Coin Of The Day (02.05.2018)- Identity Attestment, Risk Assessment and Credit Scoring On Blockchain?

What does this rose have in common with the today's coin of the day?

You don't know?

Find out below.

But before that...

Disclaimer: This is not a paid promotion. All information and data in this segment of Trollblogger are based on my unbiased personal opinion and experience, it should not be considered professional financial advice. I will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or losses, injuries, or damages arising from this displayed content or use thereof. Take care when investing in these platforms and remember to do your due diligence. Consult a financial adviser before getting into investing heavily into an endeavor. Good luck.

Welcome to another post in the series, ‘Coin of The Day’ where we assess those digital coins and find out which will be the next wave in open source technology. Please remember to subscribe for more of this content and do comment. It will be greatly appreciated.

With that aside, lets get on to the post.

As you can see in the video above, the randomly selected cryptocurrency is Bloom (now, you get it!)

This one sounds promising. It could be the start of something new. Lets see.

Bloom (BLT) is a semi-centralized end-to-end protocol for attesting person’s identity, evaluating personal risk and also an entity for credit scoring - all being done on the blockchain. It is basically a cryptocurrency version of credit reporting companies like Experian, Credit Karma and Equifax. Furthermore, this cryptocurrency acts like a crowdfunding venture to provide banking services (especially loans) to the the unbanked.

This token was added to newly upgraded CoinMarketCap… Hold up. Let me be the one to say congratulation on 5 years of service by CoinMarketCap. You guys deserve a lot of praise for your work and dedication in providing us crypto-peeps with the necessary information.

Now, back to the post: Bloom was added to CoinMarketCap on January 14, 2018.

BLT is a token created on the Ethereum platform so it is not mineable. There are 9 members comprising of engineers, financial officer, CEOs of other tech organizations and 4 co-founders of this endeavor. In addition, six advisers (from the likes of Experian, Aragon, Augur, District0x, Shift (VISA debit card company) and SunPower (solar energy solutions) pitched in to give their guidance.

For more information on Bloom, watch their short introductory video below:

Time for the features:

• Their protocol is a triangle that incorporates 1) Bloom ID (way of identification through third party organizations’ input), 2) Bloom IQ (reporting and tracking debt obligations), and 3) Bloom Score (their way of accessing the credit worthiness of an individual against how he or she spends like Credit Karma).

• Protocol voting- will serve as a means of voting in order to institute changes to the Bloom Score phases and algorithm.

• Accrediting Attestors- will allow lenders and payment history providers to submit proposals to their ecosystem so that Bloom community can decide if they are legitimate to do business with.

• Network Currency- Users (especially identity attestors and risk assessors) on Bloom network will have the decision over setting prices, incentivize by rewards in Bloom tokens for their services. (This system I think can be easily manipulated by big corporations and rigged to benefit them mostly. It also does not account for the company being legit).

• Bloom Invitation System- depends on the number of users in their ecosystem. More users make them less susceptible to external software attacks. Yes, and the user is required to fund a small amount of Bloom token to help reduce, if not prevent these attacks.

• Bloom Card- will help the user to build up his or her Bloom Score by spending responsibly. Card will be released later down in the year.

• Circulating supply is 47,674,794 tokens.

-There are over 17,640 wallets holding and doing transactions with this token.

• Since its inception, there have been over 48,760 transactions according to etherscan.

• The total supply is set at 150 million tokens.

• All Time High (ATH): Bloom’s All Time High occurred on its launching date on an exchange, January 14, 2018. The price of one token soared to $2.19 (0.00015819 BTC) in a matter of a few hours before being sold off in the same day! As of this writing, 15,819 satoshis is worth $1.44- not too bad considering the Early 2018 Bear Market.

Now, lets move on to the critique section.

My Critique:

Website and Source Code:

First and foremost, I love the design of their web page. Kudos to the person who put it together! It has a fairly good whitepaper, roadmap (although it would have been better if they'd put a time scale to it), team members’ information, what is Bloom and how it can be used to solve a real world problem.

Moving simple ‘drawings’ are perfect and appears to work like a well oiled machine from the top to the bottom of the page.

Bloom, to me, has the most pictorial representation of vines and leaves for a website dealing with credit scores. When you approach mid page, purple vertical layer slides of three components of Bloom Protocol is describe in better details.

Apart from putting the subscription, sign-up and Slack buttons at the top of the page, I don’t really find anything wrong with the site.

As for the source code, they are relatively active. In total, 99 commits were done since its inception in January by only two contributors- the last one being in the latter part of March.

Social and Popularity:

• Twitter- 6540 followers and growing. Not bad for a cryptocurrency new to the game. Tweets are regular and engagement from followers are rather low.

• Facebook- their official page has 8013 followers with over 7630 likes. Bloom team is quite active on there. Last post was on April 28.

• Telegram- has 14,350+ members.

• Reddit- 2100 ‘Bloomers’ and growing. Noteworthy of mention is an article on their partnership with Access Network to transform West Africa. Read about it here. Their threads have low number of comments.

• Bitcointalk- None.

• Medium- blogs are mostly written by Shannon Wu, one of their team members. Each article has a decent amount of reader’s engagement.

-For YouTube: Official channel has 429 subscribers and 7 videos. The viewership is large compared to other social media platforms. The comments are generally fair.

Other YouTuber channels have scores of videos on this crypto. Both famous cryptocurrency YouTubers (e.g. Crypto Lark, Ian Balina, Crypto Bobby, Tony Tian etc) and amateurs did reviews or mentioned Bloom in their videos.

Exchanges:
Bloom is traded on the following exchanges:

Bibox
IDEX
TOPBTC
Radar Relay

There is no announcement of Bloom token being added to other exchanges right now.

Conclusion:
Their concept seems promising but I feel that the regular credit reporting agencies have already up-their-game to surpass Bloom in regards to customer satisfaction and the overall utility of their products and services. Credit Karma is free when you desire to check your credit score. It is more on the matter of convenience. We, humans, prefer convenience or ease of use more than our personal security.

Secondly, although one or two of their team members are expert in credit card services, does not necessarily mean they can land partnership with the big global card providers like MasterCard and Visa. In order to implement and distribute their so-called Bloom Card, they need to get authorization from these companies or companies like these in order to have widespread adoption.

Lastly, the unbanked do not care about if they are credit worthy or not. Their focus is more on an easier experience when transferring their money from one point to the next, or from one relative to the next; all without the hassle of unfamiliar technicalities they must follow in order to achieve this. So I will not invest in Bloom but it is a great long term project. Expect the adoption to be very slow and partnerships to be few. My two cents.

Until next time, keep safe, take it easy and be fantastical.

Later.

(Update: What a coincidence that Bloom is pumping right now! I posted this article at 7 pm on my site then afterwards jump to 61 cents from 58 cents! What is going on? Anyways, still not going to invest in it solely for the hype)

Source:
➤YouTube Video 1: Sat Bits
➤YouTube Video 2: Bloom Official Promo Video
➤CoinMarketCap
➤Credit Reporting Companies