Boxing Champ Floyd Mayweather predicted on his fb and instagram that he would "make a $hit t$n of money" on Stox ICO on August 2 and on Conor McGregor fight on August 26.
What he forgot is that Stox ICO isn't available for US citizens:
Anyway, let's analyze Stox ICO and see if we can "make a $hit t$n of money" as well.
Project Overview
Stox is a decetralized prediction market based on Ethereum blockchain using Bancor protocol. It will will offer the ability to trade on prediction of events (like sports, celebrity marriages, election results, and even the weather). It uses an ERC20-compatible token, STX, which will be the primary form for fees, collaterals, and the currency for investment in event outcomes. It will feature invest.com as its debut provider and operator.
ICO sale is capped at $30 million. 1 ETH will buy 200 STX. ICO starts on August 2nd and continue for 14 days or until the sale cap of ETH is reached.
Distribution:
Here is a video introducing Stox:
Current status
There's no prototype yet, except some screenshots featuring the future app:
There will be a web app and native desktop and mobile applications. The code will be open sourced.
It will implement the user side of the model including on-chain access over Ethereum to Stox smart contracts and access to content, listings and event metadata from decentralized cloud storage. However, there's no mention about how this decentralized cloud storage will work and about dealing with Ethereum blockchain costs and latency.
It will rely on Bancor platform, which offers continuous liquidity via an on-chain market maker and mitigates volatility. It should be the first and biggest application of Bancor, and its founder Eyal Hertzog is an adviser of Stox ICO.
The company will be based in Israel, even though Invest.com’s HQ is in Cyprus.
Opportunities
- Prediction market is one of the most profitable and still not covered enough, it's estimated as 10 kazillion dollars and that if Stox could capture only 1% of that, it'll gain billions.
- Stox is founded by Invest.com, an online financial company operating since 2014, which employs over 200 employees across 5 countries, having more than $50 million year revenue, and whose trading platforms accommodate over 3 million registered users. Ophir Gertner is founder of both Stox and Invest.com.
- It's featured and based on Bancor, which had a record in ICOs history raising $153 Million (though the price of tokens is now lower than on the ICO).
Concerns
The whitepaper is vague including 57 pages, and covers lots of business opportunities, but not much on development. There's nothing released and nothing opensourced yet. The milestones are described in details, but the roadmap doesn't include specific dates or quarters.
It's featured by Invest.com, but the platform doesn't seem to be rather popular (has about 400K visitors a month). The declared revenue in is based on AnyOption.com which was acquired by them, but it has a bad reputation (accused of scamming its investors).
Augur and Gnosis are already developing platforms for prediction market, but according to Stox whitepaper there are some advantages (though not justified, as why Stox would be more scalable than others):
Conclusion
Mayweather ad should be more like a red flag. If the hard cap is reached, the market cap will be $60 million. Comparing to Augur market cap of $195 million and Gnosis' of 236 million, even with Mayweather hype, a 2x token price raise is not likely to happen soon (unless the crypto goes crazy after 1st August bitcoin split).
As there are no estimated dates of, at least, releasing an MVP, and the reputation of Invest.com is doable, I wouldn't recommend it for long term investment (better just to buy some Augur tokens as the platform is functional and expected to be released soon). For short term flipping, it's very risky but there could be some gain up to 2x if the hype continues (however I wouldn't expect it to be).