What's Up Soldiers?
Today I'll be reviewing the smaller altcoin Lunyr or LUN token. I have reviewed it in video, the link is down at the bottom if you'd like to watch that instead of read this article!
*Disclaimer - this is not financial advice but my own personal opinion. I do own some Lunyr Token, it is your decision whether to carry on reading or not.
The review will be broken down into the constituent sections:
A. Concept and Business Model
B. White paper and Roadmap
C. Product
D. Team
E. Community
A. Concept and Business Model
Lunyr is a site designed to be the blockchain wikipedia. This site brings all the benefits of decentralisation to the sharing of knowledge. These benefits include irrefutability, censorship resistance and community peer review. This system could easily be adopted by acedemic institutions and its not clear yet whether LUN wants to be an acedemic site or just an encyclopedia. Either of these options is great, and there's no reason why they can't be both.
So how does Lunyr work? Well simply put you contribute an article, it gets peer reviewed and if its accepted you receive some LUN token as a reward. Peer reviewers who reviewed with the consensus also get a reward. The LUN token rewards everyone for being involved in the sharing of information. On top of this LUN tokens are used to purchase ads on the Lunyr website, and therefore they have a utility for business as well.
Currently the system works by putting together a reward pool which sees users rewarded every two weeks from the pool. In this light Lunyr has opted to create an inflation rate of 3% per year. I understand this is necessary, however I'll be curious to see how this works and how it affects the overall value of the Lunyr ecosystem. If managed well this could only add benefits, however if managed poorly we could see the tight control reminiscent of governments and central banks, the opposite of what the blockchain stands for.
Overall the business model if pretty good, especially if the rewards pool is small, however as it scales up the rewards will get smaller and smaller unless they change the pool size. I really like the concept and think Lunyr has an advantage over Wikipedia due to its decentralisation on the blockchain.
B. White Paper
In my video we take a look at all the interesting points in the white paper, however their is simply too many to go over and keep people interested, so therefore we'll talk about the white paper in brief.
The paper is well written and has lots of detailed information. Some of the more interesting points come across with their ambitions for the future, where they state they want Lunyr to be exported for AI and robotics, for example used on systems like Amazon Alexa where Lunyr would form the knowledge base. This ambition shows that the company is pretty serious and thoughtful when it comes to their product.
The roadmap is below:
So far they've hit all their deadlines and the mainnet is working well. In terms of the ambitious AI and API kit, they are looking to release that in 2019. I would have liked to see a little more detail on the future applications because 1 year is not a long time to plan, 5 years would have been much better for any Lunyr fans out there.
C. Product
Curently the product is up and running and working pretty well. In the time I;ve submitted and peer reviewed I;ve had no problems. The UI is easy to use, simple and intuitive. As you can see below the website looks clean and uncluttered, unlike wikipedia where you are assaulted by writing every time you open it up.
In terms of peer reviewing, its easy and quick. However this could be seen as a bad thing, as people can peer review without even reading the articles and try for rewards. However, the amount of people that do looks to be negligible as the articles are mainly of good quality.
Writing an article is again easy and simple, however it would be nice to have a few more features such as the ability to make tables and mathematical formula, something imperative to encyclopaedias.
Overall the product is great! It's clean simple and intuitive if lacking a few features.
D. Team
Lunyr's team is a good one overall, the founders all have some form of experience with blockchain companies, even if they are their own.
The CEO Arnold Pham founded the second largest Ethereum group in Silicon Valley and has been a "cryptocurrency evangelist" according to their website. He studies cellular biology at the University of California and did a post bac at the University of Pensylvania. So got a scientific background but no formal education in blockchain.
Adrew Tran the COO did a degree in computer science at the University of California and studied technology management after this. He became an account executive for Oracle (American Multinational Computer Technology Company) before co-founding Lunyr. So this guy has computer experience and knows how the technology space works.
The CTO Christopher Smith went to the University of Miami where he did Computer Science and Maths, completing a BSc and an MSc in Maths. He started an PHD but didn't finish it. He has been the founder of several companies and has a large amount of blockchain development experience.
So therefore the team is pretty good, not jawdropping but good. We can be reasonably confident that they won't up-sticks and just leave Lunyr to die, but you can never be 100% certain.
E. Community
Lunyr has a pretty active community, for a smaller cap coin. They have reasonably sized communities as follows:
Twitter - 32.5k Very active (post at least once every 2 days currently)
Reddit - 2174 readers
Telegram - 3475 readers
Facebook - 1400 members
All reasonable numbers and every community is active, making Lunyr have a strong backbone to base their product off.
Overall Lunyr is pretty good. I like the product and business model. It's great to see a token out there actually with a proper product out and not just an idea or theory, something tangible. There are a few concerns with the business model and inflation model, however hopefully if managed well by the decentralised community and Lunyr developers then these will be ironed out.
I always do some arbitray ratings before I finish, because everyone loves a good rating! Here are mine, just my personal opinion so take them with a grain of salt.
Product - 7/10
Pretty good but a few issues that need ironing out (as with all new websites)
Token Utility and Business Model - 8/10
Good business model, still wary about that inflation and management around the reward pool.
Scalability - 6/10
Can scale reasonably large, but not going to take over the world, even if it does reach the size of wikipedia.
Blockchain Advancement - 3/10
Currently only a 3/10 because it doesn't advance the blockchain and it's technology forward hugely apart from introducing people to the idea of blockchain and decentralisation. When the crazy AI stuff comes out then we'll think again ;)
Investment Opportunity - 6/10
Only a small market cap at the moment so plenty of room to grow but not sure it'll ever get to the top 20 market caps.
That's all for today folks. Hope you enjoyed the review and remember to follow and upvote! Donation links down below. as well as the video link.
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