EXPERTY- CALLS POWERED ON CRYPTO

Usually the first thing I look at when evaluating an ICO is the team. All too often I see teams with people who cannot be verified anywhere, devs with empty GitHubs, or people who have no relevant experience to the position they hold in the team. Any of these are red flags and so a visit to the team page can often prevent time wasted evaluating anything else.

Experty has a healthily sized team of 16 people, and while there are no links directly from the whitepaper, they are easily available on the experty.io website. All but one of the 16 members has at least a GitHub link or a LinkedIn profile, and overall they are well filled out with what appear to be genuine endorsements and relevant work experience.

It looks like the team have already been working together on other projects which is great, and they seem to be also playing to their strengths in building the platform with React. I don’t propose to go into detail about each team member but here is an overview of a couple of key people:

CEO: Kamil spent more than 8 years as a self-employed programmer. This is important as this is exactly the sort of professional that I would expect to be an early adopter of the platform. Just going off of his Linkedin, it does look like he is maybe a little thin on leadership experience but as the team already have projects under their belt together, this doesn’t especially concern me. He also appears to be fairly young, but many successful people in crypto are so again, not a concern for me.

Solidity engineer: As mentioned in the technical section of the whitepaper, the engine of the platform is going to be an Ethereum smart contract. The recent Parity wallet issues highlighted just how badly and how easily things can go wrong with smart contracts, so this is probably the position I most wanted to scrutinize.

Solidity is a relatively new language so I wouldn’t necessarily expext to have a dev with any previous project experience in Solidity, but I would expect them to at least have a solid background in JavaScript and C++. Greg does have both of these skills listed in LinkedIn, but his work experience only shows 3 years of work and there is no C++ in his GitHub that I can see. For me this is slightly concerning and I think the Experty team would benefit from fleshing out his details (assuming that there is something that can be added).

Overall, concerns about Greg’s experience aside, I think the team looks strong. One thing that stood out at first is that they don’t see to have any actual crypto experience. However, I don’t think this is a big deal. They are’t creating or running a block-chain; rather they are building an app on top of a well established block-chain (Ethereum) and as long as the smart contracts work properly (the whitepaper states they already do), they look to have the necessary skills to make a good job of the platform.

Overview of the Project
What is Experty? As mentioned above, Experty is a platform that allows knowledge providers to easily monetize their knowledge by connecting with knowledge seekers.

Knowledge providers will advertise their availability anywhere they see fit via a QR code. This could be LinkedIn, Facebook, a business card, street advertising etc. The possibilities are practically endless. An important thing to note is that Experty will not be creating a centralized marketplace for people to advertise themselves.

Anyone who wants to get in touch with the provider will already know the rate per minute, but Experty does allow contact by SMS before the call starts to check on availability etc. This can be disabled by the provider if they prefer.

The seeker initiates the call with the provider and the provider is paid for their time in EXY tokens. It really is that simple!

A few important points about the process:

Scam prevention. The seeker’s funds are locked when initiating the call, and the call is automatically ended if their tokens are exhausted.
While payments for calls are made with EXY tokens, the tokens can be topped off using a variety of methods (USD, BTC, etc.). The roadmap indicates that this is planned for Q4 2018.
Providers may keep the EXY tokens or convert to another cryptocurrency of their choice.
Payments are made instantly on to the block chain and providers can use the funds after 10 confirmations. The Ethereum chain is fast so this is just a minute or so.
Post-launch enhancements are planned, such as the option to provide discounted rates for longer calls.
Experty is using ERC223 tokens; these use less gas than the currently more common ERC20 tokens.
Use Case The whitepaper offers a number of potential use cases, all of which make a great deal of sense. I don’t see the need to parrot them in this analysis, but I will add my own experience as this is what really got me interested in Experty in the first place.

My day job is working as a software developer for a consulting company. Most of my projects are relatively large and my time is booked in the hundreds of hours. However, I often get asked small questions from current or previous clients. These questions usually take 5–10 minutes to answer and they present a dilemma. I can’t realistically charge customers for 5 minutes of my time, but at the same time these small calls add up. This is even worse for old customers with whom my employer doesn’t currently have a contract, as billing them would require them to start a new contact which has a minimum amount of hours. Not practical at all in this case.

I’m left with the choice of either refusing to help or helping them for free in my own time, which is effectively taking away a (very small) sale from my employer. I almost always end up taking the latter approach and justifying doing so by the goodwill it brings, but I really think the opportunity for micro-transactions that Experty provides would fill this niche perfectly, and this is why I decided to get involved with the project. The whitepaper includes a number of images from a MVP (minimum viable product) version of the mobile app. It already looks nice. The interface looks intuitive and very similar to other calling apps such as Skype or Whatsapp, so most users should already feel at home. Aside from the standard features like contact thumbnails, the app also includes additional information about the knowledge provider such as their profession, languages spoken, and of course their cost per minute.

The whitepaper states that initially the web version of the app will be used for management, rather than calls. Voice calls are planned to be added to the web app in Q2 of 2018.

The roadmap also says that the desktop release is planned for Q3 2018 which includes video calls.. For me this is the important one. I‘m’ almost always sat at a desktop computer or at least in front of a laptop, and I would much prefer to use these for the calls. Also, the option to screen share is planned for Q1 2019. For me this is very important, as lot of the consulting I do involves solving problems that are much easier shared on a screen than explained. Group calls are also planned in Q2 2019, which again is an important feature if Experty is going to be used for corporate consulting purposes.

The whitepaper also mentions that they plan to integrate with third party video calling apps. It doesn’t say which, nor is it mentioned on the road map, but if this does come to fruition it would give extra choice to users.

Token Sale Details
100 million tokens will be generated, of which 37% appear to be planned for circulation at launch (33% to the crowd sale, and 1% and 3% for token-sale costs and airdrops/bounties respectively).

The hard-cap for the sale is 33,000 ETH, which at the time of writing is approximately $15,000,000. Compared to other token-sales, this is rather small; probably good news for investors.

The other 63% of the tokens split into 33% for the company (to be unlocked over a period of 36 months starting Feb 2018) and 30% for partner tokens, locked for 18 months. It’s not clear what the partner tokens are for, but I assume they are to incentivize third parties to work with Experty. Some more info on this would be nice, but perhaps I just missed it.

Possible Concerns
Aside from the slightly thin amount of history for the Solidity engineer, my main concern about Experty surfaced only this week. At the time of writing, the Ethereum network is struggling to cope with the demands of virtual cats running on the network.

This made me think. If virtual cats can do this, what is going to happen when more serious apps such as Experty start really running at full steam on the Ethereum blockchain. Even, what will happen when the inevitable virtual dogs etc arrive.

Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake soon which some people think may alleviate some of the current issues. And also it turns out that Experty have also made provisions for this issue. The whitepaper includes a section on potential Ethereum bottle-necking and outlines an idea for off-chain transactions similar to those that are currently in development by Raiden Network.

While details are a little thin, the fact that the team thought about this well before the kitties arrived is reassuring and this is no longer a large concern for me.

invest something into the project. Reading the whitepaper and discovering the extra details really helped cement this in my mind.

Experty site : https://experty.io/

Bitcointalk announcement : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2337020.0

visixom: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1197250