My today's subject is the project I have been following, I think, since early March, when its Telegram membership was hardly over 300 users (now it is over 30k). This is still a very low-profile project that has been gaining some traction lately. I don't think any major ICO reviewer has paid enough attention to it yet, except that it was mentioned by Ryan the "Gobone". This review will be about CoTrader.
The Idea
The idea of CoTrader is to make crypto investment management available to the masses. Some of us spend hours learning and analyzing projects but considering the fact that there are dozens of ICOs emerging every day, it is virtually impossible to examine all of them and there is high chance that you might miss the next big project easily. Moreover, most of us do not have enough expertise to scrutinize all aspects of a project. Yet there are people who do, and CoTrader's unique proposition is to allow platform users delegate the authority to such people to manage their funds and make money for them. In return, these managers will receive a fee for their expertise. The blockchain will provide complete transparency and accountability, making sure that your fund manager doesn’t get away with your crypto assets.
The Technology
The CoTrader's main technological feature is a Smart Fund, which essentially represent an Ethereum-based smart contract that has a fund manager, investors and shares. The fund manager, i.e. the expert trader who will manage the fund and invest to make profits, will be able to set up the fund. Investors will be able to buy the fund's shares and receive profits depending on the amount of the share their own in the fund. The manager will receive a fee for their services.
Another CoTrader's feature is the SuperDEX infrastructure that pools decentralized exchanges for maximum liquidity and power, and enables fund managers to trade on these exchanges. Initially, CoTrader will support Bancor, Kyber and 0x, with more DEXs joining later.
Smart Funds are coded in a way that investors will be able to withdraw their funds any moment.
CoTrader's platform will also enable ICO pooling, meaning that smaller investors will be able to participate in pre-sales and get early supporter discounts without being scammed by some shady pools. Investors can also whitelist on the platform and won't have to do KYC for every single ICO. More importantly, since CoTrader's shares are minted for each created fund, users will be able to trade these shares from funds set up to invest into ICOs that haven't distributed their tokens yet. This effectively will create ICO futures market on CoTrader's platform.
The whole platform is managed by DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) meaning that every systemic decision concerning functioning of the platform is made by the DAO and not by people.
The Team and Advisors
CEO and Founder Gary Bernstein has many years of experience in software development with various companies. He also serves as Advisor and Strategic Partner at Senno, a blockchain-based decentralized decision-making network. CTO Eliezer Steinbock worked as Software Engineer with the Israeli Defense Forces. Fintech Analyst Adam Kovacs served as risk and investment analyst with Citi and Cockpit Innovation (Israeli VC). The team also comprised of other blockchain and financial management specialists.
Advisors include Eric Zeng who served as VP for Strategy for Goldman Sachs and Algo Lead/Manager for J.P. Morgan. Jimmy Naraine spent several years combined with Allianz and Goldman Sachs. Ori Levi represents Block51, an Israeli premium crypto marketing agency, and Gladius, a blockchain security company.
The Token
The total supply of COT tokens is 100 billion, with 20% (20bn) being offered for sale. The price is pegged to ETH, with 1 ETH equal to 700,000 COT. Therefore, the hard cap should be around 29m ETH (although the Whitepaper says it is 10m USD). Pre-sale bonus varies from 20% to 40% with 6 months vesting. According to the Whitepaper, team and advisor tokens will be vested for 4!!! years. Frankly, this is the first project with such a long vesting period for the team I have seen so far.
The tokens are necessary for using CoTrader platform, profit buy-backs and burns, hiding fund managers' strategies and portfolios, DAO voting and cross-platform interoperability.
The public seed sale is set for 23-30 June, public pre-sale will last from 1 to 30 July, and the main sale will happen between 1 and 30 August.
The Product
CoTrader's MVP is already live on the testnet, while the mainnet should launch sometime in August. It is important to note that CoTrader's protocol supports any smart contract platform, including Ethereum, EOS, NEO, WanChain and Hashgraph.
Conclusion
In my opinion, CoTrader is a revolutionary product. The idea may not be new but the scalability and the possibility to use CoTrader to tokenize and trade basically any assets like stocks, real-estate, currencies, gold, oil, etc. as well as platform's variety of features makes it unique. Also, CoTrader will surely attract many ICO reviewers and influencers as well as investment fund managers who will be able to monetize their knowledge using CoTrader's platform.
Since I consider myself an early CoTrader follower, I think the team is very enthusiastic about what they do and super dedicated to make their product successful. CEO Gary Bernstein constantly talks to various VCs and investment funds, and participates in various crypto conferences trying to attract more attention to the platform.
The utility of the token seems reasonable and the hardcap is rather low, implying that investment-wise the project is not overvalued and has enough room for growth. The vesting schedule suggests that the team is here to make CoTrader what it is supposed to be.
More info about CoTrader:
CoTrader website: http://cotrader.com
CoTrader Bitcointalk ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4371801
CoTrader Telegram: https://t.me/cotrader
CoTrader Twitter: https://twitter.com/cotrader_com
CoTrader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cotrader
CoTrader Medium Blog: https://medium.com/@cotrader009
CoTrader Whitepaper: https://cotrader.com/cotrader-whitepaper-en.pdf
This article is not a buy/sell recommendation. I am not a financial adviser and you should do your own research before investing in any project.
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for other reviews and feel free to upvote, resteem and follow me!