So, today I will review another project I like that I believe still qualifies as "a hidden gem". Please welcome Carry Protocol!
The Idea
The idea of Carry Protocol is to connect offline merchants and real-life consumers using blockchain. And the main innovation of Carry Protocol is the word "offline". They are not trying to create another blockchain marketplace for already existing online platforms. They specifically aim to connect those small and medium-sized businesses who still have no online presence (yeah, hard to believe, but these still do exist) with potential clients. The project seeks to create a platform using which merchants will be able to analyze consumer data and communicate with clients, while consumers will have an opportunity to control their data and monetize it. The platform will also serve as an effective and transparent advertising channel.
The Technology
Carry Protocol features two components: a blockhain that stores transaction database and smart contracts, and a set of APIs that allow connecting this blockchain to third-party software. Yeah, I know, this sounds too technical so let's just look at the examples of how this will work out in practice. Luckily, the Carry Protocol's team included them in the whitepaper so I'm not going to reinvent a wheel and will just quote them here:
As you can see from the examples, this is how the platform and Carry token will work in real life.
The Team and Advisors
The team looks super-strong. Co-Founders Grant Sohn and Richard Choi both have served as co-CEOs of Spoqa, one of the South Korea's largest "customer loyalty startups with 15M+ total users checking in every second across 10,000+ stores in Korea". Grant graduated from Stanford with BA in Economics and Richard studied Biomedical Engineering in John Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and then at Cornell. The majority of the team also has an affiliation with Spoqa. Head of Business Development Jungwon Yu can boast working with Samsung and Yahoo. Technical party of the team looks strong too with many years of experience at what they do.
Advisers are befitting the team: Simon Kim is CEO and Partner of Hashed, a leading crypto fund based in South Korea, Ryan Kim is Chief Acceleration Officer and Partner at Hashed, while David Park used to work for McKinsey, Intuit, Nextdoor.com and Facebook.
The Token
The total supply of Carry Token (CRE) is 10bn, 40% of which will be sold during the TGE. About 25% of the tokens will go for the partner program, 15% for marketing activities, 10% for the Carry Team, 5% for the advisors and 5% will be as reserve. According to Carry Protocol's Telegram channel, the soft cap of the project is 25,000 ETH, and the hard cap is 48,000 ETH. Pre-sale participants will get a 15-per cent bonus with a 3-month lock-up (so, no dump expected). Only 15,000 ETH worth of token will be available for the public sale. The rest will be sold in private rounds.
The Partners
The key partner of Carry Protocol will be Spoqa, which is not surprising, considering that most of the team works there too. According to the whitepaper, Spoqa's strategic partners include Kakao, Line (for those who don't know, these are messenger apps popular in Asia) and Facebook. If any of these support Carry Protocol... you know what will happen ;-)
But in addition to these giants, Spoqa also has 15m consumers and 10,000 merchants on its loyalty platform Dodo Point. It is likely that at least some of them will be willing to join Carry Protocol.
The Product
The team plans to launch the testnet by the 4th quarter of 2018 and the fully-fledged launch of the system is expected to happen in the 2nd half of 2019.
Conclusion
I personally like the idea of Carry Protocol and the team behind it. Prospective partnerships and utility of the token may work out well in future. The project also starts genereting some serious hype in Telegram groups, which is also a good indicator.
But of course I am not financial adviser (I'm an average Joe interested in crypto), so remember to do your own research before investing into any project.
More info about the project:
Carry Protocol website: https://carryprotocol.io
Carry Protocol Telegram: https://t.me/carryprotocol
Carry Protocol Blog: https://medium.com/@carryprotocol
Carry Protocol Whitepaper: https://carryprotocol.io/static/docs/Carry_protocol-white_paper%28ENG%29.pdf?
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for other reviews and feel free to upvote, resteem and follow me!