Experty.io - ICO Review

When investing in cryptocurrencies, there are many strategies that can be applied. Mine is to be very selective in on the investments I make, and hold them for the long term. I am aware that some will fail, but the real money is made when they succeed. Growth takes time, and patience, both of which are scarce in the crypto space. Many people want to do instant money and this is not how it should work.

Having said that, one of the projects I will be investing in is Experty.io because of the reasons that follow (which happen also to be my criteria for selecting ICOs):

- Idea - Experty aims to connect knowledge providers and knowledge seekers anywhere in the world using blockchain technology (which also automates payments though an operations contract). It allows for voice and video calls to be monetized. A knowledge provider will simply set its rate per minute and when the call is completed, the operations contract settles the charges based on the predetermined rate, and the length of the call.

It does solve a real problem, because in the real world knowledge seekers and knowledge providers don't really interact with each other because there is no guarantee that each one will follow through (the knowledge provider is afraid he won't be paid, and if he asks for payment upfront, the knowledge seeker is not really sure he will get what he paid for). Therefore usually intermediaries are required, which take a good chunk. Experty will help solve that in an efficient and transparent way.

- Working prototype - it is important that the ICO is not just a whitepaper idea - even if it is a great one. I do invest only in teams that have already built a working product, even in an initial state or prototype. In this case they have built a proof-of-concept prototype version of the application, which allows to test the concept and be sure that the smart contracts are working as intended.

Actually you can see a working demo of the product here:

- Strong team with industry experience - both the founder and co-founder Kamil Przeorski and Tom Dyl are developers who have experience founding and working in React Poland which is a web and mobile applications development company located in Poland. The company was founded in 2014. So they are consultants themselves, and software engineers, plus have had the experience to develop a successful business in the past. The third co-founder is Grzegorz Kućmierz who spent two years as a software engineer at Cisco. Blaise Mathai is the blockchain communications manager and has a background as a writer for Cointelegraph and a developer for Fidelity. They are backed by a large team of developers.

However when doing background checks of the main members of the team, I found the LinkedIn profiles not very detailed about their previous work, so I would not rate the team as stellar.

- Strong advisors - they have also an complete list of advisors including Craig Sellars who is the ex-CTO of Bitfinex and CTO of Tether, some ICO experts, plus strong business and legal advisors.

- Blockchain adequacy - This is sometimes overlooked: some projects out there do not benefit from being on the blockchain. This is not clearly the case with Experty.io for which the blockchain and the use of smart contracts is a critical aspect of their value proposition. So I rate them highly in this aspect.

- Utility of the tokens - A lot of people do not get that with ICOs they are not buying equity, but tokens. Investment growth depends essentially on the demand for the tokens. In this case, the tokens will actually be used for all payments from advice seekers to knowledge providers. They will also have to be staked by users for access to premium features, and will be used by advice seekers as a deposit for advance scheduling with a knowledge provider. Plus they will be sold inside the application via different methods.

It is important to mention that no other tokens will be ever created after the Token Generation Event, so for them to sell tokens inside the plaftorm, at some point they would need to buy them back from the market, creating further demand.

- ICO structure - Hard cap of the token sale is 33,000 ETH which at the time of this writing is equivalent to USD 15 million (ETH price has risen significantly). This is for 33% of the tokens, which would mean that the total market cap on a fully diluted basis is equivalent to USD 45,000,000. I think it is a little bit on the high side and as a positive feedback to the team, given the current price of ETH, I would suggest them to adjust to their originaly target in USD which was around USD 10 million.

What do you think about Experty.io? Please leave your comments below. And if you liked this post, please upvote it and resteem it.