Did you know that you could even buy a construction sand with the crypto? Then here it is: a first world-ever cryptocoin to buy construction sand!
Today I'm going to tell you a little on SandCoin project, which will soon close it's ICO doors for new investors (so if you like to get it, be in a hurry!).
Sandcoin tells about themselves as a team working in construction business and real estate, having more than 2500 houses build along with 2000 ha. of territory near Moscow region.
You could buy their tokens, 1 SandCoin equals 1 cubic meter of construction sand (approx 0.95~1.2$ for cubic meter of sand). It's great that Ruslan (founder of the project) had an idea, how to make investors get x2..x5 to the coin price: staring to sell the sand for 5-7 times cheaper than the professional sand suppliers does (approx. 200-300 roubles which is 5~7 $). So SandCoin plans to do a buyback of their coins in exchange of the sand, and also to burn at least 10% of coins yearly during 5 years (total burning 50% of coins).
So is it a great idea to sell the construction sand and is it legit at least? Speaking from one side, the sand is natural resource, which has to belong to all Russians, as we see in our Constutution and moral/ethical ideas/rights of the people. And the earnings from selling such sand should work for good - for the Russain citizens, in theory (as it goes with oil in UAE, for example).
On the other side, the government itself in our country is ignoring these rules and ideas, selling natural resources of Russia such as gas, oil, wood, dirt (for planting trees), and even selling the whole territories with resources "included" in price. And then, we got back resulting goods such as ready-to-use furniture, food, car's gasoline, etc. back from Europe, USA, China.
And the Russian citizens are not getting anything from this sales: the money goes thorough offshore and onshore special companies, and most of them are in turnover abroad - not in Russia itself, moving from one international business accounts to another. In this reality the Sandcoin is 146% legit - and it would do even good things, because Ethereum and ERC20 tokens improves the transparency of transactions all over the world (the question is - who will buy such amounts, why, when, and for what...).
And on that side, the sand-selling platform would be good thing in trade international relationships.
Let's try to think about Sandcoin project in numbers (veritas, yeah?)... I will use 100 score as ideal, 90 - superb quality, 70 - very good, 50 - normal level, 30 - bad level, 0 - there is no such thing.
| Scoring name | Score |
|---|---|
| Project Idea | 67 |
| Innovation | 38 |
| Project Team | 70 |
| Quality and details of whitepaper | 29 |
| Landing page | 44 |
| Video | 37 |
| Other languages translations | 75 |
| Bitcointalk | 54 |
| Number of communities | 50 |
| Laws and juridical side | 68 |
| Validated and opensource code on github | 25 |
| Result project score | 50,6 / 100 |
Let me answer your question on how these scores appeared. The idea of trading platform is ok, but in the specific case there are nearly zero on innovation (the only thing - it's ERC20 crypto, and that's all). Guys are not telling us about some sort of automation they could do with sand delivery, sand counting, whatever.
Project team consists of the professionals, but AFAICS, such large project as sandpit, requires team of 10 or more people, but not 4 guys. Even if Sandcoin has this size of team, they don't show it (why?) and there aren't also any other business details (except the certificate of owning some land near Moscow). That's bad.
Landing is done on a basis level - I would say, the level, that would be enough for PreSale and maybe even PreICO, but not the ICO level. I couldn't find also any traces of mediakit or other press materials.
Video shows really small amount of practical information, except one panoramic photo of some landscape, and except the offer to buy some sand. Not much detailed and video is really cheap one.
As for translations, there are Chinese one, for instance, but the translation is limited to landing (Whitepaper is not translated). Also, I cannot be sure, that Chinese investors are okay to call to Russian numbers and they can't talk Russian, even English is often a problem for Chinese people in fact (I was in China, trust me :). But the good here is that they are developing and now there are six translations ready!
The BitcoinTalk thread got 30 post pages, but people asking for some details on the projects (which aren't published even in whitepaper!), there are no listed types of industrial machinery or mining/extraction equipment, links to other team work, a large and complete market review, links to the sources of information on sand types, pricing, etc, there are no external links at all! So we could think of the team, could it be really good or... Seems that BitcoinTalk doesen't bother team at all. In telegram chat the case is thesame...
Speaking about communities, Sandcoin has Twitter account, Facebook, Telegram account, Golos and Steemit accounts, Medium one. But the links aren't published on the main website (even after my comment on that). They also use Ruslan Pichugin account for Twitter (why do they do that?!) and number of Facebook followers are just 200 persons, and there are little more than 500 participants in Telegram chat. Speaking about Medium - superb effective platform for self-promoting (and also it's free!), their account started living just on 1 september (ICO started 18 september) so it seems they were in a hurry registering these accounts and it was a not really well-prepared action. The only positive and good ideas might be from Alexander Kwaskoff, who's posting some automation ideas to their BitcoinTalk thread here.
Returning to law and jury, they seems to have some knowledge in building and real estate, they have some land for the excavation of sand. But the fact, that they are starting ICO in Russia, where there are no juridical state of ICOs (not disallowed, but not permitted - I would call this a gray zone), is a Question from Large Q. It could be dangerous not only for the team, but also for the investors, in the future. A lot better idea would be to make the project international and supporting international law, as usually project does with organizing their business in special offshore countries - for the save of people identities, privacy, and law (the Russian government, for example, is often not following their own laws, for example, ignoring Russian Constitution, privacy laws of the state and international law, too). So it seems like a russian roulette - you could make it large and growing business, or die... I hope the guys wouldn't lose their business and/or lifes, tho.
Lastly, speaking about github repos and code there, you can find there some several framework parts (openzeppelin, etc). There is only one contributor and they don't have any coder activity going on. So we have a large question to Sandcoin - would they be able to find a good quality coders afterwards, who could make technically strong and large project, and would the source code of this platform published, well documented... We don't know anything on that.
Warning! All of there scores are my own, subjective ones!
Closing eyes on too many project negative side, we still can't say that project is "bad" or "neutral" looking at their ICO results. It's one of the most successful in the nearest months. We could see more than 5500 ETH on gain their account, which is close to 1.5 million USDs. From the starting moment the money gaining campaign slowed down a lot, but they still got some stable investments going on. It would be interesting to know, what was the main source of traffic gain to this project? You'd probably have to start your own crypto-startup to know the real numbers... But we could see some info from similarweb, of course:
We can see here, that 22% of traffic they had from USA. What was this exciting publisher, mass media, portal, which gained this project nearly quarter of visitors? I hope Sandcoin knows. Other countries in the review are quite strange, too (why them?...).
While they might be or might be not real answers to these questions, let me wish Sandcoin luck. If you gonna ask me, d'u have to invest some money to it? I'd say yes. They are real people with real ambitions, working hard to deliver their project. In the perspective of one, two or even three years, your investment can make the real X...many times, but who knows? Taking in account 1,5 million dollars, they would definitely got success :)
Of course, construction sand is important for many kins of business. Will the project become a good investment or not only the time will show (:. Remember not to put all your "eggs" into one "basket" of course, diversify your investments and risks.
If you'll decide to go on, here is their smart-contract:
Have a nice crowdsale, guys :)
P.S. You also can find meetup video where we "skypespoke" with Sandcoin representative:
Also, if you like my review, leave a comment below, so I can write some more :) Thx.
Building our future together
Den Ivanov aka @SXIII from Random City
