If the product is free, you are the product

Our story and the problems with new media

Introduction

This article is free. You can read it at any time from any of your devices. You can do so as many times as you want, whenever you want, as long as you have an internet connection.

But it was not free to write this article. Hours were put into researching the topic, building the audience, creating a relationship with the publishers, and managing and selecting the topics. And this was all done before writing the article itself.

But this article is free.

In fact, it is true that most content on the internet is free. We don’t pay for the blogs we read, the videos we watch, the podcasts we listened to. But someone is paying for it.

YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and some blogs, rely on advertisement for monetization, and as a result we are all manipulated by algorithms to buy things. Audiences click on content expecting truth and learning, but end up being persuaded to buy something. This is how most content gets made on the internet in 2018.

“The current system causes increasing amounts of misinformation…and pressure to put out more content more cheaply — depth, originality, or quality be damned. It’s unsustainable and unsatisfying for producers and consumers alike….We need a new model.
…

Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other “content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we get…well, what we get. And it’s getting worse.”

— Ed Williams, CEO at Medium

Medium differs from most other platforms because it does not have ads. However, the truth is that a big portion of the money made on Medium is still generated through sponsors.

In fact, all the money that this blog ever generated came from cryptocurrency companies that wanted us to write about them. We have always had a love/hate relationship with monetization because we always wondered “Is this adding bias to our articles?” and the answer is that it probably did.

The reality is that we want to have a tight relationship with our audiences much more than with our sponsors, and part of that is monetization. We want to attract people to read our articles, and not companies that want articles written about them.

I was so bothered by this that over the last 6 months I stopped writing articles, quit my job, and instead created a new way to monetize content. Before we get into what we built, let’s talk about content monetization: past, present, and future.

A Brief History of Internet Monetization

20 years before Medium blogs, there were RSS feeds. People could go to websites that effectively allowed them to subscribe through content aggregators. Effectively, you would download a program and that program would ask your subscriptions if they had new content. If they did it would send you a notification, similar to receiving an email.

Articles were free, and this was not out of charity. The internet was very new in 1999, and people did not trust putting their credit cards on it. After all, PayPal was not even existent, and nobody knew how it would develop. This was the beginning of an era of free content.

Around the same time, a search engine company called Google was born, and it had a crazy proposition. It would pair up things that people searched with advertised content that would match what people were searching. The highest bidder would see their content first; and so, a gigantic internet revolution started, and searches were free.

5 years later, a small social project called The Facebook quickly learned that people are eager to share their personal information with other people on their social circles. This information could then be sold to advertisers which would then use it to give ads with an extreme level of demographics customization. Another revolution started, the monetization of social media, and social media was free.

Over the next 13 years, these companies learned everything about us and created artificial intelligence that would target and sell us products at a scale that was hard imagine when it all started. The CEO of Medium (and founder of Twitter) knew the monster we created, and started a blog that would not show ads.

Medium

Medium’s mission is a simple one — to create a platform that focuses on quality articles.

Medium and its publishers are not evil corporations taking all the profits away from content creators. In fact, Medium has struggled to monetize so much that a year ago they let go of a third of its staff.

As of today, we are reducing our team by about one third — eliminating 50 jobs, mostly in sales, support, and other business functions. We are also changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on originally.
 — Ev Williams, CEO at Medium

If you read a paragraph like that you would assume that this company is failing because people are not using the product. But it may surprise you to discover that this happened while Medium grew the fastest its ever grown.

In terms of momentum, 2016 was our best year yet. Key metrics, such as readers and published posts were up approximately 300% year on year. And we witnessed important stories published on Medium — from world-famous leaders to unknown individuals — on a daily basis.
 — Ev Williams

How is it possible to have a company that keeps growing and being used, and yet has to let go of a third of its staff? Those are clear signs that people are not incentivized to pay over the internet.

How can we engage audiences in a way that they are willing to pay for content?

As a consequence of this broken monetization, Medium decided to charge users directly through the Medium Membership program. For $5 you can read unlimited premium articles (free members get 5). Medium then pays creators a fraction of those $5 based on claps from premium members. So if a premium members claps a lot of articles, you only get a small fraction of the $5, while a premium member that barely claps will bring you a larger portion of the money if the few claps he/she gives per month go to you.

Making membership-only articles restricts the visibility of your blog, which means that your audience growth will be severely reduced. So it could be a sacrifice between showing your article to your most loyal fans, and also creating a low visibility post that won’t get you new audience members.

The current state of monetization

I started writing articles a year ago, as cryptocurrencies started exploding. During this time I decided that a blog could be the best way to learn about the topic. There was no expectation to make money, nor was there an intention.

Eventually the blog started gaining more attention and joining more publications. It received the badge of Top of Finance and Top of Investment, which essentially means that people would read out blog for longer than other blogs in those categories.

At some point we started receiving emails from companies offering us about $1,000 USD to write blogs analyzing their consensus protocols, or cryptocurrencies. This was a nice validation for our blog, but also created a real way to make it possible to do weekly posts and analysis.

Let’s put things in perspective. The highest paid blog by Medium was $1,700 and about 90% of stories do not make more than $100. So for us to receive $1,000 USD per blog for a sponsor was just insane.

In fact, we found the following interesting trivia on an article by the writing cooperative:

The top story [on Medium] earned $1,744.21 that month. Against the 180 million stories that were published according to the rough maths above, that means you have 10 times less chance of making $1,744.21 on a story than you have of winning the jackpot on the UK Lottery.

Unfortunately, this meant that sponsors would be able to look and have opinions on our stories, which would heavily affect the truth of the conversation. We explicitly told users which blogs were sponsored, but that was not good enough.

In fact at some point we were writing articles that were either specifically for sponsors, or specifically attractive to new audiences, and pretty much nothing in between.

Truth and content

When people subscribe to blogs / content creators, they do so because they expect high quality content. High quality essentially boils down to being honest and informative. But how can we write something honest and informative when we receive money from sponsors?

More importantly, how can we provide you a better and more dynamic experience. We don’t want you to pay us (or Medium) $5/month because sometimes we will write more articles or less articles, and sometimes you will not like the articles we write.

What if we could create a system where you pay exactly for the stories you want us to write, and we decide together if and when to write them?This is why we started working on Bountey.

Bountey and the future of monetization

All the monetization solutions right now look like this:

1. Receive money from sponsors and bias your content
2. Ask audiences for monthly payments (or per article) regardless if they want the story

We wanted something that allowed us to:

• Write what our audiences want, not sponsors
• Let our audiences pay for what they want
• Feedback from our audiences about what we should write about
• Rewarding our most loyal fans, without affecting new fans
• Maintaining Visibility without making membership-only content

Why should you give someone a monthly payment, when they may not write anything that month, or what is the incentive for them to write more often than once? That’s clearly a suboptimal.

Bountey is a website where you (and also content creators) can offer ideas to your favorite content creator, and then you and others can deposit money into that suggestion. Content creators can then take the money and execute that suggestion.

Best of ICOs

We want to run an experiment. We want to see what would happen if we asked our readers to vote on the articles we will write. Specifically, to vote by depositing money. We would only take their money when we write the articles they want to read, and only then. It also doubles as a way for us to test the kinds of articles they want to read, and for them to suggest them to us.

For that reason, and from here on, we will post all our ideas for new articles on bountey.com/bestoficos

If you like our content, and would like to help us, please head over to that page and vote to let us know what you think.

We will no longer take money from advertisers, and we want 100% of our payment to come from the things that you want to read, and not from products and things people want to sell to you.

Conclusion — How to make money writing Blogs

You have 4 options:

1. Take money from sponsors and try not to become biased
2. Use Medium’s partnership and make ~$10 per story
3. Ask for money monthly, and charge people like you charge rent
4. Take a bet and join Bountey, and let your audience make suggestions

After all, the Medium is the message.

Looking to help?
Support us on Bountey! https://www.bountey.com/bestoficos

Bountey

Thank you for supporting us.

How to make money writing Blogs was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The AI Algorithm Market

SingularityNET is a Swiss company based in the Netherlands that raised approximately $36M USD (at that moment) in exchange of their AGI token, currently valued at around $0.17 USD each, through their ICO which lasted for a single day on December 19th, 2017. What’s crazy about this company was that they raised their entire ICO in about a minute.

SingularityNET is creating a marketplace for AI algorithms and services. With the rise of AI + Blockchain developments, we wanted to take a look at some of the current players in the space and what differentiated them.

Introduction

The Idea

“The value and power of Artificial Intelligence is growing dramatically every year, and will soon dominate the internet — and the economy as a whole. However, AI tools today are fragmented by a closed development environment; most are developed by one company to perform one task, and there is no way to plug two tools together. SingularityNET aims to become the key protocol for networking AI and machine learning tools to form a coordinated Artificial General Intelligence.”

From: the SingularityNet white paper

SingularityNet defines itself as an open-source protocol and marketplace for AI services. Essentially they are trying to solve the problem that AI companies currently build their own services and libraries independently, while SingularityNet would be a collection of many AI services in one. They belief that general AI should not be owned by a few number of corporations, and instead should be owned by everyone.

This concept is very similar to Google’s TensorFlow, a project that was once a private series of algorithms created by Google’s AI team, Google Brain, and that is now also an open source library with a series of tools to enable anyone to tap into Machine learning and deep learning easily, as well as, enabling the public to contribute to its ever-growing library of AI-centered tools.

The company is looking to have a release of its software by December of 2018.

History

SingularityNET is owned by Hanson Robotics Limited, a Hong Kong company that was founded in 2013, and that specializes in creating human-like robots (or androids). The company is well known for having created Sophia (image below). In 2017 the company created SingularityNET along with its Chief Scientist, Ben Goertzel.

A technological singularity is given to the epoch in human civilization when humans create an AI so powerful that it is able to improve itself at an exponentially faster rate, thus quickly surpassing humanity’s intellect, ultimately ending the current human era, or at the very least modifying it beyond anyone’s capacity to comprehend. This was described as “The Singularity”, a name coined by American SciFi author Vernor Vinge in 1993 to refer to a single artificial intelligence controlling everything. This is also known as a Super Artificial Intelligent, or SAI.

Apparently the team at SingularityNET thinks this is something that could be potentially positive to our society, and has decided to create a platform that will take us there faster. The company sees that the current state of AI is incredibly problem-specific (narrow), and in order to make a general AI, we will need to have a greater ability to share and build strong artificial intelligence libraries and tools, essentially they want to put all of the current AI techniques into one marketplace. Ultimately creating a whole that will be greater than the sum of its parts.

The company believes that the best way to do this is through a decentralized, open-source network that would enable all AI developers to add to the network.

Furthermore the company has also created a subdivision of hardware robotics by the name of Hanson Robotics. The idea would be that this hardware would look and act like humans, and then utilizing SingularityNET’s software, it could also think and behave like one. The company is looking to create the first fully functional android.

The Marketplace

SingularityNET is aiming to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In its quest it has partnered with OpenCog Foundation, an open source toolkit looking to achieve AGI. The SingularityNET foundation will use this partnership to develop natural language processing, probabilistic logical interface, evolutionary learning and other core systems for AI development by the name of Atomspace. The agents on SingularityNET are created as an expansion of Atomspace.

The idea is that people (users) can use tokens to purchase AI services from single or multiple AI agents on the network, depending on the complexity of the problem. The marketplace is in short a combination of different AI partnerships that can be rented out to users in exchange of the token. The nodes themselves are AI blackboxes that people can hire.

Users and agents can be used exchangeably, as other AIs could request certain algorithms to be rented out by other players. Essentially created a tangled network of services and requests. The following is a diagram created by the SingularityNET team to depict an example of what this would look like practically:

Technology

The Platform

Currently the platform is being built on Ethereum Virtual Machines, the company is aware that this will not scale and will ultimately build their own consensus protocol.

The company claims that their platform will have the following attributes:

• Interoperability: The network can interface with multiple blockchains
• Data Sovereignty and Privacy: User controls what type of data is shared as controls on top of network
• Modularity: Multiple arrangements of AI Agents, and failure recovery systems are possible
• Scalability: The platform securely hosts private and public contracts, and claims near zero transaction costs

The company wants to enable all kinds of hardware devices to be able to run nodes, similar to IOTA. A play that significantly targets IoT and other devices that have continued access to the internet.

The Token

The tokens are used for different AI nodes and processors to exchange value.

For example, if a customer wanted to utilize a specific AI algorithm created by another developer, he could simply pay the AI node for its service. This could enable any agent to use multiple different AI technologies through their token.

AI nodes can have internal subcontractors that are private from the network. Enabling people to interact with a node, and the node itself to pay participants within it to solve the problem. The idea is that multiple computers could run a node, and the node only represents the AI that is being utilized.

Traction

This ICO is probably best known to be one of the fastest to be ever completed. In about 60 seconds the company was able to finalize its goal and raise about $36M USD in exchange of their AGI token, currently valued at around $0,17 USD per token.

Team

SingularityNET is built by a fascinating CEO, and a series of well-educated AI researchers, marketers and partners. Starting with Ben Goertzel. Ben is also the Chief Scientist of a prediction firm by the name aidyia holdings, as well as robotics firm Hanson Robotics. Needless to say his areas of expertise are Artificial Intelligence, robotics, data science and mathematics. He has also been in multiple documentaries for having created the android, Sophia.

The ICO

Token Distribution

SingularityNET Genesis Contract produced 1 Billion AGI Tokens. Their distribution is the following:

• 50% for ICO
• 20% as reward pool
• 18% given to founders (2 years vesting)
• 8% to the SingularityNET foundation
• 4% given to campaign supporters

The Reward tool will be released at a rate of 2% per year, starting a year after genesis. The reserve will be itself split into different groups:

• 40% development
• 40% beneficial
• 20% curation

Furthermore the platform is planning on creating its own consensus protocol / blockchain and will add a 10% yearly inflation of the reward pool awarded to new blocks generated in years 2 — 11.

Criticisms

Fundamentals

The company believes that the power of AI should be shared by groups of pople instead of small numbers of corporations

“SingularityNET is backed by the SingularityNET Foundation, which operates on a belief that the benefits of AI should not be dominated by any small set of powerful institutions, but shared by all.” — SingularityNet White Paper

We are not sure if that is the right response. Even though Elon Musk might agree with them, there are a lot of concerns when it comes to democratizing AI.

In the words of AI Safety Researcher, Robert Miles:

“The argument sounds like: Nukes are extremely dangerous, so we need to empower as many people as possible to have them”

Funding

The platform awarded 26% of its token to the founders and the SingularityNET Foundation, and 4% to campaign supporters. This means that about 30% of the tokens were given internally. It can be debated whether this is a lot of money for the company or not. We have to take into consideration that once the platform releases the price might be substantially higher.

AI Copycat nodes

The system claims to be open source, and has also partnered with an open source AI platform in order to solve users problems. However, most of the AI nodes on the platform will essentially operate as black boxes. This could cause a problem where nodes copy open source AI libraries and essentially re-sell the services through cheaper computing power as a black box solution. It is possible then, to have a system where those that spend more on marketing solutions end up getting a significant portion of the market without creating new AI innovations.

This can even be a problem in the case that there are no black box agents. Because even if all the code is open source, people could still copy algorithms from open source libraries and resell them on the market. This happens most commonly with hardware products made in cheaper countries by copying intellectual property from other countries. We can see this happening as well in an open source AI marketplace such as this one.

Blockchain

Currently the company mentioned that it is utilizing Ethereum Virtual Machines, and that its also planning on building its own consensus protocol. However, the white paper also mentions that it may use IOTA or some other IoT Blockchain. Which one is it? Why is the company so confused about its core technology for consensus? There seem to be a lot of questions regarding the token, how it will evolve, and how they will transfer or utilize multiple blockchains. Furthermore the company claims to be scalable and working on that but there are little to no details on how they will actually achieve scalability, which is especially difficult on blockchain architectures.

Conclusion

SingularityNET brings together a series of extremely important technologies that will surely lead the tech industry for the next decade. The ability to quickly and easily purchase AI algorithms is going to be a significantly powerful market in the upcoming future.

The biggest concern we have is the unforeseen consequences of decentralizing and democratizing this power. There is a real danger that could occur from having an anonymous market of people purchasing very powerful AI services.

The ultimate goal of SingularityNET is to create a Super Artificial Intelligent that physically interacts with humans through hardware devices that are also robotic humanoids. There could also be a series of dangerous consequences if this idea actually becomes successful and reaches its mission.

It is too early to determine yet what the value of this network will be, and it is therefore completely speculative to assume whether or not it will be a success, and also if it will cause the apocalypse.

Looking to help?
Support us on Bountey! https://www.bountey.com/bestoficos

Want to stay up to date in ICOs?
Visit us at https://thebestoficos.com

Have an interesting story?
Write us at info@bestoficos.com

Disclaimer

This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness,accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.

SingularityNET ICO Review was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A 5 minute guide to ICO prerequisites

With $4B fundraised through ICOs, it looks incredibly tempting for a company to ask themselves, the question of whether an Initial Coin Offering will be an easy way to get money. The reality is that an ICO is a much more difficult process, and only make sense if your company fits a very specific set of criteria.

If you are thinking about going through an ICO, you are definitely not alone. This is one of the most common questions we get as Blockchain consultants. The reality is that this question is based on a huge set of other assumptions and circumstances, and we thought it was important to discuss some of them.

Before even considering an ICO, we have to consider the reasoning. If you are thinking about doing an ICO because your company cannot fundraise via classical means, it will be very unlikely for you to have a successful ICO. There are many costs leading up to the event that cannot be avoided.

In terms of technology, the most important question is whether or not you should even use Blockchain technology. For that reason we will start with the question, should you even be using the Blockchain?

The Blockchain Test

The Consensus

The first condition a company should meet is that it is crucial for any ICO to satisfy the conditions of the utilization of Blockchain. Namely, the question:

“Is a shared, immutable, and decentralized database the best way to run your business model?”

If the answer of that question is no, then you can stop right there with the experiment. This is the one and most important question regarding not only ICOs, but the use of Blockchain technologies in general.

Even if you decide to create a private Blockchain, and only enable certain individuals to write or collaborate in it, you have to accept that whatever consensus protocol you use, will require a shared and immutable database at its center, and the business will be relying on this shared information database to provide a good or service.

Hybrid and Private Blockchains

Once you have decided that a Blockchain-based consensus protocol is crucial to your value proposition, the next question is to decide what type of Blockchain satisfies it.

The hybrid Blockchain model is a combination between having some decentralized database, and also a private one. This is typical for companies that have a username and password. The power of a centralized database enables users to recover it in case they lose it. Something that you wouldn’t be able to do with a wallet.

Private Blockchains are those that are owned by a corporation (and/or partners) and is not necessarily displayed publicly. This obviously has legitimacy and centralization concerns. This type of Blockchains is more typically used to create a trustless system between business partners.

Should we ICO?

Your own token

Even if using blockchain is necessary, and having using a token is central to your product’s offering, it still does not mean that you should ICO, or even create your own token. There are hundreds of options already out there, and using an already-existing token will remove a lot of headaches from multiple sides including:

• Technical
• Speed of development
• Having to go through an ICO
• Potentially legal
• Chicken and Egg problems
• Potentially exchangeable

But of course you lose:

• Control
• Optionality
• Flexibility
• Optimization for your use
• Sometimes trust

Based on your resources and ability, it might be a good option to start with someone else’s token to test an MVP and then develop your own token after you have understood the problems and solutions that can be offered.

Network Effects

You should consider that companies that have a necessity to reliably produce and share data have a stronger argument for an ICO than those that do not. More importantly, companies that rely on network effects to grow and share data are going to develop a mature Blockchain usage faster than those that do not have network effects.

The ICO

The process of going through an ICO is long, complex, and much larger than the scope of this article. However, the most important aspect of it, is that you have to strategize and prepare the 5 following categories in your marketing documentation:

1. Business strategy and relevant information
2. Technical details and importance
3. Legal procedures and best practices
4. Taxation implications and best practices
5. Marketing, especially with legal considerations

This means that a series of professionals should be involved in your ICO and the jurisdictions you want to target. For more information you can check our website.

Conclusion

Any type of fundraise will require a lot of professional advisory in different parts of it. ICOs are no different, and in fact, probably require more advice than any other early stage funding method. For this reason you should always talk to professionals and discuss with them your intentions and arrive to a solution.

While the industry looks glamorous and simple on the outside, the reality is that even when your company matches the perfect description of an ICO (whatever that may be), you still have to do a serious amount of work and preparation in order to actually launch this type of campaign.

And most importantly, there is currently no consensus of exactly what type of ICOs are allowed in which jurisdictions. The current field is full of questions regarding legal, taxation, technology, and a lot of very legitimate concerns about the practical uses of Blockchain technologies and its problems.

That said, the industry is poised to be one of the most important communication and financial innovations in the last decade, and is demonstrating that giving the power back to the people is an incredibly strong force for both good and bad.

Lastly, remember that the question of should we ICO is very different from can we ICO. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.

Looking to help?

Support us on Bountey! https://www.bountey.com/bestoficos

Want to stay up to date in ICOs?
Visit us at https://thebestoficos.com

Have an interesting story?
Write us at info@bestoficos.com

Disclaimer

This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.

Should You ICO? was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An insider story to the stupidest prank in the world.

Imagine you fundraise 50 million dollars from investors, once the money hits your bank account you proceed to delete your website, and all the information about you. Finally, you email your investors a picture of you having a beer in the beach and saying :

“Thanks for your money, I’m out”.

If this is your idea of a prank, you would probably have a job at “savedroid”. The German company that decided to throw the crypto world into chaos while simultaneously damaging our reputation in the world stage.

So what happened?

Introduction

Yesterday I woke up to my phone vibrating to notifications, apparently the blog was getting a disproportionate amount of people reading it. I did not think much of it and continued my day normally, that was, until our blog got this comment on one of our reviews:

…uh oh.

I googled “savedroid” and found a series of articles by CCN, TechCrunch, and many others explaining that the company we reviewed in February had potentially defrauded people for 40M Euros. I went through their website and all the website showed was the following image:

The company’s Telegram was also abandoned by its moderators, and according to a Youtuber the offices were completely vacated. Not only that, but there was a tweet from savedroid’s CEO saying this:

Now, I consider myself a fairly calm and rational person. But the moment that I saw this I just thought that one of 3 things had to be true (in this order):

1. He was kidnapped and extorted into posting this
2. The Company actually just stole the money with their faces publicly everywhere
3. It’s a prank

The last possibility was probably the least rational, because who would cause so much damage as a PR stunt. We already know that the field of ICOs is full of scams, after all our very first article was Why Most ICOs are Scams. So why would anyone “prank” people by encouraging the greatest fear in the field, and simultaneously ruining their own reputation?

Imagine a security company called people and said: “Your mother has been killed in a break and enter” and right as your whole world is falling apart they finish they waited a couple of minutes and said “Just kidding, but if you bought our house alarm, you would never receive a call like that!”

Not only that, there are a series of reasons why this was a monumentally stupid idea:

• People can commit serious self harm if they believe they have just lost their investment
• People remember “$50M USD ICO Scam” story much more than “That $50M Scam was a prank” in fact we have already seen that it is the case. People still ask us about the scam, without knowing it was a prank.
• Anyone who helped this company is also seen as part of the scam, and put at very high risk of harm due to collaboration with the pranksters
• Major credibility loss from the entire crypto industry
• Your company will be known as the one who scared people as a PR scam

The following day after the potential scam, savedroid’s CEO restored the website and posted this video on YouTube, explaining his position regarding the prank:

But the damage was done. Almost nobody paid attention to the prank, and most people outside of the industry just remember the 50M Euro scam. The worst part of all, is that we were involved with Savedroid, and we had no idea this was going to happen.

The Context

Early in February, we received a message from a German marketing company, requesting we do a series of reviews on some German ICOs. Our protocol with paid reviews is that we will charge companies to write the review, and then we show them the review. If they are not happy with the results we will not publish it, but we do not allow people to change the actual content of the review (unless we were inaccurate in some aspect).

We had an interview with Savedroid’s CEO, the now infamous Yassin Hankar. The interview was actually not out of the ordinary in any way, and the company was actually extremely transparent and honest with us. We were able to collaborate the information on the company’s incorporation, and reputation through German media companies.

Unfortunately, they never revealed to us that they would pull off one of the most upsetting PR stunts in history.

Our story, “Savedroid ICO Review” can be found here. It has since been removed from our publisher’s list, and we are considering deleting it, but for the purpose of transparency, we have decided to keep it online for now.

Fast forward to last week, I immediately contacted the German company who hired us to write the review and we received the following response:

“Hi Pablo,

We are currently monitoring this situation. At this time, however, the only information we have is the same that you do: that which is publicly available.“

At this point we lost all hope in the situation. When even the marketing company hired to help with this ICO has no idea about one of the largest pranks in history, then nobody knows what is going on.

From our perspective, savedroid kept their marketing campaign secret from everyone around them, making it even more dangerous, as nobody prepared for it, and it affected the reputation of all the companies, individuals, and investors around the project. And they did that without their consent.

The Conclusion

This wasn’t just a dumb publicity stunt, it was an extremely irresponsible and outright dangerous prank. Savedroid’s reputation was not the only one affected by the prank, faking a crime is still an incredibly stupid and irresponsible activity.

After these recent events, we have completely changed our policies regarding accepting sponsored stories, and the way we approach and are approached by them. We have since worked with the German marketing company that originally hired us for the review. Furthermore, we have decided that we are tired of having to rely on sponsors, so we are creating our own platform for content creators to profit without resorting to advertisement. We are doing this through Blockchain tech, but that’s beyond this article.

The ICO industry has already been heavily affected by many real ICOs, the last thing we need is people creating fake scams, that end up causing pretty much the same amount of PR damage to all of us working to make the industry more transparent and accessible.

Yassin has currently not answered our request to interview him and post the results publicly. We will update the situation in case anything changes.

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Disclaimer

This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness,accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.

Savedroid: The damage caused was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Concerts VR Token — Review and Interview

ConcertVR is owned by a Berlin based Company, Goodstuff-Media. They bring the experience of a concert directly to a user through VR technology. The company is looking to raise about $30M USD through the sale of their own CVT Token at 0.00015ETH each for a total of 60,000 ETH. The token enables users to purchase concert tickets, on-demand events, songs, and more.

Their pre-sale sold out in less than 4 days and raised about 1.1M € through 1,200 ETH. Originally the company was planning on launching their ICO on April 2nd, 2018. But due to Google’s Message regarding ICOs, they have delayed this decision by two weeks. Their main ICO will be now open from April 15th to May 15th, 2018. The company has already won multiple awards, and is currently increasing the roster of artists and partners, with new ones every week.

Introduction

The Idea

ConcertVR’s idea is straightforward. They want to bring concerts and festivals to Virtual Reality. Their attempt to make this market a reality includes the utilization of their cryptocurrency to enable artists, vendors, and and ticketing platform to communicate and trade with each other in an ecosystem. The purpose is to make the visual and economic experiences much better for multiple players in the music industry.

What makes the company special is the fact that all the team members have been in the entertainment industry for over 15 years, we interviewed their CEO, Sebastian Deyle, to find out what makes them different, and what the company has in store for the next couple of months.

“Imagine you could enjoy concerts from all around the globe in real time without leaving your home?“ — Sebastian Deyle, CEO at concertVR

One of their key technical differentiators, is the camera angles that they record at any given concert. Enabling the user to choose where they want to be during the event. The company claims to have achieved this through their eye-tracking technology.

Finally, the company’s utilization of Blockchain technology is a direct result of solving the complexity of the festival ecosystem, between managers, ticket sellers, merchandise, artists, and so on. They effectively enable artists to sell an unlimited amount of digital tickets, since anyone could experience the concert from home. Far more interesting than the current DVD and Netflix solutions.

From their point of view, purchasing a physical ticket actually has a series of barriers of entry:

Furthermore the company is looking to bring more than just the real live footage of a concert. The company has ambitious plans to also build an online store that would enable users to purchase individual songs, concert events, and special content and access that you would not otherwise find during the typical experience.

Entertainment companies tokenizing content are also able to provide feedback and dynamics that create a more personalized experience. One of such experiences is the ability to vote. They want to create a social network of sorts, where users vote on their favorite song and artist, which is becoming an increasingly used strategy with tokenized business models.

History

“Two years ago, me and my partner, Andreas Knuffmann, were working on the tourism and VR industry. Mostly creating hotel tours, where you could go into different rooms. The experience was okay, but where is the emotion? We would never buy this.

So we decided to get together and start brainstorming. Since we both have worked in the film and entertainment industries for over 15 years, we naturally thought that the best experience would be concerts. What if we can find a way to use VR technology to let people experience the concert in VR time from your own home, that is something we would spend money on.”

But why hasn’t anyone else done this? We made some calls and figured that a lot of artists were excited about the idea, we figured there was something here.”

Sebastian Deyle, CEO at concertVR

The Token

ConcertVR utilizes a standard ERC20 Token, the company subtly points throughout the white paper, that they will initially use Ethereum, which may mean that the company is ready to utilize other platforms in addition or substitution of just using Ethereum smart contracts. This probably points out to some concerns regarding the scalability of the Ethereum network in the upcoming years.

The company is planning on hosting a big portion of the data in a decentralized fashion through the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The company is planning to use a strategy similar to filecoin to decentralize the user information using ethereum. The concertVR will not be holding user information themselves.

Technology

The company has built a prototype that enables mobile users to watch concerts using 360 degree cameras, and also technologies like Google Cardboard. The company has mentioned that the current version of the software also enables the use of VR headsets such as Occulus Rift, HTC Vibe, and others.

ConcertVR has also mentioned that they have developed an eye tracking technology that would enable the user to be “anywhere in the concert hall”. The company currently provides three points of view:

• The Stage: The users will feel what it’s like to be a rockstar by essentially looking at the audience and seeing what artists see
• The Audience: Users will be able to experience the concert from the usual point of view as the audience
• The Back: This section is a general way of seeing the concert as a whole and experience its size

Business Model

The company has multiple revenue streams regarding the sale and distribution of music and events. Their idea is to enable users to be able to purchase concerts and songs individually, and also enable users to purchase a monthly subscription.

The company is pricing each product as follows:

• Subscription (monthly): 8.99€
• Live-concert: 24.99€
• Recorded concert: 14.99€
• Single song: 2.49€

The song pricing is slightly higher than what you would find on a digital store, the reason for the higher cost, is that the songs that are being purchased are technically complete 360 degree video portions of an event or festival, so you are getting much more than a song.

The company is expecting to make over 250,000€ in its first three months of operation, over €8M in its second year (3,200% increase in revenue) and over 23M€ in its third year (300% increase). The goal is ambitious, but the company thinks it is conservative based on the traction they’ve received already.

The purpose of the tokenization of the platform is to create a microeconomy similar to that of kik’s kin and other social network platforms, that enable multiple players to pay and sell the creation of their content. In the case of concertVR, they will enable artists to sell their music directly to the public through the platform, through tickets, subscriptions, and even enabling the sale of merchandise and other licensed products.

The ICO

The company had a fantastic Pre-ICO and was able to sell out in only 4 days. Raising 1,200 ETH (~$600,000). The company is now looking to raise 60,000 ETH (~$30M USD) through their ICO.

The company was looking to launch their ICO on April 2nd, 2018. Due to the recent news from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to ban all cryptocurrency-related companies from their Ads offerings, the company has decided to delay their ICO until April 15th.

Token Distribution

Based on their white paper this is how their token distribution looks like:

• 55% sold during token sale
• 18% used to develop the platform and maintenance
• 12% will be given to advisors
• 10% held by the company
• 5% will be reserved for partnerships with artists and others

The biggest challenges the company will face will be to convince users that they will continue to grow as fast as they need to, and the fact that they are arbitrarily fundraising at a valuation of over $50M USD pre-revenue, may bring considerable difficulties to the companies ability to fundraise.

The Market

The Virtual Reality Market was valued at $5.2B in 2016 and is expected to grow to $162B by 2022. Some of the most interesting investments in technology in the last couple of years have been around the creation of VR hardware, so it is expected that there will be a 40 fold increase in the amount of people owning this hardware within the next 4 years.

Festivals are also extremely difficult events to organize, prepare, and execute. Let alone verify. Almost exactly a year ago, Billy McFarland was supposed to create one of the most exclusive and interesting festivals in the world. The Fyre Festival. The event was supposed to occur in the Bahamas over the weekends of mid April to the beginning of May 2017. Once people actually landed on the island, they were horrified to discover the event did not exist as promised, and as a result the organizers are currently facing over 8 lawsuits with an estimated value exceeding $100M USD in damages.

Traction

The company has been working on the project since 2016 and claims to have a fully functioning prototype. Their demo can be found on the following YouTube video:

The video shows that the prototype requires a facebook account and connecting it to the concertVR servers. In reality, the company will enable users to login using email, wallets, facebook, and other authentication systems. The company is planning to launch their beta version of the project in October of 2018.

Team

ConcertVR is currently a product by Goodstuff-Media in Berlin. Their CEO, Sebastian Deyle is an experienced producer hosting multiple TV shows in Germany. He has also worked in the entertainment industry for over 15 years and has also worked with Virtual Reality technologies, however he’s never been happy with the current solutions offered.

Their CCO, Andreas Knuffman is an awarded executive producer, and freelance director that has worked in the industry for over 25 years. Most importantly, Andreas and Sebastian have worked together in the past building other technologies and working in entertainment.

Lastly, their head of development, Frank Zahn, is the CEO of Exozet, another Berlin-based company with over 150 employees, that specializes in what they describe as the “Digital Transformation” of companies through the use of Digital Marketing.

The company also has a wide range of other talent in the music and digital marketing industry, including Stefan Schulz, a veteran in the entertainment industry who worked Universal Music group and serves as a board member to multiple other entertainment companies.

Criticisms

The company currently decentralizes the information on their users, however it is still difficult to predict exactly how this is done, and there are multiple ways to do it wrong, and very few ways to do it right.

“All data will be stored on a decentralized cloud based data bank which will be hold on the net by nodes.” — concertVR White Paper v1.3 p.16.

The company mentions that no user data will be stored on concertVR servers, does this mean that our data will be stored in the nodes, and therefore publicly available to anyone? How is this mediated against privacy laws in different countries? We are not quite sure yet.

There are of course, multiple different companies attempting to come with similar solutions for concerts in VR, such as NextVR (which focuses on sports). So the company will have to quickly face and defeat a lot of incoming competition. If their ICO is successfully funded, this problem could be partially solved through a strong marketing campaign with the funds raised. ConcertVR also has the advantage that they are focused on VR, and also specializing in the European market.

That said, concertVR has an extremely experienced team in the field, and has been able to create very strong relationships with artists and players, many of them which will be revealed the weeks following the beginning of the ICO sale. Furthermore, the creators have demonstrated their ability to close deals, partnerships, and focus exclusively on generating VR content, as opposed to any type of concert content.

Lastly, the company is attempting to increase in size relatively fast. They expect their product to triple in sales every year. While this goal is conservative for a startup with an experienced team, it is still risky, just like any other startup.

Conclusion

ConcertVR’s proposes an argument that most of us will agree on, which is that the role of AR/VR technology in digitization of human experience will be massive in the next decade. We can see evidence of this trend in any meaningful analysis of the market, including:

• The investments into AR/VR
• New Hardware enabling the technology
• Better software for AR/VR
• Many more companies developing solutions
• The trend towards a digitized and personalized lifestyle.

The biggest question for concertVR will be to demonstrate that they will play a significant role in the industry and also be able to achieve that long term as more players enter the market. It is currently unclear how they will answer that, but if they do, they are in for a massive and very profitable markets.

The fact that they were able to quickly sell out their Pre-ICO is already a good indicator that this company will success at their ICOs, but we are curious about their ability to perform once their launch their platform, and most importantly, their ability to get big name artists signed and using it.

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Disclaimer

This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness,accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.

ConcertVR ICO Review was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Erotica VR Token

Introduction

Me.mento is a company based in Berlin, Germany. They make vrXcity, a Sims-like virtual world where users can interact in VR with artificially intelligent, photo realistic avatars of their favorite erotic stars with which they can carry out any and all of their fantasies. They are raising money to put the finishing touches to vrXcity, to launch the product and increase the number of adult content stars on their roster to over 7,000 in 2 years.

Their ICO is currently underway, they are raising €130M in exchange for their redBUX tokens. The company is currently selling 10,000 redBUX for €100 (€0.01 per token). There is a 35% discount for the public pre-sale period which will continue until April 15th, the discount will then decrease to 15% after April 16th and will decrease further to 5% on April 30th. Their website can be found here (Warning: link for adults only).

They are capping the pre-sale to 3.9B tokens. An extremely ambitious ICO. We expect to see adult content (and VR) gaining a lot of momentum in the near future. As of today the project has already sold most of their presale tokens (over 2 billion).

The Idea

Combining Sims and VR Pornography

What makes this ICO special is how easy it is to believe the product could be huge. They’ve already demonstrating they can attract the necessary partners by bringing on big names in the space, like Wicked Pictures and several famous adult stars. Nearly everyone naturally drifts to pornography when thinking about applications of AR & VR. vrXcity is what you get when you combine the Sims, VR, and adult content.

What if you could interact in absolutely any way you want? What if you wanted to experience your favorite pornstar, through BDSM, in the moon, or a spaceship? What if you could be anyone you want?

— Sebastian Malm, CPO at redBUX

It’s the world’s first interactive VR erotic platform for adults. Users can interact with fully animated, artificially intelligent avatars of their favorite adult stars (and eventually amateur models that are ‘scanned in’ via pop-up shops and kiosks). They claim to have a 2 years head start on competitors both on quality, and also on their library of 3D models already generated from their previous company.

The company has been in operation since 2014, it was initially focused on making 3D printed models of erotic actors for companies like Wicked Pictures & JOYclub, before transitioning to making 3D digital avatars instead.

“The idea to start with 3D printing came from the fact that it allowed incredible amounts of customization. We had the necessary equipment to scan and create models of porn stars. The transition to VR became clear”
 — Sebastian Malm, CPO at redBUX

Context: Market Sizes & Demographics in VR & Pornography

It is useful to colour the explanation of vrXcity by providing context of the size of the VR/AR and pornography industries.

Pornography:. The global pornography market is one of the largest in the entertainment industry with approximately $100B in sales annually. For further context, the US pornography industry is 50% larger than Hollywood movies on a basis of profits and is larger than both the NFL and NBA combined. In Switzerland, a conservative country, 25% of internet users consume erotic content and in Germany 12.5% of all internet traffic goes to pornography. Needless to say, despite its taboo status, the adult entertainment industry is massive and worth pursuing.

VR/AR: The International Data Corporation (IDC) place the VR market at $5.2B in 2016 and expect it to grow to $162B by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 85.4% (AR) & 44.5% (VR) respectively. The primary demographics of VR users are males under the age of 40, matching up well with that of the pornogrpahy industry. It’s also important to mention that the growth rate of this industry is also expected to be the largest in the technology and entertainment industries. Companies like Google have invested hundreds of billions in VR technologies in the last 3 years.

Pornography has played an important role in the entertainment technology industry over the last several decades. It was instrumental in the success of VHS over Betamax in the 90’s (which was superior technologically) and of Blu-Ray over HD DVD in the mid 2000’s. Me.mento believes pornography will play a similarly important role in the adoption of virtual reality as an entertainment medium by changing the pornography experience from passive (pictures and video) to interactive (virtual reality).

“Sex is all about interacting with each other. The cam girl boom shows that people want to have interaction, there is still a large barrier between the user and the cam girl, you cannot really interact.”
— Sebastian Malm, CPO at redBUX

vrXcity will be a digital marketplace occurring in a virtual world, comprising: erotic stars (via photorealistic models), consumers, advertising partners and 3rd party content providers. See the figure below for a high-level overview of how each party will interact with vrXcity.

Erotic Stars — Adult stars and amateurs can create 3D models of themselves at any of me.mento’s scan centers, artificial intelligence is then used to ‘animate’ the avatar, allowing users to interact with a lifelike character.

The erotic star can then rent their own studio, a virtual store within the vrXcity world, where they can offer special services to their fans. They can customize their studio based on the user’s preferences, and even advertise various products like lingerie or sex toys.

Erotic stars gain a long-term revenue stream which only requires a one-time effort of creating their avatar at a scanning site. Once created, digital avatars can interact with clients around the clock. These relationships with users are governed by digital contract, payment is sorted automatically using the redBUX token as currency.

Consumers — Pornography makes up 7.65% of global internet traffic. The fastest growing segment of pornography is webcam / live shows, showing the market desires more personalized content. vrXcity offers a personalized experience, but importantly also allows users to do more than passively watch. It allows them to have life like interactions with their favorite erotic stars.

Like the erotic stars, consumers can also rent out studios in this virtual world and design the rooms according to their wants and needs. They can even bodyscan their real-life partners and enjoy unrealized sexual fantasies with them. They can even organize swinger parties with their friends and earn redBUX through admission fees to their events.

vrXcity will also have a feature called Free Style Studio where the users can design their fantasy experiences and can even choose their dream partner including choosing body size, cup size, eye and hair colour. An additional fee is charged for access to Free Style Studio, the fee will depend on the amount of computer effort required to make the desire come true, how long the sequence is and which star the user selects.

Using blockchain will allows users to enjoy a simple, secure and anonymous system that minimizes distractions from their experience when doing things like paying for goods and services in the virtual world.

Figure 2. Use Cases for redBUX in vrXcity

Brands/Advertisers — brands can leverage the audience of erotic stars and can create ads without requiring the stars to be physically present. Instead of being limited to 2D pictures or videos, products can be advertised through demonstrations and can be purchased on the spot. Sex toys are a common product sold with adult content, in vrXcity sex toys can be demonstrated by their favorite erotic actors. WebCam girls can also exert their influence over their fans for digital or physical gifts. Advertisers can also take out ads on outdoor buildings in the virtual world.

External Content Providers — 3rd party software developers will be able to interact with vrXcity and will be able to publish 3D pornography games, 360-degree videos and other content using redBUX as a secure and anonymous payment option. Me.mento will receive an initial service fee and small percentage of all revenues generated from sales from 3rd party providers.

The Token — The First Adult Content Token

The redBUX claims to be a utility token, and it is based on the standard ERC-20 Ethereum smart contract. Consumers, erotic stars, advertisers and 3rd party content providers can buy and sell goods and services with the token. They will also be able to buy and sell the token on exchanges.

New users will have to purchase redBUX on exchanges in order to interact with the virtual world. Partners outside of vrXcity, like Wicked Pictures and iwantEmpire, will also accept redBUX as payment for their content and webcam channels, increasing demand for redBUX and increasing transaction volume.

There are 3 reasons that inspired us to do an ICO:

1. We needed a good solution for payments which are extremely restricted for the industry.
2. The ability to do licensing and paying pornstars without the need of complex agreements and paperwork, which are extremely restricted for the industry
3. Leveraging the networking effects that cryptocurrencies provide to their customers.
- Sebastian Malm, CPO at redBUX

The team at me.mento claims to have technology that allows them to create photorealistic 3D avatars of real people. It is unclear if the avatars will really be photorealistic upon release or decent to good quality 3D renders as seen in the white paper. They rely on 3rd party VR/AR headsets like Oculus or the upcoming Magic Leap and auxiliary tools like haptic response equipment to allow their users to experience their virtual world.

They also mention that avatars will be artificially intelligent but do not discuss where progress is at on this front. They will likely need to develop this capability in-house, they’ll also need to find a way to capture the real person’s personality and impart it to their avatar to provide a great user experience.

The blockchain technology allows for a seamless payment ecosystem between all the stakeholders of vrXcity, including consumers, adult stars, advertisers and 3rd party content generators. Simple purchases and other transactions are easy to verify, validate and implement regardless of where users are located.

“Germany is really strict when it comes to payment online, we had to have valuable steps behind so that the overall experience is much better for the user, especially in the VR experience where you cannot just put your credit card, it would ruin the experience”
 — Sebastian Malm, CPO at redBUX

While it is understandable that me.mento would focus their efforts on developing the virtual world itself rather than on building the complex VR hardware, it should be noted that this could make it challenging to offer a seamless user experience due to the numerous VR solutions out there, all of which could introduce slight variations to the user experience.

The ICO

Their ICO is currently underway. The pre-sale began on March 22nd and finishes April 15th. During this time the company is offering a 35% bonus to redBUX purchasers. The estimated price will be €0.01 minus the 35% discount. The main sale will take place starting on April 16th and will continue until May 15th. The minimum purchase requires is €100 worth of redBUX tokens.

Me.mento will issue 13B redBUX out of a hard-capped 20B supply. Unsold redBUX tokens will be burnt after the token sale. The white paper explains they are raising €130M, €39M (3.9B redBUX) coming from the pre-sale and €91M (9.1B redBUX) from the main sale. You can purchase the tokens with either Fiat currency (Euro and USD) or with cryptocurrencies (ETH, BTC, BCH & LTC) here. Citizens of all countries can participate in the sale, except those in the US, China, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan & Cuba.

The following pie chart shows how the token supply will be distributed:

Figure 3. redBUX Token Distribution

As of March 26th, 2018, they have sold 2,020,286,982 tokens of the 3.9B they are offering, or around 52% of the pre-sale total.

Application of Funds: The funds from the ICO will be used to finish the vrXcity prototype, complete internal product testing and then private & open beta testing. Following beta tester feedback the product will be prepped for a full launch with MVP level features including 3D avatars of over 900 adult stars, and the ability to enjoy peepshows, lapdances, stripshows and interactive VR sex. However, other features like access to digital shops, multi user features like group sex, the ability to scan yourself into the virtual world and interactive hardware for more immersive experiences won’t be available until almost 2020. See below for a breakdown of the use of funds and for the features to be released upon initial launch.

Figure 4. Use of Funds

Image Caption: Image found on Pg 16 of redBUX white paper found here

Figure 5. Features to be Released Before 2020

Traction

Based on the white paper, the team is near completing an alpha version of vrXcity and should begin testing shortly. They expect to complete alpha and beta testing in time for a summer 2018 release of the product. This product requires massive amounts of development work so this is an impressive feat in and of itself. It is unclear how the team is incorporating artificial intelligence into the first version of the product, if at all. The white paper could have done more to explain this part of the product.

The team has demonstrated very impressive progress in establishing licensing agreements with over 900 adult film actors, including stars like Texas Patti (238K facebook followers) and Jessica Drake (275k Instagram followers). They also have agreements in place with 7,000+ camgirls, 150+ retail stores which will advertise their products in vrXcity and receive social pushes from 100+ partner websites which boast massive audiences.

Team

Me.mento has a strong founding team with the necessary business and technical experience to deliver the virtual reality product. The only unclear capability surrounding the me.mento team is if they will be able to build the artificial intelligence talent to create avatars that can provide a good user experience through human like interactions.

Tobias Platte, me.mento’s CEO, has led marketing at a Deutsche Bank, ran an international advertising agency as well as several startup companies. Sebastian Malm is the company’s Chief Product Officer, he has deep experience in game design and user experience, this experience will be a great asset to me.mento in developing an unforgettable virtual world experience. The team is growing quickly, with 14 team members in R&D, 4 in concept & game design, 12 in animation, 21 in character art and 9 more developing vrXcity’s virtual environment.

They have strong advisors in place to help facilitate the partnerships and agreements they will need to build up a sufficient content base for a good launch. Examples of strong strategic advisors include Steve Orenstein, founder of Wicked Pictures and blockchain experts like Till Von Ahnen and Andreas Rayo Kniep.

Conclusion

Compared to many ICOs out there, this product is one of the easiest to imagine having a very strong demand if executed correctly. It almost doesn’t require explanation, people inherently understand how big a product like this could be simply based on how large the pornography industry is and how much the experience could be improved by making it interactive. Future features like being able to create avatars of significant others is also very interesting and could lead to significant changes to relationships as we now experience them.

There is some ambiguity around the technical progress of the project, particularly around the artificial intelligence claims found in the white paper. It could be the case they are contracting out this part of the product, that the white paper was simply unclear or that the AI components of vrXcity won’t be released in the initial product. A strong user experience will be a must for them to win over customers. The bar for quality is high, if the team is unable to provide realistic looking avatars, or enjoyable human like interactions with those avatars, adoption may be capped to a group of early adopters.

The team has demonstrated very strong traction in aligning themselves with some of the biggest companies in the industry, getting licensing agreements in place with over 900 adult stars and over 7,000 webcam girls. The potential marketing push from partners like Wicked Pictures and the adult stars & camgirls who are incentivized to bring users to the platform is likely to make this project successful, given they can release a compelling product.

Looking to help?

Support us on Bountey! https://www.bountey.com/bestoficos

Want to stay up to date in ICOs?

Visit us at https://thebestoficos.com

Have an interesting story?

Write us at info@bestoficos.com

Disclaimer

This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness,accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.

redBUX ICO Review was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the worst weeks for cryptocurrencies

Introduction

Last year we saw the bulk of the development of a new type of industry and funding. Even though Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have existed for over 3 years, we saw the most amount of ICOs and the largest ever happening between September and December 2017.

An industry worth half a trillion just a month ago has suddenly lost almost $200 million dollars worth of its market cap in only 4 weeks. Welcome to the second week of March of 2018, probably the worst ever for the cryptocurrency world.

The market is incredibly volatile, but losing so much so quickly has created a lot of fear and lack of trust for the industry. There were a set of 3 events that triggered the collapse of the market this month.

We will discuss the events that caused the collapse, as well as the misconceptions and unregulated practices that allowed the environment to develop to its current state.

The Problem

At its core, the problem of ICOs is predicated on the fact that a lot of people made a lot of money from purchasing tokens developed by some companies, and set at some completely arbitrary value. Then those investors would advertise their earnings and others would follow, inadvertently causing a pyramid scheme-like behavior.

One of the most problematic aspects of this behavior is how successful it is.

1. Company A uses Blockchain because:
   1.a Company A has an idea, usually an existing market, but with Blockchain
   1.b Company A needs to fundraise but can’t find investors through traditional means
2. They create a 20 page document discussing this idea, but leave out any important details regarding the corporation, experience, traction, etc
3. They create a campaign to raise an arbitrary amount of money in exchange of an even more random amount of tokens
4. The promise is that the tokens will have a core functionality in the product, with some heavily implied description that the token’s value will rise as the company develops
5. Company partners with PR company and advertises token sale through social network
6. Primary investors purchase said token and go to social media to advertise it
7. Secondary investors purchase the token therefore raising the value for primary investors
8. Primary investors make a huge profit and advertises it
9. Cycle repeats with new Company B

There is a reason that fundraising is really difficult. And that is that private investment, and accredited investors have a lot of options, and your company has to make sense in multiple dimensions in order for them to consider it the best use of their money.

Even after months of negotiation and work, very few companies raise their initial seed round, and many less are able to fundraise after that one. The idea is that a token sale would fit nicely between a Seed round (or original fundraise) and a more serious Series A round.

The reason that it is so difficult, is because giving money to new companies is inherently extremely risky. The founders are young, inexperienced, it’s a small team, the markets they are competing against are fairly developed, and they have to execute faster, better, and stronger than anyone else before them, in order to win big. And the investors need to win big, because for every 10 companies they invest in, only 1 or 2 will become profitable.

The Events

The idea behind Securities Commissions is to protect the citizens of its jurisdiction from fraud, and from such risky investments. The idea is that without vetting a company, it is impossible to make a good prediction of its success, and if someone does not dedicate their full attention to investment, they will most likely make fatal mistakes and lose a huge amount of their savings. Thus the creation of a body to regulate misbehavior and investment practices.

The idea of securities commissions is as old as stock trading itself. As such the regulators have carefully been examining ICOs. This new type of investment strategy is strange, it is not quite a formal funding round (no stocks), but it is also not exactly a crowdfunding campaign like kickstarter (you get a token, not a product, and the token may increase in value).

The weird nature of these tokens left the commissionaires perplexed, and many of them decided to wait before making clear guidelines about what would be considered a security and what isn’t. The lack of clarity allowed a game of dancing in jurisdictional grey areas that is currently played in the ICO world. To make things more complex, the token sale is opened worldwide, and it makes it exceedingly difficult for the regulators to reach consensus (ha!).

The SEC Announcement

On March 7th, 2018 the United States federal regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provided the following announcement:

“Online trading platforms have become a popular way investors can buy and sell digital assets, including coins and tokens offered and sold in so-called Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”). The platforms often claim to give investors the ability to quickly buy and sell digital assets. Many of these platforms bring buyers and sellers together in one place and offer investors access to automated systems that display priced orders, execute trades, and provide transaction data.

A number of these platforms provide a mechanism for trading assets that meet the definition of a “security” under the federal securities laws.”

— Via Statement on Potentially Unlawful Online Platforms for Trading Digital Assets found here.

The announcement discusses how many exchanges and other ICOs are actually breaking the law by selling and trading unregulated / unregistered securities. This comes as no surprise for many who have followed the industry.

It is true that while many (if not most) ICOs break the law, the commissionaires have also done a poor job at making it simple and accessible for people to even know if what they are selling is a security. It is estimated that a company will spend $50–100k just figuring out that question per jurisdiction they are interested in selling to.

Our hope is that the process will become much more clear and mainstream as we see regulation pur in place.

The Google Announcement

This week, Google decided to

“In June 2018, Google will update the Financial services policy to restrict the advertisement of Contracts for Difference, rolling spot forex, and financial spread betting. In addition, ads for the following will no longer be allowed to serve:

Cryptocurrencies and related content (including but not limited to initial coin offerings, cryptocurrency exchanges, cryptocurrency wallets, and cryptocurrency trading advice)”

- Google’s Financial Services Policy website found here.

This will not only affect ICOs, this message applies to anyone that is planning on advertising any information regarding cryptocurrencies which includes the exchanges, the wallets, and legitimate pieces of software attempting to make the cryptocurrency user experience better.

Many critics see this move as extraordinarily hard and naive, due to the fact that many ICOs, exchanges, and products are legitimate and have taken proper measurements with regulators in order to receive approval, and explain their technology. Google has decided to take a broad approach and ask questions later. Further delegitimizing the entire field.

The Environment

Too many (bad) ICOs

It is estimated that there are over fifty ICOs every month now. Entire websites have spun with the whole purpose of keeping track of such events and try to have some way of analyzing or at least comparing each of them.

Examples of such platforms are:

• ICO Data
• ICO Watchlist
• ICO Alert
• Crush Crypto
• The Tokener
• ICO Index
• And many more

The sheer volume of new ICOs has also caused an oversaturation of the market, and even with all the tools available it seems harder than ever to make a decision, and to select a winner.

Concerns regarding Ethereum

One of the most overlooked aspects of the challenges ahead, are the technical ones. Most ICOs are currently being developed as ERC20 tokens, that is, the tokens have been developed using Ethereum Virtual Machines, and suffer from huge scalability and pricing issues.

Those issues include:

• Scalability: Only a certain amount of transactions can be transacted per unit of time, as more companies use the framework, the more it gets clogged
• EVM Prices: The cost of processing power for ETH companies keeps rising
• Transaction Costs: The cost of actually transferring money keeps increasing over time

Many others have started to work on new Blockchain technologies that solve some of these issues, in what is sometimes called Blockchain 3.0, examples are:

• Stellar
• IOTA
• ArcBlock
• Many others

Conclusion: The Future

Blockchain and other Blockchain-inspired technologies are incredibly powerful, and provide a new layer of understanding about transmitting data and value. In an era where the exchange of such will become incredibly important, cryptocurrencies have developed a new way to see the world that is more free, faster, and more practical.

The reality is that private funding is a difficult exercise. Investors care mostly about profiting from their investments, and they should. But crowdfunding is different, when people give money to a Kickstarter Campaign they are not giving it to make money, but they are doing so, because they want to see a new product become a reality and realise the dreams of the developers.

When you combine both markets, you need to do so in a way that satisfies the incentives of both parties: money, control, and the development of a legitimate product. We believe that cryptocurrencies are one, if not the best, solution to achieve this hybrid.

However, we also believe that in order to satisfy both incentives, there have to be tight, and extremely clear rules about how to proceed. The different commissionaires and legislators have acted extremely slowly, while technology will keep increasing its pace.

The only way to move to a brighter future is through a clear marketplace, and a clear set of rules on how to place in such market. Without a list of “do’s and don’ts” there will continue to be problems and people punished in every area.

We are hoping that the future brings clarity and reasoning, and that will create a good environment for people to build successful and valuable companies through new technologies, including Blockchain. We are also expecting to see the rise of Stable Tokens, as a consequence of legislation. Stable tokens do not change in price, and are therefore only attractive to those seeking to fundraise, without providing speculative investment value.

If you fear that your company is not following regulations, please contact securities attorneys or your local regulators. Our parent company, Durata can help to guide you in the right direction as well.

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This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness,accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.

The End for ICOs? was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Messaging and Social Token

Introduction

Kik is a mobile messaging service with over 300M users worldwide that began in 2009. The main demographics are young adults and have an emphasis on user privacy. Interestingly, Kik is located in the same city in Canada as us — Waterloo, ON, which is also where Ethereum was created by Vitalik Buterin in 2015.

The Kin ICO sale took place over two weeks, from Sept 12th to Sept 26th, 2017. It was one of the most popular ICOs of 2017, raising 168,732 ETH, or around $50M USD (an additional $50M was raised from institutional investors in a pre-sale) from 10,026 individuals in 117 countries. This fell short of their fundraising goal of $125M. The fact that Kin could only be purchased with ETH, and that their fellow Canadians were exempt from purchasing (this was to keep their ICO in a regulatory green zone) likely influenced them failing to meet their fundraising goal.

The Idea — a Marketplace Token

Their goal is audacious. Founder and CEO, Ted Livingston, has spoken on numerous occasions about the dangers of competing against the near monopolistic big tech companies for advertising dollars. His aim is to take Kik in a different direction by creating a two-side marketplace where interactivity between users and the production and consumption of digital services (bots that help you with tasks, etc.) is how the platform will be monetized. Kik feels this will allow them to produce higher quality products than competitors by allowing them to focus exclusively on user experience (and not advertisers’ interests).

“Developers would take a percentage of the daily reward in proportion to the number of transactions their service was responsible for…this creates a reward engine, a beautiful network effect” — Ted Livingston

Kik has history in digital currencies. They implemented Kik Points, a digital currency within Kik messenger with a similar flavour to WeChat, over a 2.5 year period beginning in 2015. During that time users completed over 253 million offers and spent their earned points on 74 million purchases. According to the whitepaper, the average daily transaction volume was 300,000 with a peak of 2.6 million. Importantly, Kik Points showed that users did not need to be technologically savvy to use digital currency.

Kik wants to be a participant in this digital services ecosystem that is fair and open, rather than a landlord, and so are investing in making the platform run on blockchain. The money they are raising is to help them implement the infrastructure needed to build this decentralized system and to establish Kin’s fundamental value.

Kik will ‘kickstart’ the ecosystem by exposing its millions of users to the ecosystem. Fundamentally, Kik is trying to create a two-sided market. A big question will be whether Kik’s existing users will take to this new ecosystem to a large enough degree to be able to entice new services to enter and create a stable environment.

To create this community of ecosystem partners, Kik needs to separate themselves from managing the supply of Kin. Kik will initially set up the Kin Foundation as a 3rd party to administer the tokens and support the digital services being provided. Over time it will be replaced with a fully decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

What has happened so far?

It’s been half a year since KIK’s ICO. The market has adjusted since and the token has gained and lost value during this period. Interestingly enough the token gained its peak value and market cap ($1B USD) at the beginning of January. Most likely due to the overhyped sensation of the market that we saw at the beginning of the year.

The effects of that hype were felt by almost every single token including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and pretty much any of the top 100 tokens by market cap. The market has lost billions of dollars in value in the last month so this may also explain KIN’s steady loss of value lately.

The current state of KIN is much more stable than it has ever been before, however it is clearly been deflated in value and Market cap to about a quarter of what it was worth at the beginning of the year.

It is likely too early to tell whether the token will continue being successful in the next 5 years, and it will most likely depend on the amount of useful applications that will be created within the ecosystem.

What’s in it for Me? Why is Kin Valuable?

Basically, you make money by participating. You can earn Kin by creating valuable content, curating content and through offering digital goods & services to others in the community. You can then spend your Kin on other products, services or other valuable things on the platform built by other members of the community. Imagined use cases of Kin include:

VIP Groups — Celebrities and thought leaders can create VIP groups which cost Kin as an entry fee, users could then engage such celebrities, generating tangible value for their time and attention.

Premium User Generated Content — creating an open market for content will create higher-quality content on the platform that will reward the creator and create higher engagement with consumers.

Shoutout Messages — Users can decide to gain attention by paying Kin to post messages to groups, and users who receive these shoutouts will receive Kin.

Tipping — Users can reward creators of content they like by tipping them for their contribution.

Bot monetization — Bots can do useful things like order food, which you could pay for in Kin

Brand Missions — Brands can pay Kin to users in exchange for completing tasks like answering a survey or curating content.

Because the supply of Kin is finite and users (demand) will grow over time, the value of the Kin tokens purchased now will grow in value. Because Kin is still very early in their roadmap, the Kin is a solid long-term investment strategy.

Token — Bait and Switch?

The initial plans for Kin was for it to be based on Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard token. Since their ICO however, Kik has announced they plan to move to the Stellar network to better deal with congestion issues. This announcement has been met with some criticism from the developer community who feel Stellar is too close to centralized networks of today (the platform uses ‘anchors’, or trusted entities, to hold your money and honor withdrawals more quickly).

We don’t yet know what will happen to coins that have already been circulated, but it is assumed that they will be exchanged for a Stellar compliant token on a one-to-one basis.

We still know that the intent is to have Kin be a general-purpose cryptocurrency that is open sourced, with a fixed supply, that is fractionally divisible and tradable on exchanges. This last fact is important, because it allows users to exchange their tokens for USD.

Technology

The Kin token is currently based on Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard token and was first intended to be built on the Ethereum blockchain. Initially, the Kin foundation will host a private blockchain on centralized servers. The intent of a private blockchain is to improve user experience by:

· minimizing the time to confirm transactions

· avoiding ETH transaction fees; and

· improving speed by avoiding putting stress on the public network

To illustrate this potential issue with congestion, we can look at the success of the Kik Points experiment.

There are currently 740,000 daily transactions of Ethereum each day, Kik could introduce somewhere between 300,000 transactions (the average daily transaction volume for Kik Points) and 2,600,000 transactions (peak daily transaction volume of Kik Points).

Since ICO, Kik has announced their intention to move to the Stellar platform, which can better handle larger transaction volumes. We expect more to be released on this shortly, likely through a technical white paper. However, we know the goal will still be to transition the Kin network to a fully decentralized and autonomous system over time.

ICO Details & Toke Distribution

Kik offered 1 trillion Kin tokens during the 2-week ICO (out of a total supply of 10 trillion Kin). The purchased tokens are 100% of the available liquid supply.

At the time of the ICO, 3 trillion (or 30% of the total supply) were pre-allocated to Kik as the founding member of the Kin Foundation. They will be subject to a vesting schedule of 10% per quarter for 10 quarters.

The remaining 6 million is under control of Kin Foundation, locked under the Kin Rewards Engine Schema (which will be used to grow the Kin Ecosystem and fund the operations of the foundation). Each year 20% of the remaining kin out of this pool will be released to reward ecosystem partners. Rewards will be transparent, auditable and secure. Early partners will receive higher number of kin.

The Kin Foundation will use up to 5% of the reward allocation (up to 3% of the total supply) for operations and marketing, to help ecosystem partners acquire users and bring other partners to the ecosystem.

Inflation Schedule — New partners are given proportionately more for early adoption. This table describes the inflation rate, or how much kin as a percentage of total supply will be introduced into the ecosystem each year (it is assumed Kik’s 30% is fully vested).

Traction

Kik is an established company with over 150 employees, they have raised $120.5M in venture capital money and have a private valuation of over $1B.

Kik has a track record of innovations. They were the first chat app to become a platform (2011), the first western app to integrate bots (2014) and tested out Kik Points back in 2015. The Kik Points experiment provides some evidence that they are likely to succeed. During the experiment users completed over 253 million offers and spent their earned points on 74 million purchases. There were more transactions involving Kik Points than Bitcoin transactions over the same period. Importantly, Kik Points showed us that users did not need to be technologically savvy to use digital currency.

Team

One of the ways that the Kin ICO stands out is through a demonstrably excellent team with a deep background in running digital communications, consumer mobile apps, and digital media.

Ted Livingston, the founder and CEO of Kik, has led the company since inception, raised VC money, grown the team and the user base to 300M. Kik’s other executives have impressive backgrounds in finance, operations, communications, mobile and consumer apps and enterprise sales & partnerships. They have worked at organizations like Rounds, Spotify, Google, AOL Time Warner and Citizens Business Bank.

The core Kin team is deeply technical and includes software developers with experience in blockchain architecture, blockchain security and anti-fraud.

Advisors — Kik also has a top tier group of advisors, including Amir Chetrit, one of the cofounders of Ethereum.

Criticisms

While Kik has a large user base, its number of monthly users stopped growing as of September 2016. This is likely due to the popularity of other apps catering to similar demographics, like Snapchat. Importantly, this raises questions about if they will begin to lose users over time, which could hurt the value of their two-sided marketplace. The fact that their messaging service is used heavily by child pornographers could further hurt their popularity.

The use of hybrid on-chain and off-chain technologies is ultimately logical and supports the company’s mission. It is critical that they offer a great user experience to help foster adoption into this new economic model.

Kik has yet to release their technical whitepaper, likely due to the fact they are still identifying how things will change by moving to the Stellar blockchain. This will be an important release for current holders of Kin.

Another potential issue is that the Kin Foundation, and its executive team, must remain arm’s length from Kik until the legal and governance structures can be put in place to make the Kik Foundation into a DAO. It is also important that the Rewards Engine will be governed by a well-defined process based on an objective, performance-based methodology that will be auditable and open for anyone to see.

Conclusion

What makes the Kin ICO so exciting is that this is a proven team, with demonstrated traction, working on an ambitious goal to change products that have hundreds of millions of people interacting with each other.

While the partly centralized nature of the token may turn off some, we think it could actually be a good strategy to introduce cryptocurrencies to their youth audience. It is also clear that they have a plan in place and intend to transition to full decentralization.

One of the largest issues with this ICO is the change from the Ethereum network to the Stellar network and the questions that this raises. The bar is set very high for user experience in consumer apps and any sort of friction points will cause them to lose users.

However, even with these challenges, Kik has a large existing user base to leverage and has demonstrated their ability to execute and innovate over time. It is likely they will be able to transition the Kik platform to a two-sided marketplace, albeit with some effort.

The mission Kik is undertaking is valiant. If they can successfully demonstrate they can succeed without the advertising business model, it will likely influence others to do the same. Inhibiting the powerful network effects that companies like Facebook have generated is good for the public at large, but it will also make users happy, especially those with the growing concern with privacy.

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Disclaimer

This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness,accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.

Kik’s KIN ICO Review was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Healthcare Token

Introduction

WELL is a California based company (Delaware Corp), which is looking to connect healthcare specialists all around the world with patients. What makes them interesting is that their founder has personally suffered through a terrible experience with the US healthcare system after breaking his leg. In addition, the system has been built over the last 2 years.

Their token is the WELL and their pre-ICO started February 25th. The company is trying to raise $3M USD for their soft cap and $28M USD as a hard cap in exchange for their WELL tokens, which will be sold at around $0.1 USD each, minus bonus discounts. Their website can be found here. Their full ICO is scheduled for April 16th, 2018. The minimum investment is $1,000 USD for 10,000 WELL tokens (minus discounts).

The Idea

Founder Ildar Fazulyanov started WELL in April 2015, after having his leg broken. Ildar found himself going through multiple specialists, surgeons, and therapists. The process was so slow that he was still waiting for his first appointment, he broke his leg a second time.

The team at WELL is building a decentralized global healthcare network. Their premise is that it is difficult for patients to find access to remote diagnoses, while health practitioners struggle to invoice and manage payments.

“The WELL token will enable an on-demand system that solves the current problems of cross-border payments, data accessibility, and payment risk, allowing areas with the highest quality of healthcare to serve the entire world.”

Well White Paper, p. 3

The company explains that, as healthcare prices keep rising, people will require a better way to find remote diagnoses by tapping into a network of professionals. They believe that people should have access to doctors all around the world even if they are not able to hire them themselves.

Furthermore the company claims that health insurance has made the whole ecosystem complicated due to the layers of complexity regarding claims. It is yet unclear how they are able to make this system less complicated. The claim is that the immutable nature of the Blockchain network will provide a real patient history that insurance providers can confirm. But we are not convinced that truth is the reason why the insurance process is so slow.

How it works

The current platform enables people to have a videoconference with a doctor. The doctor may potentially be able to provide help through this online service. The results of the session are then recorded and enable the client and practitioners to have access to a medical history of the patient. The platform follows the HL7/FHIR Medical Record standard.

The practitioners can generate prescriptions, discharge notes, and there is also collaboration with different labs.

Traction

This company is one of the rare cases where the incorporation documents are actually made available to the public. They have incorporated as a Delaware Corp since June 4th, 2015, filed as WELL INC (File #5760572). Their logo has been trademarked, and their medical platform was registered for a patent in the United States in August 1st, 2017.

During that time, the company built up a network of therapists, by 2017 the company had conducted over 13,000 patient visits, serving over 1,600 patients (About 8 visits per patient). The company was billed over $1M USD for those services. They also claim to be the fastest-growing on-demand healthcare platform in the world. They now offer therapy in several languages including english, spanish, russian, and chinese.

The company has been certified by multiple healthcare programs, including:

• Medicare
• myMatrixx
• Optum
• Century Pacific Medical

Their current telemedicine platform has provided over 40,000 telemedicine sessions with 110 doctors, and other specialists. Which includes:

• Remote monitoring (RMM)
• Connectivity with patients
• Conference calls with patients
• Recording results

The Token

WELL is built using a standard ERC20 token. The purpose of the token is to be able to transfer funds between patient and doctors, but also escrow those funds. The successful performance of a visit (e.g.) would release those funds.

The team makes money from the following services:

• Transactions: They take a fee from every transaction
• Ancillary Services: They provide translations, pharmacy orders, training, etc. for a fee
• Remote Patient Monitoring: They can set up iPads and other infrastructure at hospitals
• Network Access: They charge caretakers and hospitals a fee to join the network

They will create roughly 1.5 Billion tokens (worth $150M USD). 40% will be issued for the crowdsale, they will keep 20% for the team (why so much?) and release the last 40% over 4 years at a rate of 10% per year.

Follows this chart:

Technical Details

The company provides no technical details on their 45 page white paper. We wonder if they will eventually release a technical white paper for review. For now we only know that they will potentially use an ERC20 token which they expect will be traded on exchanges.

The white paper also claims the platform will maintain a “one-to-one mapping with legally bound promises for health care services.” We have no idea or understanding how this is implemented, let alone promised or confirmed. More details on the “Criticisms” section of this blog.

ICO Details

WELL’s crowdsale began this February 25, 2018 and will continue until they reach their hard cap of $28M (ETH or BTC) or until May 25th, whichever happens first. They will sell 1.5 billion WELL tokens in exchange for the $28M or about 60 WELL tokens per $1 USD.

The company accepts: ETH, BTC, LTC and fiat. The discounts will follow this table:

Use of Funds

The company will keep 20% of the tokens and they will be used for:

• Building the WELL platform
• Staff Salaries
• Sales and Marketing Expenses
• Recruiting
• App Development costs

We are not sure why the company gets to keep such a large percentage of the token, when they clearly have already a very detailed business model for the platform. Why are users expected to pay for the development, deployment and usage of the platform while simultaneously not getting shares and only a small bonus discount?

The Team

The CEO of WELL is Ildar Fazulyanov, born in Russia and studied chemical engineering at the Moscow Bauman University. He then studied an MBA at Tuck School of Business (New Hampshire, US). The white paper also mentions experience in healthcare, accounting and business development.

Co-founder Alex Prokhorov is another Russian national, BYU alumni and Fintech investor. He began as a financial advisor at Ernst & Young in NYC and quickly became an investor. That said, this information comes from their white paper, on the white paper there is a link to his biography which goes to an anonymous profile with no extra information.

The rest of the team includes:

• Dr Matthew Lefferman — Clinical Director (Only Medical Doctor in the team)
• Dmitry Semenov — Development Team Lead (Worked at Qvolta)
• Josh Fonger — Process Architect
• Yetkin Timocin — Developer
• Dr. Istvan Csatari — Designer

Needless to say, the team has experience and looks extremely competent. The company also has a series of advisors in finance and medical information.

Criticisms

The white paper drags along very simple concepts and even goes as far as explaining game theory and the prisoner dilemma (with examples). However, what the 45 page white paper does not explain or provide answers to is much more serious:

• Insurance Claims
• Private Information Safety
• Physicians Credibility / Competence
• Negligence Possibilities
• Guarantees and Licensing

The company also seems to have been successful. So why do they need an ICO? If they believe that the product speaks for itself, and also that Blockchain would be the right implementation for it, why not create a stable token that never changes in price? In the case of WELL it seems that ICOing is more of a gimmick to fundraise, instead of a legitimate use of the Blockchain.

They also mention that it is difficult for people in developed countries to find healthcare. Would those people have the technology or the education to utilize a crypto token effectively in order to deal with their medical worries? Would we have to explain to the sick and elderly how to use this technology? Do we need to train doctors, hospitals, and patients to use an immutable ledger, that does not forgive transactional errors?

The current list of people expected to use the token are:

• Patients
• Doctors
• Insurance companies
• Healthcare systems
• Charities
• Research Institutions
• Loan Companies
• Pharmacies and Pharmaceutical companies

Who provides the education for everyone? WELL? Will they charge for that? There are a lot of unanswered questions. If you want to see the complete list of people who are expected to use the token, we can thankfully point at WELL’s Token Matrix found here.

It is also important to mention:

“All services provided by healthcare professionals on the WELL network constitute recommendations only, and patients must seek official diagnosis and care from healthcare professionals licensed in their corresponding jurisdiction”

WELL White Paper Page 28

In other words, there is no guarantee or repercussion for any negative side effects from the network. This means that if you are paired with a disreputable or unlicensed practitioner, you will not be able to seek compensation if something goes wrong. We wonder how this will affect insurance claims through the platform, when they cannot guarantee the competence of their doctors.

Lastly, the platform guarantees that it will maintain “legally bound promises” for health care services. There is no discussion on how this is actually achieved, or the steps and measures to keep this promise. Our concern boils down to the fact that we do not know what prevents a physician from lying or making a mistake, and what steps will be taken to avoid these issues.

One of the problems ultimately affecting Blockchain based information is that it is by nature immutable, and transparent. That does not sound very useful for healthcare records without very well thought-out legal and technical implementations.

Conclusion

There are multiple sides that make this ICO an interesting story. The first is the fact that the founder has a personal attachment to the problem. He broke his leg, experienced terrible service, and then broke it again before he saw the first specialist. The company has also operated since 2015 and is quite open about what they have accomplished in that time.

This company has patents, copyrights, and incorporation documents, and while those are fantastic transparency moves, they make us wonder: does the company really need an ICO? If they have already built the bulk of the platform and its fees, why do they need to go to the public for funding?

We also struggle to find the use case for the cryptocurrency. Those that need this product the most are children, the sick, the elderly, and people in developing countries. Can we expect those people to have the technological education to handle a cryptocurrency asset in order to pay for their needed medical attention? We do not know.

The company also expects the minimum investment for the ICO to be $1,000 USD. Won’t this limit the investment participation heavily? Time will tell. Note: It is also important to note that if you are a citizen or permanent resident of the US, you can only participate on this ICO if you are an accredited investor. Citizens of China and Singapore are disallowed outright from investing.

This looks like an incredibly competent technology and project, and we are sure that many of our questions could be answered by the WELL team. Ultimately, our biggest question is whether or not a Blockchain implementation is the best way to store Medical Health Records, given how risky negligence is, and how social hacking can cause incredible damage to these systems, as well as the barrier to entry required to understand and participate in them.

We are looking forward to seeing this story develop.

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Well ICO Review was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Savings Token

Note: After the developments and the catastrophic marketing campaign by savedroid, we created a new article updating on the situation and what happened since this article was written.

You can read “savedroid: The Damage Caused” here.

Introduction

savedroid is a company based in Frankfurt, Germany. Their purpose is to help people save money through a bot that automatically invests and saves your cryptocurrencies. They have been in operation since 2015. Their original application was created for banking has been downloaded over 200,000 times in Germany, and they are now looking to expand worldwide and into the crypto market.

Their ICO is currently ongoing, they are raising 60M€ in exchange for their SVD Token, the company currently sells 100 SVD for 1€ (minus discounts). Their website can be found here. savedroid has already raised over 25M€ for their ICO with 19 days left.

The Idea

What makes this company special is the fact that their team is heavily stacked, the founders have worked in FinTech for over 10 years, and they have experience building, testing, and deploying a previous software product. Their application already has a user base and is highly rated, giving them a huge edge over most ICOs.

Originally the idea behind savedroid was a mobile platform that included a savings robot. Their belief is that saving money is boring, and tedious. Their solution is simple: you set up goals or “desires” through their mobile app, then the robot would take part of your income and put it into a savings account. Depending on your income and goals, you could, for example, automatically save 5% of your income into their savings account every month. You can also program an activity that would save your money, eg. you save $10 every time you go to the gym. They dubbed these activities / events, “smooves”. The money is stored in a free savings account with a partner bank “Wirecard”.

Two years later, the team at savedroid realized that even though helping Germans save money is important, the market for investing in cryptos might be even more so. There are hundreds of millions of people all over the world investing and purchasing cryptocurrencies, most of these investments are difficult and come with a lot of hassle. This is a complex market worth over half a trillion dollars by market cap. The creators evaluated their mobile application, and redesigned their savings robot for the crypto market.

“Honestly, the user experience along the entire [cryptocurrency] journey completely sucks… the idea is to enable people to invest in cryptocurrencies, derivatives, and ICOs in a simple and gamified way”

- Dr. Yassin Hankir, CEO at savedroid

Traction

The team at savedroid has been developing their FinTech platform since 2015. Their current non-crypto version of savedroid has been downloaded over 200,000 times and is only available to German citizens, who have collectively saved over 10M€. Their app has a rating of 4.2 stars. Half of their users are within the 25 – 34 demographic. This was partially possible due to a 3M€ equity investment they received in 2017.

The platform also claims to be developing a self-learning artificial intelligence algorithm that knows exactly how best to save and optimize your expenses. Apparently the AI will be launched this year and will be improved over the lifetime of the company. Their plan is to enable the robot to purchase cryptocurrencies this year and be able to trade futures by 2020.

savedroid has also been able to build a strong network of partners. The idea is to be able to offer as many financial tools as possible to their customers. This includes savings accounts, credit cards, trading platforms, and direct access to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Their plan is to continue expanding the list of partners to offer more investment instruments and options.

The Token

The SVG (savedroid) token is based on a standard ERC20 Ethereum smart contract. Users will be able to sell and trade SVD tokens with each other after the ICO’s distribution event. The SVD Token has the following properties:

• savedroid savings fees
• Trading other cryptocurrencies
• As a storage of value
• Other services within the network

The company will also artificially deflate the market by burning their own tokens to increase price, this will happen as a percentage of the used tokens when users pay for the savings services. The company describes the flow of their tokens through the following chart:

Their platform will enable users to trade:

• Ethereum
• Bitcoin
• Ripple
• IOTA
• Dash
• Stellar
• Others

Their plan is to be able to also trade their token in cryptocurrency exchanges. You can also buy tokens directly from the company, as they will keep a percentage of the tokens.

They plan to distribute the token in the following way:

Technology

The team at savedroid claims that their robot savings algorithm is the core of their technology. The way it works is by defining certain triggering events or activities in the user’s everyday life, called “smooves”. Every time the user participates on one of these self-imposed activities, the robot is triggered which causes it to safe some predetermined amount of money by storing it in a savings account. It is unclear what makes this technology “smart”, and seems to be mostly a gamification of savings.

The company also claims that the robot is able to optimize savings. The way it is explained, the robot can determine what type of purchase activity the user realized, and is able to determine a more efficient alternative to that activity. Their example is telephone bills, the robot should be able to find a cheaper contract that offers the same value, or a credit card with better rates than your current one. It is also unclear how or if this works, as the company calls it its “secret sauce” and does not go very deep in the details.

ICO Details

Their ICO is currently ongoing. Their Pre-ICO started in January 12th and finished January 26th. During the Pre-ICO the company offered a 30% bonus to purchasers of SVD. The estimated price will be 100 SVD = 1€

Their ICO started in February 9th and will go on until March 2018, offering 55% of all SVDs available for purchase (5.5 billion). During their white paper they explained they were expecting to sell in the lower double digits millions of SVD, they have already sold over 3 billion of them.

These percentages are probably heavily off since they were planning on raising $1–3M USD and they have been able to do over ten times more. The following chart explains how they explain to use the more than $30M USD they have made so far:

The soft cap for their ICO is 50 million SVD and their hard limit is 5.5 billion. As of February 18th, 2018, they have sold over 3.3 billion tokens (over 60% of available hard limit), so they may run out of tokens before their end date.

The Team

Core Team

Big claims require a lot of evidence. In the case of savedroid team, there are a lot of reasons to believe they will be able to deliver their promises.Their team is only 20 people, however the team has been in the financial industry for a while, and has an experienced advisory board.

The CEO of savedroid is Dr. Yassin Hankir, an economics PhD that worked for McKinsey & Company as a private consultant for banks, he then moved into developing his first financial company, and later developed savedroid. Their COO, Marco Trautmann, is also an experienced banking and IT professional. Also from McKinsey where he worked as a product manager. Lastly, their CTO, Tobias Zander is a software developer with experience in e-commerce, and also a blog writer.

The rest of the team includes veterans in IT for banking, as well as economics students. Needless to say the team at savedroid loves banking and infrastructures.

Advisors

savedroid’s advisory board includes an extremely competent list of founders and Chief-level executives of several German finance, AI, and consulting companies including: Infosys, 2iQ Research, Traxpay, ETRONIKA, SatoshiPay, 360T, and over 10 others.

The team and advisory board of this ICO are certainly some of its strongest points.

Criticisms

It is currently not clear how the platform will enable users to exchange their cryptocurrency back into fiat. They do not define the process, price, or how much they will potentially be charging per transaction back to fiat. Page 14 of the version 1.4 of their white paper states:

“They will automatically receive a virtual, fully secured wallet and all fiat funds that the user wants to covert to cryptocurrencies will be converted magically in the background to the selected cryptocurrency.”
— Page 14 v1.4 savedroid’s White Paper

We are not sure what “magically” means but it would be good to clarify.

This is mentioned at the conclusion as well, but there are no indications or explanations regarding their trading and savings algorithm or “Robot”. It is mentioned multiple times that it relies on a secret AI technology but we wish there was more information about this or some sort of test or validation that is real.

It seems that the trading platform will rely on a sort of hot wallet mechanism, this can obviously carry multiple different dangers, as we have mentioned on previous articles, in short, you are trusting a third party with your private keys, which is a great target for hackers, as well as much more sensitive to human mediocrity and / or corruption.

While their partnership list is fantastic, it is also extremely centered in the German markets. This was understanding from a German company helping Germans save money, but now that they are expanding to a global scale, it is crucial for the company to adapt worldwide partnerships.

Regarding the price of the token, the company has decided to utilize the gimmick practice of artificially deflating the token by destroying (burning) some of the token, thus increasing price.

Conclusion

The company seems to have put a huge emphasis in organizational transparency. This ICO is following regulations and compliance in multiple ways. It is one of the few ICOs that we have seen coming from Germany that are not based in some tax haven country such as Switzerland in order to avoid paying tax. The company has gone through great lengths to make sure they demonstrate that they have incorporated, raised funds before, and also a clear idea of who the team and advisors are.

It should be the norm to follow rules and regulations in ICOs, specially in FinTech, but this is really not the case for the majority of them. We are very pleasantly surprised with this German company and its need to follow regulations. The company also complies with security auditings provided by TÜV Saarland Group, to make sure that they follow industry standards for cyber security.

That said, not everything was completely transparent. Their technology, and more specifically the algorithms, ideas, or any proof of the workings of the robot were missing from the White Paper. We understand they want to keep it secret, but we don’t even get to look at the variables, data, or any other measurable metric of success. We simply do not know anything about the complexity of the algorithm(s) used.

Even with these hiccups we think that this will be a successful ICO. There are over 19 days left for their ICO and they have already managed to sell half of their tokens for about 25M€.The company is trying to solve a very important and common problem that plagues ICOs: Complexity and large volumes. As more people are getting into cryptocurrencies, it is clear to us that offering simple financial and savings options will become increasingly important.

Lastly, the company has a lot going for it. The team is heavily stacked, and well connected in the German FinTech circles (some of the strongest financial services in the world), the team has done a lot of research and put quite a meticulous product over the last two and a half years. Which are probably their biggest strengths.

Interestingly, their white paper is quite possibly one of the most dynamic white papers we have ever read. If only because they essentially created a YouTube video for every single one of the white paper chapters. You can find the entire playlist here.

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Disclaimer

This website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. This website cannot substitute for professional advice and independent factual verification. The ideas and strategies on this website should never be used without first assessing your own personal financial situation, and without consulting a financial professional. All content in this website is for informational purposes only, and is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness,accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this website. This is just a stub, your access to and use of this website is conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with the Full Disclaimers. The Disclaimers apply to all visitors, users, and others who wish to access or use this website.