What is Current?
Current, or Current.us, is an online decentralized streaming platform that offers to pay users for playing all their media through its application. The application promises 160 million musical tracks and over 1 billion videos as well as the ability for users to import their library, providing free listening and watching for all.
This application seeks to create an incentivized streaming ecosystem through a blockchain that will lower the costs for premium subscriptions. The company will use a cryptocurrency known as CRNC (pronounced “currency”) for ad and subscription purchases, and users who stream entirely with Current will earn CRNC.
Main Features
Ticker: CRNC
Token type: Blockchain
Total tokens: 1,000,000,000 CRNC
Initial token price: US$0.24 = 1 CRNC
Fundraising goal: US$5,000,000 - US$20,000,000
ICO soft cap: $5,000,000
ICO hard cap: $36,000,000
Total tokens for sale: 350,000,000 CRNC
Accepted currencies: ETH, BTC, NEO
Minimum transaction amount: 0.03 ETH
Public presale: February 7, 2018 (12:00AM CT) - February 21, 2018 (11:59PM CT)
Main sale: March 14, 2018 (12:00AM CT) - April 4, 2018 (11:59PM CT)
What are they solving?
Current recognizes a number of different problems that are faced by both creators and consumers.
Creators
Costs. Networks can be expensive, leading creators to charge higher for their products or to not receive their due deserved to pay. Current provides additional income opportunities to creators.
Inability to reach audiences. Creators may not be able to easily reach their target audiences globally in an efficient manner. Current seeks to help in that reach.
Intermediaries. Current cuts out the middleman from the equation, with profits going directly to consumers, allowing creators to earn more.
Consumers
Content Availability. Consumers may have difficulty reaching content that they enjoy - sometimes due to their locations - and need to use multiple platforms to stream different varieties of content. Current hopes to allow users access to a large variety of high-quality content on one platform.
Costs. Many services charge high amounts for subscription services. Current hopes to make these more affordable by providing CRNC tokens as incentives, which can then be used to purchase premium features.
Advantages of Current
Current’s system offers a number of advantages.
Convenient streaming. Current makes use of APIs that allow for streaming of all varieties of content, from videos to music and more. It is not limited by platform-specific content.
Introduce cryptocurrency ownership on a wider scale. Thanks to the token incentives offered by Current to those who stream on their platform, a wider variety of individuals will own and use cryptocurrency, reducing barriers.
Smooth recommendation features. Current is equipped with a unique algorithm that provides recommendations at a more intelligent level to streamers. Users can also set up a preference profile that helps improve these functions.
Their Team
The founding team behind Current consists of:
Dan Novaes, Co-Founder, and CEO, an entrepreneur who has been profiled in numerous media outlets like Bloomberg and Forbes for his impressive collection of achievements in business. He has been a blockchain investor since 2013.
Kiran Panesar, Co-Founder, and CTO, who has worked on multiple safe, secure, and scalable website development services that handle over a billion requests monthly.
Nick McEvily, Co-Founder, and CPO, who has 8 years of experience at the head of design and software teams. He is an investor in cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin and has given talks about blockchain technology.
The team is also made up of 12 other team members who are well experienced in their respective fields. Current also credits 11 advisors and investors.
Token Structure and Distribution
1,000,000,000 CRNC tokens have been prepared for sale. 35% of these tokens will be offered during the token sales. Unsold tokens will be put on hold for a period of two years before being re-released.
A separate 35% of the available tokens will be used as mining rewards that will help grow and maintain the Current platform with algorithm advancement, data, and other means.
17% of the tokens will go to the team behind Current, for both early and future team members as well as advisors and early contributors who were behind the development of the platform.
10% of the tokens will be going towards supporting community growth programs and building strategic partnerships. Current hopes that these efforts will help to mold the ecosystem of the application and its incentives.
Finally, 3% of the CRNC tokens are allocated for the foundation of Current, in order to ensure a smooth transition to an open-source platform, provide long-term network governance, and to fund partner support and academic grants.
Our Opinion on Current
Current’s potential is huge, given its 200,000 users that are already interacting with and making use of their application and platform. However, in order to reach further milestones, there may be some difficulties and threats lying ahead.
Many streaming applications allow users to make friends and build communities with those who share their similar interests, and this is an engagement dynamic that can do a lot of benefits for a platform. Current does not have features that allow for user interaction, which can potentially make it difficult for users from other sites to make the switch to their platform.
Current also does not name any of its partnerships, which make it difficult to be sure of the ways that the company is leveraging its partners. With the promise of aggregated user data access, plenty of big media sites would presumably like to form an arrangement with Current, but it is unclear whether this benefit is something that Current has taken advantage of.
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