DOT price was 0.109 ETH meaning that a total of 485,331 ETH was raised from the sale of the five mln tokens.

At the time of writing, the above ETH figure is worth some $345 mln. A very impressive figure from just an action. Despite the frozen funds, the team at Parity Technologies insists that they will meet the Q3 2019 launch date on time. This coin still has potential, yet its practical use case still must be proved for a better understanding of what it is supposed to do.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-polkadot-wait-what-does-it-do

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Paragon the Dope Dope

Anytime you mix drugs and cryptocurrencies, there is always disaster.

Anytime you mix drugs and cryptocurrencies, there is always disaster. The same goes for Paragon, a company that launched an ICO back on October 25, 2017. Despite raising more than $100 mln during the ICO, the token price tanked a day after the launch starting at $1.68 per token and falling down to $0.48 only three days later. On Dec. 21, 2017, there seemed to be something of a pump and dump when the token price surged to an all-time high of $4.11 and then crashed back down $0.52. Paragon is currently trading at $0.28 at time of writing.

While it is a novel idea to have Paragon run on ERC20 smart contracts, the world is just not ready for legal marijuana. Despite the gains it is making in some states in the US, it is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which keeps out major institutions, such as banks, which are key to helping the industry run. The fact that only a small percentage of the world’s population are using crypto, combined with an illegal substance spells disaster for the producer. That’s a train that is just not getting out of the station. Furthermore, its a bit of a crowded market out there in the marijuana crypto space.

What Paragon was designed to do

According to their website, the smart contract block train is supposed to cover two aspects of the so-called legal or medical marijuana industry: 1) linking the customer securely with a doctor who will write a prescription for the patient and then 2) remit that information to a dispensary to verify the product, and the entire supply chain, lab testing of the said product, ID verification of the patient, and the secure payment from the patient to the dispensary.

The team behind the smoke

Jessica VerSteeg CEO- Formerly Miss Iowa. Her motive behind Paragon was born out of tragedy, when her NFL boyfriend, who played for the New York Giants became addicted to opioid painkillers after suffering five concussions. This unfortunate addiction later led to his suicide. The idea is to promote Paragon as a non-addictive alternative painkiller.

Egor Lavrov, chief creative officer, is a Russian public relations specialist who earned his millions in web-based projects in Russia and abroad. He runs several online projects, of which Paragon is just one of them.

Lavrov and VerSteeg are married to each other.  

The lawsuit: Paragon up in smoke

In February 2018, Paragon was hit with a lawsuit, claiming that it violated the securities act. The lawsuit states that approximately between Aug. 15, 2017, through Oct. 16, 2017, the defendants raised at least $70 mln in digital cryptocurrencies by offering and selling unregistered securities in direct violation of the Securities Act.

It also stated that on Nov. 2, 2017,  Paragon ICO investors received an email updating them that during the Paragon ICO crowdsale they had collected 533 BTC and 8,092 ETH- worth approximately $7.3 mln and $10.2 mln, respectively, as of Jan. 12, 2018. Unfortunately, these amounts did not include any of the cryptocurrencies they collected during the Paragon ICO presale.

The presale, according to several sources claims, that the presale of some $33 mln was raised by family and friends only. There were no outside parties involved in the presale. Is that considered private gifts?

Cards stacked against

With the pending lawsuit and the gray area of marijuana, it is easy to understand why the token price has fallen so fast. While the idea of Paragon is nice on paper, the world is not ready for legalized weed just yet, and therefore, Paragon is ahead of its time.

Other Marijuana related cryptos



- Potcoin

- Tokken

- Hempcoin

- Cannabis Coin

Source: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-paragon-the-dope-dope

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: How Real Product Failed to Boost Token Sales

Small company offers microloans to stimulate economic well-being of developing nations, but its ICO results are mixed

The developing world has a challenge: people have the skills they need to start a business and bring themselves out of poverty, but there is no easy way for them to get the credit to buy the capital equipment they need to get started. According to Micromoney’s website, “100 out of 196 countries in the world serve as a home for two mln unbanked people, who use cash only, do not have any credit history and do not have access to any financial services.” Here is where Micromoney steps in.

It is an automated open-source credit and big data bureau that promises to provide instant credit check and microloans to users in 15 min via their smartphone. The platform also claims that users can pay lower interest rates and earn better credit scores the more they use the platform.

Crypto backed by a real product

Micromoney claims it is backed by a real product unlike many of the other cryptos out there. The following are important points made by the company:

- Built on Ethereum
- Smart contracts eliminate the intermediaries and provide fast service
- Open source software that is free and transparent  
- Financial inclusion of more than two bln people
- Create a digital identity
- Massive future growth and expansion into more than 100 countries

The ICO

For a small company founded in Cambodia, the token sale commenced on Oct. 17, 2018 and raised $10.5 mln. Despite what the company wants to do, the sales figures are a bit lower than expected. Despite that, the company has grown and expanded since its founding in 2015.

Short timeline of achievements

2015 — Cambodia: In December 2015, the company started with: $30,000 of initial capital, three employees, first 20 customers, and all the processes were executed in Excel and Google Docs.

2016 — Expanded into Myanmar. Work began to develop the Decentralized Credit Bureau, grew to 35 people working for the company. 23,000 unique registered users.

2017 —Expanded into Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand In 2017, the team increased to 85 people now 95,000+ unique registered users.

2018-- The company expanded into the Philippines and is ready to expand into the following countries:

- Hong Kong
- Vietnam
- China
- Malaysia
- Singapore
- Nigeria

The above countries have a large populace which will truly benefit from microcredits and loans. This will help raise the standard of living in these counties, too. The more people that can get the loans to start their businesses, the better their financial situation, which should spread to others and raise the quality of life over time.

The team behind the coin

Sai Hnin Aung -  Co-founder, COO. Serial Entrepreneur, experienced business development professional, investor, strategic leader, and executive with more than 18 years of experience in microfinance & financial services, new loan products initiative, risk management, business start-up, financial analysis.

Anton Dzyatkovskiy -  Co-founder, IT & Scoring. Lending Director in Everex, a payment crypto.

Token trading unimpressive

Micromoney (AMM) entered the market on Dec. 17, 2017 at $0.50 per token. In January, it rocketed upward to a high of $2.42 per token before falling back down in late January to $0.81 and then remaining relatively flat through March and April. At the time of writing, AMM is trading at $0.30 per token, rather unimpressive for all the expansion and growth taking place.

The coin is currently ranked at 747 on Coin Market Cap. On the one hand, this is a small company that is working in developing countries, on the other it has some great potential should it take off and continually grow and expand its operations. Perhaps, another ICO would be the shot in the arm this company needs to raise its profile among investors and the general public.

The link: https://cryptocomes.com/past-ico-review-how-real-product-failed-to-boost-token-sales

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Nebulas Not as Cloudy as Appears


Search engine for Blockchains? It will be needed soon to find the right Dapps

The token sale for Nebulas ended on Dec. 16, 2017, and it raised some $60 mln. It currently has a market cap of $345.5 mln and the token price is increasing in value since the ICO. The token debuted before the official ICO and it was trading at $4.58 when it entered the market in August 2017. At the time of writing, it was sitting at $9.71 per token, a 112-percent gain!

Nebulous Blockchain searches- no more!

One of the main problems that Nebulas tries to solve is searching for relevant decentralized applications (Dapps). As Dapps become more and more prevalent, being able to find the right Dapp to meet your needs will be harder and harder. That is why the value ranking will be vital in sorting Dapps. It will be akin to page rankings on a search engine, but for Blockchains and Dapps instead.

No forks at this table

The elimination of hard forks or fundamental programming codes changes that affects how the Blockchain functions. In the past year, there have been countless hard forks that have created new cryptocurrencies, and thusly, “parent-child” rivalries, such as the most notorious case, Bitcoin and it’s hard fork of Bitcoin Cash.

The latter, supporters like Roger Ver say, is the original Bitcoin! Without the hard forks, it makes it easier to manage a Blockchain and its nodes, the originator of the programming code, does not have to worry about miners and coders going rogue and splitting up the Blockchain. The idea behind the no forking is that the system should upgrade over longer periods of natural changes to the protocols and policies.

3 Pillars of Nebulas

The following are descriptions, taken from the website, of the three core technologies that will allow Nebulas to develop continuously and naturally.

1. Value Ranking: Nebulas Rank (NR) provides a measure of value for every unit in the Blockchain. It is the core ranking algorithm and was open sourced. The algorithm is based on liquidity, propagation of users' assets, and the interactivity between users. NR is used to rank addresses, smart contracts, Dapps and other entities on the Blockchain.

2. Self-evolving: Nebulas Force (NF) enables Nebulas to respond to new demands without forks. It provides the Nebulas Blockchain and its distributed applications built on top, the capability to self-evolve. In this way, developers are able to make changes, incorporate new technologies, and fix bugs without needing to hard fork.

3. Native Incentive: Nebulas Incentive (NI) rewards devoted Nebulas developers and virtuous users. Incentives are the driving force of Blockchain evolution. The Nebulas Incentive includes Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP) and Proof of Devotion (PoD).

Development team

The China-based team behind Nebulas has some developers who are responsible for creating Antshares or what is now known as NEO.

Hitters Xu- Founder and CEO of Nebulas, Founder of AntShares, now known as NEO, a Blockchain pioneer in China, the former Director of Ant Financial's Blockchain Platform, Alibaba’s financial branch and part of Google's Search & Anti-Fraud team.

Robin Zhong- Nebulas co-founder, former architect of Ant Financial's Blockchain Platform, former Senior Development Director of Dolphin Browser, Leader of Game Division.

Aero Wang- Nebulas and NEO co-founder, initiator of OpenIP and IP Community, a serial entrepreneur in Blockchain industry.

With a strong development team, mission, vision, $60 mln raised, and most importantly an actual purpose, Nebulas has some strong potential.

Ypu may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Aeternity For All Eternity?

Claiming to be better than Ethereum, Aeternity is rising up, but what does it do?

The scalable Blockchain platform was launched out of Germany on June 1, 2017. The initial token price was $0.68 and now, at the time of writing, is trading at $4.70 per token, a 591 percent gain!

The ICO raised some $24 mln from approximately 8,000 investors over a two-week period. The mission behind Aternity is similar to many of the ERC20 tokens out there: to be similar to Ethereum, but better by introducing more complex technologies layered on top of the smart contracts system.

Premise of technology

Aeternity offers a network of state channels, which enables the exchange of value with anybody in the world in a trustless way.

Users can interact privately with each other and businesses can keep their records off-chain and not in public view. Additionally, users can have infinite almost instant transactions because the Blockchain is needed for adjudication or transfer of value. Furthermore, to facilitate the use of the smart contracts, Aeternity uses oracles to feed data into smart contracts which require it to transact.

Commodity prices, stock prices, weather conditions, the list is limitless on what parameters can be set by the smart contracts. The Aeternity Oracle Machine provides real-world data to the Blockchain. Each user can ask questions about the environment, surrounding the smart contract and the oracle provides the answer.

A consensus mechanism comes into play in case of disagreement. However, Aeternity takes an unusual step in having two consensus mechanisms on the Blockchain.

Danger of dual consensus mechanisms?

Oracles are generally singular, centralized data streams that often brings in security risks. To determine whether a supplied fact is true a new consensus mechanism has to be placed on top of the existing consensus mechanism. However, this strategy does not add security and if attacked it can be made to produce “false” values.

The development team of Aeternity is well aware of these security risks and is working on converging the two consensus mechanisms into one. This approach will reduce costs and increase security. By planning to decentralize the oracle, Aeternity will actually tighten the security of the network and the smart contracts developed on it.

The following excerpt  is taken from the website and describes the advantages of Aeternity:

“We present a highly scalable Blockchain architecture with a consensus mechanism which is also used to check the oracle. This makes the oracle very efficient because it avoids layering one consensus mechanism on top of another.”

It reads further: “State channels are integrated to increase privacy and scalability. Tokens in channels can be transferred using purely functional smart contracts that can access Oracle answers. By not storing contract code or state on-chain, we are able to make smart contracts easier to analyze and faster to process, with no substantial loss in de facto functionality.”

The team

The CEO and Founder of Aeternity, Yanislav Malahov, who had been working on Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and had envisioned using powerful algorithms for Ethereum. Now, he is using these algorithms for Aeternity.

There are 47 employees listed on the website, all of whom have a deep interest in Blockchain and a breadth of other related skills. Overall, there is a positive outlook on this company, which has risen up into the top 30 on coinmarketcap.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Ask the Oracle From Middleware



How a superior decentralized oracal technology reels from FUD

ChainLink is what is known as middleware or software that acts as a bridge between an operating system and a database, for instance. ChainLink allows smart contracts on various networks to connect to the resources they need to be successful.

In this era of getting rid of the middleman, ChainLink, while it has good application intentions, is going against the grain. Let’s dig into the financials before talking tech.

Big ICO, small price performance

ChainLink entered the market on Sept. 20, 2017 at $0.15 per token. It broke $1 in January 2018 for about 10 days hitting a high of $1.35 before falling, and falling back down into the depths. At the time of writing, it the price per token sits at $0.52.

Despite raising, some $32 mln during its month-long ICO throughout September and October, the token has not performed well despite the advanced technology. Betamax was also more advanced than the VHS tape but failed to achieve success despite its technological superiority. Some say it lost due to a rumor linking it to Porn- FUD from a bygone era?

Further compounding the price stunting has been all the FUD that has raked up and thrown into the media. There was a point where ChainLink was being called a scam. It seems that buying and selling the rumor is more the norm in the crypto-trading sphere, than buying or selling on the actual news. The FUD really put a wet blanket on the price.

A third factor is its partnership with SWIFT, while it might seem like a great partner, the idea behind cryptocurrency is to do away with antiquated, expensive payment systems. Unless, SWIFT will try to use Blockchain as a way to reinvent itself and become competitive with cryptocurrencies?

ChainLink tech: decentralized Oracal nodes

ChainLink is a decentralized oracle solution that bridges the gap between what is going on in the world and the Blockchain-based smart contracts. While smart contracts can only be executed internally on the Blockchain, there needs to be something that links external APIs to the Blockchain, so smart contracts can execute automatically based on real-world factors.

The problem with oracles are that they are centralized or owned by a company. There is a potential for bias in the information being transmitted by the oracal to the smart contracts.

When a third party provides the oracle service for executing smart contracts, that trustlessness or decentralization disappears.

ChainLink’s solution to this problem is that it is the oracle: decentralized oracles powered by Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens are what makes ChainLink the middleware. The data being sourced from the decentralized oracles is unbiased a not from a sole source but multiple sources which allows for better consensus and verification.

Dynamic Duo

ChainLink is run by two key players Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis. Nazarov began his career building peer-to-peer marketplaces, going on to the investment team at FirstMark Capital. He joined the cryptocurrency revolution in 2011. Ellis was previously a Software Engineer and Team Lead at Pivotal Labs, where he worked on securing sensitive HIPAA compliant data and building scalable payments automation software.

ChainLink offers a lot of fascinating technology but fails to deliver due to overblown FUD which has marred its reputation. While it has raised some $32 mln from the ICO, it could perhaps better market itself for a better market position. On Coinmarketcap, it is ranked at 103.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Qtum Wants to be Ether, But it’s Built on Bitcoin



What financials show for a hybrid between Ethereum and Bitcoin protocols?

Throughout the many Past ICO Reviews, a common trend has emerged: many tokens are ERC20, which are built on the Ether Blockchain. This should not come as a surprise because many innovative Blockchains with tokens want to do something more than be a payment-services solution. To do that, smart contracts come into play and Ethereum is the smart contract’s king. So it is no surprise why so many companies build on Ethereum.

What is surprising is that Qtum is not an ERC20. It is built on Bitcoin’s unspent transaction output (UTXO) transaction model combined with a proof-of-stake consensus model. The developers stated that these elements of the Blockchain make it better suited for business-enterprise systems.

Financials

Qtum entered the cryptocurrency market early in 2017 with a March ICO that raised $15 mln. While it seems small compared to what has been raised over the past six to nine months, it was the fourth biggest ICO in terms of funds raised at that time in March 2017. Token prices debuted at $6.40 in March 2017 and at the time of writing are up 202 percent to $19.34. CoinMarketCap has it ranked at 18.

But now comes the questions that every cryptocurrency fears to hear: what is it good for? What can it do?

Hybrid functions and subsequent tokens

One of the primary goals of Qtum is to be able to bridge the Bitcoin and the Ethereum world. What makes the software unique is that Qtum’s core technology combines a fork of Bitcoin Core, an Account Abstraction Layer allowing for multiple Virtual Machines, including the Ethereum Virtual Machine and Proof-of-Stake consensus aimed at tackling industry use cases.

21 Dapps and counting

Qtum has 21 Dapps on its page that are either working or a prototype. Many of them are their own coins and platforms such as Energo, which is built to measure and regulate clean energy produced within local microgrids- this model empowers consumers and allows community members to directly exchange energy in a system unburdened by the constraints of a traditional grid.

Designed with stability, modularity and interoperability in mind, Qtum is a toolkit for building trusted decentralized applications, suited for real-world, business oriented use cases. Its hybrid nature, in combination with a first-of-its-kind PoS consensus protocol, allows Qtum applications to be compatible with major Blockchain ecosystems while providing native support for mobile devices and IoT appliances.

Quantum Team

Patrick Dai graduated from Draper University and was previously employed by Alibaba.                                         
Neil Mahi has 20 years experience developing software and has four years experience in the Blockchain space.
Jordan Earls has been developing software since he was thirteen. Jordan has reviewed over 100 altcoins and identified multiple exploits in coins.
Patrick Dai, Qtum Project co-founder, said that Qtum intends to become a smart contracts platform for business. The Qtum project will make it easier for companies and industries to develop practical applications on top of Qtum. The project envisions a future consisting of automated business practices and seamless machine-to-machine communication. In March 2017, it was announced that PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PwC) would partner with Qtum.  “Having PwC, which has broad expertise across industries and a global network, support Qtum will help us fulfill our mission,” said Dai. Furthermore, the hybrid nature of Qtum will allow it to interact with Ethereum- and Bitcoin-based Blockchains for better compatibility capitalization.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: How Cobinhood’s Arrows Have Missed the Mark



Cobinhood’s tokens grew at amazing rate, but identity crisis and lost of banking access made it miss the target

It has been a rough ride for cryptocurrency exchange provider Cobinhood. Not only did the stock, and now crypto, exchange Robinhood sent them a cease and desist order because of similar name touting the same services, the Taiwanese company lost access to banking services for its customers. Meaning users could not send or receive fiat transfers to the platform.

To remedy this, Cobinhood has accepted stablecoin Tether, which is tied to the US Dollar at 1:1. Cobinhood’s claim to fame is its zero-trading fee. Before diving deeper, let's look at the ICO financials.

Big break out, bigger bust

Cobinhood’s ICO ran from September 13, 2017 to October 22, 2017 and raised $13 million. The entry native token price was $0.04 on September 30, 2017. At the time of writing, the price per token now sits at $0.08, a 100-percent growth.

While 100% looks like an amazing rate, it should be noted that Cobinhood hit a high of $1.52 on January 10th, 2018, a 3,700-percentage gain! But then over the course of a month, the price tumbled down to $0.25 by February 10th, and continued its slide to the present day.

Note that the token started trading before the launch of the exchange on December 17, 2017. CoinMarketCap rank is 305

Without bank access, buying crypto isn’t easy

Cobinhood’s banking partners decided at the start of 2018 that they would not do business with the exchange. It is assumed that this reasoning came about due to the nature of many banks not wanting to work with cryptocurrencies. This essentially strangled the exchange and put a burden on the users.

To remedy this, the exchange announced that it would enable Tether-based buys and sells. In other words, the user would have to hold Tether off exchange to make purchases on the exchange. This led to a crypto-for-crypto buys and sells. If you know anything about exchanges, then you know that this adds on more costs, fees, and waiting time for the user and this is not ideal.

Despite the Name, it Hangs in the Game

Despite the name and the issues with competitor Robinhood, it seems to be a technologically sound exchange. The company has taken several measures to ensure a quality experience with the exchange.  when the company performed a stress test to push the platform to its limits, the exchange averaged 1,154,284 orders and 10,142 order book updates per second for each trading pair — making it the first cryptocurrency exchange capable of true high-frequency trading. A rather impressive feat, considering the largest exchange Coinbase has had several meltdowns over the past 6 year when trading volume skyrocketed.

The Team

Popo Chen - CEO and Founder
Chen Tai Yuan is a 26-year-old serial entrepreneur who earned an Electrical Engineering master’s degree at the age of 22. At the age of 24, he founded 17 live streaming, a leading live streaming platform across Asia with more than 5M daily active users. In three months, 17 live streaming raised 10M USD.

Wei-Ning Huang - CTO and Co-Founder
Wei-Ning has three years' working experience at Google. Before that, he was an active open-source contributor and worked in the open-source space for more than five years. He specializes in building large-scale web applications with demanding throughput and availability. Wei-Ning is also an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, having five years of cryptocurrency trading experience and deep understanding of the blockchain technology.

Tony Scott - Advisor to Cobinhood and Former U.S. Federal Chief Information Officer
Tony Scott was the third U.S. Federal Chief Information Officer, serving from 2015-2017. During his tenure, he was involved in leading various digitalization and blockchain-themed projects as well as improving the cybersecurity of government.

The Bottom Line

Cobinhood is an interesting case because it has many users and a strong technology platform, and advised by the former U.S. CIO. 

However, the red flags are big ones: name contesting with Robinhood, loss of banking partners and thus the ability to buy and sell fiat, adding more steps and fees to a complicated process for new users. The native token has suffered much in the past few months almost returning to its starting position. The ICO raised a good bit of funding, but the subsequent hits have damaged the reputation.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: On VeChain Success Train



VeChain promises to verify products, link up logistics and end the black market

Singapore-based VeChain, a non-profit organization, was founded in July 2017 as a solution to product identification management with Blockchain technology: a unique ID for every product, combing Blockchain and encrypted ID. One month later the token was launched. Starting at only $0.23 on Aug. 21, 2017, VeChain has increased by 2,091 percent in eight month’s time up to about $5 and is ranked now 15 by CoinMarketCap.

Don’t get lost in logistics

VeChain is a Blockchain-as-a-service company that primarily focuses on supply chain logistics. In conjunction with developed smart chips, it essentially uses Blockchain and the Internet of Things to track products in real-time, keep counterfeit products out of supply chains, and allow retailers and wholesalers a glimpse at how products performed in various quality control tests.

VeChain suggests a solution to make every product traceable and verifiable. For the consumer, this means you will be able to verify that what you are buying is the real thing.

For example, wines, whiskeys, and down to the exact ingredients that went into making these fine products can be verified by using the tracking technology. Diamonds, pharmaceuticals, the list goes on. With verifiable products and ingredients, consumers will have confidence in what they buy. As more commerce moves online so will the money.

A system like this would weight heavy on the black market of knock-off goods, leading the way for its eventual consolidation and potential destruction.

VeChain currently works with:

- Luxury goods

- Liquor

- Auto

- Retail

- Agriculture

- Cold-chain logistics

- Logistics  

It’s all who you know

VeChain has been partnering with some large, well-known companies, which is really drawing some attention. It first partnered with Norway-based global assurance service company DNV GL to allow retailers to track products in real-time. But the big news was its  February 2018 announcement that VeChain and German car manufacturer BMW would be teaming up. In particular, VeChain will aid BMW in tracking its auto parts supply chain so as to eliminate child labor.

Partners:

- PWC

- DNV GL

- BMW

- Michigan State University

- Oxford University

The stress test

VeChain is the very first digital currency to pass the Cryptocurrency Disaster Recovery Plan (CDRP), according to PwC. The CDRP acts as a stress test for the crypto market, with the most serious and likely threats to virtual coin holders being examined such as loss of login info, virus infiltration, system crashes on virtual wallets, hardware damage, private keys compromised, etc. It was determined that VeChain responses to these threats were sufficient so as to protect the assets of token holders. This is similar as to what banks have to test for after the 2008 financial crisis but specific for digital assets.

New economy

Overall, VeChain looks like a success story from hundreds of failing ICOs. However, it is interesting to wonder if the ICO is the precursor for the next level of fundraising for new companies. As many companies start to move toward Blockchain adoption and development, the ICO just might replace the IPO in the next 10 to 20 years. It is hard to say how the market will function in the future, but there is no doubt that Blockchain and cryptocurrencies will be a part of the new economy of the future.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE