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Initial Coin Offering To watch: The Bee Token, Gems

Published 01/17/2018, 11:12 AM
Updated 07/09/2023, 06:31 AM

1. The Bee Token (USA) beetoken.com

The Bee Token (Beenest) is an Ethereum blockchain-based decentralized platform for short-term housing search. Beenest challenges modern giants in the industry, such as AirBNB and VRBO, charging zero fee for using the service through decentralization and elimination of the intermediary. The project also has protocols for resolving disputes, as well as managing ratings of the users' reputation on their platform. Besides, the reputation rating associated with the addresses / accounts in the Ethereum blockchain will be implemented, which will be set by the average number of reputation points, including their rating as a host, a guest, an arbitrator, etc.

The mission of The Bee Token is to decentralize the short-term housing market and return direct management and profit to the users and owners. This means that the client pays less, and the landlord gets more due to the elimination of intermediaries between them. Beenest is going to launch the Alpha version on the Ethereum test network in January 2018 ahead of the crowdsale. The project announced numerous partnerships with various companies that will interact with their product:

  • Request Network, which will provide a system for clients to request payments from tenants;

  • Rentivo, which will provide fame in the travel / tourism industry and inventory, including the BEE token on its platform;

  • Connext, which will help Beenest accept payments with a credit card; and

  • Origin, which is a protocol for creating sharing markets using IPFS.

BEE tokens will be used to perform transactions on the Beenest platform with 0% fee, unlike the 1% fee for BTC, ETH and other ERC20 tokens and 3.99% for fiat. BEE may also be staked to vote as an arbitrator in the Beenest arbitration protocol. The more BEE tokens the user has staked, the more likely they are to be chosen as an arbitrator. A fixed BEE rate per dispute will also be paid.

The project consists of a team of engineers from Google, Facebook and Uber, who decided to revise the market for short-term housing rentals, because all existing centralized platforms charge exorbitant transaction fees.

Jonathan Chou, Co-Founder and CEO, is a former Uber leader in the Security and Fraud division, has experience with startups that were sold to Sun Chemical and 3M. Tony Tran, Co-Founder and CTO, has 10+ years of software development experience, previously engaged in software development with Uber and Bizo (acquired by Linkedin). Ali Ayyash, Co-Founder and Lead Engineer, is a former lead engineer in Google Cloud and headed Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services for more than three years. Min H. Kim, Co-Founder and Head of Business Development department, is a former Chief of Staff at Civic Technologies and currently an advisor for a quantum chain Quantstamp, WeTrust and Bitclave.

We can recommend the project for both short-term and long-term investment. The project has a very strong team and advisors, a low goal of $15 mln, all bonus tokens are blocked for 1 month, which will mitigate the price dumping immediately after the BEE tokens start trading. The idea of a decentralized home-sharing platform has considerable potential.

2. Gems (USA) gems.org

Gems is a decentralized platform for contracting workers to perform micro tasks built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Not only Gems competes directly with such giants as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower, it also has advantages over them due to the blockchain technology. Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower have been insanely successful companies with exponential growth in revenue since their foundation. But at the same time, they have key problems that the blockchain technology can solve. This industry is extremely profitable and successfully developing.

The Gems protocol verifies the performance of tasks and the reputation of network members; Decentralized apps will be built on the Gems Protocol. Gems platform is the first platform built on the Gems protocol. It matches workers and requests for performing micro tasks corresponding to their skills. Anyone can build on top of the Gems Platform, creating innovative verification methods for new tasks.

Gems Network performs the following tasks: removing the middleman taking a large fee, verifying accuracy of work results, building an efficient interface, removing the need for banking infrastructure, properly incentivizing and disincentivizing miners and requesters.

Payments will be made in Gems tokens for miners (those who perform tasks) and verifiers (those who check the work done by miners). In addition, miners and verifiers will also need to stake some tokens for the task performance. This ensures that they will have an incentive for good work. Requesters will also stake tokens. Those who do a bad job will lose their stakes and suffer a decline in reputation, which will make their work on the Gems network more difficult.

Key Gems team consists of brothers Rory and Kieran O'Reilly. Both graduated from Harvard. They were both recognized by Forbes in their 30 under 30 list for consumer technologies. Besides, O'Reilly brothers are Thiel fellows. As you may know, another famous Thiel fellow in the crypto space is the Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin.

Starry cast of advisors: Ben Maurer is the co-founder of reCAPTCHA, a system which determines if a user is human. reCAPTCHA was acquired by Google in 2009. In 2010, Ben Maurer left Google to join Facebook. Ben Maurer also worked at the White House as part of the US Digital Service where he improved the communication tools used by the President and his staff.

Biz Stone is the co-founder of Twitter, Medium and Jelly. Inc. magazine named him Entrepreneur of the Decade and Time listed him as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Luis Cuend is the co-founder of Aragon, a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, and an MIT TR35 honoree. He was also an Advisor to the VP of the European Commission.

We recommend the project for investment in both the short and long term. One of the best projects of the early 2018 with a huge HYIP and 45,000+ members in the Telegram group.

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