Doc.AI ICO review

Doc. AI recently held a pre-ICO, where investors had a minimum contribution of 50,000 US dollars. The main public crowd sale starts tomorrow, 9/28/17, at 6 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

There are some good things to like. The website and documents are very tastefully designed, the name “doc.ai“ makes me think of an artificially intelligent doctor on a smartphone, and Pantera Capital serves as an early advisor. They plan to raise around 30 million dollars, which would represent 37% of all tokens, leading to an implied market cap of 81.1 million US dollars, which is not astronomical in the crypto universe. However, this is where the good news end.

Tokens will NOT be distributed until the beta is released, which may take up to 3 years. In addition, the name “doc.ai” is very misleading. The platform does NOT serve as an artificially intelligent doctor on a smartphone. Instead, it serves as a research platform. Token value will be derived based on users hiring data scientists to conduct research studies on their profile.

The value added by the artificial intelligence system is questionable from my point of an investor. The AI seems to use image recognition to, for example, calculate body mass index from a photo (why this would be useful given that BMI is almost certainly more accurately obtained using simple height and weight is beyond me), or create a medication list from labels. As far as adding value to the data scientists who will be acting upon bounties created by users using the tokens, exactly how it does this is very questionable and is poorly explained in the whitepaper. It seems to be all hype and no substance.

Using my hypothesis (https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@nighthawk888/a-fundamental-framework-for-the-valuation-of-cryptocurrencies) that token market cap should be equivalent to the value of goods and services able to be directly purchased with the currency, I cannot see an economy of 81 million US dollars developing on this platform anytime soon. There is a very high risk that your investment will be worth 50% or less at the time tokens are distributed.

I suspect, but cannot prove that this company is using a token sale in lieu of venture capital because they were unable to raise a sufficient amount of money.

When I raised these concerns on their Telegram channel, their moderator quickly moved to silence me, and banned me claiming that I was a “bot”.

Buyer beware.

Disclaimer: I am not an investment professional and this is not investment advice. This is strictly my own opinion.