Today I’m very excited to share with you and ICO that I only discovered a couple of days ago. I think this ICO is going to be a winner. It is ICON’s platform’s first ICO and it’s called Blue Whale. To find what Blue Whale is all about and why I’m so excited about it, keep reading this post!

In 2017, there was an independent study commissioned by the Freelancers Union and Upwork. They found that in the year of 2017, 57.3 million people freelanced. This indicated that the freelancing workforce in USA was growing at a rate 3x faster than the average workforce. It is estimated that by 2027, 58% so the majority of the workforce will be freelancers.

There is another related term to free lancing called Gig economy. A gig economy is an environment where organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements.

The difference between gig economy workers and free lancers is that gig economy workers work for companies but free lancers work for themselves.

However, both of them are not entitled to any employment benefits e.g. sick benefits or long service leave because they are essentially self-employed.

There are companies that offer their service as middleman to help self-employed people find work, e.g. upwork, uber, taskrabbit, fiver etc.. however, despite that self-employed people still struggle with several problems, sometimes caused by these middleman themselves.

The three main problems self-employed people face are:

1. High commission rates,
2. Expensive market and advertising
3. Lack of security

1. High commission Rates:

Most centralized gig/sharing economy platforms take between 20% - 50% in commissions from each transaction. Despite an advertised 25% commission per ride, Uber and Lyft charge real, effective commission rates of up to 42.75% after deducting booking fees. That’s almost half of the worker’s money gone.

1. Expensive Marketing and Advertising Costs :

Freelancers need business to survive. And so they are forced to stay with existing centralized platforms despite the exorbitant commissions because these platforms are the best places to find business. However, big companies like Google and Facebook take advantage of this monopoly to charge unfairly high advertising costs.

The average cost per click on Facebook costs the advertiser $1.72 and on google it costs $2.32. The cost per action is even higher, cost $18.68 on facebook and a whooping $59.18 on google.

The average small business using Google AdWords spends between $9,000 and $10,000 per month and $100,000 to $120,000 per year on their online advertising campaigns alone. That’s more than some people’s annual wage!

1. The third disadvantage self-employed people face is the lack of security.

Existing sharing economy platforms do not offer any employment benefits, making freelance work highly precarious for self-employed people. Ceasing work due to ill health, or family issues basically means zero income.
All these above disadvantages, make it really hard for the self-employed person to make a living.

This is where the Blue Whale Foundation comes in to try and change things for the better in a big way.

Blue whale offers 3 solutions to the 3 problems, and we are going to take a detailed look at their solutions. This is the core of the Blue Whale project. If you understand these 3 solutions, you understand the Blue Whale project.

To combat against high commission rates, they offer what is known as the Contribution Activity Manager or CAM.

Imagine this bar represents 100% of the freelancer’s payment.

50% of this gets taken up by high commission rates. The whole concept of decentralisation is to take out this expensive middle man and redistribute the wealth back to those who deserve it.

So Blue Whale would charge a much fairer commission e.g. instead of 50% it might charge 20% and it wouldn’t keep that 20% but rather give it back to the community, i.e. the community members who help to maintain the system. There are 6 services that a community member can do to earn part of that 20%

Referrals—is bringing new users to the service

Lead Generation—is bringing new community members to the project. E.g. the platform can charge low fees because they have few staff members, but in turn it is the community members who act as staff. So by bringing more community members on to help run the project, you are saving staff costs and that is the money given to lead generation.

Curation—is the act of verifying the freelancers that enlist are genuine and appropriate

Verification—is the act of confirming the work or product of the freelancer meets a minimum quality

Abitration—is the act of resolving conflict (if any)

Reputation—is the reputation freelancers and services build for themselves. This will affect the rewards they receive which we will cover soon.

The next feature is their Decentralised Associated Network or DAN.

You know how in traditional blockchain projects you can install mining software to earn crypto? In blue whale, you mine by installing actual business/ infrastructure tools e.g. Booking software, accounting software etc… and lend that software service to freelancers for free. Which means that unlike other platforms where freelancers have to pay exorbidant fees for marketing and advertising and book-keeping, on Blue-whale, all these services are free! This alone would make Blue whale one of the most attractive platforms out there for self-employed people.
Anyone from services to individuals can act as nodes to perform this service.

Which means this, the way I see it, the core of Blue Whale is not actually blockchain technology, it is actually businesses apps used in a decentratlised model. The nodes are actually business APIs, not hash functions or other cryptographic solutions. They do use blockchain properties e.g. the links between all the different parts is maintained by cyptocurrency token use, as well as smart contracts to make it efficient, and the concept of the project is blockchain style, but again the core working nodes are using business APIs not proof of stake or proof of work. That’s why its called the Decentralised Associated Network.

This is actually a good thing, and Il tell you why.

The mother company of Blue Whale is a company called Verlocal. And Verlocal is actually a very successful freelancing platform in US, Canada, Sinagapore and Japan that has already tried and tested these principles.

Verlocal is the only freelancing platform that offers free Booking & Scheduling Software to be installed on providers’ websites which motivates providers to join the network. This Re-targeting of advertising to visitors lowered their monthly advertising bill from $70,000 to $4,000 while resulting in 300% higher sales. So there is already a working prototype in the market. It has also been announced that Verlocal will convert completely into blockchain model, i.e. be the first customer of Blue Whale sometime in 2018.

In other words, think of it this way. Where in many blockchain ICOs you are taking a big risk as an investor because you have no idea if the proposed tech of the ICO will succeed. In Blue whale, you are almost guaranteed the technology will succeed, because they already have a very successful working prototype on the market.

Furthermore, where other projects have to hit the market and start looking for business, Blue Whale is going to hit the market and immediately have a multi-million dollar business running on it.

ICOs are always high risk investments, but these features, make it a safer than most bet for me.

The third core feature of Blue Whale is their Reward Bank or (ReBa)

20% of the initial ICO’s funds as well as 60% of subsequent net profits will be kept in a reward bank. The deposits in the reward banks are utilised as welfare benefits for freelancers e.g. Pensions, paid leave, sick leave, etc..

So if zero booking and scheduling fees weren’t attractive enough, they are now offering employment benefits, which is simply unheard, and unseen of in this industry. If you were a self-employed person, there is really no reason not to use this platform. Im so bullish on this project.

One more aspect of the project to introduce to you:

This is their governance model or Decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO)

The project is called blue whale, because just as the blue whale is the largest mammal in the world, they are aiming to be the largest employment network in the world.

The blue whale project has to be bigger than just verlocal. Verlocal is just a start. They are aiming to attract different service providers that will be called provinces. Each province will have their own system tailored to their needs as long as they comply with the over Blue whale’s policies. Abit like Federal government and State governments.

They can even mint their own currencies, but to simply the management of transactions across the network the individual issued coins have to have a fixed exchange rate with BWX which is the native Blue Whale Token.

But in a very decentralised manner, major decisions regarding the project e.g changing the distribution of the reward bank etc.. will be made via a voting system involving these provinces. So it’s a very open and accountable way of governing that many of us in western societies will find intuitive and like.

Team:

Let’s take a look at their team. It’s a big team, and a solid team. If you include the Verlocal help there are 21 names listed on their website. Let me read part of the first 3 resumes for you.

Will Lee / CEO, is a serial entrepreneur and has worked in the sharing economy industry for 5 years. He studied Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University and the owner of Verlocal,

Hyunjin Choi / CTO Hyunjin is an expert in computer security with more than 20 years of experience in R&D as well as commercialization. As the head of Advanced Platform lab at Samsung Electronics, he led the development of software platform which now runs on a wide range of Samsung devices, such as smartphones, tablets, TV etc. Believing that security is the key to payment technology, he initiated secure operating system development and demonstrated a world first prototype during 2012 London Olympics in collaboration with VISA Inc. He also served as one of the chief architects during Mars Polar Lander project at NASA, USA. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cambridge University, UK.

Changsub Keum / CIO C is a software architect and researcher with 20 years of experience in the ICT industry. His interests include blockchain technologies, service platforms, and software architectures. Most recently, he was the research director of a trustworthy network service platform at ETRI, a government-sponsored research institute in South Korea. He got the Ph.D. at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). He is a board member of Korean Software Engineering Society.

And you can go through their website and look more at each member of the team, but I find it an impressive team.

These are their advisors. Very impressive resumes as well. Il just read some of their titles, so you have an idea of who these guys are

Injong Rhee / Former CTO, Head of R&D, Software and Services at Samsung, in charge of all software and services globally at Samsung mobile.

Marco Torregrossa / Managing Director at Euro Freelancers and Secretary General at European Forum of Independent Professionals

Kyungjoon Lee / ICON Foundation Council member and CEO at DAYLI Intelligence

Jonghyup Kim / ICON Foundation Council member and CEO at theloop

Simon Yu is the CEO and Co-founder of StormX.

Namsik Lee / President of Suwon University

And there are more.

I haven’t seen such a heavyweight resume in an ICO for a while, it inspires confidence to say the least.

Social Media

One thing that I was surprised to find is that they don’t have a big social media following. They have already completed Pre-sale successfully, and we are less than 10 days from ICO. Yet their twitter has just over a thousand followers and their telegram group chat has just over 2000 members. For a project of this scope, I expected 5-10x those numbers.
Especially if youre into a quick trade out once it hits the exchanges, the popular projects with a lot of awareness are the ones that rise once they hit the market, but the market awareness of this project is not that high.

Personally, because I am bullish about this project and want to HODL it, Im glad its under the radar and there are less people to compete with at ICO. But that’s because I have faith in the long term success of this project. So it may be good or bad, depending on how you look at it, but definitely much smaller social media than expected.

Roadmap:

It’s a very long roadmap that goes into 2021. Nonetheless it’s very fast paced. Testnet is this quarter, integration with Verlocal is next quarter Q3, and DAN protocol will be implemented by Q4. Also in Q4 the Blue whale network Alpha will go live in US, Canada, Singapore and Japan. 2019 will see the other core features being released each quarter, and in 2020 Q1 we see a retirement reward protocol launced on the Blue Whale Network. The second half of 2020 will see an insurance reward protocol, so really big incentive with probably big partners too and the roadmap ends in 2021 with the freelance economy global standard protocol. So this probably means the infrastructure for global projects. So it’s a long HODL guys, if you can believe in this project, they are very amibitious basically aiming to be the biggest freelancing protocol in the world. Meaning even bigger than Uber. Imagine getting into Uber in its ICO phase. It’s not a chance that passes by every day, at least that’s my own thoughts to myself.

Token Mechanics

This is their token mechanics. Their total supply is 100 billion tokens, which is a lot. But if you consider their scope its understandable why its so large.

More importantly is their marketcap. Their hard cap is 55 million. Which is abit big. Most decent size ICO’s have market caps around 30-40million. But of course you have recent crazy ICOs like telegram aiming to raise $2billion. So then suddenly 55million doesn’t seem that much.

If they start with a marketcap of $55million, that would put them at number 215 ranking on the market. No way, I don’t think they are going to ranked so low, this is easily a top 100, top 50 coin. From my point of view.

Coming back to the ICO sale. In the pre-sale which ended recently they had a 10% discount only, which is great. You don’t want to see too big a discrepancy, cos it risks people dumping once the coin hits the exchanges. There is also a three month lock-in period for those who got in during pre-sale.

The ICO itself is due in May, so very soon, some are guessing 1st of May, but its not confirmed by the team. You can purchase the ICO with either ICX or ETH, but you have to register on the whitelist now if you want to be part of the ICO.
All in all, pretty unremarkable token mechanics, slightly higher hard cap, not sure if they will reach it given their community is small, but they did hit presale easily and it is ICON’s first ICO, so I’m expecting they will hit Hard cap as well. I consider this an attractive entry price, but that’s just my opinion.

Last positive thing I want to add before ending is currently there is no other competition for blue whale in the blockchain space. It is a completely novel idea. Stormx is the closest project with gamitising micro-tasks, and if you watched our review on Stormx, I ended by saying that the freelancing market has so much potential to grow and if Stormx could cross over to be an actual freelancing platform, it would have so much potential. So it’s a potential blockchain idea I’ve been keeping my eye out for, and to see it actually happen now with a solid team and working prototype, and being ICON’s first ICO and all. Just makes me really exicted. I think this is a game changer and I’m really excited about it. I’m going to get into it personally.

As always this is me sharing my personal journey and thoughts with you, I am telling you what I am going to do, I am not telling you what to do. I am not a professional and this is not a financial advisor so please always do your research and make your own decisions.

That’s it guys! That’s my take on Blue Whale. Drop us a comment, let us know what you think of Blue Whale. I hope you found this review helpful!