Gladius (GLA) ICO Analysis: A Decentralised Blockchain-Based Cyber Protection Network

Executive Summary

Project Description

Of recent, the threat posed by DDoS attacks have grown prominently, and companies are actively looking for a way to protect themselves. Sadly, a lot of the firms that currently offer DDoS protection services are under threat of getting DDoSed themselves. Rather than solve the problem on ground, this just shifts the threat from one target to another, leaving the companies exposed still. Despite not satisfying their clients, these firms go on to charge huge amounts of money.

Gladius provides a solution that nullifies the DDoS threat without making companies pay over the odds. They plan to create a platform where users can act as validators for websites that seek protection from DDoS attacks; these validators will run nodes, check the website’s connections and block malicious activities, earning the token, GLA, for their work. Since Gladius is going to be a decentralised P2P network, the network itself is immune from DDoS attacks.

To make things even better, with Gladius, companies only have to pay when they have been attacked, as opposed to the usual practise by DDoS protection services where payment is mandatory, even in the absence of an attack. This initiative by Gladius gives smaller companies the opportunity to afford proper protection, and it allows the big companies save huge chunks of money; giving them a financial incentive to use Gladius. With their unique value proposition, Gladius are looking to break into a big, heavily-growing market. “Cloudflare has a market cap over $3.2 billion. Imperva/Incpsula’s cap is over $1.5 billion. Akamai’s is over $11 billion.”

Apart from serving as a method of payment for validators, Gladius’ token, GLA, will also be used to purchase DDoS protection and CDN services on the platform.

Hard Cap and Valuation

There will be a total of 48,150,000 GLA tokens, and Gladius aim to raise $12.5M for 60% of the token total. 15% of the GLA left is reserved for “operations”, 10% goes to the founders, and the final 15% is for the team. The founder tokens are locked for 18 months, and the pre-sale tokens are also locked (depending on the amount you contributed for up to three months). This effectively reduces the available supply to 90% of the token total minus the amount sold during pre-sale. Gladius provides different bonus structures for their sales as shown below:

Bonus During Private Pre-sale

$10,000–$30,000
bonus 40% (1 month vesting)

$30,000–$100,000
bonus 50% (1.5 months vesting)

$110,000–$200,000
Bonus 60% (2 months vesting)

$200,000–$500,000
bonus 70% (2.5 months vesting)

$500,000+
bonus 80% (3 months vesting)

Bonus During Public Pre-sale

1–16 ETH
bonus 20% (0)

17–34 ETH
bonus25% (0.5 months vesting)

34–103 ETH
bonus30% (1 month vesting)

103–334 ETH
bonus35% (1.5 months vesting)

335+ ETH
bonus40% (2 months vesting)

Bonus During ICO

First 24 hours
20% bonus

Week 1
5% bonus

Week 2
3% bonus

Week 3
1% bonus

Week 4
No bonus

No vesting for tokens bought during the ICO

Important Dates

Gladius held a pre-sale from the 15th of October, 2017 to the 23rd of November 2017. After that, they launched another public pre-sale; this one started on the 24th of November, 2017 and is due to end on the 30th of December 2017, or until public pre-sale allocation is exhausted. Actual token sale starts on the 14th of January, 2018.

Marketing Power

As at the time of publication, Gladius had over 5900 Facebook subscribers, 6600+ Telegram users, and over 5700 followers on Twitter . They also have over 650 followers on Medium.

Prominent Advisors

Jeremy Epstein, Marketing Advisor.

• VP Marketing at Sprinklr.
• CEO of Never Stop Marketing.

Well-Known Team Members

N/A

Howey’s Test

According to the Howey’s Test conducted by our analysts, it is unlikely that Gladius’ token, GLA will be considered a security.

Team Members’ Areas of Expertise

Please note: In this section, our usual practice is to focus on the team members, with minimal focus given to the advisors and partners. In Gladius’ case however, advisors play a big role, and this is reflected in the fact that 15% of their token total is earmarked for their advisors, community and marketing team while the founders get only 10%; usually, advisors are not given so much prominence — or so much token allocation. As a result, even though we cannot accurately estimate the roles of the advisors and how much effort they put into the project, we must entertain the possibility that they are equally as important (if not more important) than the members of the team. Therefore, special mention will be given to the advisors in this section, and their names will be followed by the title “Advisor”.

Business experts

Max Niebylski, Founder and CEO.

• Co-Founder of Goliath Design.

Ori Levi, Marketing Manager.

• Owner of Leprechaun (Imported clothing from Asia). He was responsible for brand development, web site traffic growth etc. for over 5 years.

Hezy Yeshurun, Advisor.

• Co-Founder, and Chairman of the Board of ForeScout for over 17 years.

Target market experts

Hezy Yeshurun, Advisor.

• ForeScout (mentioned above) focuses on cybersecurity.

Jim Brinksma, Business Strategy and Development Director.

• VP, Strategy & Business Development at Ciena.

Marketing experts

Ori Levi, Marketing Manager.

• Marketing Director at Aaa Capital Llc for almost 2 years.
• VP, Marketing at Market Across for over 2 years.

Dori Harpaz, Advisor.

• VP, Marketing at Secdo for over a year.
• Director of Marketing at Incapsula for over 5 years.
• Branding Team Manager at eToro for 3 years.

Legal experts

They are working with 5 lawyers and 4 accountants on retainer from Paul Hastings and RSM.

Software engineering experts

Max Niebylski

• Computer software engineer intern at jobs.nih.gov for over a year.
• Software engineer at rotundastore.com for 6 months.
• Software engineer intern at Bloomberg for 4 months.

Marcelo McAndrew, Co-Founder and COO.

• Mobile development intern at digitalinfuzion.com for 3 months.

Konrad Seweryn, Web Developer.

• Freelance full-Stack developer for over a year.

Additionally, Gladius hired 5 different security engineers with decades of experience in the industry from Cloudflare, Akamai etc.

Blockchain development experts

No team member with notable blockchain development experience. However, they are working with the team that did Metamask’s and Coinbase’s UI/UX and blockchain integration.

Token sale structure

No team member with prior ICO launch experience, but they are working with the wings.ai team for their ICO structure. Furthermore, one of their advisors, Frank Bonnet is the founder of DCORP, a startup that raised $7m during its ICO.

Token economics

Same as above. No team member with notable token economics experience, but they have experienced partners.

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Disclaimers:

• Nothing written in this article is a legal or an investment advice.
• Information is provided on a best-effort basis and is subject to change without prior notice. Be sure to verify everything you read with a project team.

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The analysis was produced by Research Center team members: Robin Davids, Mark Jedd, Eugene Tartakovsky.

We are constantly working on improving our work and we welcome all constructive feedback. Let us know what you think.

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