Online shopping and commerce have witnessed unprecedented growth in the past decade. In 2016, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to $2.3 trillion USD and are projected to grow to 4.48 trillion USD in 2021.
But as with any growing industry, e-commerce is extremely competitive. There are more than 20 million online shopping stores in the world, and the majority of them hardly generate any revenue. This diversity of options is inconvenient for the end users as they have to maintain multiple accounts, loyalty cards and provide banking details at each platform. Very few markets have aggregator platforms which compare pricing for similar goods at multiple stores.
Eligma is building a layer on top of e-commerce stores, enabling users to buy, sell and compare products across multiple stores using a single account login.
Eligma will offer the following three key services:
Discovery: Eligma will create a unified shopping account for each user which can be used to manage any online store. A deep neural network-based product recommendation engine will find the best deals for products users are looking for.
Inventory: Eligma will provide a household trading agent which will notify users when is the best time to sell their purchased products based on AI predicted future and current value. Users can even register their household products on the platform and sell them. An escrow based payment service will bring trust to the system when two users interact with each other.
Universal Loyalty: Users do not need to register for standalone loyalty programs of each retailer. Eligma will transfer value from existing loyalty points into ELI tokens and credit them directly to a user’s wallet.
Eligma will maintain an extensive and curated product database with more than 300 data fields. Eligma has partnered with the world’s leading product data provider IceCat NV from the Netherlands, who started the product data collection and processing in 2001. This product database will be connected to online stores for finding relevant information. Eligma will offer cryptocurrency payment option even for stores who currently do not accept them.
Eligma as of now does not have an MVP. They have demonstrated crypto payments integration and mobile wallet. An MVP for the product will be available in August 2018, and the initial testing would be done in Slovenia. Geographical expansion to the UK will only be done in mid-2019. The roadmap and development extend till Q3 2021, while further expansion in other geographies will only be done in 2022.
Token
The ERC-20 ELI tokens will have a wide functionality on the platform. Users can pay merchants in the form of ELI tokens at a discounted price. Other cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies can also be used for payment across the platform.
Users can use ELI tokens for several other purposes like product hunt ( ELI balance will be locked when ordering a product hunt), to push items for listing, escrow fees, advertising, loyalty points and other value-added services.
The token distribution is as follows:
60% crowdsale
19% Eligma team
5% advisors
16% future partners and community and user growth
Team
Eligma received an early stage funding of 1.5 million Euro in September 2017, which has afforded them a 26-member strong team.
Founder and CEO Dejan Roljic is a serial entrepreneur and has founded and advised multiple organizations. He founded ABC Accelerator, dedicated to high-tech companies, which has invested in more than 80 startups from around the world. He has also worked with a few blockchain based projects in advisory roles.
There are two other co-founders, Matej Gregorcic and Joze Mermal; both have extensive entrepreneurial experience. Eligma is supported by 14 advisers and has partnerships with a few organizations.
Verdict
On a conceptual level, Eligma is a fantastic project. They have won the award for the best pitch at the Crypto Summit 2018 held in Switzerland. There are projects which have some of Eligma’s features like the search of products through several stores, but none of them are trying to solve the problem in a holistic way that Eligma is doing. Overall, Eligma is good on paper, but a lot depends on the execution. They are raising funds for a very complex project without an MVP.
However, with enough funding, the team seems capable enough to execute the project. The product development stretches till mid-2021, we would have preferred a shorter roadmap.
Growth Potential
Eligma deploys AI and neural network based layer on top of e-commerce platforms, which gives it a distinct advantage over existing price discovery platforms. +3
E-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries globally. Eligma solves some of the major issues that users face in the industry. Even if Eligma can capture a small section of the global e-commerce industry, it will be considered extremely successful. +3
Enigma’s platform will have millions of listed products, collated from thousands of e-commerce websites all accessible via a unified account and loyalty program. This concept will be very appealing to the end users. +4
A strong team and quality advisors support the project. Eligma has also partnered with multiple organizations, primarily in the Slovenian region where the first phase of the implementation will be done. +3
Risks
An MVP is a necessity when you are raising funds for a project of this scale. The team had shown some blockchain capability when they demonstrated the crypto payment integration and a wallet for a Slovenian project. However, these two form a tiny component of the overall Eligma project. -3
The product development extends till mid-2021, which is far too stretched in my opinion and gives ample opportunities for competitors to gain market share. Expansion in geographies other than Slovenia and the UK will only be done in 2022. -2
The whitepaper is lengthy and provides enough information about the proposed product, but does not delve deeper into the technical details. -1.5
Disposition
We arrive at a rating of +6.5 for Eligma. Although a project without an MVP may not deserve a rating on the higher end, we feel that the team is strong and credible enough to develop Eligma. They have raised a significant amount in the ongoing presale itself, so we are assured that the hard cap will be achieved. Considering that the MVP will only get released in August 2018, there might be a slump in the token pricing during the interim period.
