ICO Research: PolySwarm

in #ico7 years ago

Polyswarm.png

ICO Research: Polyswarm NCT

https://polyswarm.io/

Introduction

This report will look at the company, existing business model, application, token information and current community. This report was carried out as of 01/02/2018. We do not endorse any investment and we are not financial advisors. We merely look to research Initial Token Offerings, based on the existing available information.

Company Introduction

Is the company incorporated?

Swarm Technologies Inc. was incorporated in Puerto Rico on 4th September 2017 (FILE # 399970) according to Polyswarm’s medium post.

But note also there seems to be another company of the exact name Swarm Technologies Inc. that is incorporated in Delaware on 2nd March 2017 (FILE # C3989977). Cannot confirm ownership as listed by an agent. But mentioned within the token sales terms is the governing law, being that of State of Delaware.

The token sales terms also refer to a subsidiary of Swarm Technologies Inc, as Swarm Technologies K.K. No further information can be found on this subsidiary.

Former brand was Swarm Market now PolySwarm as of 8th November 2017

Ambiguous company structure

With no clear Inc registration number information on companies documents or site. It is also unclear of the operations base legal jurisdiction i.e token agreement refers to Delaware, Company Blog Post refers to Puerto Rico.

Existing Business

Polyswarm is a decentralized threat intelligence market made possible by Ethereum smart contracts and blockchain technology. Polyswarm aims to incentivize rapid innovation for anti-virus and automate cyber threat intelligence with precise economic incentives concerning the malintent of files, network traffic and, URLs.

The company is too new, to have an annual filing at Puerto Rico. And without a product or existing service, they appear to have no income.

Estimated Company Valuation: Seed Stage

The company is at the seed stage, and we cannot locate any information on Patents. The Public Github is still very young and has limited commits, which indicates they are still in concept stage, therefore, their IP value is currently limited.

Location

2018-02-01_16-10-47.png

Tel: 415 800 2844

Registered Address: 1413 Ave Ponce de Leon, San Juan, PR 00907

This location is a co-worker space run by Piloto. This company allows shared offices, but also virtual offices to allow businesses to take advantage of certification under Act 20, Act 22, and the rest of Puerto Rico’s tax incentives.

Street Map search highlights virtual office

Formal address is 11 hours by plane away from the CEO and team. Cannot locate trade or working office address in California. According to an interview with the CEO, he covers morning chat sessions, which implies a decentralized team.

Trademark

According to Trade Mark Search no registrations have been made by Swarm Technologies, PolySwarm or Steve Bassi CEO. There appears no trademark for the PolySwarm brand.

This brand appears to have no Trademark protection.

Partners / Clients

Partnership

Announce on the 19th January 2018 as a press release, Polyswarm has co-founded a consortium for decentralised cybersecurity with Rivetz. Will be a professional group, that helps developed best practices for blockchain-based cybersecurity. The new group will be called DC2.

Aiming to leaders in industry

The start up of this consortium, will allow Polyswarm to position itself as an industry leader. Though note the consortium has only been agreed and is in very early stages.

Technology Ambition

Second Quarter 2018

They aim to bring out a minimal value product, that can adhere to their bug-bounty workflow. This will be an Alpha stage product and affectively only a test net. According to their GitHub repository that covers this aspect, they seemed to start work on the offering at the beginning of November 2017. With 1 developer currently committing code.

Quarter 3 2018

Still in very early product stages, they intend to deliver the application via a Raiden-style channel, to try maybe to bring network transactions off the ethereum network, to assist in scaling the application.

**Quarter 4 2018 **

This is their expected release for Beta version, or Version 1. Basically further testing, with aim to eliminate bugs. This version will still use test tokens.

Quarter 2 2019

Version 2. This version will be expected to be the market ready product, aiming for a stable product version.

Very Early Stages in Development

The company is more or less at concept stage, aiming to create a very early version and allowing testing to begin. They intend to develop in an agile way, and most of 2018 will be on a test network.

Looking at sidechain solutions
Interesting note: They committed a change on the 4th December 2017, that will allow them to run via Raiden Network.

GitHub

There are 6 public repositories that appear to be managed by 1 developer.

  1. Token Example

  2. Polyswarm

  3. Perigord

  4. Ganache-core

  5. Go-ethereum

  6. Ultimate ICO Calendar

There is not too much to show to the public, and what they do show, ties in with their roadmap. With typical repositories covering the ICO and Tokens. With work already started on the MVP version.

In addition they seem to share in developing a replacement to Node.js as an Ethereum equilifent. From this repository there are 36 developers. Each commiting small amounts of code. Lead by Tim Coulter of Truffle Framework.

Single Developer by access to wider development network

1 developer is currently deploying commits to Polyswarm’s Github, highlighting limited development capacity. As part of Ganache-core development, they seem to have access to a wide range of Ethereum coding specialists.

Token Usage

Is it a BlockChain or a Token?

It is a ethereum solidity contract built on the blockchain. As thus restricted till scaling opportunities exist on the ethereum platform but it appears this ICO, is considering solutions, with a raiden-like off-chain solution. It is a utility token, as such does not provide dividends, so is not a security.

NCT powers all the major PolySwarm interactions:

  • Bounty placement

  • Offer channel establishment

  • Teardown

  • Exchange

  • Registration

  • Truth determination

Bounty Placement being the most used aspect of the network, in terms of purchases of planned services. Such as completing a bounty, once a bug has been found.

High Utility Planned

The token will be used for every bounty, and rewarded to those that complete the bounty. With off-chain solutions envisaged, they plan on focusing on the token economy.

Price

1 ETH = 31,337 NCT

Upon final sale amount being concluded, an additional 30% of tokens will be created.

15% Towards Network Growth

15% Retained by the Incorporated Company

ICO

ICO Phases

Per 1 ETH Tokens Created ETH Raised (*$800)
Phase 1 (Presale) 54,526
Phase 2 37,604 235,025,000 $5 Million (6250 ETH)
Phase 3 34,471 432,550,000 $10 Million (12500 ETH)
Phase 4 32,904 616,950,000 $15 Million (18750 ETH)
Phase 5 31,337 979,281,250 $25 Million (31250 ETH)

Note Ethereum raised and tokens created, is an educated guess only. This does not consider price or exchange fluctuations or aims of the PolySwarm ICO.

Total Estimated Tokens on Phase 2 to 5 - 2,263,806,250

Total Polyswarm controlled tokens - 679,141,875

Total Estimated Supply: 2,942,948,125 (2.94 Billion)

Not clear on amount they wish to raise or tokens that will be distributed

The information provided is not too clear, and conflicting in different sources. The information provided on their website - envisages $50 Million. But according to the token sale agreement, there are 4 tranches and a Pre-Sale. The total of the 4 Tranches - specifies $55 Million. 10% more than, what is listed on their website front page. In addition, it is unclear if the Presale stage includes the first tranche or is a separate additional amount raised. In addition to the fluctuations between ETH / Dollar, it is very difficult to calculate an expected total supply.

Market Date

Sale starts 20th February 2018 till sold out or ends automatically on 22nd March 2018.

Token is liquid

Being an Ethereum token, expect the coin to be listed straight away on decentralized exchanges like EtherDelta or 0x based protocol platforms.

Distribution

Token Distribution

There does not appear to be any founder tokens, but 30% of the total supply of tokens released to the Swarm Technologies Inc, will be issued to other companies, individuals at the sole discretion of the company.

Proceeds of funds raised

  • 54.51% - Developer Salaries

  • 3.00% - Office Expenses

  • 4.06% - Operational Overhead (travel, hosting, etc)

  • 14.49% - Legal

  • 13.62% - Marketing

  • 10.32% - Tax

The budget for the funds raised, seems realistic and split according good business practice.

30% Supply of Tokens can be issued at the sole discretion of the Swarm Technologies Inc

Expected Earnings

As a business, the company currently appears to have no income, and is expected that they will have a market ready version by 2019.

Clarification on Budget Required

No sources of information could be found regarding existing income. It appears there is no formal income, and the company will be solely reliant of ICO Funds.

Those seeking to invest, it is recommended that the companies burn-rate per month is requested.

Team

Core Team

The core team profiles that was available:

Name Job Type Category Experience Endorsements Network Strength
Steve Bassi CEO Technology 10 Years 23 130 Low
Paul Makowski CTO Technology 6 Years 13 360 Low
Ben Schmidt Director Technology 6 Years 8 123 Low
Nick Davies COO Security 17 Years 172 394 Medium
Maxwell Koo Developer Technology 6 Years N/A 10 Low
Adrian Escude CMO Operations 10 Years 70 1244 Medium
Bill Fehr VP Operations 24 Years 71 1084 Medium
Evelyn Hytopoulos Chief Economist Finance 4 Years 30 500 Low
Jessica Thiefels Content Marketing Marketing 10 Years 81 849 Medium

Team have minimum experience but in the right places

The team seem to have minimum experience, but their expertise lies correctly with the product. Note the majority of the team have worked together on another company called - Narf Industries, another company that also deals with security.

Advisory Team

The advisory team, most likely being reimbursed via tokens, may be just endorsers of the project. But the team backgrounds are within ideal companies and security governmental departments, they should be able to convey the best advice for this industry.

Name Title Category Experience Endorsement Rating Network Strength
Carl Hoffman Advisor Technology 31 Years 100 2199 High
Mark Tonnesen Advisor Technology 17 Years 298 500 Excellent
Dan Guido Advisor Security 12 Years 155 1343 High
Chris Eagle Advisor Technology Unknown Unknown 133 Medium
Dr Sergey Bratus Advisor Technology Unknown Unknown 25 Medium

Note there are very experienced names that are advisories, which is well in line of best practice with good use of panels skill sets.

Also advisory team seem to be of the right background experience to advise on this project.

Community

They have pretty much the established places to have a web presence, but most are limited in network affect. It is still early and we expect that they have a small dedicated PR team to focus and increase the online following post ICO.

Followers Strength
Linkedin 64 Low
Bitcoin Talk 6 Very Low
Medium 89 Low
Steemit Not Listed Not Found
Reddit 61 Low
Twitter 1231 Medium
Instagram Not Listed Not Found
Telegram 4611 High
Facebook 594 Low
Youtube Not Listed Low

Small Current Marketing Impact

From their site, they appear to have only 1 person conducting content marketing, and do not cover such roles as community manager.

Position Vs Competition

The comparison looks at the nearest competitor in the crypto-scene. Guardtime was picked due to closely managing the way they monitor and resolve security threats.

Guardtime seem to be a large company, with at least 100+ employees. In addition to access to 150 cryptographers, developers and security architects, seem to be in an established position to compare to.

Swarm Technologies GuardTime
Team Strength Medium Excellent GuardTime’s team are more established and have a much larger tech team.
Technology Low Excellent PolySwarm, have yet to finish the MVP, where as GuardTime, have many platforms in existence.
White Paper Low N/A PolySwarm’s whitepaper was not clear enough to easily work out the end solution and its token amount was ambiguous.
Token Value Average Rate Avg Value: $0.016 Private Early VC $8 Million Raised in 2010 Compared with similar token distributions across industry as whole. As offering is quite unique.
Community Low Excellent PolySwarm’s community is of low size, and the marketing team seems inadequate for the task in hand.

Conclusion

Their marketing team seem to be very small, tie that into low amount of followers across their social media platforms. Seems to be an area they need to improve upon. The marketing is not even strong enough for the crypto-community.

The team of Advisors is one of the strongest part of this ICO. The advisory team are well established in themselves with strong lengthy backgrounds and applicable experience.

The core team, has an average experience of 10.33 years each. In addition the experience closely ties into the product offering, and the team seem to have the capability to carry through this project.

The company has poor fundamentals, with the Team being the only obvious strength. **A negative factor **is the lack of development or offering to the market. This product is in very early stages.

The tokens may appreciate in value due to speculation, but will not be utilised until mid 2019. Meaning they will have no use case for about 1.5 years.

Though we expect, if the company can get a working product released, the economic usage of each token or utility will be high, as they will be required in every transaction. It also appears that they plan on creating a buyer and seller market, that would work well on an open platform across the globe. Allowing the buyer (Company placing bounty) to get the most efficient price for security bugs.

On conclusion they have no existing business, apart from the team already have worked together on Narf Industries. The team have the expertise to follow their roadmap, and appears realistic in its timescales. From this based on minimal comparables we give this ICO/business offering a 55% out of 100% rating and would expect a fair dollar value investment return.

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