Carry Protocol (CRE): Connecting Merchants and Consumers ICO Review
If you’ve been reading my previous posts and/or if you’re actively researching the new developments in crypto, you’re already aware that South Korea is very active in the space. Many promising projects are coming out of this country such as ICON, Sentinel Protocol and FANTOM. Carry Protocol (CRE) is a new one to add to the list. They will be conducting an ICO later this summer. The KYC and whitelisting process for the pre-sale is currently ongoing. The pre-sale will start on June 24th and participants will receive a 15% bonus.
Carry Protocol
The objective of Carry Protocol is to resolve the current issues in the offline commerce sector: merchants’ data on consumers is fragmented and incomplete, consumers have no control over their personal data and offline advertising is outdated and ineffective.The Carry Protocol offers:
- Crypto-enabled payment terminals for offline businesses
- Branded tokens for offline brands and shops (loyalty points)
- A wallet API for payments that enables consumers to monetize their transaction data
- A targeted advertising system
The two following use cases are the best way to understand how the system will work, they have been taken from their whitepaper.
Team, Investors, Advisors
The Carry Protocol is operated by the co-founders of Spoqa, South Korea’s largest brick-and-mortar rewards platform. They have also expanded in Japan. The company is highly successful and has partnerships with giant businesses such as KakaoTalk (more than 50 million active users). They have 10 000 partner stores and 15 million customers.
Thus, the team already has relevant expertise in the offline commerce sector and in loyalty & reward programs. They will be able to update their current offerings to offer the Carry Protocol when it will be ready.
Investors in the project are big players such as Hashed, the biggest crypto fund in South Korea. The others are Kenetic Capital, Signum Capital and XSQ.
They also have an impressive board of advisors composed of big names in the space. What’s most interesting is that, compared to other projects, they seem to have been able to attract people from different regions in the world. I think that this is important for a project to succeed globally.
Token Sale
In total, 10 billion tokens will be issued. As you can see below, 40% are for investors, 25% will be reserved for the partner program (rewards for partners joining the network) , 10% for the team, 15% for market activation (airdrops, for example), 5% for reserves and 5% for advisors.
The funds collected will be used for:
- Research & development (30%)
- Payment hardware for merchants (25%)
- Operation & business development (20%)
- Sales & marketing (15%)
- Other uses (10%)
The price will be 74 750 CRE per ETH for the pre-sale and 65 000 CRE per ETH during the ICO. While ETH is at $500, this gives a price of $0.0067 and $0.0077, respectively. Tokens sold during the pre-sale will unlock linearly over a 3 month period after the token generation event is done. There are around 1 billion tokens available for the pre-sale and ICO participants, which means that around 3 billion tokens have been sold in private rounds.
Roadmap
The team expects to have distributed all tokens by the end of Q3 2018 and to have launched the Testnet by Q4 2018. The system is expected to be up and running sometime in the second half of 2019.
To sum up, Carry Protocol seems like a well-thought project by a competent team with relevant experience. Also, the token distribution seems pretty fair.
Original article: Carry Protocol
Satoshi's Blog is the go-to place to be aware of all the new developments in the crypto space.