Concept:  

Simple Token seeks to simplify the tokenization process of businesses while increasing scalability to allow for millions of users on consumer apps to interact with blockchains. Cryptokitties was the perfect example as to why Simple Token is a necessity on the blockchain. Cryptokitties took 11% of the traffic on Ethereum when it released, congesting the entire blockchain, resulting in high transactions fees and causing ICO’s to be delayed.  

Blockchain technologies are going to continue to disrupt the financial and business world. Right now blockchain is a futuristic idea, many people make the comparison that blockchain in 2017 is where the internet was in 1993. As a result blockchain has room for massive growth. Currently, the demand for blockchain developers is far greater than the supply of them, causing them to be expensive.  Another issue with current blockchain systems is scalability.   Simple Token aims to cut out the need of hiring a blockchain developer, saving businesses costs and allowing them to tokenize their own businesses. Think of OST as a platform where you don’t need to go through the hassle of creating an ICO; receive funding, go through the legal process etc.     

ICO: November 2017 

• 1ETH= 3598 ST + 15% bonus
•  Softcap: 50,000,000 ST  
• Target: 100,000,000 ST   

Simple Token’s ICO was extremely successful achieving 189% of its target. A total of 46, 828 ETH was raised by nearly 6,900 people.   

Token Allocation:    

• 30% Token Sale 
• 17.2% Future Token Sale: Locked in smart contracts for 6 months 
• 27.2% Acceleator Program: Token supply reserved for grants for promising token projects and developers building on Simple Token. 
• 5.6% Early Backers: 3 year vesting schedule. 
• 10% Advisors: 2 year vesting schedule 
• 10% Founders: 3-4 year vesting schedule   

Use of Proceeds: 

• 10% Sales and Marketing 
• 10% Legal 
• 10% Security
•  5% Accounting 
• 10% Overhead 
• 5% Administration 
• 50% Technology     

Fundamentals:   

Current Price: $0.65 

All Time High: $1.40 

Coins in Circulation: 257,283,723 

Max Supply: 800,000,000 

Market cap: $169,000,000 (Low market cap) 

Rank: 124 

Exchanges: Binance (12/29/2017), Huobi(1/21/2018), Okex (1/22/2018) – 3 of the largest exchanges in the world (all in the top 5)   

My take: There is obviously a lot of room for growth considering its low market cap and being so far from its high. Simple Token is only on 3 exchanges and they have stated that they will continue to work on being added to new exchanges.

 Recent News/Upcoming Events: · 

• OST sitting on $100M fund to do OST start ups ·
•  January 15th ICO Bonus Drop (~57,000,000 tokens added to circulating supply) 
• Updated Roadmap found here. 
•  2 New Exchanges (OKEx and Huobi) 
• ostKYC- KYC and Whitelisting solution powered by OST 
•  Announced Partnerships with 11 startups (will be discussed in more detail below)         

Does it Have Working Products? 

OpenST 0.9.1 with OpenST 0.9.2 releasing in the coming weeks.     

ostKYC: 

Know Your Customers (KYC)/Anti-Money Laundering (AML) are two requirements for an ICO in order to prevent/reduce fraud, money laundering and scams. It is a pain for both the ICO and the investor as it can take weeks to sift through tens of thousands of records and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.   Simple Token has solved that problem by developing a solution in partnership with Cynopsis Solutions. ostKYC helped Simple Token process 2,000 applicants in the last 24 hours of their token sale. This product will likely slide under the individual investors eye as it’s not significant to them. However, this product is huge for future ICOs. Right now ostKYC is available in two packages below.  · 

• Lite: 6 OST per API call (10,000 API calls) · 
• Plus: 10 OST per API call (25,000 API calls)     

Roadmap: OST releases monthly updates, this is taken from their most recent update.  

 Product Development: 

• ostKYC: (mentioned above) was announced to be released at the end of January and the team met the deadline having it available to the public on January 25th, 2018 
• ostKIT alpha: Simple Tokens blockchain toolkit will allow any company to design token economies and stimulate transactions on their testnet. It is expected to be released in February 2018. Some of the features can be found on their monthly update. 
• ostExplorer: Block explorer that will allow for insights on OpenST sidechains as well as on ETH public blockchain February 2018 
• ostWALLET: Consumer facing wallet Q2 2018 
• OpenST Protocol 1.0: Q2 2018   
• Partnerships: 20 partnerships have been announced and it looks like they will continue to add more partnerships in the coming weeks. Furthermore, they are hoping to announce more startup batches like their OST startup day, although that is TBD.   
•  Exchanges: OST is listed on Gate.io in the near future and they are commited to adding OST to more exchanges in the future  
•  Team: OST plans on increasing the size of their team from 30 to 50 (20 new additions)   

Team:  

Simple Token currently has 30 members on its team! That is a tremendous amount of people working on this project and gives me (as it should you) confidence that they will achieve all of their goals. I will not go into in-depth on all of them but will highlight some of the important people on their team. Current team members have worked on the HyperLedger as well as with Microsoft. The team resides in two offices (Berlin, Germany and Pune, India) as well as having remote workers in Canada and Singapore. The majority of the team have worked on several projects before (Hem.com, Fab.com and Pepo). As if this team wasn't already impressive they plan on adding 20 more members to their team. 

• Jason Goldberg, CEO and Founder: Has 18 years of internet entrepreneurial experience and has founded two successful websites. He launched HEM.com alongside some of the teammates at Simple Token. Hem.com is a design brand that produces sustainable furniture. He’s also the CEO and founder of Pepo, an app that connects travelers with locals in the area you are traveling. The app currently has over 100,000 downloads on the Google Play Store 
• Nishith Shah, CTO and Founder: Has worked alongside Jason Goldberg on Hem.com and Fab.com as well as experience in smaller internet companies   

OpenST Independent Board of Advisors: 

•  Allen Morgan: Has 35 years of experience in Venture Capital firms as well as an associate fellow at the University of Columbia and sits on the board of Directors at Idealab.  
•  Chris Dark: President at C2FO. He has held positions at Atomico, AOL and Bain&Co. 
• Daniel Weinberg: 20 years of experience in financial trading.                   

Advisors Team:   

Wow is all I can say about their advisors team. It’s obvious that Jason has some serious connections in the industry and that people are interested in his project. I do not know the extent to which these advisors participate in but they all have extremely impressive backgrounds and have worked extensively in the blockchain sphere as well as some having been a part of dotcom era. 

•  Trent McConaghy: Founder of Ocean Protocol, BigchainDB, founder of IPDB foundation ·
• Brian Lio: Founder and CEO of Smith + Crown (crypto financial news website) and a fellow at the Singpore University Social Science. 
• Rick Dudley: President of Vulcanize (blockchain technical guidance firm), has worked with ConsenSys previously. 
•  Jehan Chu: Co-founder of Kenetic Capital (have funded capital for ICX, AirSwap and many more) 
• Gil Penchina: Angel in Brave, Ripple, Filecoin, Civic and EOS and Paypal in 1999. Co-founder of Pryze.com and former co-founder of Fastly 
• Sebastian Quinn-Watson: Advisor and market lead on projects such as Viberate, Bankera, Powerledger, Airswap and more 
• Gary Nuttall: Founding partner of Team Blockchain  
• Mark Bonchek: Founder of Shift Thinking and faculty member of Singularity University with over 50 articles published in HBR and is the first person to receive a PhD from Harvard University on topic of Social Media 
• David Bohnett: Founder of Baroda Ventures and founded Geocities.com, a website which once ranked 4th in the world in terms of trafficked websites in the early 90s 
• Thomas Power: Board member to companies involved with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. 200,000 twitter followers. 
• Adam Jackson: Advisor and investor to early blockchain projects. Co-founded Doctor on Demand. 
• Matt Chwierut: Research Director at Smith + Crown   

Investors:  

Simple Token has an impressive list of early backers. I will not go into detail with all of them but will highlight a few. NOTE: It is not known how invested any of these firms are, these are all listed on their website. 

• Tencent: An early backer, Tencent are the owners of Wechat, a Chinese platform that has millions of daily users. I can’t emphasize how big this is. WeChat has 700 million daily users and has tons of functions ranging from a tinder-like app, to ecommerce. Tencent is also invested into MOBA-Game (League of Legends), a company that has over $624m in micro transactions. It is not determined the extent to which the investing/ partnership position is. But exciting news nevertheless.  ·
• Kenetic Capital: Kenetic Capital was an investor into ICON (ICX) which has just released their mainnet and has a MKTCAP of $3.5bn. They are invested in many more although I can’t seem to find a list. I know that they are also an early backer of AirSwap.  
•  GreyCroft, 500 Startups, #Hashed, Kryptonite1, CM Crypto Capital, BlackPine, Vectr, SVK Crypto, Correlation Ventures, and Mick Hagen are among the other early backers.                                  

Partnerships:  

Simple Token has 20 partnerships, yes, you read that right. 20 partnerships. Granted, the partnerships are not Fortune 500 companies. I’m not going to go into full detail of all of the companies, but here are a list that stood out at me. Many of these companies are in their nascent stages and have not fully developed into full working products. Pepo, Gushcloud and Digital Knights are definitely the 3 that impressed me the most. Personally, the 11 new partnerships weren't all too impressive, but time will tell as they are all new start ups. 

Pepo: Pepo is a social media app with thousands of daily users and over 100,000 downloads. Pepo allows travelers to connect with other travelers/locals to find ‘insider tips’ on their travel destinations. Pepo coins are given to other users when a picture of theirs is upvoted. These Pepo coins can be redeemed for local travel services. Pepo was founded by the founders of Simple Token.    

Digital Knights: Digital Knights scouts and evaluates software developers globally to ensure that your company can choose the right partner for your project. The company is based in Europe and has offices in Germany and Switzerland. The token is intended to be use as a reward and feedback mechanism.  

InterviewBit: InterviewBit aims to help its customers prepare for interviews in the tech world. They help get you connected to the right company, refresh your coding skills, and practice interview questions. InterviewBit hopes to tokenize their website to allow users to buy courses and coaches as they accumulate it. One of the founders used to work on fab.com alongside Jason Goldberg (Founder of Simple Token).   

Xain: Xain builds applications using AI technologies using the Ethereum blockchain to develop AI products. Xain will use OpenST protocol to explore tokenized applications on their network.    

Gushcloud: Gushcloud is an Asia marketing and entertaining network that connects audiences to more than 12,000 influencers and creators. The company works in 8 countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea and Japan). They are hoping to use the token to reward and incentivize online influencer marketing, micro-payments, and more.  

Look (by Vidi-VR): Look is a Virtual Reality social media platform focused on creating, sharing and discovering content. Look is looking to tokenize their business to incentive and reward activities within Look. CEO Jason Goldberg has written an article regarding this partnership found here.  

 Tesloop: Attempts to provide travelers with an alternative to fossil fuel cars by providing them with a Tesla for intercity travel within Southern California. Tokenization will allow Tesloop to interact with car ownership, ride hailing and other services.  

ConnectScale: Fishing social community built around their fish scale device, which allows you to track catch data from fishing trips. Their app only has 1,000 downloads and has been around since 2015 in Tennessee. Not really sure if or why they would be partnered with Simple Token but who am I to say.   

Lookhave: Social networking platform that connects personal wardrobes to your smartphone. They only have 50 downloads but by the looks of it they are just getting started as a company.

Treat: A spanish start up that seeks to help to share treatment and receive information from experts and verified resources about topics of interest. 100,000 downloads of their app on the google play store. 

How is the Token Valuable?  

OST token is valuable because it is needed to be purchased by companies who want to use OST products. Currently OST is needed to be purchased if a company wants to use their ostKYC platform during ICOs. If a company wants to tokenize their own company, OST are required to be purchased off exchanges. OSTs are not mined and no more will be created, so as supply decreases the demand of these tokens will increase.   

I don't get what you mean, why would a business want to tokenize?

I'll use the use case of Pepo. Pepo is an app oriented towards travelers to allow them to get "insider" tips from locals and other travelers in their area. Let's say that Pepo wants to create a Pepo coin that can be redeemed for certain prizes as an incentive for people to use their app/increase quality of the content. Pepo can go to Simple Token and buy $1,000 worth of OST (let's assume 1 OST= $1). Pepo can then create a Pepo coin at a certain exchange. Let's say they agree that $1 OST will equal 1000 Pepo Coins. Each Pepo coin will be worth $0.001. If you redeem enough Pepo coin you are entitled to use them in their "Store" for special features. 

Simple Token has a detailed response on reddit of how a company's token price will work when the value of OST rises or decreases.

Why would people use Open ST protocol?   

Companies try to minimize costs of everything, the same will be done for blockchain. It is not a matter of if businesses will want to use blockchain/tokenization, it is a matter of when. Blockchain development is time consuming and expensive. OST seeks to reduce those costs to make it easy for companies to create a token economy for their business. Think of other products that companies use in order to reduce their own costs; Salesforce is used for CRM instead of doing it in-house. Shopify simplifies the process of online stores. Wordpress and WIX make it easy to create a website without the need for development. Simple Token seeks to do this on the blockchain.   

 Social Media:

 The team is very active on social media. They answer people’s questions on Reddit and in their Telegram group very frequently and Jason Goldberg will occasionally answer a question or two. 

Reddit

Twitter

Telegram

Okay, this sounds good and all but tell me what are the negatives?

One can argue there are a few negatives. I am going to state them and then make a counterpoint to each one.

Jason Goldberg (CEO) has had some unsuccessful ventures before: Yes, he has, and he is more than open to admitting his failures. But let us also look at the positives. Pepo and Hem.com are both successes. It's not like we all haven't failed once before. Most people who have succeeded have failed more times than not. This of course could fail, but that's a risk especially with crypto assets. 

The Marketing Team is bad: Yes I'm sure some people would like them to market themselves better. I personally love their design (although their logo could be a bit better). Jason Goldberg has stated that he wants organic growth and let the product prove itself. I'm personally under the same opinion and many of the projects in crypto that I have invested in do not market themselves as well as others (looking at you Tron). 

A lot of those startups that are on their platform will fail: That is definitely a risk, but that doesn't change the fact that there is interest in the platform itself. It is not Simple Token's fault that their product or app fails. Sometimes there isn't an interest in it (note: some of their partnerships I really don't like, but we'll see if I'm wrong). 

Final Judgement: 

I am very impressed with Simple Token's team and professionalism. There are only a handful of low market cap coins that can boast a team of 30 with an advisory board like Simple Tokens. Simple Token has continuously come out with partnerships and news since they completed their ICO. I am very impressed with their ostKYC as I think it will fly under the radar from retail investors but will be big for companies planning on doing ICOs. There is obviously interest from start ups using their platform as 20 have agreed to use it. 

They have a lot of short-term news coming out and have a ton of room for growth considering their market cap and the number of exchanges they are on. I think people are underestimating how big this coin can be in the future and as they continue to roll out their products and partnerships it will only get bigger. For now, I am content with the price action as it means I can buy more OST before it explodes. 

I have given you some negatives to consider before investing in this coin and with any crypto asset there's always a big risk of failure.

Note: I have invested in this coin from before the market correction and have continued to purchase it at these levels. I am not giving you financial advise and you must do your own due diligence before making a final decision. I am simply giving you the research I conducted.