Ian Lee is a freelance writer for hire specializing in the areas of business, finance, and economics. He also has over 5 years of experience in investment banking.
Verasity ICO Review: Bringing Decentralization to Video Sharing
Verasity is a video sharing platform that aims to disrupt the status quo and bring the best of the centralized and decentralized worlds together. However, this project has much more to offer than simple video sharing; what sets it apart from the rest is its innovative economic model which puts the viewer first, yet allows content creators and advertisers to benefit as well.
Right now, there isn’t much hype behind this project, as the company has yet to begin its marketing efforts. However, it...
ICO Review: Could ALAX Potentially Disrupt China’s $15 Billion Mobile Gaming Market?
The ALAX ICO is launching in less than two weeks on April 17, and there is already a lot of buzz surrounding this project. It is a blockchain-based mobile game distribution platform that was started as a joint venture between two Chinese companies; Dragonfly and DECENT. The idea behind ALAX is to connect game developers with gamers, particularly those who are unbanked, while lowering expenses involved for everyone in the ecosystem.
Before ALAX’s ICO launches, let’s take a look at what this pr...
Dock.io ICO Review – More Than Just A Decentralized LinkedIn
Cryptocurrencies may be the new and popular currencies of today, but there is another form of currency most people don’t think about that is far more valuable.
That currency is your personal data. Facebook is worth $500 billion for a reason. Just recently, Facebook was hit with the news that a political data firm had managed to gain access to 50 million users’ data through sketchy means, and without their consent. The firm had done so by using a popular Facebook personality quiz as a Trojan h...
Review: SyncFab’s ICO Is Live Now, But Is Its Momentum Lacking?
SyncFab comes straight from the tech hub of our modern era – Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has been criticized for its role in leaving behind Middle America, attracting a majority of all venture capital and releasing disruptive technology, including automation, that they say is destroying the traditional middle class. It has also caught flak for its heavy use of outsourcing, although that is just as common in Middle America as well.
SyncFab, founded back in 2013, wants to help tackle those i...
Trakinvest Is Using Blockchain Technology to Teach You How to Trade
Most people wish they were better at trading, and many people do in fact try to improve. Yet, statistics show that the majority of day traders are unsuccessful. A 2012 Wall Street Journal piece revealed that over 70% of accounts at retail-focused FX broker FXCM were unprofitable. Another earlier academic study showed that over 80% of day traders lost money, and even among those that made money, it was usually insufficient to cover transaction costs. Only about 1% of day traders could be calle...
Walmart Is Planning To Use Blockchain Technology For ‘Smarter’ Shipping
On Thursday, March 1, 2018, the US Patent and Trademark Office released a patent application filed by the retail behemoth Walmart. The patent application is titled merely ‘Smart Package.’ It talks primarily about a smart package that can have features such as internal sensors and security systems. The application also talks about how said smart package might be delivered via autonomous vehicles.
The application mentions blockchain technology in the context of “a delivery encryption system com...
The Bitcoin Pizza Day Legend Repeats His Feat, This Time With Lightning Network
May 22 is known as Bitcoin Pizza Day, in commemoration of Laszlo Hanyecz’s purchase of two Domino’s pizza for the then reasonable price of 10,000 BTC back in 2010. The significance of this was more than just the price, however. Laszlo was an early Bitcoin developer, and he intended to show its viability as a currency. The pizza purchase was one of the first purchases ever done using Bitcoin.
That said, 10,000 BTC would be worth over $100 million at today’s prices, enough to buy about 10 milli...
CREDITS ICO Review – Sold Out in 17 Hours, But is This Nothing More Than a Scam?
On Feb 17, 2018, a little known but highly ambitious blockchain project called CREDITS, launched its public crowdsale. The hardcap for the crowdsale was $20 million, not a massive amount, but not a trivial amount either. It took only 17 hours to hit this figure. In total, the ICO generated about 20,000 transactions from 15,000 addresses.
Despite this success, there has been relatively little hype and marketing around the CREDITS project. Which is strange, considering that CREDITS isn’t your a...
Healthtech Offers Investors Big Potential Profits By Preventing Foodborne Illness Outbreaks
Technology and healthcare have always gone together. Which is why as the importance of public health safety increases in tandem with population density, the ‘health tech’ industry is also booming. This is a rapidly growing $6 billion market that has entered its mergers and acquisitions consolidation cycle. And right now, HealthSpace Data Systems Ltd. (CSE:HS) (OTC:HDSLF) (FRA: 38H) is one of the few independent health tech providers left in the entire industry.
Foodborne illnesses are a major...
PolicyPal ICO Review: The Integration of Insurance and Blockchain
Startups are always trying to use blockchain technology to improve and disrupt traditional industries. In this case, that industry is insurance. Based in Singapore, PolicyPal is part of the emerging field of ‘insurtech’. It is looking to blockchain technology to improve and innovate upon traditional insurance offerings.
Before it launches its ICO in March 2018, let’s take a look at what this project is all about.
History of PolicyPal and the Team behind It
PolicyPal was founded in 2016 after ...
Review: Refereum Just Cancelled Its ICO And People Are Outraged – What Happens Next?
On February 8, 2018, Refereum cancelled its planned ICO on the day of the ICO itself. The backlash from the crypto community has been fast and furious. Many are calling for blood, or rather, hoping for the Refereum token to crash hard.
Before we go into what happened to the Refereum ICO and why the community is so outraged, let’s see what Refereum is all about.
Refereum: Cutting Out the Marketing Middleman
Refereum is a blockchain-based gaming referral network to connect influencers, players,...
Review: TheKey Botched Its ICO; Can This Identity Verification System Recover?
TheKey has not had a good 2018. Its ICO, which began on January 15, 2018, reached its limit within one hour. Yet, many in the crypto-community remain angry at TheKey, with some calling its ICO “the worst ICO of 2018”.
Mistakes were made. In this article, we’re going to take a look at the TheKey is all about, how it botched its ICO, and what comes after.
What is TheKey?
TheKey is a blockchain-based identity verification (“IDV”) system that is launching in China. It is built on the NEO platform...
Dfinity Review – Building A World Computer Using Blockchain Technology
Many blockchain projects are ambitious, but you would be hard-pressed to find one as ambitious as Dfinity. Dfinity’s goal is to create an intelligent, decentralized cloud, a giant blockchain computer that will support enterprise IT systems.
This is a direct challenge to traditional centralized cloud computing services today, such as Amazon Web Services. Dfinity will be more cost-efficient compared to centralized services. While computing costs will be higher, this will be more than balanced o...
Gems ICO Review: The Decentralized Amazon Mechanical Turk
In today’s gig economy, an easy though hardly lucrative way that people can make money through the Internet is via micro-tasks. Micro-tasks are the tiny tasks that go into a larger project, in this context they often refer to simple tasks such as image verification, writing product descriptions, extracting text content from an image and the like. Because these tasks are simple, the pay is often low, typically a few cents.
In the current environment, crowdsourcing platforms connect businesses ...
GoNetwork ICO Review – Bringing Cryptocurrency To The Masses Through Mobile
GoNetwork has a vision; mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. The team behind GoNetwork sees mobile accessibility and interoperability as the keys to achieving this. They want to create a highly scalable, low cost, and low latency first mobile network infrastructure for Ethereum.
The team intends to do this by creating a state channel off-chain network similar to the Raiden Network for Ethereum and the Lightning Network for Bitcoin. A simple explanation of how these networks work is that they re...