FOREWORD
This review of Saifu is completely impartial. I have not received any sponsorship in any form from publishing this article, neither from the people developing this project, neither from any other entity. This review is in-depth and will include my analysis in several areas. I believe that this review reflects my own way of interpreting data and information and you may or may not agree with certain parts of this review. I should also mention that I am not a native English speaker, but that should not be an excuse for any mistake found in this article. Please highlight any errors if spotted.
All the facts presented in this review are either found in Saifu’s content posted online, either found in the Telegram group. External links and timestamps will be found throughout this article. I have had lengthy discussions in the Telegram group with the staff in order to clarify certain points for this specific review. You may check the conversations I had with them by looking up the messages starting March 4th.
The content of this article is valid at the current date of uploading it. In the future, there might be significant changes to this project which will not be included in this article. This article should not be the basis of your investment.
I will always fully disclose any ownership of a certain token / coin which benefitted from my review. In this case, the only tokens I own are sourced from the translation of the ANN of Saifu, which would be roughly 750 – 2,000 SFU, or approximately 0.075 – 0.2 BTC at the ICO price.
Concepts and Ideas – General Overview
A Saifu account’s purpose is to make it easier for people to purchase cryptocurrencies by acting as a bridge between crypto and fiat.
„Saifu is a licensed global financial platform powered by blockchain and world-class bank-grade security technologies that allows private and corporate clients to easily buy, safely store, exchange and pay with crypto and fiat currencies using debit cards and IBAN accounts.”
They will try to achieve this by holding the fiat in bank accounts, while the cryptocurrencies will be held in „Secure Hardware Modules” offered by one of their partners, Thales. This is a link of a short presentation of their collaboration.
So far so good. By focusing on making cryptocurrencies easier to access by people, they could be looking at a huge market due to the increasing demand of cryptocurrencies. I believe a lot of people simply do not invest because they find it too difficult to get started. The idea definitely seems to be appealing, but the execution could be rather difficult and troublesome, as they are trying to situate themselves between being a bank and an exchange, having to comply to all sorts of policies and regulations and, of course, satisfy the customers.
Information about the people behind the project
The company
Unlike many projects, the company’s details are public. You may see for yourself here. You need to complete the Captcha, navigate to Search and input the company's identification number, which is 05690382.
Paymaster A.S. is a licensed payment institution in Czech Republic and is currently preparing their FCA application for their license in UK. That does not mean that only individuals from these two countries can open an account on Saifu, but anyone from anywhere in the world. What is equally important to these licenses is their contract with a company (under NDA) that offers a white labeling solution and which is partnered with Mastercard. Despite the fact that the company’s name cannot be disclosed, it is an European entity which is also licensed. The whole fuss about this contract is due to the fact that the company currently issues Saifu cards – that is until Saifu qualifies for a Mastercard prepaid card issuer license themselves, which depends on Saifu’s ICO performance.
The Team
Now I will focus on the experience of the team members of this project. As seen on their website, Saifu has 2 founders, 5 heads, 4 specialists and over 15 other employees. Information is available about the founders, heads and specialists. Moreover, almost all of them have Paymaster A.S. / Saifu written in their Linkedin Experience. This is a good fact, as most not-so-serious projects’ members will not have that added to their profile and stain their career with their horrible “crypto-attempt”.
The founders experience is quite vast, especially in the case of Evgeny Vigovsky, who is the COO and CTO of Saifu. He had worked for over 12 years for Kaspersky and his Linkedin profile is quite solid. The other co-founder, Alexander Legoshin, was mostly involved in marketing and development, having a background in programming. The other’s experience range from average to good and you may access their Linkedin profiles here: Eizens Slava, Leonid Kondratiev, Zach Murray, Victoria Kolosova, Danil Perushev, Dmitry Glukhodedov, Maxim Prishchepo, Anatoliy Sokolnikov and Denis Katkov.
Regarding their advisors, they have Timothy Enneking, Ben Banerjee, Aleksandr Minakov, Johnson Chng and Vaclav Bedrich. I would check some of them to see whether they are legit, but, unfortunately, I do not have a Premium account to do that.
The final remarks would be: team has this project mentioned on their Linkedin profiles, the experience of the team is not bad at all, especially within the founders and most of the heads. I could say I am pleased with them.
The Token Sale
As shown on their website, they have gathered so far 488 BTC (or roughly $5m at $10,300 / BTC) from their ICO which started on the 19th of February. That is obviously below their softcap of $10m and not even close to their hardcap of $49m. However, they have received aproximatelly $17m in their private sale from private buyers and funds. I am not sure why this fact is hidden from the website, where you can only a small exclamation mark stating "not including OTC sales". The Token Sale lasts until the 30th of April, the price is a firm 0.0001 BTC (LTC, ETH, BCH, DOGE, and USD and EUR wire transfers are also accepted) and there is no purchase bonus available.
The Whitepaper – Getting into the details
So far I’ve only talked about the positive things about Saifu which could make me look like I have been paid. Well, buckle up, we are going to go a bit deeper and talk about the Whitepaper and certain things you should know about this project, both positive and negative aspects.
The Whitepaper has 40 pages, from which roughly 10 are an Introduction, Problems, Our Mission and so on. The last 7 are about the team, so we are left with 23 pages of content about the product itself. As I expected, the Whitepaper is not quite technical, meaning that certain facts or processes are not explained. For example, there are not a lot of details (or no details at all) about how the Secure Hardware Modules work or about the VASCO security solutions (these are not even mentioned in there). I would have at least preferred a quick rundown of how these will protect my money. Anyway, I will now begin dissecting the Whitepaper.
“Customers will be able to do the following things:
• Top up their accounts from bank accounts or using cards
• Buy and sell cryptocurrencies
• Make payments with fiat currencies
• Transfer cryptocurrencies to and from external wallets
• Transfer money out of their accounts”
The following 2 infographics explain it better how the Saifu’s system will work:
Despite the fact that, so far, this sounds pretty good, there are quite a few downsizes.
Centralization (at least partial). First of all, just as Alexander Legoshin mentioned in their Telegram, “I would also say that while we do perform a partially centralized function in the cryptocurrency world, cryptocurrencies are still by their nature decentralized.” Basically, they will hold the access keys in the hardware provided by Thales (at least the keys are created there and can’t leave the module), the fiat in safeguard bank accounts, the servers will be in their full control (this could mean there is the possibility of downtime) and maybe other smaller facts. This is a clear case of a tradeoff between decentralization in the favour of convenience and usability.
The fact that Saifu is centralized to a certain extent leads to two problems, not only is the platform sensitive to downtime and other risks, but also this a pretty big hit regarding the marketing of Saifu. People in this cryptosphere seem to hate anything centralized and you never know who their next centralized target might be.Anti Money Laundering (I am not referring to their ICO campaign). Each transaction will be checked. If a transaction is labeled as suspicious, then…explanations will be demanded and so on (keep in mind there will be an initial KYC procedure when opening the account). Officially, they will not even allow transactions of “dirty” cryptocurrencies. If you have been sold “dirty” BTC, you might get into trouble when using Saifu. Alexander also recommended using trustworthy platforms when trading, as you might become a victim of what I have just explained above. A “suspicious entity” is defined in their Whitepaper as:
• Dark Net Markets – hidden markets that sell mainly illegal items using bitcoin
• Ransomware and/or Stolen Coins – receive funds from stolen coins / known ransomware
• A mixer / tumbler - More than 80% of mixing activity is related to other suspicious entities
• A scam - Receiving funds from known scams
• An unlicensed Money Service Business - Unlicensed MSBs facilitate money laundering
• Gambling - In some jurisdictions online gambling is illegal
The reason why this is quite bad is the fact that you don’t really know if the BTC (or any cryptocurrency) in your wallet could have been in contact with a red-flagged address. And this contact with a red-flagged address might have happened years ago, who knows? All of this has not been mentioned in the Whitepaper, but in their AMA Video at 1:14:03.
- They will not support anonymous cryptocurrencies. Again, not mentioned in their Whitepaper, but in that video at 19:29. They are planning to add ERC20 and Ripple in the near future, but anonymous coins will never get on Saifu. The reason could be the fact that anonymous coins like Monero will become the target of regulations and most illegal activities are conducted by using them. Monero on Saifu would mean a bad reputation not in front of the cryptocurrency userbase, but in front of institutions and governments.
The main good aspect about Saifu is, obviously, the ability to make it easier to invest in cryptocurrencies and, thus, contribute to making them mainstream. This is where the SFU token comes into play. The SFU token will be used to offer some perks to people owning it by giving some tokens back on purchase of services and by offering discounts.
So when I think of the SFU token, I sort of imagine the BNB token, the KCS or the COSS one. Basically, the SFU will be used to pay the fees and you will receive a bonus (as shown above) if you owned SFU tokens before making the purchase / exchange. If you don’t own SFU tokens when using a service, the platform will purchase them for you and you will only be entitled a “5% Tokens Back”.
Moreover, at least 70% of the SFU tokens paid as a fee for the services will be burned, lowering the liquidity. The developers have also stated they might adjust this policy if it is needed, so it is a good thing they have it mind.
Regarding the distribution of tokens, the tokens sold to the public will account for 65% of the total supply, the tokens reserved for the team is 25% and 10% will remain in the “Market Making Pool”, which are the funds used to initially operate and provide the services.
People might not fully understand the impact of Saifu in case it succeeds. Saifu’s target addresses to “non-geeks”, which is the majority of people, and not long-time investors or traders who can manage all these things by themselves. These are the people that have no idea how to invest, they might not understand the technology (or only partially) and which are frightened by the idea of losing their money in a scam. Their objective is to create a platform similar to an online banking one, which allows them to be appealing to a big percent of the population.
The fact they are licensed will give users the feeling of safety they are given by banks. Actually, not only the users, but also possible investors have some sort of warranty that this project is not a straightforward scam. However, not all the projects that are not scams do perform well. Anyway, Saifu could definitely become used by many people from many countries (especially after the launch in the US) and could see a good development. The plans they have for the future include further business integration, perfect for the future companies looking to work with mixed currencies.
My final remarks for this section: there are good aspects and bad aspects, but I believe people with different levels of knowledge about cryptocurrencies will weight these aspects in a different manner from one another.
# Marketing
This is the section I will tackle the way Saifu has been conducting its marketing campaign. This includes their ICO campaign (mostly an analysis of their content on bitcointalk.org), their social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Reddit, Youtube) and their Website. I shall begin with their ICO campaign’s marketing.
ICO Campaign
Their marketing consists of an ANN thread and a Bounty Campaign.
The ANN thread (at the moment I am writing this) has received ~6,900 views since de 27th of November last year. To my surprise, it hasn’t been update since the 16th of January and its information is relatively inaccurate.
However, the design is good and the moderator of the thread kept it active by answering questions.
Honestly, this was quite alarming when I found out about it. I was going to translate their ANN and, obviously, I was given an old template. When asking that specific person why it didn’t correlate to what it was shown on the website, he seemed deeply confused and thanked me for pointing it out. It seems they still haven’t fixed it. At least my translation is up-to-date with the reality, by I assume others’ are not.
Now jumping over to their Bounty Program. Their thread has been viewed 4,500 times since the 23rd of February. Their Bounty includes the following campaigns: signature, translation, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Reddit), Telegram, articles, reviews or videos and a “reserve fund”. You may check here the fact that I have not been paid as part of the Bounty Program (my profile is this one)
Anyway, their Bounty Campaign does seem to be hold a reasonable amount of participants, considering the beginning of the campaign was on the 23rd of February. At the moment I am writing this, counting the rejected ones too, there are only 11 people participating in their signature, 300 in Facebook, 320 in Twitter, 100 in their Medium, roughly 40 in their Reddit and 70 in their articles and videos one. There is definitely room for improvement.
In my opinion, it is important to mention the fact that KYC is compulsory and that residents of the People’s Republic of China cannot participate in the ICO, but, to my surprise, Americans can. I say “to my surprise” because of the fact that Saifu wants to enter the US market at some point in the future. As you might already know, it is illegal to participate in an ICO, as ruled by the Securities and Exchange Commission. I am not outlining these facts because it is illegal, but rather because it could draw consequences in the future regarding entering the US market. I am not sure about whether this could impact their entrance in the market, but I found it weird that Alexander states in their AMA video at 28:13 that they try to remain as compliant as possible to any regulations and laws in order to build a reputation and acquire as many licenses as they can. When I brought up this aspect in their Telegram chat, I’ve been given the answer “US citizens buy a utility token for future use. It's not illegal”. I have no idea whether they are right or not. I don't have extensive knowledge in the legal field but I simply felt like mentioning this fact here.
Social Media
This is where I review Saifu’s activity on social media. They stated that they are not interested in worldwide marketing, but are rather focusing on Europe, as there will be the starting point of their project. But that does not stand as an excuse. Marketing should start happening as soon as possible, but also as much as possible. This is just like refusing a head start in a competition.
Their Facebook page has a modest 800 likes at this moment, while each posts gets around 100 like after a while. Keep in mind the bounty campaign accounts for almost half of the likes the page has received. They do post almost every day, which is good, but those numbers, just like most of these, could be see a better day.
Their Twitter account has 400 followers and each tweet receives a bit more than 100 likes and retweets. At least their Twitter audit is 98%.
As I was writing this article (and waiting for that steemit approval), they launched their airdrop which substantially increased their number of followers, getting to around 12,900. Definitely better than the paragraph above.
Their Medium is, unfortunately, embarrassing. 133 followers, but no content has ever been posted.
Their Reddit profile has a couple of posts. I do not understand why they do not have their own subreddit, it isn’t even that hard to manage one.
Their Youtube channel has a few videos and the AMA stream video I mentioned above. One of their videos has 575k views, I am not really sure how.
The Website
Just like the ANN, very good design. I do not have anything negative to say about it. Informative, clean, up-to-date. Feel free to check by yourself: https://saifu.ai/; http://ico.saifu.ai/; https://tokensale.saifu.ai/.
Misc.
As I had to constantly be in contact with the staff in order to ask questions, I had the chance to be part of their Telegram group. The group itself has 2,400 members16,300 and rising thanks to the airdrop and is not unbelievably active. Now with all the influx of airdrop participants, it might see a bit more activity. The support is very helpful and quick to answer any questions and even the co-founder Alexander Legoshin answered quite a lot of my questions there (of course, he did not know about my intention to write this review about them). I can easily say that the way they handle PR is professional, which is something I always enjoy seeing.
Closing words
I believe the major downsize of this entire project is the lack of deeper marketing and understanding of the technology. The idea behind is good. I cannot criticize the technology behind it because there are not many details available at the moment. To my mind, there are two possible outcomes:
a) this project’s marketing steps up, the technology behind it is top-notch => this becomes a really good investment.
b) this project’s marketing stops after this airdrop, the technology does not give confidence about its "bank grade" status, making Saifu fade into irrelevance and uncertainty.
My conclusion will stop here. It is up to you to make a decision. My decision should not interfere with yours, so that is the reason why I will not state whether I will be investing more or what I am planning to do with my SFU tokens from the Bounty reward. You should never trust anyone’s investment advice. Always do your own research.
Thank you for going through this review. I appreciate the time you have put in reading it. As this has been my first article ever, I am looking forward to any tips or improvements you might suggest due to the fact that I am looking to continue reviewing ICOs here on steemit.com. Any upvote or follow will be much valued!
DYOR by using the following resources:
Resources
http://saifu.ai/
http://ico.saifu.ai/
https://tokensale.saifu.ai/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2472594 (ANN)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3005479 (BOUNTY)
http://ico.saifu.ai/Saifu-WhitePaper.pdf
http://ico.saifu.ai/Saifu-One-pager.pdf
https://www.facebook.com/saifuai/
https://twitter.com/AiSaifu
https://medium.com/@saifu_ai
https://www.reddit.com/user/Saifu_ai/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCot0jHLgsl-e3y4Ve-lNj1A/?ab_channel=Saifu.ai
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KSkXDhZqFnQfMCRJQ0Fx1DgMPve1tU9t/view?usp=sharing (Partnership Presentation)
https://t.me/saifu_ai