Orchid Protocol ICO Review / Research notes

Orchid Labs Inc. is an open-source project committed to ending surveillance and censorship on the internet. The Orchid protocol uses an overlay network built upon the existing internet, which is driven by a peer-to-peer tokenized bandwidth exchange, creating a more inclusive, liberated internet.

PROBLEM: Solves the censorship and surveillance problem. 76% of the world lives in a censored internet. The recent rise of far left liberals could lead to a lot of censorship - we need to be able to express our freedom of speech and our right to internet. This ICO seems to solves that problem. Alexander Lloyd who is on their advisors list is a human rights advocate.

PRODUCT NECESSITY: There is a need for the product but it is also a question of adoption. Being paid to use it is a plus. The convenience of the product should also be a factor to consider, for example, is it as easily accessible? Is it easy to cash out the orchid coins earned? The decentralisation of this project is also helpful because governments can’t interfere with it.

ROADMAP: I did not see a roadmap neither on their website nor on their whitepaper. They also don’t have a working product either so we have no idea of what the team is up to. This could be an issue if you want to flip this ICO because you don’t know what to wait for. You don’t know whether there will be news that could pump the price of the coin up. It is also an issue for long term holders because there is no working product and it is hard to measure the team's capability without it. However, this may be due to the ICO being in its early stages it might be published later on.

TEAM

• Stephen Bell: Steve started companies in Europe, the U.S., and China before founding Trilogy VC China, where he spent 10 years backing Chinese seed stage startups.
• Brian J. Fox: Brian is an entrepreneur and open-source advocate, the first employee of the Free Software Foundation, and the author of the GNU Bash shell.
• Jay Freeman: Jay is a software engineer and the developer of the Cydia software distribution platform used on millions of jailbroken iOS devices.
• Gustav Simonsson: Gustav is an engineer and developer who helped launch Ethereum in 2015, working with core protocols, clients, and security auditing.
• Dr. Steven Waterhouse: Steven is an experienced investor and entrepreneur, having co-founded RPX Corp, led cryptocurrency projects at Fortress and Pantera Capital, and the Honeycomb product at Sun Microsystems.

BONUS: Presale bonus is 30%.

PRICE: Raising $120m for 20% of the project. The VPN sector is expected to reach $106b by the year 2022.

HYPE: They don’t have a Telegram group so I cannot measure the hype depending on that but they have 8,222 followers on Twitter which is quite a lot considering how under the radar they are.

COMPETITORS: substratum