OPEN COLLECTORS NETWORK — The first one-of-a-kind token

Open Collectors Network is the first decentralized platform for one-of-a-kind tokens, where everyone can seamlessly own, create, customize, interact with and trade individual tokens, on an open market, based on existing standard specifications.

VISION

As founders of Open Collectors Network, we consider ourselves as get-your-hands-dirty programmers at heart. We love a good technical challenge and since the beginning of 2017 we’ve started looking into blockchain tech. How the different proof-of-X work, all the hashes out there and the special structures, like IOTA & Raiblocks.

The more read about the blockchain, the more we saw the beauty in it, and we knew that’s what we wanted to do from then on. But at some point, it hit us: all the coins out there were just currency, and like money, they’re fungible. Whereas in our daily jobs, writing code was all about working with things that are non-fungible: like the list of company products, users, roles, services and so on. The list of possible use-cases for unique tokens is virtually endless: the entire IT industry depends on it, and if they converted to the blockchain, they’d get all the benefits decentralization brings: security, transparency, trust and the ease of attaching monetary value to something (virtual currency).

With this in mind, we started investigating what exists out there and it seems not a lot. Just a newly created Ethereum standard (ERC721, with a couple of other ERC proposals). So that’s our vision: to create a decentralized open platform, based on existing standards, for non-fungible tokens, all the while making it easy for the IT industry to join the blockchain revolution.

GOAL

Our aim is to create the first decentralized platform which facilitates storing and interacting with non-fungible tokens.

We are slowly but surely entering the mature phase of the blockchain era and yet, every new crypto currency or blockchain technology out there is made to work with just one thing: a fungible token. If you have 10 BTC, they are just as good, identical in fact, to any other 10 BTC that someone else owns, and the same is true for more modern blockchain technologies, like IOTA or Ripple.

From our experience as hands-on developers, we realized that the non-blockchain IT industry usually deals with non-fungible collections of objects, where if you were to randomly select two or more items from a collection, they would have differing characteristics or attributes.

It is this rather simple use case that Open Collectors Network, or ECTO, is aiming to solve, albeit we believe it’s probably one of the most basic and commonly used patterns in programming, and for which is there is currently no easy blockchain alternative.

In addition, though the use case is simple, we anticipate large demand for our platform, by everyday users who will be using our web interface to create unique items, under the Public category, and even more so by companies, which will most likely be using the platform’s public API, for more advanced scenarios and bulk creation of unique items, for the specific (corporate) purposes of their dApp.

In time, as increasingly more tokens are created on the platform, the early or popular ones will appreciate in value, enabling their owner to auction them to the highest bidder for a profit.

All creation and trading operations on the platform will have a nominal fee associated with them, the proceeds from which will be shared with the holders of our platforms own utility token: the ECTO token.

MARKET

The market for non-fungible tokens is virtually endless. If you look around you, almost all the things you see can be categorized: people, cars, streets, shops, products, art and so on. One thing all these have in common is their respective items are all different from one another.

All these items are currently being indexed or managed in a centralized fashion. An art gallery internally keeps a ledger of its different exhibits. A car info website has its own SQL database where it has gathered all car specs over time. And the list goes on…

All these industries depend on one in particular: the IT industry. It has a 9.27 trillion dollars market capitalization in the US alone and is among the fastest growing industries. Although our business model will allow us to approach any company, the IT industry is our main target and the one that will most benefit from decentralization. But how?

Well, just as an example, ever since its early days, IT industry developers working in FORTRAN and other early languages, have had the need to work with collections of objects, and this is still just as true today. These objects usually represent items in a specific application domain, like company assets, products, users, services, income balances etc. The objects in a specific collection are all part of just one category, yet they have different attributes, making them unique. Of course, they must all be stored somewhere and interacted with, but currently this is preponderantly done in a centralized manner.

Although the IT industry is the most natural first adopter of blockchain technology, as it becomes mainstream, more and more companies, indeed with entire industries to follow, will want to take advantage of the benefits decentralization and the blockchain brings:

• Transparency and trust
• Bullet-proof security
• Robustness
• Scalability
• Ease and cost-efficiency of attaching monetary value (virtual currency) to an asset

USE CASES

The possible uses cases for unique tokens is almost endless. We have several that are already implemented and more that we have thought about and working on. But more importantly, it's the ones we didn't think about that are most exciting: our platform is open to everyone and we expect innovative ideas to be implemented on top of our platform, especially since it abstracts away all blockchain related complexity. Just to give a few examples:

• Digital media and rights marketplace
It is worth noting that any digital media could be represented here. This could be a graphic, image, music, book, or anything else that one may want. For example, any artist, writer, musician would be able to sell their asset, as long as it was digital to anyone who wanted to do purchase the asset. Going further, digital rights relating to the ownership of the digital media can be bought and sold via the marketplace. The latter has the benefit of circumventing digital rights auction houses and significantly reducing cost of transacting and the fees related therein. Small creations, like a brand-name, or a logo can be directly held on-chain, whereas larger ones can be stored anywhere on the cloud, and only a hash of their value stored on the ledger. This brings the best of both worlds: cheap/fast storage and full accountability.

• VR
VR is fast becoming a mainstream industry, and through our platform, it will be seamless to tokenize valuable virtual objects that can be traded between participants, while attaching monetary value (virtual currency) to them. Additionally, because our platform respects an open standard, it will be possible to make use of items between different VR technologies/implementations interchangeably.

• Business sector
Any freelancer or business can easily tokenize personalized products (cars, devices or hand-crafted items).

• Trustless ICO investment pool
It is quite common lately for groups of individuals to pool together small amonts of virtual currency, in order to participate in the private sale stages of an ICO, where there is a mandatory minimum investment. Most use plain old Excel sheets to keep track of contributions and distribute tokens after the sale, by having an owner/manager do the transactions. Needless to say, this is less than ideal, and there’s been quite a few cases of things going bad. An ICO pool is certainly a non-fungible token, where its unique attributes are the token sale address and the token contract address. In fact, this will be our first implemented use-case. At the time of this writing, it is currently in testing phase.

Operations on the platform are powered by using our own coin, the ECTO token.

TOKEN DISTRIBUTION AND PRICE

Total tokens: 150,000,000 ECTO ( 100,500,000 public; 2% bounty + 65% sale )

Token price varies by sale duration:

• 1st week: 1ETH = 6600 ECTO
• 2nd week: 1ETH = 6300 ECTO
• 3rd week: 1ETH = 6180 ECTO
• 4th week: 1ETH = 6000 ECTO

FUNDS DISTRIBUTION

In addition to the development of the exchange platform itself, we put emphasis on marketing and attracting strategic partners. We believe this is key to a successful product, and development will be an agile, interactive process, based on the needs of users & partners.

ROADMAP