ICO Alert: Open Platform - blockchain payments infrastructure for applications

Finally I can publish this ICO Alert for Open Platform. I spent lot of time looking into this project and now I am ready to share my thoughts with you. Please take this blog post kind of as summary of Open Platform`s white paper and do your own research before you invest.

In every project I look into, the below criterias are what I look into, but to understand what I am looking in each of them for, you should check my blog post explaining how I do my research. Here is link or just check it out under my profile.

Vision - Open Platform aims to become first blockchain payments infrastructure for application developers to process e.g. in app purchases, app membership payments etc. It can be deployed on already launched as well as newly developed apps. OPEN is a utility token, that is needed to create the smart contract (or Scaffold as Open calls it), which is needed to start receiving payments from app users.

OPEN aims to bring blockchain to the masses by tackling what is predicted to be $71.7bln market by 2020 and it has the first mover advantage in this field. Open is utilizing Ethereum smart contracts, it will be scaled via migration to Tendermint as the usage of the platform grows. This should be seemless as both are running on the same EVM. 

What I like

Token metrics - total supply is 1bln OPEN tokens, 50% for sale, 1 OPEN - $0.08 - generally speaking 1 billion total supply is my maximum. Apart from those 500mln for sale another 200 mln are allocated to Developer Program to incentivize developers to use the platform via airdrops. And another 200 mln are allocated for the team and are vested

Team - Open has a quite large team of 10 core team members and 4 advisors. Team behind Open is very experienced in app creation and app promotion. Team is covering many important areas on both executive and developing side of their business.  They have 2 Berkley absolvents among their development team. Their advising team covers finance & partnerships, payment and operations (ex match.com president) field. Chandler Guo, who is very well known in crypto business is listed as investor. Apart from Open Chandler also invested in Qtum, NEO and Tron.

Social media support for Open is huge, but this could me mainly because of their bounty program. Open has 42k followers on Telegram and 23k followers on Twitter. Admins on their Telegram are quite knowledgeable and friedly. If they are unsure of topic discussed, they don`t hesitate to bring it to the team and ask questions.

Roadmap is something that I really like in this project. It is long enough and has a lot of releases that should help the price to go up.  Open SDK 1.0 should be released in June and its update to 2.0 in July of 2018. Open platform (including Open Wallet and Open API) goes live in July 2018 under version 1.0 and by April 2019 will be updated up to 3.0 version.

MVP was released however only in form of video introduction. Video shows test user account creation and payment for service/membership of an email app (simple email app used as an example only)

What I don`t like

Hard cap was raised, actually it was more than doubled. The team actually realeased official statement explaining this move. Here is link to their Medium statement, read it and make your own peace with it. I mean it is not a disaster, but generally speaking I don`t like to see hard cap being raised.

There are few things I was asking about that were declared as not shareable. Like how long are team tokens vested for, what amount of tokens and for what price were sold during private sale and if it was vested. I don`t like to see this amount of secrecy.

Developer program is 200mln token pool that is going to be used to incentivize developers to start using Open platform via airdrops. This is actually not a bad thing as it shows that they have plan for rolling the project out, but in my opinion the pool is too big (20% of total supply) and it will be topped up with 3% fee off of every transaction.

Token sale orientated mostly towards developers, although this could be seen as positive as it shows that Open wants to do serious business.  But between the airdrops, developers program and most of the tokens sold to developers there is little space left to make profit, at least in short to mid term as in my opinion all of the developers will have tokens they would need for that time being. 

Above points should play important role in decision making whether to invest in this project. In my opinion Open Platform is very good project, that the team behind manages very well and I have no doubt that this project will help to bring crypto adoption to the masses. In my opinion the profits are there in long term, that is when developers will need more tokens to run their payment. 

Hope you guys like my rundown of Open Platform, I would really appreciate your FOLLOW here on Steemit and/or on Twitter, where I share all my thoughts on upcoming and passed ICOs. Have a good day