10 Questions answered about an ICO. Today: the potentially money making Cryptobank Polybius.
1. When will the ICO take place?
The ICO for Polybius has already started on the 31st of May at 12:00 PM UTC. Investors have 5 weeks to invest and currently as we are in week 3 of the ICO there is still a 10% bonus given. Week 4 will see investors receive a 5% bonus and if you buy in the last week you won't get any bonus.
Currently there are 18329 investors whom together invested USD 20,471,153 in the ICO. Which on average is $ 1,116.87 a person.
2. What is the initial price?
1 Polybius token (PLBT) will cost $10.00 during the ICO.
3. What is the total supply?
The total amount of PLBT is not locked as it depends on the results of the ICO. Polybius mentions in their prospectus that they have not locked the total supply as they need to be able to add tokens before the end of the ICO and need to revoke any unsold amount. However, they did cap it at 20 million PLBT which would mean the maximum amount they would accept is 200 million dollars. Any unallocated PLBT will be destroyed when the ICO ends.
4. Will there be an additional issue of tokens?
According to Polybuis there will be no additional issue of PLBT in the future.
5. What is the ICO structure?
All the PLBT sold during the ICO will make up 93% of the total supply. This 93% will include any bonuses given to investors for purchasing early on in the ICO. 5% will go to the founders and 2% will be given as bounties to pay for different campaigns on social media and exclusive support.
6. What is a Polybius Token (PLBT)?
The Polybius token is a Profit-Share Smart Contract which represent the right to receive 20% of the annual profit Polybius Bank or Payment Institution makes. All the holders of these tokens will receive their share of the 20% based on the tokes they hold at the end of the financial year as dividend. This dividend will be paid in Ethereum and therefore investors will need to download an Ethereum wallet (I suggest myetherwallet.com which they also mention themselves).
7. How can I purchase and store PLBT?
Anyone can make an account on the Crowdfunding Dashboard that Polybius offers on their website (polybius.io). Setting up an account will take less than 5 minutes and there is a full range of payment options. Whilst many ICO's just accept Ethereum or Bitcoin Polybius isn't picky. See the options below:
A. Wire transfer in USD or EUR (Minimum purchase amount 10 PLBT)
B. BTC, ETH, USDT direct transfer (Minimum purchase amount 1 PLBT)
C. Multiple cryptocurrencies supported by ShapeShift.io (Minimum purchase amount 1 PLBT)
D. Emercoin (EMC) direct transfer (Minimum purchase amount 100 PLBT)
E. Debit/Credit card payment (Visa/Mastercard) (Minimum purchase amount 1 PLBT)
8. What is Polybius?
Simply put: Polybius is aiming to be a bank. A 'contemporary banking institution' which will implement features of blockchain-based technologies, IoT, modern banking and Big Data. Their slogan is: 'A Project of a Regulated Bank for the Digital Generation'.
While starting off as primarily a financial institution, the Polybius project is meant to grow into your daily servicer and companion ecosystem. It will aim to enable secure and seamless connections between life and the things we love and use every day. The key elements of Polybius ecosystem are the Polybius Foundation and the Digital Pass. Polybius Foundation is the subject fostering the Polybius Bank or Polybius Payment Institution (P.I.) at the start. Its customers will not only get access to a variety of financial services, but will likely be among the first to get the PolyID that will plug them into the Digital Pass environment. Digital Pass is an independent environment as a service, which will serve as a storage for encrypted individual information. The security of access to the information will be enabled by SSL certificates, dynamic PINs and, to some extent, by biometrical data. The security will be compliant with the PSD2 RTS requirements issued by the EBA Authority on 23.02.2017. Among other planned features are scoring and sensitivity systems for credit and insurance businesses, asset and currency trading systems, seed & VC investment tools, eID and Trust services and other features described in this Prospectus.
Polybius is being designed as a highly scalable platform targeted at simplifying our daily lives.
9. The Team
The Polybius Foundation consists of a team of financial, security, legal and technical experts. It was established and still is registered in Estonia. The Team mainly consists of people working for HashCoins as technically you can see it as one of HashCoins projects. The CEO and co-founder of HashCoins is Sergey Potapenko and he holds the same positions in the Polybius Foundation. So does the other founder/chairman of the board, the CTO and a few more.
HashCoins OÜ is an IT company, registered and established in 2013 in Estonia headquartered in Tallinn. The main focus areas of the company are development of authentication and security systems; creation of decentralised and distributed ledger (DLT) solutions; and provision of cloud computing services. HashCoins OÜ will initially be the servicer and the provider of cloud and DLT storage, security, servicing and redundancy solutions for Polybius infrastructure including the Digital Pass services.
10. Should you buy it?
I will put a small amount into it as I am always interested in stocks that pay dividend and Polybius is something similar. Besides that Polybius has also raised over USD 6 million in the first 3 days which means they will have enough money to receive a European banking license and so start operations in the EU as they met the requirements for that. This was milestone 3 in their road map as you can see below. I am also sure they will get that 25 million so there is no financial reason why they couldn't achieve their projected profits in the years to come. More tokens will mean you have to share the company profits with more people so it is worth keeping an eye on the amount of money raised. If the operating profit for token holders is USD 5.68 million and there are 2.5 million tokens every token will receive: USD 2.27. Which at USD 10 a token would be a lovely 22.5% ROI annually. If that would be the case you can expect the price of one PLBT to easily go up to USD 35-40. However, I don't have a clue how realistic their numbers are so don't consider this financial advice. If they reach the maximum of 20m tokens then the return would only be 2,84%, USD 0.284 a token, and the price of one PLBT would probably go a bit below the $10. But I see more upside to downside and if they reach their projected figures there is good money to be made.
Sources:
https://polybius.io/
https://polybius.io/media/business_model.pdf
https://polybius.io/media/prospectus.pdf
https://www.hashcoins.com/management
https://www.hashcoins.com/about