Metacoin

Covering Bitcoin, the Blockchain, Altcoins, and Fintech

An ICO to Watch: TaaS

ICO WatchEDITOR’S NOTE: We learned on April 22, by examining the terms for the TaaS ICO, that investment is prohibited in the United States. In addition to being bolded in the document, you must affirm that you are not a United States citizen before continuing. As of this writing, 9 a.m. CDT in the US on April 24, TaaS has raised US$5.5m.

If you’re new(ish) to the crypto space, you might be wondering: “How do I get in on some sweet ICO action?” And if you’re really new to the crypto space, you might ask: “What’s an ICO?” We’ll try to (figuratively) kill two birds with one stone, er, post by talking a little about a rather interesting ICO we bumped into: TaaS.

ICO: “Initial Coin Offering.”

Here’s a term that is pretty straightforward. IPO – “Initial Public Offering” – makes total sense in the investment vernacular, and is a pretty commonly used phrase. A company, having proved its worth over time, decides to raise money by, for the very first time, offering its shares to the public over one of the bigger stock markets (NYSE or Nasdaq).

Initial Coin Offerings work the same way, but the twist is that an ICO isn’t traded over a stock exchange. And, these coins are often the opposite of proven – in fact, many ICOs are trying to get enough capital to get their idea/coin/token off the ground.

Meet TaaS

 

TaaS ICOFirst of all, we’ll admit it’s a pretty slick webpage – though the logo, frankly, leaves a lot to be desired. Also, there’s a bit of a Soviet connotation in the name – remember “TASS,” the Soviet news agency? (Nyet? You’re probably not old enough.)

But let’s talk about the technical aspects of this, and whether or not this idea is worthy of your investment dollars (or coins, as it were). From the website (which is the first one we’ve seen with the TLD extension of “.fund”):

TaaS is a tokenized closed-end fund designed to reduce the risks and technical barriers of investing in the blockchain space. Built on a profit-sharing smart contract, TaaS introduces an innovative Token-as-a-Service business model, allowing investors to subscribe to the fund’s income stream. TaaS built an innovative Cryptographic Audit technology to become the first, truly transparent fund dedicated to cryptocurrencies and tokens.

Sounds a little like a cross between a mutual fund and a venture capital fund.

A Crypto “Fund of Funds?”

We’ll go with that: here appears (at least to our eyes, which, while not “untrained,” aren’t experts in the fund space) to be the closest thing to a Fund of Funds that you’ll find. At least so far. Fund of Funds invest in, well, a bunch of funds. They’re like hedge funds but they just spread themselves around various mutual funds.

Or this could, if you read the materials on the site, appear to be closer to buying into a trading desk or flash trading firm. Except they’re just going after blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

How will this shake out?

Darn good question: we’ve only got a few more weeks before the ICO is done and you can’t buy the tokens directly. Instead, you’ll have to rely on trading them on the open markets – and, as of this writing, only two exchanges are going to have the TaaS tokens as part of their mix: Livecoin and Kuna (the largest exchange in the Ukraine). (Read more here from Cointelegraph.)

So we’ll be watching closely.

By the way, if you want us to write up your ICO, send us a note: info – at – metacoin – dot – co.

Four Coins that Could Quadruple by This Time Next Year

Okay, folks. It’s time. First, the disclaimer:

We don’t provide individual advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Seek professional investment, financial, and legal advice before investing in any asset, let alone cryptocurrencies, which are a brand-new, emerging class of assets. Read our recommendations and take them with a grain of salt, do your own research to back up your investments, and be prepared. Use this site at your own risk.

Now that we’ve scared you, here’s our post.

We gotta admit that this is a rather fun universe we’re entering here. Part dot-com boom (before the bubble), part options trading when it was just invented. And part gambling, because, let’s face it, some of these ICOs and emerging cryptocurrencies are like playing the lottery or playing roulette.

That being said, though, the idea of creating an entirely new form of money, based on computing power and solving code and a lot of stuff that’s way over the heads of mere mortals – well, that’s just plain thrilling.

So, as we jumped head-first into the pool with this post, we tried to think of the particulars that could make these coins actually go crazy in the market. Some of this is going to be a little too techno, and some of it is going to be real-world. All of it is mere speculation: I can’t see the future.

But if you take our “BRED Portfolio” post as an example of our ability to be soothsayers, we might be on to something here. (If you had invested in the BRED Portfolio on April 1, you’d be up 12.08% in just three weeks.)

Enough background. Let’s dive in: Four Coins that Could Quadruple By This Time Next Year.

Metacoin Meme

#1: Litecoin

That does it for me. Seriously, though, once you’re starting to see a coin used side-by-side with Bitcoin, you now know it’s got real-world functionality.

Litecoin (LTC) is about to hit its fourth birthday, and it’s actually well below, on a USDT basis, its all-time high of $50.27 a coin (achieved in November of 2013). It’s that factor first and foremost on our list of reasons why this coin could quadruple by this time next year.

Volume of late has been huge – 9-figures worth traded a couple times in April – but its utility, to the tune of transactions per day in the thousands (more than double the number of Dash transactions, per this chart), tells us that the coin is actually being used out there in the wild.

Over the weekend, the LTC/BTC pair was trading at .01 to .012-to-1 – support kept the price above .01 pretty much all day on Saturday. This is another good sign.

Expect volatility, though – I’d hazard a guess that it may bounce around in the .009 to .01 range for awhile. That’s a good price to jump in at.

Mandatory mention of Segwit here. LTC is moving toward Segwit. Segwit is important. Let’s all talk about Segwit!

Disclosure: We’re long Litecoin at the present moment.

#2: Dogecoin

Yeah, I can’t believe it either. A coin named after an Internet meme…you CANNOT be SERIOUS? Dogecoin. I’m serious.

DOGE had more than 10,000 transactions in the past 24 hours – more than Litecoin; third in the rankings behind Bitcoin and Ethereum – and its market cap is $50m+. So it’s legitimate.

What really jumped out to me? The average transaction value. It’s pretty low ($310 or so) when compared with others; the median transaction of around $3.28 tells me that people are using this coin as a Venmo substitute. (Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But I’m guessing fewer lattes are purchased and more random paybacks and IOUs are covered with this one.)

Dogecoin trades around 35-38 Satoshi of late. Its all-time low is 15. I see more mainstream use in its future. I wouldn’t be shocked to see it in the 60s in a month or so.

#3: Digibyte

Digibyte logoDid we mention Segwit above? We did. Here’s a link to the latest on Digibyte Segwit activation.

To the layman, this means little, but to those in the know, here’s the general consensus:

  1. Segwit is important; its adoption will drive the price of the coin adopting it higher
  2. It may never happen with Bitcoin, it might happen with Litecoin
  3. It looks imminent with Digibyte.

Place your bets: with a current market capitalization of less than $10m, do you think the bargain hunters will start shopping for the coin that is the first to activate Segwit? Honestly, quadrupling might be a lowball estimate. We’d accumulate anywhere in the low 100 Satoshi range.

Disclosure: we’re long Digibyte right now.

#4: Bitcoin

BitcoinDidn’t see THAT one coming, did ya?

Let’s assume that Bitcoin stays around $1200 USDT, giving it a market cap of right around $20B. Now, let’s also assume that Bitcoin becomes the word synonymous with all digital currency, crytpocurrency, and altcoins (even though it’s NOT an altcoin), sorta like “Kleenex” brand facial tissue is everyone’s word for facial tissue.

I was going to say that there’s all sorts of crazy economic stuff going on in the world, but heck, I’d focus on two things that should drive the value of Bitcoin way up in the next 12 months:

  1. Brexit
  2. The tenuous state of the EU and the Euro

Now, that might get folks moving toward the US Dollar – which is a fair guess – but if you factor in the dicey nature of the US economy and the role of the Federal Reserve in money printing…do you think the masses will want to start putting their money into the US Dollar? Especially when an infinite supply of dollars could, technically, be printed?

Do you think a $5,000 price point for one Bitcoin is out of the question?

Disclosure: We are currently long Bitcoin.

Additional notes: we do not make any trades in any of the listed coins here for 24 hours after the date we publish this report.

 

Sikoba Launching as Peer-to-Peer IOU Platform

SikobaWelcome to the brave new world of blockchain startups, where ideas range from the straightforward to the esoteric to the “what IS that?” Different angles toward distributed ledger technology, different industries impacted, and different levels of buzz, all in one emerging, exciting, and sometimes downright crazy industry.

So we thought we’d talk about one of the ideas that falls into the “straightforward” category: a company called Sikoba, whose ICO we started tracking a couple weeks ago here on the site. (And, of course, if you’re part of an ICO or blockchain startup, reach out! We’d love to hear from you. Info – at metacoin – dot – co.)

Don’t Call it a “Lending Platform”

When we caught up with Sikoba CEO Aleksander Kampa over email, we were very quickly corrected on one point: Sikoba is not a peer-to-peer lending platform. Here’s more:

Metacoin: Please give us your elevator pitch.

Kampa: Sikoba is a decentralised money platform based on peer-to-peer IOUs and built on blockchain technology. Participants who know and trust each other in real life grant each other credit lines in the Sikoba system. They can then pay each other without using fiat money. These peer-to-peer credit relationships are governed by contracts with specific conditions, fee structures and repayment rules. Using credit conversion, a kind of configurable rippling, payments between participants who do not trust each other become possible. Fiat money or cryptocurrencies are used when there are no credit links between participants, or to repay outstanding balances when needed.

Metacoin: How is Sikoba different than btcjam or other peer-to-peer lending platforms?

Kampa: Sikoba is not a peer-to-peer lending platform! It is a peer-to-peer IOU platform, which allows payments to be made without having money (whether fiat, crypto or any other asset) to begin with. 

Metacoin: Why is blockchain technology needed?

Kampa: Sikoba is being designed as a decentralised system with the goal of eventually becoming independent and self-organising. Blockchain technology will make this possible.

Metacoin: What is the consensus model of your chain? (if applicable)

Kampa: We’re designing the Sikoba blockchain as a “federated blockchain”. This is a permissioned mining model where only authorized nodes add blocks to the blockchain. The Sikoba federation will be self-governing, meaning that members will be added or removed from the federation based on votes of the federation members themselves.

Metacoin: What are the tokens people get for participating?

Kampa: Following the presale, Sikoba presale tokens will be issued on the Ethereum blockchain. They will eventually become exchangeable into Sikoba (SKO) tokens, which will be used to pay for transaction fees on the Sikoba network.

Metacoin: When exactly does the sale start?

Kampa: The pre-allocation phase has started on 17 March 2017, the public presale will start on 25 April.

Metacoin: When will the token be released to participants?

Kampa: Sikoba presale tokens are expected to be released by the end of June 2017. Participants will receive usable Sikoba tokens when the Sikoba platform launches, which is expected in 3Q2018.

Metacoin: What is the current state of your project?

Kampa: We are a technical team of 3 people, plus several people providing support on a part-time basis (Ethereum coding, admin, legal). Sikoba is still at the concept stage, elements of technical documentation exist but are as yet incomplete. With the funds raised in the presale, we aim to expand the team, finalize a detailed white paper and develop a MVP before the end of the year.

Where to find info…

You can check out the Sikoba Presale Page to learn more. Sikoba is also on Twitter.

Kampa is pretty active on Medium, and you can see his take on “replacing banks” here.

Is Delisting of an Altcoin a Kiss of Death?

Altcoins of DoomBreaking news from last night on Poloniex might have some highly negative implications for some altcoins. Specifically, this announcement, which caused more than a shock on the Poloniex exchange:

On May 2, 2017, the following will be delisted: BBR, BITS, C2, CURE, HZ, IOC, MYR, NOBL, NSR, QBK, QORA, QTL, RBY, SDC, UNITY, VOX, XMG.

Whoa! That’s quite the list.

Pretty much all of the coins on that list went down big time; this is to be expected, since Polo is the largest exchange and traders could very easily assume that these delistings were a vote of “no confidence.”

QED: QORA

This chart will show you how one particular altcoin, the thinly traded QORA, was impacted.

QORA DropDisclosure: we owned small amounts of QORA and – crazy enough – we were able to liquidate quickly and still have a (TINY) profit on the overall trade. (Because we accumulated QORA during drops over the past couple months.)

But, TBH, this news does not bode well AT ALL for QORA, and here’s why: it’s only listed on one other exchange. CCEDK is a Danish exchange that we have just learned about…this morning, when researching where else QORA can be traded. (We checked yesterday on Bittrex and Bitfinex and, well, nada.)

If you use Twitter as a judge, the lack of tweets from QORA also doesn’t do them any favors. And a whopping 10 BILLION coins outstanding means that the coin, which trades as of this writing (08:00 in the US Midwest) at 3 Satoshi, has a market cap of ~$378,000 US.

Will other coins fare any better?

Oddly enough, we were working on a different blog post yesterday afternoon, using VOX as an example. Here’s a screenshot that we took in the middle of the day, before everything went south.

Fibonacci In Action

At the time of this screener, we held VOX and it was trading at around 3100 Satoshi. It has now dropped to 960 or so. It likely won’t come back; though the Voxelus platform looks interesting, it’s tough to find anywhere else you can trade the coin.

As Always: Buyer Beware

The reason for the delisting is likely that these aren’t very liquid coins. Hint: if you’re rarely cracking the top 20 or so coins, you’re not on anyone’s radar, and you’re not part of even an occasional pump-and-dump, well, that doesn’t bode well for your long-term trading prognosis.

And if you’re not widely used, either, that’s a pretty bad sign. QORA’s market cap puts it barely in the top 200, but not significant enough to register with the masses.

If you were buying these coins hoping for a pop, that’s okay. But, if the long-term fundamentals weren’t there in the first place, delisting amounts to ripping off the band-aid on a gigantic flesh wound.

An ICO to Watch: Exscudo (EON)

ExscudoWe must admit: the first thing that got us interested in Exscudo was their “bounty program.” So if you don’t want to read the ins and outs and hear what makes this coin different, just skip to this link and sign up.

(Sidebar: if you are working on an ICO and you want us to know about it, let us know.)

Exscudo Basics

ExscudoIf you read the mission statement, you get the sense that the goal is to bridge the traditional and the digital, maybe serving as “Bitcoin meets SWIFT.” Or as “Ethereum meets Nasdaq.”

Or maybe if one of the crypto exchanges decided to launch its own currency. (Which…well, I’m not sure how a Poloniex currency would work.)

The core of the Exscudo value proposition is their proprietary technology, called EON, which is touted as a “flexible new generation blockchain technology.”

In any event, they might appear to be taking a really big bite out of the crypto economy – and maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it isn’t.

Here’s a bullet-pointed list of everything they’re planning on doing:

  • An exchange platform
  • Trading terminals
  • Wallet
  • Crypto debit card
  • Decentralized protected messenger
  • A merchant system.

If you’re thinking “that sounds like a lot,” you’re right.

So…how will they pull it off?

Let’s go to the videotape…

All told, this is an extremely audacious project.

ICO stats

They plan on issuing 240,000,000 during the ICO, with 150,720,000 available for sale (the rest will be allocated as detailed here; this is a sensible part of any ICO).

They’ve fixed the price of the coins – EONs – at 0.0002 BTC. Current math, then, tells us the following:

  • 1 BTC = $1,200 USD
  • 1 EON = $0.24 USD
  • ICO raise = $57,600,000

About that bounty…

Again, what really piqued our interest was the bounty program. Here’s where folks – like us, we’re members of this program – can potentially earn tokens. They’ve set aside 1 percent of the overall available for the bounty program – 2,400,000 coins. To earn them, you need to do things like “retweet” (“RT” for the uninitiated) their official tweets about the program, or like their Facebook status, or agree to say nice things about them on Bitcoin Talk.

It remains to be seen how quickly the bounty program will grow; at last writing, tweets were holding steady at around 500 RTs, and they had yet to report what was happening with individual bounty participants.

But we’re patient.

We plan on following this coin throughout its ICO, and beyond. We’ll keep you updated on what we learn.

One last thing…

Anyone else remember the name of Portugal’s pre-Euro currency? Yes, the “Escudo.” Hmmm.