As usually in my reviews I will first present the very basic data about the project itself and then I will proceed to my pros and cons followed up by a short verdict. If you want to learn more about Nucleus Vision, head to the website (https://nucleus.vision/) as with this article I’m aiming only to review the project — for more complex description of its features please do your own research. Enjoy!

The Basics

Starting with the current price and supply:

Half of the supply is still in hands of the team. The rest of it is distributed as seen below:

I will let the project present itself on the video as the site and white paper are having surprisingly hard time presenting the idea in simple terms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=lbl5ad-8LZw

I highly suggest reading the light paper available on the website to fully understand the points I will be making in the following parts of this article.

Without further ado — let’s begin!

The Good

• First of all — they already have a working product. They are gathering data from 10 shops in India with a working sensor. The development already goes few years back so the goal here is to expand and develop the rest of the road map. A preview of it can be seen here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=GWuGMyOJzE8

• They have a really strong backing. Their development was possible because of the funding from the likes of Tim Draper, Reliance Capital and few others. It’s always good to have a real money behind as it puts pressure on the team to deliver the product.

• The team itself looks solid. CMO Martin Dudley brings enormous industry knowledge to the squad and all the other members of the core team represent enough experience in their respective areas for me to trust them. With a project that ambitious I would’ve liked to see more entrepreneurial success from the CEO Abhishek but I will let it pass with all the support around him. Team is well diversified with both business and blockchain specialists (although I must admit that the blockchain team is lacking in experience) and the advisors are top notch (minus Ian Balina)— ICON, Harvard, JIO, Microsoft. A lot of support in blockchain development and management which is good as it’s the missing element of the core squad.

• They are tackling a huge market of over 28 trillion $ worth, that is in the middle of going through structural shift due to offline-online retail distribution changing. There is a place for a disrupting technology there even with e-commerce rapidly growing on popularity, as the perks of physical stores are still very legit today (need of experiencing the product in person)

• They have a strong partnerships in Vodafone Idea Reliance and Intel. The project itself will have to gather a lot of those big players if they want to succeed so it’s good to see that from the start they are capable of delivering significant agreements.

• The idea for the retail industry looks promising. The solution they are presenting (identifying people without the usage of Wi-Fi, Bluethooth of GPS) with a clear value for both customers and retail companies might see a bigger adoption if the idea is executed right (more on that later as I have a lot of doubts). It’s definitely a niche that they found which can be filled with a promising tech so with the development still very early — there is a very big potential for growth for the investors.

• The community and hype for this project is already insane — a lot of people have those early TRX feels as it’s a very ambitious product with a very low token price that recently got added to the biggest exchange. Even if I feel that the hype based on fundamentals is not justified, there is no denial that in crypto the community can often matter much more than the development itself (looking at you XVG) even if most of the people are the “moon boys” projecting it to go 1$ in less than a month.

• They did apply for a few patents — whether it is likely that they will get even one is remained to be seen (if anything I would say the first proposition has the biggest chances) but it creates some kind of positive hype and might possibly be a very big advantage if they manage to reach it. It’s a pure speculation at this moment but it’s worth noting as not many other crypto project are in a position to apply for those.

The Meh

• The Nucleus Powered World is their long-term plan to connect the whole world with IoT devices by creating Nucleus Vision Home, Nucleus Vision Air, Nucleus Vision Car etc. As of right now they are yet to conquer a retail industry first and their Physical Security stage looks already impossible to reach (more on it later) so anything beyond expansion to a bigger number of retail shops should not be taken into consideration while valuating this project since they are yet to deliver their basic promises first.

• The main value for customers comes in rewards and personalized propositions — the problem is that if there is no previous history on the customer there is no data to create such value for him. The process of creating a personalized proposition requires multiple authorizations from all parties and could take a lot of time and that’s outside of potential questions about the quality of the offer for the customer.

• The system requires partnerships with TelCos and with each different country that need will be addressed individually. They are already working with Vodafone and Idea which sparks confidence in the team reaching those agreements but in no way this can be taken for granted.

• I have a hard-time imagining the cooperation between the companies on the platform in sharing data. It is said that the information about the customers would be shared across non-competing entities but if the network is not big enough why would any company want to share their precious user data to competitors in exchange for some nCash (that might be worth 30% less in a few weeks due to volatility)?

• Their GitHub is terrible. Even if they are not updating it they are still showing it off on their website so I feel that it should be judged anyway. A small review of it from ico-check tells the whole story here:

• Their Lead Blockchain Developer — Bryan Lemster — has no visible blockchain experience. They do have a team of 9 blockchain devs but when you combine that leader with their terrible github activity it raises some concerns on how their final development is going to look like, since a lot of functions are not working yet.

The Bad

• They have no solution for price volatility. The nCash is going to be mainly used as the reward system for walking into the shops and sharing your data within the platform — that’s a huge amount of tokens distributed for free that can be dumped by anybody that doesn’t want to pay for products with the nCash. If the project somehow ends up going mainstream they cannot allows themselves to have a typical crypto price fluctuations as that would discourage all parties to use it once the value of their holdings drastically go down. They could’ve thought of a token system similar to Friendz — 2 coins with 1 pegged to a stable price and a token that is exchanged in relation to it for other services.

• I am not buying their “Physical Security” stage (Nucleus second biggest value proposition). They are saying that their sensor which works within 200 metres range and is limited basically to mobile ID and basic movement metrics is supposed to help catch criminals and provide security in bigger venues? At the current stage of their tech it is impossible to do it as it would require more features like face recognition (Faceter ICO anyone?). Their criminal recognition goes out of the windows the moment a person decides not to use a telephone near the device. They are making it sound like they have some alien technology on board while ION is currently tested on 10 small shops and even that is yet to be seen if it can handle larger amount of customers.

• They are currently only partnered with Gini & Jony based in India. They say on their website that they are trusted by 100s of confirmed other retail partners including Gap and Tommy Hilfiger. The problem is there is no information or any MoU (memorandum of understanding) available to see (outside of telegram Admin’s words). So unless we are presented with some official documents on this I take this as a very weak hype tool that actually would go along with the buzz word salad on their website and whitepaper. Not to mention that the former company from which Nucleus was created was supposedly working with over 10 000 shops already (Admin’s answer to the origin of that claim below)

Screenshot from Bellboi.com which existed before Nucleus Vision

Current explanation of it

• Even if every data transfer must be confirmed by the customer first (otherwise it cannot be sent to partners) it still raises a lot of concerns about user privacy as the recognition system is automated. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some regulatory obstacles along the way to bigger adoption.

• The White Paper lacks any business or marketing strategy in place outside of the road map showing number of deployed sensors and key words of development. How are they going to reach those new partnerships and what is the more detailed development timeline? What features will be added to their tech? The presented data is not backed by anything specific, those could be random numbers as far as I’m concerned and it wouldn’t change anything.

The Verdict

If I am bullish on this project it’s because of the hype that surrounds it. The idea is easy to sell and the community around it is ridiculously large. The token metrics are pointing at a possible big run-up coming since people are mostly concerned with USD price even if the supply here is as big as 10 billions. Fundamentally I think Nucleus proposition is exaggerated and I don’t believe it can reach any stage beyond retail industry as of right now. The team is strong and they are already working with the partners so the growth here would be definitely justified — just not up to the levels people are currently expecting this project to reach. This ain’t the next BTC but it sure might make you some good $ if you manage to ride the hype train and leave it at the moment nCash is about to sit right next to TRX and XVG as the most overrated currency on the market.

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