Note: The projects included in Satoshi•Fund ICO Monitor vary significantly in terms of investment risks. Before considering any investment, make sure you read the reports below carefully and take time to do your own due diligence.

Blackmoon Crypto

Note: Blackmoon Crypto ICO ended in one day after reaching the hard cap. The total of $30,000,202 was raised in BTC, ETH and LTC.

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About

Blackmoon Crypto is a project of the Blackmoon Financial Group, a financial technology company founded in 2014 and already backed by private investors. The company’s current product is a Lending Marketplace Platform whose monthly volume of lending deals equals $13M. The company now wants to build a new platform for setting up and operating tokenized investment funds for investments both in crypto- and fiat assets implemented using the Ethereum smart contracts.

Implementation

• Problem being solved
  There is no real-life problem as such that the platform should solve, except it tries to bring together within a single platform and ecosystem investors into crypto- and traditional assets. The team’s expectation is that crypto-investors will win by getting access to a wider range of assets in the fiat world and will thus be able to diversificate their portfolios, while the fiat investors by getting access to crypto-assets will benefit from higher returns because of the crypto-assets’ high profitability.
• Platform usage
  The platform will allow fund managers to create tokenized investment funds on the platform - for investments either in crypto- or fiat assets. Fund managers will be able to issue each their own tokens (which is different from the platform’s token BMC) and distribute them to investors. The platform will provide a fund management tool to fund managers as well as an analytical interface to all token holders.
• Ethereum smart contracts will be used to “create, manage and govern tokenized investment vehicles and the platform itself” according to the whitepaper; but for the rest the technical implementation is not specified.
• Blackmoon Crypto intends to use the Bancor protocol ERC20 smart-token standard within the Blackmoon Crypto infrastructure
• Source code is not yet available on the project’s Github

Internal economics and token

• Platform’s native token is Blackmoon Crypto Tokens (BMC), ERC20 compatible. It gives token holders a right to participate in the platform’s operations and receive rewards for their contribution from the funds of the Blackmoon Crypto platform. Namely, each BMC token holder can apply to become a Continuous Contributor by depositing her BMC and choosing a specific role: that of an investment advisor or that of a legal advisor. For acting in either of the two roles users will get rewarded with a share of the funds’ tokens available on the platform. The source of the rewards will be the fees paid by the funds on the platform (see more details below). The conditions of exchanging funds’ tokens for other currency will be determined by a fund that issued each particular token.
• Total supply of BMC: 60 million tokens
• Another type of tokens will be funds’ tokens issued by the funds on the platform as described in Implementation section above
• Fees
  Funds will pay a number of fees for using the platform: a structuring fee (once), a promotion fee (once), a maintenance fee (daily), a transaction fee (per each transaction). More details available on page 17 of the whitepaper

Team

The team has a strong background in investing and finance. Oleg Seydak is a co-founder of Flint Capital, a venture investment fund, and served as a Managing Director in the investment firm Finam Global. Ilya Perekopski is a co-founder, former VP and CCO of the popular social network VK.com. Less clear is who will be doing the tech part as only one blockchain specialist Alexander Rugaev is mentioned who is the founder of https://icopromo.com/ and has participated in developing of TaaS and Chronobank.io.

ICO

• Pre-ICO: ended on 1 September reaching $8.27M, at token price 1BMC = $1
• ICO started on 12 September and ended on 13 September after reaching the hard cap
• Total of $30,000,202 was raised in BTC, ETH and LTC
• ICO token price:
  $1 - 1st to 2nd days
  $1.05 - 3rd to 7th days
  $1.10 - up to 7th day
• Maximum investment per account: $1M
• Token distribution:
  50% - public;
  30% - company’s reserve (locked for a minimum of 36 months)
  20% - team and advisors (24-month vesting period and six-month cliff)

Conclusion

• An ambitious idea to connect the world of crypto-investments with the world of fiat investments, letting each investment fund on the platform to issue its own tokens which should reinforce the platform users’ possibilities and profit
• The platform introduces a few interesting components such as specific roles for users who are ready to constantly contribute to the platform’s operations, and the co-existence of the platform’s token with tokens issued by the funds on the platform
• It is not clear who and how will ensure the security of investors’ ETH given the potential vulnerabilities in the Ethereum contracts. of money stored in Ethereum contracts
• The platform will be developed by an already established company with a strong management, but it is not clear who will be developers doing the tech part, namely implementing Ethereum smart contracts into the platform
• Also, an open question is who and how will ensure the security of investors’ ETH given the potential vulnerabilities in the Ethereum contracts. This work requires a group of high-level experts in the team who can test and monitor the contracts, but they are either absent, or not announced
• Legal issues is another potential threat to the project’s feasibility. The tokens issued by the funds on the platform will be securities (see F.A.Q. here) and the team says to ensure the funds’ full compliance with all applicable regulations treating it as one of the project’s core focus areas. However, until there are particular positive results, the legal issue remains a source of risk. The legal team - if there is any - is not announced
• No proof of concept available (neither codebase on Github, not the technical specification in the whitepaper, nor the platform prototype)
• The token distribution is far from being fair: only 50% of all tokens will be sold to the public against another 50% reserved for the team and the company

Useful links: website, whitepaper, blog on Medium.

Kin

Note: As of 15 September, 2017, 12:40 UTC, the Kin ICO is ongoing with 327,081 ETH (including pre-ICO contributions) raised to date out of 432,526 ETH available in total.

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About

Kin, a cryptocurrency built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, will be a primary currency for transactions in the Kik Messenger. The Kik Messenger is a free instant messaging mobile app developed by the Canadian company Kik Interactive, Inc. (Kik), and is available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. According to the team it has 300 million registered users (15 million active users monthly) and maintains a bot platform with over 187,000 bots created by third-party developers.

Implementation

• Problem being solved
  • There is no particular real-life problem the project is trying to solve beyond the development of its own business. It aims at creating inside the Kik Messenger a new decentralized ecosystem with such functionality as a chat, a social media platform and a payments system. The Kin token will be used as a unit of account and as an incentive for users and partners of the ecosystem.
• Platform usage:
  1. Allows the Kik Messenger users to purchase products, services, and other valuable assets offered by merchants and developers on the Kik platform (examples of such services include VIP groups, premium user-generated content, shoutout messages that allow users to promote messages for some fee in Kin tokens)
  2. Enables payments between users (users can send a certain amount to support good content)
  3. Allows advertisers to directly engage with consumers (users are rewarded with small amounts of Kin for completing simple promotion tasks)
  4. Allows external developers to build their apps on top of the Kik Messenger
• The source code is not available
• The developers have not disclosed technical details of the project yet, except that it is supposed to be a “semi-centralized system”. The only on-chain part of the system will be represented by the transactions in Kin settled on the Ethereum blockchain. The rest of the transactional infrastructure will be built using a centralized off-chain ledger with an API available to all digital service partners.

Economics and token

• Platform’s native token is Kin, ERC20 compliant
• Total supply: 10,000,000,000,000 Kin (fixed)
• Token utility:
  1. As a means of payment within the Kik Messenger ecosystem
  2. An incentive for other digital services and applications to join the Kik Messenger ecosystem (see “The Kin Rewards Engine” below)
  3. In the future - an incentive for users to perform curation, content creation, and commerce
• The Kin Rewards Engine
  60% of the Kin token supply will be allocated to the Kin Rewards Engine through a smart contract. Every year 20% of the remaining rewards allocation will be distributed among ecosystem partners in order to bring new digital services and applications into the Kik Messenger ecosystem. New partners will be rewarded proportionately more to encourage early adoption.

Team

The team is 20 people plus an advisory board. The core management team has a lot of experience in the digital and technology field. All of them are currently working at the Kik Messenger.

CEO Ted Livingston founded Kik at the age of 22 years. CFO and COO Peter Heinke has over 20 years of experience in finance, operations and strategy at companies in the media, technology and transportation sectors, senior engineering vice president Dave Simons - over 20 years of engineering and business experience at a variety of companies, including Points International, NeoEdge Networks and AOL Time Warner.

They also recruited several blockchain technology experts. The advisors are experienced and well-known in the blockchain community.

ICO

• 1 trillion Kin tokens are offered for sale during pre-ICO and ICO (10% of total supply)
• Pre-ICO:
  • Finished with $50 million received from accredited investors, including Blockchain Capital, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital
  • 488 billion Kin tokens sold
  • 30% discount on the ICO token price
• ICO is available only for registered participants in order to make it compliant with KYC requirements and “perform a fair and broad token distribution”, as the team claims here
• Registration has ended on 9 September, 2017
• ICO started on 12 September, 2017 and as of 15 September, 2017, 12:40 UTC, was ongoing with 327,081 ETH (including pre-ICO contributions) already raised out of 432,526 ETH available in total.
• Hard cap for contributions: $75 million (512,195,121,951 Kin tokens)
• Maximum investment amount for each registered participant: $75 million USD divided by the total number of successful registrations
• Accepted currencies: ETH
• Token price and bonuses during ICO: 1 ETH = $289 = 1,973,581 Kin; no bonuses
• Token distribution
  10% - pre-ICO and ICO
  30% - will be allocated to the Kik company and released at 10 percent per quarter, for 10 quarters
  60% - will be locked under the Kin Rewards Engine scheme and will be used for the growth of the Kin ecosystem; initially administered by the non-profit Kin Foundation, later - supposed to be decentralized
• Token distribution will not start until Kik completes the integration of Kin into the Kik Messenger. The exact date of this event is not announced yet

Conclusion

• The Kin token will be used only within the ecosystem of the existing Kik Messenger application which is already operational and has a large user base; the Kik Messenger has plenty of competitors both in traditional (WhatsApp, WeChat) and blockchain (Status, Toshi) industries; this project does not seem to have any significant difference compared to its contenders
• Detailed technical documentation and future development roadmap are absent; the open source code is not available, and at this stage the project seems to be a very centralized solution as the Ethereum blockchain will only be used for the settlement of transactions in Kin tokens
• In fact, users will get a standard user experience of a messenger app without much of the complexity going along with the blockchain systems which could significantly drive the mass adoption of the blockchain technology among large user base of the Kik Messenger
• The more users and partners join the ecosystem, the higher the value of the Kin must be. The growing network effect of the Kin ecosystem will encourage new users and partners to join this project
• In our opinion the team looks quite experienced and capable to implement the project with such scale
• Only 10% of the total token supply will be sold to ICO participants, while 90% of all issued tokens will initially be controlled by the team and a legal entity behind it (the majority of these tokens will later be distributed to new partners who join the platform). About half of the tokens left for sale (4.88% of total token supply) were distributed to pre-ICO investors with a 30% discount. Thus, only 5.12% of total token supply (512 billion Kin tokens) will be available for registered ICO participants. This does not look like “a fair and broad token distribution” at all.

Useful links: website, whitepaper, Slack, blog.

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You can also read this article on Medium.