1. Merculet (China, Singapore) merculet.io
Merculet is a protocol aimed to arrange decentralized finances, i.e. money funds established outside the state and municipal system. The project is being implemented by Krypital Group, which have already launched some successful projects, such as ArcBlock and CyberMiles. Merculet positions itself as a chief growth officer for global entrepreneurs, they seek to help entrepreneurs create a promotion and monetization model.
Solutions that the Merculet project offers:
Ranking system
Both young startups and established companies find it increasingly difficult to attract new users and their attention. Merculet solves this problem by creating a Value Attention Network. It consists of three core components: User Attention Value evaluation system, User Attention Token and Open Content Platform.
User value
Merculet creates the blockchain-based evaluation system to scientifically measure the value of a user’s attention with a UAV token as a measuring unit. An entrepreneur can access the UAV system, which can seamlessly integrate with traditional reward-point systems, through a set of open protocols.
Open content platform
Merculet builds an open content platform based on consensus and driven by tokens to solve the problem of attracting attention and increasing the value of attention. Open Content Platform will be able to implement automation operations and will be open everywhere in the content industry (existing public networks, existing app chain, content creators, content users and content copyright trading).
The investors of the project are Fenbushi Capital, Neo Global Capital, and Krypital Group, which already cooperated with ArcBlock and CyberMiles. As we can see, strong companies invest in this project, which is always a good indicator for determining the project potential.
Ivan Jiang (China), the project founder, graduated from one of the most prestigious MBA schools in China (13th among MBA schools worldwide), worked as a development engineer at HP. Then he was a chief engineer in major SAP subsidiary for 2.5 years and the first China representative of SAP cloud acceleration. Ivan is also founder of the Magic Window. According to Medium blogs, he is widely known as "China’s Reid Hoffman". Ivan collaborated with Alibaba (NYSE:BABA), HP, SAP, Netease and many other world-class companies to jointly realize his vision of the Merculet project.
The advisory board consists of Shoucheng Zhang – staff member of the US National Academy of Sciences, professor at Stanford University, founder of the DanHua Capital fund and physicist with 25+ years of experience. Another name in the advisory board is Shen Bo – founder of BitShares and Fenbushi Capital, a veteran of the traditional financial industry with 12 years of experience in working with securities brokers, hedge funds and an investment bank.
Tokensale will be held on April 10-14, 2018 at the rate 1 ETH = 87,500.0 MVP. Hardcap is 31,000 Eth. 30% of the total amount of tokens is allocated for the sale.
Summarizing, we can say the following: objective information about the team is very insufficient. The product is not ready yet. An advantage is probably the fact that the project is implemented by the same team as ArcBlock (profit +400%) and CyberMiles (profit +500%). Merculet is also quite good at marketing.
The project assessment is 7/10. Recommendation from The Token Fund analysts is to consider the project in the medium term.
2. Traceto (Singapore) traceto.io
Traceto is a project developing decentralized KYC (Know Your Client) services. The idea behind the project is to decentralize the process of conducting KYC through the use of smart contracts and AI technologies. TraceTo employees will be involved in identification, while Cynopsis, the already existing and well-established company located in Singapore, will check the financial part. The long list of this company’s customers includes such well-known projects as Icon, Bluzelle, Storm, Confi, Quantstamp, QLink.
The main difference between the project and its competitors Civic and uPort is that Traceto checks the money source and financial well-being. Selfkey is similar to Traceto, but there are differences in identity verification – it is performed by a third party in Selfkey, and by a company itself in Traceto. There are several similar projects: Po.et, Verify, Thekey.vip, Devery. Overall, competition exists, but Traceto looks more like a leader than everyone else due to the partner companies, such as Digix, FintruX, FidentiaX and PolicyPal.
There are a few issues about the project’s roadmap. According to it, the service will only be ready by 2019, and the public system will be ready by the end of 2019. The public sale will commence on April 4; the whitelist is open and along with KYC should be passed in GBX (gbx.gi). Tokenometrics: the project's hardcap on the main sale is $30 mln, the token value is $0.1. Total capitalization is $100 mln.
The team is represented by Chionh Chye Kit, the Co-founder & Managing Director in Cynopsis Solutions Pte. Ltd. since 2014. He is also the Director of CCK Solutions Private Limited, a company that has been providing individual consulting on compliance issues for corporate service providers and accountants in Singapore in accordance with AML (Anti Money Laundering) requirements since 2015. He has also been an Advisor to Kyber Network since 2017.
Dias Lonappan is the Chief Executive Officer of the project, former Head of Engineering at Serv.sg, CTO of Quantified AssetsPte Ltd and an IT Analyst for Tata Consultancy Services.
Project advisors: Ooi Beng Chin, Distinguished Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore, who has been serving there for 28 years, since 1989. He is also a Co-founder of MediLOT Technologies (this company is engaged in rethinking information using blockchain in medicine) and Shentilium Technologies.
Another advisor is Loi Luu, the CEO and Co-founder of Kyber.Network, Technical Advisor for Republic Protocol, Co-founder and Core Developer of truongnha.com – a service that researched and laid the foundation for solving the problem of school management in Vietnam.
Project drawbacks include a standard idea, which has nothing fundamentally new; unreasonably used blockchain; an existing competition; very weak roadmap; poor tokenometrics. Advantages of the project are: a list of interesting companies among partners and customers; a good, maybe even a great team; legal smoothness.
The project deserves an objective assessment of 5/10.
The Token Fund analytical department does not recommend the project for investment due to weak tokenometrics and long development of the project.