Zebi (ZCO) ICO Analysis: A Secure and Accessible Ecosystem For Data Solutions

Executive Summary

Project Description

There is no denying the fact that, at the moment, the digital age is in full flow and most organizations have their data stored on remotely-located hard drives and cloud-based servers. However, there are some organizations that need high-value data as part of their day-to-day activities and as a result, need to have the data handy. Government institutions, hospitals, banks, insurance companies and a host of other organizations like them need constant access to important data like health records, personnel information, loan requests documents, customer records, account statements and so on. This means that valuable data is held centrally, where it is vulnerable to tampering, hacks, insider manipulation and mishandling, qualification fraud and so on. These incidents have been on the rise in recent times and Zebi’s research team estimates that every year, Indian organizations and their customers lose ~$30 billion.

Zebi aims to provide the organizations mentioned above with a hacker-proof and tamper-proof solution. The Zebi ecosystem will reportedly have 2 interconnected components — Zebi Chain and Zebi Gateway — and their ecosystem should serve as a platform for data providers and data requesters to meet and transact hitch-free. Zebi Chain is planned to be integrated with the Ethereum blockchain.

One of India’s largest state governments, the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) have already agreed to safeguard their land assets with Zebi Chain. The team also plans to reward individuals that provide data on the platform. Individual data requestors may also benefit from using a system that promises security, speedy exchanges at low cost, and tools for data verification.

The Zebi Data Gateway, on the other hand, is meant to serve as a means of communication and validation between the organizations that hold data — the data providers and the people that need the data — the requesters. All data requests will come with a transaction fee, and the fees will have to be paid in ZCO, Zebi’s ERC20 compliant token. In addition to being the payment medium, ZCO is also likely to serve as a utility token in the Zebi ecosystem; to reward prospective participants for contributing to the Zebi platform.

Hard Cap and Valuation

There will be a total of 1 billion ZCO tokens and Zebi hope to raise $10 million for 30% of the token total. The remaining 70% is shared thus: 50% is earmarked for the company i.e. Zebi’s founders, team, advisors, data providers and other partners; 15% goes to participants in the ecosystem (including bounty campaigns), and the final 5% will be used to cover token sale expenses. The company tokens will be locked for 18 months (starting from March 2018) and will be released in batches after the 18 months have elapsed.

Zebi held a one-week pre-sale from February 5, 2018 till February 12, 2018. During the pre-sale, there was a 30% bonus and they raised $2 million (2,027.1 ETH).

Price Per Token

1 ZCO = 0.000033 ETH, and for the purpose of this crowdsale, the price of 1 ETH will be pegged at $1,000. The minimum amount that can be purchased during the crowdsale is 0.1 ETH (3,000 ZCO).

Zebi have an extensive option of bonuses for investors. These bonuses vary with the amount of ZCO bought, but all buyers that invest in the first 48 hours of the crowdsale will receive a 10% bonus.

Important Dates

The crowdsale for ZCO is tentatively set for the 5th of March, 2018. It will end when the hard cap is reached or on the 31st of March, 2018.

Zebi plan to have their token listed on major exchanges 2/3 weeks after their crowdsale ends.

Marketing Power

As at the time this post was published, Zebi had over 5,740 subscribers on Facebook, 1470+ members on Telegram, over 200 followers on Twitter and 40+ people in Slack.

Team Members’ Areas of Expertise

Business experts

Kalyan Muppaneni, Board Member

• Founder, and CEO of Pi DATACENTERS (a datacenter organization) for over 3 years.

Renuka Rathode, Product Strategist

• Founder of Adnest Solutions, a customer acquisition and retention platform that generated viral referrals for businesses.
• Co-Founder of VDeliver, a logistics startup that makes point-to-point deliveries.

Sudheer Kuppam, Co-Founder and Board Member

• Managing Partner at Epsilon Venture Partners for over 2 years.
• Experience in the VC industry in Silicon Valley and Asia Pacific for over 18 years.
• Managing Director at Intel Capital for 8 years.

Sridhar Gadhi, Advisor

• Founder & CEO of Quantela Inc (a digital technology solutions company focused on IoT) for almost 3 years.

Target market experts

Babu Munagala, Founder, CEO and Managing Director

• Director of Software Development at Oracle for almost 19 years. Oracle offers database Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Kalyan Muppaneni, Board Member

• Founder of a datacenter organization (see above).

Sudheer Kuppam, Co-Founder and Board Member

• Member of the Board of Directors of Pi DATACENTERS for over 2 years.

Phani Arega, Vice President & Engineering Lead

• Group Manager of Software Development at Oracle for almost 12 years.
• Software Architect at Quest Software (now acquired by Dell firm with several services including database management and data protection services) for 3 years.

Phil Mui, Advisor

• Executive Vice President at Acxiom (a technology and service company that provides the data foundation for some of the world’s best marketers) for over 3 years.
• Group Manager for Google Analytics for 6 years.
• Senior Product Manager at Oracle for a year.

Marketing experts

Renuka Rathode, Product Strategist

• HR Manager at Wegilant Net Solutions where she was responsible for the organization’s marketing activities for 6 months.

Prahalad Thota, Advisor

• Worked in Marketing Analytics at PayPal for 5 years.

Bhavesh Shah, Advisor

• He worked in Marketing for several firms including eDriving and Kaiser Permanente.

Legal experts

Anirudh Rastogi, Advisor

• B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) at the National Law Institute University.
• LL.M. (Master of Laws) at Harvard Law school.
• Managing Partner at TRA, a law firm that specializes in representing innovation-led businesses, for 5 years.

Software engineering experts

NOTE: 16 of the 23 members in this team are full-time developers trained at MIT, Oxford, Stanford, or IIT (one of the best engineering schools in India).

Babu Munagala, Founder, CEO and Managing Director

• Director of Software Development at Oracle for almost 19 years (see above).

Phani Arega, Vice President & Engineering Lead

• Software Development at Oracle for 12 years (see above).
• Software Architect at Quest Software (see above).

Kalyan Muppaneni, Board Member

• Global Enterprise Architect at Intel for 15 years.

Vasu Parameswaran, Advisor

• Former Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft for almost 3 years.
• He worked as Senior Engineering Manager at Uber for almost 2 years.

Blockchain development experts

No team member with significant blockchain development experience.

Token sale structure experts

No team member with prior ICO launch experience.

Token economics experts

Same as above.

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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: Alexander Hinz, Mark Jedd, Eugene Tartakovsky.

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