NKOR (NKR) ICO Analysis: An Ecosystem for Securing, Verifying and Distributing Digital Data
Executive Summary
Project Description
The current legal framework is quite incompatible with the online environment and as a result, it does not afford adequate protection to creators as regards copyright infringement. Small-time contributors are affected the most and there is little they can do to prevent their intellectual property from being downloaded, altered, or distributed without their permission; third-parties even make steady profits from their creations and there is little they can do about it. When centralized platforms like YouTube or Facebook keep track of users’ online activities, rather than use it to forestall piracy, they are more focused on exploiting the data for marketing and generating revenue. Because of the issues outlined above, user privacy demand is hardly satisfied by the internet these days.
The NKOR project aims to provide a marketplace with the components required for fair content distribution, content analysis, and transparent index search; an autonomous, decentralized marketplace for intellectual property (IP) and copyright distribution. According to the team, on the NKOR platform, content will be treated like a digital asset, and creators will be able to manage their assets securely. Uploaded data will be authenticated and timestamped, and smart contracts will be used to link the data to a transaction on the blockchain. Furthermore, reports claim that publicly accessible and immutable records will be kept on all uploaded data, and timestamps will show the time the data was created, the time it was received, and all the times it was edited. The NKOR platform is also expected to keep track of data uploading and sharing, ensuring that plagiarism is impossible in the ecosystem.
Furthermore, the NKOR platform plans to facilitate the buying and selling of intellectual property between content owners and interested buyers without the need for a third-party. Since NKOR knows the rightful owner of the content, buyers will be able getting in touch with owners directly. Consequently, transactions are expected to be simpler, cheaper and very transparent. Additionally, the whole transaction — the transfer of copyright — will happen on the blockchain, and the entire NKOR community should ensure its validity.
Simply put, NKOR plans to design it’s ecosystem to cater to the needs of content creators, content consumers, copyright entities, heritage & cultural institutions, and industry players.
NKOR’s token, NKR, will be ERC20-compliant and it will likely act as the utility token on the ecosystem. Nearly all actions on NKOR will need NKR tokens: it may be used by participants to upload their content to the blockchain or to pay for another user’s copyrights. Creators will also be rewarded, in NKR, for providing quality content on the platform.
Existing Product
No product or prototype is available at the moment.
Hard Cap and Valuation
There will be a total of 200 million NKR tokens and the NKOR project aims to raise 25,000 ETH for 20% of the token total (soft cap = 2,500 ETH). The remaining 80% is distributed as follows: 29% is reserved for the company and for future cooperation, 20% is to be distributed among miners, 15% will be used for bounties and community campaigns, 12% goes to the team members, and the final 4% will be shared among the project’s advisors.
The miner tokens and the tokens earmarked for bounty campaigns have no lock-up period, the rest of the tokens — team, advisors, company and future cooperation — will be vested for 12 months and 25% of the vested total is to be released every quarter.
Price Per Token
1 NKR is expected to be worth 0.000625 ETH.
Important Dates
Due to circumstances surrounding their KYC process, the investors cabinet, and a decision by the team to release an MVP before their TGE, NKR presale as been postponed to a yet to be announced date.
According to the team, a beta version of their platform will be released in Q2 2018.
Marketing Power
As at the time this post was published, NKOR had over 19,000 followers on Twitter, over 17,000 members on Telegram, 16,000+ followers on Facebook, 9,200+ subscribers on Youtube, and over 6,500 followers on Medium.
Team Members’ Areas of Expertise
Business experts
Eric Klein, Co-Founder & CEO.
- CEO of High 4k (prior HighTV 3D), an Entertainment channel, for over 11 years.
- CEO of FashionOne, an International TV channel, for almost 2 years.
Artem Lapatanov, COO.
- Founder & CEO of Digital Crafters, a software development company, for 3 years.
Ivan Didur, Co-Founder & CTO.
- Co-Founder & CTO of DataRootLabs, a full-service Data Science & Artificial Intelligence R&D company, for over 3 years.
Gil Vinder, Co-Founder & COO and Ami Inbar, Co-Founder & CMO.
- In 2014, they co-founded BizProfits.
Anatoliy Melnichuk, Advisor.
- Co-Founder & CEO of SnapSaves (acquired by Groupon), a mobile couponing platform, for 2 years.
Target market experts
Ivan Didur, Co-Founder & CTO.
- From his time at DataRootLabs.
Marketing experts
Eric Klein, Co-Founder & CEO.
- Director of Marketing and Events at FashionTV for over 3 years.
Gil Vinder, Co-Founder & COO and Ami Inbar, Co-Founder & CMO.
- BizProfits (see above) is a CPA network and it is involved in performance marketing.
Legal experts
Eric Klein, Co-Founder & CEO.
- Masters in Law from the Bar-Ilan University.
Elisha Ben Tamar, Co-Founder & Legal Advisor.
- LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) from IDC Herzliya.
Software engineering experts
Ivan Didur, Co-Founder & CTO.
- 5 years of experience with AI, Big Data and Distributed Systems
- CIO at EGO Digital Agency, a digital agency that provides web development and big data analytics solutions, for 2 years.
- Co-Founder & CTO of DataRootLabs (see above).
Artem Lapatanov, COO.
- Founder and CEO of Digital Crafters (see above).
Blockchain development experts
No team member with blockchain development expertise.
Token sale structure
No team member with token sale structure expertise.
Token economics
Same as above.
Conclusion
Strengths
- A solid use case that seeks to solve a significant problem.
- Popular project with good marketing power.
Potential risks for investors
- No blockchain development expertise.
- No prior ICO launch experience on the team (their pre-sale has already been delayed).
- Notable competitors in the segment, e.g CreativeChain or KodakOne.
- No existing product or MVP.
Disclaimers:
- Nothing written in this article is a legal or an investment advice.
- Information is provided on a best-effort basis and is subject to change without prior notice. Be sure to verify everything you read with a project team.
The analysis was produced by Research Center team members: Alexander Hinz, Mark Jedd, Anna Muratova.
If you enjoy our research, consider supporting us by following our Twitter, Telegram and Medium and sharing our articles with your friends and colleagues.
Thank you for staying with us! Follow us and subscribe to receive regular reports.