We previously wrote about the idea of using an energy backed crypto token.  It is one of those ideas that take the idea of crypto beyond just the ‘virtual’ world and into the ‘real’ world. In addition, the idea of an energy backed crypto is appealing. It provides the advantages of a blockchain – an open, incorruptible ledger, combined with a token that’s backed by something that is useful in the real world – and what’s more useful to our civilization than energy?

Today, we discuss another such project – RED (Restart Energy Democracy).  The RED team is also putting out an energy backed token, called the MWAT token. The company is more interesting though – they have an existing client base of over 3,000 businesses and 25,000 residences, and has an existing business in the EU. This greatly helps when it comes to trying to get others to adopt your ideas and product, since there’s a ready customer base already.

Also, the team is knowledgeable about the industry and therefore presumably have a higher probability of success.

We’ve heard some people trying to compare WePower and RED. We don’t take sides on projects we discuss. However, there’s this misconception that if there is one project in the space, then there’s no need for another one. This is completely false. The energy industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Innovation in this industry will drive the next trillions of dollars of value created. There is space for multiple projects.

In fact, the more projects in a niche, the better, since they are bound to take different approaches and methodologies, and after the dust settles, the market determines which approaches worked and which didn’t. We like to see such real world experiments run, especially in the crypto world. This reduces the learning curve for the next projects.

We are, of course, seeing an increasing trend towards crypto projects that combine multiple technology trends. In a similar vein, the RED project combines green energy with crypto.

So about the RED Platform itself, it can be used for a number of purposes. Firstly, the simple buying and selling of electricity in a peer to peer marketplace is enabled. This means if you have solar panels installed on your roof, you can sell this energy to your neighbor – no need to go the grid at all. A small community-driven power project can become feasible all of a sudden.

Also, energy-backed tokens are interesting in that they help finance a green energy project better than regular money. How? By promising to pay back not in USD or EUR but in KWh instead. This is more predictable and isn’t dependent on the market vagaries. This provides a higher incentive for entrepreneurs to start new projects and get them funded.

RED has the MWAT token backed by energy, with a maximum of up to 1 MWh, although it starts at 0.1 KWh.

Interested in participating in their token sale? Make sure you read the whitepaper.

Photo Credit: marian rodriguez

We’ve often said in the past that to understand the true power of crypto, you need to look not just at ‘blockchain technology’ in isolation, but combine it with all the other technology trends that are going on in the world today. In effect, the power of crypto will not be unleashed in isolation, but in a combination of different technologies that will shape the next 100 years of humanity. In that regard, projects working to combine blockchains with other technologies – AI, AR/VR, IoT, autonomous mobility, etc. excite us, since what we need is a lot of experiments run in these areas, so we know which ones work in the real world, which ones fail, and the lessons learned from those failures to build a better system tomorrow.

To that end, we want to introduce our readers to a new crypto project that is aimed at combining two of these powerful future trends – crypto and autonomous vehicles. The project is called DAV – Decentralized Autonomous Vehicles. It is a crypto token for the economy that will be enabled by the future technological progress of the autonomous vehicles. What the DAV Token itself does is to provide access to the DAV Platform. What the DAV Platform does is to allow access to a range of services in the autonomous vehicles space.

The DAV Platform is a platform that lets various autonomous vehicles transact with one another. This will be a crucial feature of the autonomous cars revolution, because it can help automate a lot of the features of decision making traditionally reserved for humans instead of machines, especially when it involves payment.

Using the DAV Platform, for example, you can access a peer to peer market of mobility. The way this works is like any other peer to peer marketplace – one party rents out the resource, an autonomous car in this case, and the other party borrows the same resource. The platform brings both the parties together on one platform to enable the transaction. The payment for this service all happens in the DAV Token.

The DAV Platform is a multi-sided marketplace, however, since there are also service providers in the equation. The service providers help keep the autonomous cars in working condition and good shape, and are paid for their service by the owners.

One nice feature of the whole platform is that it is an open marketplace and not limited to large corporations that are active in the autonomous vehicle space. From the very beginning, the company is building out the platform keeping the person to person market in mind, not just a person borrowing something from a large corporation. This therefore eliminates the need for a middle man during the transaction, which can become a rent-seeking entity with hideous profits at the expense of the people/users/community. Here, the value created by the network is shared within the network, not with the shareholders of a large corporation.

The DAV Platform also solves other issues that the autonomous vehicle industry will need to solve, such as identity and discoverability. These are crucial, since the ‘objects’ are in the real world and not in the virtual world. Identity is a crucial element when fungibility isn’t desirable or required, which is unlike many other digital goods.

Remember that the platform is decentralized, so everything from discovering resources to communication amongst the parties is facilitated in a decentralized manner.

If you like such long term bets, check out DAV’s whitepaper for more information on the project.

Photo Credit: Photo Steel

CoinMetro is a native crypto project, born out of the space, taking cues from the much larger forex market while still retaining its crypto roots. What’s the demand for such a product? Simple – crypto investors deserve better than what the current infrastructure provides, and a comprehensive platform that provides all the needs of crypto investors and traders can see a fast and accelerating update in the community.

How CoinMetro Stands Out

CoinMetro is trying to do a lot of things – sometimes, it feels as if they are trying to do too many things at the same time. However, unless it is able to provide the most comprehensive set of features to the existing crypto community, they are unlikely to see uptake rapidly. This is because competition is stiff, even if the competition may have a lot of issues.

So how does CoinMetro aim to compete? Well, essentially by doing everything that a crypto trader and investor could hope for, and much more.

For example, CoinMetro has an exchange, but there are many other crypto exchanges out there as well. However, it allows for fiat currency trading from the get go. Then, it allows margin trading for the crypto traders. This is a big feature that not many other crypto exchanges provide, that professional traders require to come on to the platform. Even better though – the margin is extended by long-term holders of crypto, not the platform itself.

What this does is to create a marketplace for traders and long-term holders where the long-term holders get to earn ‘interest’ on their crypto savings, while the short-term traders get to leverage their positions and amplify their P&L potential from crypto trading. It’s a win-win really for both these communities.

For regular users, CoinMetro also has a debit card that can be used for everyday goods and services – just like you’d use a regular debit card. Behind the scenes, the crypto assets are sold off and converted to local currencies when you make a purchase. A handy tool built into the platform.

For more advanced crypto traders, CoinMetro has several features unique to the platform. This is because the team understands that if it can get the heavy professional traders onto the platform, it helps with liquidity and forms a positive feedback look attracting many more traders and investors.

So what does CoinMetro provide these pro-traders? Well, for starters, the platform provides superior analytics inspired from the Forex markets that has seen a steady professionalization over the years.

Then, on the functionality side, it offers fairly complex order types. This is useful for the pro-traders – while regular traders and small-time investors likely just use market and limit orders, there are many professional trading strategies that cannot be supported without the use of fairly complex order types that need to be executed reliably.

Finally, for investors and asset managers, the CoinMetro platform allows for the creation and trading of groups of crypto – similar to an ETF style crypto. What this means is, if an investor new to crypto wants exposure to crypto as an asset class, all they need to do is buy one of these ETF-like funds on the platform and they can automatically get exposure to many underlying crypto-assets as opposed to just Bitcoin or other more popular ones.

The crypto market is huge, and there is enough room for a serious competitor that provides a one-stop shop for all of investors’ needs. Can this be CoinMetro?

Check out CoinMetro’s website for more information.

Photo Credit: Asian Development Bank

Today, we want to introduce the WPR token to our readers. This is the WePower token. The reason it caught our attention is because it has something very unique – the value of the WPR token is literally backed by green energy. By holding the WPR token, you can access energy. Hold enough tokens (and live where the projects backed by WePower are located) and simply by virtue of holding them, you can get free power. That’s a very unique value proposition than many of the other crypto projects in the marketplace today.

So what’s the story behind WPR? Glad you asked. Let’s dig into this token a little bit.

Energy Backed Crypto Token

WePower is a green energy trading platform, which lets investors back green energy projects. The projects in turn repay the investors not in dollar terms, but in energy terms. The WPR tokens in turn accrue a percentage of the transactions, specifically 0.9% of the power returned to investors is sent cumulatively to the WPR token holders.

Since the payments are happening in energy, the WPR holders get a small amount of energy. This is different from dividends! The WPR token holders can use the energy if they are near a WePower power source. If not, they are free to sell their energy tokens in the free marketplace for others to purchase.

Although WPR isn’t the first energy based crypto token, the value proposition is fairly unique as far as we have seen. The WPR token should retain value beyond mere speculation, because the token holders can use the tokens to pay for electricity. The WPR tokens should be valuable for that reason beyond just trading and speculation that are currently rampant in the crypto markets.

Role in Real Economy

Let’s be real – the world needs more energy over the coming years and decades, as billions rise out of poverty into ‘first world’ levels of living. The energy sources we have today aren’t sustainable. We need more green energy sources and projects to come online.

The way to do this so far as been through political action, but as countries like the United States have shown, this is far from easy and one powerful country can derail all the plans. What’s the alternative then?

Well, simple – let the market economy fund the generation of the next decades of green energy projects. The marketplace and investors can take the risk for onboarding these new projects. Governments can help via subsidies whenever they can, but if not, the free market is capable of driving the price down.

This makes WPR token immediately attractive to a wide array of real world energy uses. The WePower network will fund new green energy projects in a marketplace, let investors put down the money, and then get repaid from the successful execution of the project. The interesting thing is that the repayment happens not in local currencies or even cryptocurrencies but in terms of energy. Therefore, the investors in the projects get returns in terms of energy. The whole ecosystem, therefore, that WePower is building, revolves around payment and repayment in terms of energy.

The WPR token accrues energy in the transaction fees of 0.9% paid to the WPR token holders. Therefore, for every 100 MW of energy being added by the WePower network, 0.9 MW of that energy is distributed to the WPR token holders. You can directly use this energy if there’s a power source in the WePower network near where you live. If not, you can just sell in the marketplace at a market rate.

WePower therefore finds a way to combine crypto-tokens with the future of green energy. That should appeal to a wide array of investors in and outside the blockchain space.

If you’re curious for more, check out WePower.

Photo Credit: Kimco Reality

Fund Platform is an interesting new crypto project that is building a full infrastructure for a crypto-investing platform. An interesting aspect of the Fund Platform is that instead of going the traditional route of having a token on Ethereum (ETH), Fund Platform is instead building on NEM.

The Choice of Building on NEM

NEM is an interesting choice of blockchain for Fund Platform. Although it isn’t Turing Complete for smart contracts, NEM is well suited to handle crypto-assets on the blockchain, borrowing that legacy from the first pure proof of stake chain, NXT. Also, NEM is far older than Ethereum and has been going strong after all these years (NEM was created in 2014). Therefore, it has shown to be resilient to change after all these years, and the NEM blockchain continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Another big advantage of NEM over Ethereum is that NEM is a far more scalable blockchain than Ethereum is right now.

NEM uses a Proof of Importance protocol for blockchain consensus, as opposed to Ethereum’s Proof of Work (PoW). This makes NEM more scalable than Ethereum and able to handle a higher number of transactions per second.

Some might question this choice – shouldn’t all new projects try and build on Ethereum to maximize network effects? The answer is no. There are multiple possible winners in the blockchain space, and we would much rather see projects that are resilient rather than risk everyone on one blockchain Ethereum.

Also, Ethereum is an overkill for simple tokens. Simple tokens don’t need complex Turing complete contracts. Instead, NEM offers exactly what a token needs – its ability to track tokens through the blockchain and for the assets to represent something. Several new blockchains like Waves and Stratis also provide this type of functionality. However, NEM is older than them all and has a better throughput.

Also, since there are scores of ICOs on Ethereum going on every single day, presumably Fund Platform can stand out as an ICO for the NEM community members, who don’t see ICOs that often.

About Fund Platform

Now that we have the choice of blockchain for the token of Fund Platform out of the way, let’s discuss the platform itself. Fund Platform is created as a crypto investment platform. It brings together crypto investors with fund managers, while cutting out the unnecessary fluff in the middle.

Here’s the big twist though – unlike traditional fund management, the fund managers cannot run away with your funds. This is a fundamental problem in crypto investment community where you don’t know if you can trust the person who you give control over the money. Even more than trust, it is a matter of accident as well – for example the fund manager may be very trusted, but due to a mistake, might get hacked and lose all the funds. This isn’t the first time such a thing would happen.

Instead, what Fund Platform does is make custody of funds simple and on the platform itself. This means the responsibility of security of funds falls on the Fund Platform developers instead of every single asset manager on the platform. This is important because asset managers cannot be known to be the best in the world on security, after all.

The fund platform itself is tokenized on the NEM blockchain, so you can quickly and easily go in and out of a fund that is trading on the Fund Platform.

Fund Platform makes it really easy to start your own virtual crypto hedge fund, while reducing custody risk at the same time. It is a win-win for the asset managers and end crypto investors really.

There’s a native token for Fund Platform called the FUND token. This is the token of the platform, used a currency to pay for everything from legal expenses to paid API access.

To learn more, check out the Fund Platform website. The pre-ICO is ongoing with the ICO about to come soon. If you’re considering investing, make sure you read the whitepaper as well.

Photo Credit: Stef

It is always good to see startups use blockchain technology to solve issues in the real world, or use the technology as a means to a better world. White Rabbit should qualify as one of those attempts.

Founded by a team of software professionals and movie professionals, it is geared at the creative industry. More specifically, the project aims to better the relationship between ‘pirates’ who stream digital media content, and the creators of that content, by ensuring that the right people get paid when media is streamed, without burdening the end user and without the need for third-party middle men.

The problems of ‘pirating’ are well known, but White Rabbit is making a bet that many of these so-called pirates are just fans waiting to discover the next great creative uproar. Pirating is easy and provides access to the content that the fans want. It is fast and efficient. However, in that process, the connection between the fans and creators can get lost with our current infrastructure.

Digital subscriptions don’t solve the problem completely, because each is its own silo. If you need content, you’ll need to sign up for Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and whatnot. This is not the most convenient option for fans to access content. Therefore, they look for alternatives, that don’t necessary reward the content creators. In addition, these closed ecosystems all have their own logins and monthly payments – something not always feasible for ordinary people.

So what’s the solution? It is partly philosophical – treating fans as fans and not ‘pirates’, and partly technological – make it as easy as possible to help out the creators you enjoy.

The White Rabbit solution is to completely separate distribution from payments. This means the manner and method of accessing content doesn’t have a direct bearing on the payments to the content creators. This is a powerful idea, and time will tell if it is something that catches on with both sides.

In addition, by using blockchain and cryptocurrencies to run the platform, the team has chosen technology that is inherently transparent and pretty much instantaneous. You no longer need to trust some shady third-parties telling you how you should get paid. You can audit every single transaction on the blockchain yourself, and know how many fans actually subscribed to your work.

In addition, the White rabbit solution offers a way to increase revenue for the content creators by engaging directly with their fans. Today, that is just not possible on traditional sites like Netflix and Amazon. However, creators can really tap into the long-tail of their fan base and make a living off of it. Remember the 1000 true fans concept?

If you like to learn more about White Rabbit, check out their website here and their whitepaper here.

If you draw an analogy between the early internet and world wide web of the early 90s with where blockchains are today, you can see many similarities. When the web was young and early in the 90s, everyone was just looking to do things they knew from other domains, and put it on the web. This is how you ended up with a lot of terrible ideas, which ultimately led to the dot com crash. We are seeing a very similar pattern today with ICOs. You take an existing idea or concept, and try to make it ‘on the blockchain’, similar to ‘adding dot com to your name’ before the dot com crash. No wonder then that there are terrible ideas being produced in the ICO markets today.

But don’t despair! The dot com crash didn’t mean the end of the web. Rather, it meant a refinement of the startups, their ideas, and a focus on what’s important and what matters. No longer were people looking to be lazy and just ‘do it on a website’. Instead, once you start treating the web as an organic whole, a complex system, which has characteristics different from what came before, you were able to create multi-billion dollar companies that have changed life on the planet.

Similarly, today many projects take the ideas of the old economy and try to do that on the blockchain. This doesn’t usually work, but will work in some cases.

However, the biggest advantage of the blockchain is that it is a new paradigm in and of itself. This is a powerful idea, and powerful ideas will be built on it in the future. You need to look at applications that make sense in a blockchain world, not the ones that are borrowed from the old economy. Blockchains and crypto-tokens enable a brave new economic world, and people need to get used to thinking in those terms.

That brings us to today’s project that we want to discuss with you – FCFL, or Fan Controlled Football League. We like bold ideas, even if they fail, because these ideas push the envelope of what’s possible. FCFL is definitely a bold idea, because it is trying to create a new sort of sporting experience that is hard to impossible without the blockchain backbone.

So what is FCFL building that gets us so excited? It is a new sporting paradigm where the fans are in control. Forget the days of sitting on your couch, with a beer in hand, yelling at the television screen because your team didn’t do what you wanted it to do. Instead, if you think you’re so good, why don’t you tell your team what to do? Seriously, what’s what FCFL allows you to do – direct your team’s plays. Everything is fan controlled, including the plays during the game. That’s pretty revolutionary for professional sports, and a new paradigm. Fans do everything from drafting to deciding plays during the game!

All of this is enabled with the help of the native FAN token. The voting power that you get is proportional to the number of FAN tokens you have, along with other things like how good you are. This is a nice use of the token, and it will find use among fans and sports enthusiasts in general. This gives it value to these people.

We are always looking at project pushing the frontier. With FCFL, the pro-sports category is up for grabs. Any takers?

Check out their website and whitepaper to learn more.

There’s been a lot of debate about ‘protocol tokens vs. application tokens’ in the crypto community. Since the space is so new, no one really understands how it will evolve. However, some VC investors with a lot of money made some theses about the evolution of the space, declaring protocol tokens to be ‘superior’ to application tokens. We at Crypto Sailor reject that hypothesis. In fact, in a world of copy-paste altcoins, we like to see real applications. Real applications with real users. And real use case of course.

Today, we discuss one such application to prove our point – FortKnoxster. It is an application that makes clever use of a crypto-token. The token is used to drive the application. The application has a direct use of the token. The strength of the project lies not in creating a new blockchain protocol but in creating an application with real users, willing to use it because of a compelling selling point.

In the case of FortKnoxster, that unique selling point, or USP, is around privacy and variety of communications. All the data on the system is encrypted, which means no company has access to your private data, not even FortKnoxster. This is a real need for both businesses and individuals in a globally connected world that leaks a lot of data about users and systems through everyday conveniences like using a messaging app.

The variety of communications part is also interesting. It does a combination of many things you’ll do with separate apps today – from storing of files like a Google Drive to the chat platform, like Telegram. In fact, the team calls its product ‘Telegram on steroids’, so it does much more than what Telegram does. In addition, all of this is encrypted, which means no third-party can read or listen in to your work or conversations. This is important for trust and privacy, and is what will ultimately drive consumer adoption for the FortKnoxster application.

So why does the app need a token in the first place? Once there are real users using the system, based on the compelling use case of private communications, it is only a matter of time before the amount of data hosted and used by the app explodes. The token is used to ensure that the data is being adequately stored by the peers, in a peer to peer network of sharing data, like IPFS.

Also, the token is used for all the native functions in the app, like upgrading storage for example. As with other applications, it is helpful to have a native currency with the users that is controlled by the system and its users as opposed to external parties and sources. This gives more control to users and developers.

We see compelling projects at all levels – be it protocol layer like Ethereum or application layer like FortKnoxser. The industry is evolving at a rapid rate, and we should welcome applications that make use of the blockchain for their business case. Ultimately, after all, it is applications that end users will use, and that will drive the adoption of blockchain platforms.

Sharpe Capital is a new crypto project in the asset management space. It’s token, SHP, provides dividends based upon how well the proprietary fund performs. This might make you think it is similar to existing asset management tokens like ICN or TaaS. However, it is important to appreciate the differences in the token behavior and token value to fully appreciate what Sharpe Capital is all about.

First the similarities. The Sharpe Capital team will invest in the crypto markets through a proprietary fund. The profits are then shared with the holders of the SHP token. The ‘dividend’ is paid every month, depending on how many SHP tokens you own. This is very similar to what TaaS does with its tokenized asset management platform. Iconomi is similar but the method of returning capital to token holders is through a buyback and burn instead of an ETH dividend.

However, there are also considerable differences between the approaches of Sharpe Capital and other tokenized asset managers like TaaS. For one, the token holders actually need to perform work in order to qualify receiving their dividend. In this way, it is not a passive investment with expectation of profit. In fact, the better work you do, the more you get paid.

So what’s this work? Simple – it is crowdsourcing of sentiment data. If you predict the sentiment correctly, you’ll be rewarded more. The data collected with this crowdsourced intelligence of sentiment on assets is used in the algorithm that the team employs to generate profits.

Another difference in the approach that Sharpe Capital is taking is around the kinds of assets that it trades. The team plans to trade both traditional equity type investments and also crypto-assets. Also, remember that the token holders will generate their own estimates of crowdfunded sentiment analysis. This itself is a product that can be sold in the marketplace, if there is interest from financial industry players like hedge funds. Therefore, similar to Iconomi’s ICN, the SHP token holders also have multiple potential sources of return.

As the asset management space expands, it is important to keep an eye out on these tokens because they could be big winners. This is because they gain a lot when the crypto industry as a whole expands. We’ve seen in 2017 that the industry can grow incredibly fast. This is not just for Bitcoin or Ethereum but new ICOs and new tokens for promising projects as well. All of this provides plenty of sources of generating profits by pooled capital investment vehicles like TaaS, ICONOMI, and Sharpe Capital.

We’re not in the business of picking winners, but the asset and industry trend is your friend. Check out Sharpe Capital and also their pretty detailed whitepaper to learn more.