Summary
The Ink Protocol ICO may have an skyward fight when it comes to approval, but with a solid team and perception, we think they have a shot. We will make a small bet on the Ink Protocol.
Highlights
The Listia Marketplace
Ink Protocol will become the new prestige and payment system within the Listia marketplace.
•Launched 2009
•10M registered users
•100M items sold
Actual users with Listia Credits will have their balances converted to XNK, providing the token with a tremendous boost for basic usage, strength, and network effects on day one.
Project Overview
Online marketplaces are now an everyday appearance of the digital world. Hundreds of millions of people use sites like Twitter or Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist to sell and buy goods. One of the main issues when controlling online transactions is trust between sellers and buyers. Online marketplaces advantage from systems based on influence to help sellers and buyers elect whom to transact with. But on sites which employ influence-based ratings, users do not have hold over their own reputation. What if reputation was purchased or owned instead by the users themselves and could be smoothly transferred across marketplaces? The Ink Protocol ICO come up with a way to do just this.
Team
Listia Inc. was founded in 2009 (Two Thousand Nine) and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. According to Crunch base, Listia raised a total of $11.2 million in 4 rounds. Investors of Listia include Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. The latest round was done in October 2013. They have between 51-100 employees and 10 million members on their app.
The bio of the key team members are listed below:
Gee-Hwan Chuang, Co-founder & CEO – M.S. and B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University. Before co-founding Listia in 2009, he worked as a software engineer for ZyXEL Communications and founded GEE! Technologies, a company that owns and operates several online shopping, e-commerce, and blog sites.
James Fong, Co-founder & President of Listia – B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University and M.S. in electrical engineering from San Jose State. He is a self-described entrepreneur who has worked as an engineer for Sun Microsystems and Micron technology in the early 2000s before co-founding Listia in 2009.
Gee-Hsien Chuang, Head of Product for Listia – B.S. in computer science from Cornell University and MBA from the National Taiwan University. He has worked as a software engineer for Tropian, Cisco, and Slide share before becoming the first employee of Listia. His mobile/web application developer specialties are Ruby on Rails, Python, and Google AppEngine.
Ngan Pham, CTO of Listia – Ngan received a B.S. in computer science from the University of California Davis in 2007. Since then, he has worked as an IT assistant for Stellartech Research and a software engineer for StreamSend. His specialties include Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, C/C++, HTML/CSS, Python, Photoshop, Solidity, and block chain technology. He was hired as CTO of Listia in August of 2011.
Advisors of the project include Samuel M Smith, PhD, Chief Architect Reputation AI Systems at ConsenSys, Philip Krim, CEO of Casper, and Lester Lim, Marketing Strategy Advisor for CoinFi and Selfkey.
Token Metrics:
• Ticker: XNK
• Token type: ERC20
• ICO Token Price: 1 XNK = 0.13 USD (0.00013333 ETH)
• Fundraising Goal: 15,000,000 USD
• Sold on pre-sale: 10,918,700 USD
• Total Tokens: 500,000,000
• Available for Token Sale: 30%
Concerns
•From the public info that we assemble (app ranking history, website traffic, the co-founder admitting that Listia’s advancement is not as quick as everyone wanted), and finishing fund raising round being 4 years ago), we admit Listia is not a developing business. Since the switch to (XNK token) does not adequately change the business model of Listia, we are not assured if the ICO will help Listia’s growth.
•It is less than 2 weeks before presale initiate and the coming roadmap of the project is not released yet. We can't inspect the soundness of the roadmap and level of planning of the team in assassinating its vision.
Conclusion
Overall, we like the flipping budding but are neutral about the long-term budding for this ICO. Our thinking on buying the tokens for investing and flipping for the long term are as follows:
For flipping
Good: With a hard cap of $15 (Fifteen) million ($3.5 million already sold), strong team and high market information and awareness, we believe the project can be sold out with incorrect demand.
Seeing
For long-term holding
Neutral : We are not sure how profitable and lucky Listia is given the disparate information we gathered. The usage of cryptocurrency does not dramatically change and better the business model of Listia, so we are on the boundary or neutral about the interest that the adoption of block chain has on Listia.
WEBSITE : https://paywithink.com
Whitepaper : https://paywithink.com/#documents
