Hello to all curious minds in startup and crypto community!
We at InnMind always seek for interesting external insights, knowledge and expert opinion, expanding our network of experienced professionals and learning from them continuesly.
Today we want to share with you an interesting ICO review, prepared by telegram community McAfee Approves and supported by supported by Golden Borodutch channel. Thanks to @Kiku_Reise for permission to share!
Original review is published here
This review is dedicated to analyse the Streamity ICO, trying to figure out what's hidden inside; whether there are any white spots that need to be addressed by the project's team or risk concerns that have to be disclosed to the investors. Authors highly encourage Streamity team to publish their answers to all the questions marked bold in the review — this should positively affect investor's trust. In the case of some questions left unanswered or ignored — readers can objectively deduct that the team couldn't or didn't want to answer them. Let's get the shovels and start digging!
Product
First, we will briefly cover the product information, lay out all the product parts off the White Paper and then we will ask the product questions.
The main product, StreamDesk — a p2p exchange which differs from others by providing exchange security using smart-contracts. Streamity points out the main differences as: wide list of cryptocurrencies available for exchange, fiat payment services partnership, compulsory verification (KYC), their own cryptocurrency convertor. Users will have to pay in order to use the service, depending on the package chosen, from $1 to $5000 per month. They also promise small fees of 0%-2% if you trade over your package limits.
Info and analytics service — a part of the website with cryptocurrency investment predictions and recommendations made by Streamity team and community members rewarded with project's tokens. This section will include: cryptocurrency market, market reviews and news aggregation — services that aren't well described in the White Paper.
Investment resource — a website section with various subsections: ICO calendar, crypto-startups investment statistics, projects' ideas actuality prediction, analytics' articles and blogs, traders' blog-chat and semi-automatic and automatic trading signals. Chat and trading bot development is going to be led by the company called ScriptTradeCoin, of which there is no public information.
Education resource — a website section with the cryptocurrency knowledge base and Streamity Educational Center with various trading, investment and other crypto-related courses.
Altogether, users will be able to exchange crypto for fiat, read crypto news, trade crypto with bots, and predict whether a particular ICO is going to be worth investing to.
1: StreamDesk exchange
- Do you have an exchange prototype? Can we see it? According to the roadmap, it should have been ready by the August 2017, but nobody has seen it and the team decided to re-write it.
- What were the reasons to re-write the prototype?
- Can you name the banks and payment services that have already signed partnership agreements with you?
- On what grounds will payments services disclose third party transaction details to you? Can we see at least one signed agreement with at least one payment service that agreed to provide you with such sensitive data for your smart-contracts? And how will you address the fraudulent bank transactions issues?
- How do you ensure exchange deal being private and anonymous? Due to the smart-contract nature and public orders system, exchange cannot be private and exchange looses one of the crucial elements of being a fully p2p system.
- What do you mean by the middlemen-free exchange? Funds blocking (escrow) till the smart-contract responds and double-fee protection process are the elements of the centralized middlemen service. Another element of the truly p2p service lost.
- How will you protect user's private date obtained during verification process? We won't accept answers like "they will be encrypted". Please, try to specify what kind of cryptography and security will be used — it's very important.
- Can you describe the technical details of non-ERC20 cryptocurrencies integration?
- What are the technical details of the crypto-converter? Who will develop it within your team? Streamity mentioned that they will develop a cryptocurrency converter but never gave any technical details.
- Who will develop StreamDesk mobile app? Do these people have experience with iOS and Android development? Can we see the apps they've built before?
- What are the technical details of your payments system? Who will develop payment processing and what kind of experience this person has?
- Will you develop the exchange API? What conditions will have to be met to use it?
- Are there any other ways to use Streamity to exchange crypto to fiat without fees aside of buying 25 000 STM tokens and getting the $5000/month package?
- After the purchase of the package without fees who will cover the bank acquiring costs and payment services fees?
- Your servers resolve smart-contracts in a centralized fashion, it opens the system to numerous vulnerabilities. What actions did you take to ensure the cyber security?
- Will you publish the MVP code to the open source community?
2: Info-analytics resource
- Why do you need cryptocurrency market overview, market reviews and news aggregation if there are already plenty of such services online? How will you differ from the competition? Answering "our service will be better" will not be sufficient — please, give us particular reasons why it will be better.
- White Paper says that each service will make profit independently from others. How will you make profit on the info-analytics service?
- Who will decide on the users' tasks in the system?
3: Investment resource
- Why did you even mention ScriptTradeCoin, if it doesn't exist yet?
- What functionality will trader chat have exactly? What conditions will have to be met to use it?
- Who exactly will develop the investment services? Who are these people?
- Can we see the previous products built by people who will develop trading bots?
- You do understand that the only one who makes profit on the trade signals is the one giving them, right? How will other users benefit of the trading signals then?
- Who and how will decide on whether to grant permission to a user to publish trade signals or not?
4: Education resource
- Who will work on the knowledge database context ads? Can we see this person's previous experience?
- How will Streamity be different from Udemy and why will it be better?
- Who exactly will partner Streamity on the educational courses?
General questions:
It is planned to use artificial intelligence in various resources of Streamity medium.
— Streamity website, ecosystem description.
- What resources and how will they use blockchain with AI? Why do you think AI is necessary there?
- Who are the people developing AI? What is their previous experience and can we see their previous completed AI projects?
- What kind of AI will you use? Neural networks? If so, what type of neural networks and can you layout their proposed structure?
- Why didn't you still adapt the ICO website for mobile devices? Do you really want to revolutionize the market but lack the ability to adapt a simple websote for mobile platforms?
- Where did you get numbers in the business-model and what formulas and equations did you use?
Let's go over Streamity plans from White Paper that depend on the amount of funds raised.
0,5 mln $ is the minimum sum required to launch the project.
1,5 mln $ - P2P exchange service aimed at Asian and European markets. Information-analytical resource.
5 mln $ - P2P exchange service aimed at Asian, European and US markets. Information-analytical resource.
- What do you mean by "aimed at markets"? Marketing?
- Can you specify how will money be spent? What will the expenses be?
10 mln $ - P2P exchange service aimed at Asian, European, US and Latin America markets. Information-analytical, educational and investment resources.
20 mln $ - P2P exchange service aimed at the world market. Information-analytical, educational and investment resources translated in 5-7 major languages.
- Couple of languages to translate will cost $10 000 000? Who are these translator that will be involved?
As Streamity claims on the website, they've raised $2 800 000 during the pre-ICO round. However Ethereum blockchain only has the records of 1 254 ETH, that is roughly $1 180 000 by the moment this article is published. Team doesn't want to disclose the proof of funds raised via other means.
- Why do the funds raised differ on the website and on the Ethereum blockchain? Also, where did the funds from pre-ICO go? Private Ethereum wallets?
All the tokens left after the sale will stay in the reserve under the founders control. It's very risky due to the reasons that founders can sell all their tokens at any moment and crush the token price. White Paper says that 50% of the team tokens will be locked for one year by the smart-contract. We took a deeper look at their smart-contract and found out that lock is real. However we found another loophole that the team can unlock the dedicated amount of tokens more than once, thus having an option to emit as many tokens as they want one year after the contract is published. Which is really bad as the more tokens they have, the more tokens they'll sell.
Advisors
We've reached out to all the advisors and asked them to confirm that they actively participate in the project development.
- Andrei Zolin — blockchain-specialist. Quickly answered on Telegram that he consults Streamity on the smart-contract technical implementation.
- Sergey Bogatyrev — business-development specialist. Rejected to cooperate with us saying: "who are you to question me?". We can only speculate that Sergey provides legal services under the Best Business Solutions Singapore company.
- What does Sergey Bogatyrev do at Streamity?
- Alex Gayduk — machine learning specialist. CEO of Fortifier, company that develops software for insurance and medical startups. Answered on Facebook that he consults Streamity on the exchange implementation.
- Jacob Okonya — fintech journalist. Reached out to him on the LinkedIn, still no answer.
- Opinder Preet Singh — blockchain-specialist. Quickly answered on Facebook that he consults the team on the Indian market and blockchain technologies.
- Stephan De Haes — marketing specialist. Answered on Facebook that he consults the team on marketing and advertising.
Streamity cofounder promised in the official Telegram chat that there will be 6-7 more advisors on the website soon.
- Can we see whom do you intend to add as advvisors?
Team
In my opinion, Streamity is showing hopeful results, thanks to the experienced and well-known team, challenging and relevant idea, the only one of its kind.
— Streamity website. Quote of Vladislav — Streamity Cofounder.
Pretty lofty words — "experienced and well-known team". Let us check them. By the moment we publish this article, there are thirteen people in the Streaming team. First, let's take a closer look at two most important people on the project — cofounders.
- Vladislav Kuznetsov [ln|fb|tg] — cofounder, CEO. Has been the CEO of the "KVB Print" company that rents heavy machinery, fixes and sells electronics. There is no more publicly available information about Vladislav.
- Is there any proof that Vladislav owns HP brand store as per his LinkedIn?
- Is this all the experience Vladislav has? What about 10 years of business and investment experience? Any trace of it online?
- Dmitry Martianov [ln|fb|tg] — cofounder, CTO. You can trace his experience on his stackoverflow and github, where he keeps some of his works, however, mostly web-development. We couldn't find any trace of his experience building e-commerce websites online (mentioned at his LinkedIn) or business experience (mentioned on the Streamity website).
- Does Dmitry have any experience launching an IT product which ended up being used by more than 10 000 people?
Getting to the gems of any IT project — software developers. They have five software engineers on the website that isn't bad at all. Let's try to trace their experience.
- Maksim Smirnov [ln|fb|tg] — software engineer. According to his LinkedIn, he has pretty nice development experience: five years of software engineering and leading in small companies and around five years of work at Alpha-Bank. From his words, he no longer participates in Streamity — he helped with the database pre-ICO architecture. We reached out to him and he confirmed on Telegram that he doesn't perform any active development for the project at the moment.
- Egor Okhterov [fb|vk] — software engineer. His LinkedIn says that he has worked at Yandex as a Perl Teacher for a year and then worked as a software developer at Kaspersky Lab from 2013 to 2017. In 2018 he started to work at Mail.ru. Doesn't have much activity going on at his GitHub.
- Can you confirm that Egor has worked at Yandex, Kaspersky Lab and now at Mail.ru?
- What exactly does Egor do at Streamity?
- Sergey Bevzenko [ln|tg] — backend developer. Also doesn't have much going on at his GitHub. Does PHP, JS, Go development. Worked at small companies as a PHP developer for a couple of years, including Atalan. We reached out to Atalan and they confirmed that he mostly worked on e-commerce websites for Ashan and Tyreplus (Michelin).
- What does Sergey develop at Streamity?
- Pavel Bolgarskih [ln] — blockchain developer. LinkedIn is empty. Graduated from university in 2015. He is a freelancer actively looking for work. There is no more public information about him online.
Streamity website claims that Pavel has developed smart-contracts for multiple successful ICO's. Can you name these ICO's, please? - What does Pavel exactly do at Streamity?
- Nikolai Stepanov [vk|tg] — blockchain integrator. Only appears in the White Paper. Winner at SQL and 1С olympics, developed Wnutter (private messages stats at VK) and Kotofun (bot assistant). Developed five small apps for Android. No trace of his experience with blockchain online.
- Can you show us any successful blockchain projects developed by Nikolai, please?
Of course it's great that they have five developers and all, but they seem to lack any experience with the implementation of any successful products. It's not right to pick on the only developers in the team, but one of them is inactive, another doesn't have any personal projects and it looks like he works for two companies simultaneously, third worked at small companies but never made anything successful or high-load, fourth is a freelancer with only two years of experience, no completed projects and looking for a job, fifth has nothing to do with blockchain, however, is listed as a blockchain related developer.
- How will Streamity develop the promised product infrastructure without enough experienced developers? If all of them are experienced, please, provide the proofs.
Read more about team in the original review text
Legal
Streamity is registered in Singapore. Legal is managed by Best Business Solutions company.
However, quick search returns us a company providing virtual offices.
- Can you give us the real Streamity office address? Or does Streamity only have virtual office?
- Do you have a legal certificate proof of business good standing Singapore?
The team claims that their token isn't a security and can be purchased in any country. However, at the same time, their token has one of the most significant security element — they advertise the token as an investment that will bring profit in future on the 3rd page of their Russian White Paper.
If one sells a token to investors that can then be sold with profit (or loss) on the exchange market, then it is almost certainly a security. If one claims that token isn't a security yet it is an investment — one is clearly trying to fool the investors.
- Can you provide legal proof that STM token isn't a security?
Conclusion
We believe that a decentralized fiat-crypto exchange platform is necessary for todays market, however Streamity project in particular is too dependant on bank and payment services partnerships. Existing competitors with large client bases and market shares can easily integrate p2p smart-contract system and demolish the need in Streamity.
Streamity didn't gave the exact date but they promised to launch MVP before the start of the ICO. Main drawbacks covered in this review are the size of the platform promised and the lack of experience among existing team members. As usual, we hope that Streamity will timely answer all the questions marked bold in this review.
Special comment by Nikita Kolmogorov:
It's hard to add anything to the information covered in the review so I'll just give you my opinion. Firstly, they promised a lot of unnecessary stuff — they could stop and focus at StreamDesk but kept going with promises and got to media, algo-trading, trading signals. Secondly, even though they technically have developers, none of them have relevant experience. Thirdly, even though Dmitry — cofounder — tried to resolve the conflicts in the official project's chat, he still didn't directly answer the most important questions, only tried to give very vague answers.
What do we have in the end? Enormous plans to conquer the Earth without any relevant experience. Personally, I would suggest you to keep out of this project. Streamity Team can believe in their dreams but it will be crushed by the harsh reality. Key factor for my opinion, if you're interested, was the lack of strong developers.
Authors say special Thanks to:
Nikita Kolmogorov — for support, team communication, smart-contract audit and editing.
Alexandr Arbuzov — for the team communication and information search help.
Golden Borodutch for the moral support :)
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