CoinSpectator Blog

Six interesting ERC20 projects to invest in right now

In the last few months our editorial team have been flooded with pitches from a variety of token based startups. We’ve read white papers on everything from blatant scams through to fairytale ideas and everything in between.

As an investor it can be hard to cut through all this clutter and find the next big token, especially one that will make a good return on your investment. This is getting considerably harder with scammers becoming more creative when their marketing techniques and ideas.

That said every so often we do come across innovative blockchain projects that genuinely fix a problem and are set to revolutionise their respective industry.

Our team have researched six promising ERC20 tokens backed startups we think will make great investments.

HelloGold

HelloGold is not a Blockchain firm you might be familiar with, despite the company raising just over 17,000 Ether in a token sale earlier this year.

The project aims to simplify the purchase and management of Gold through a smartphone app for low to medium income customers based in poorer parts of the world.

Built on the Ethereum blockchain the project helps do what traditional gold investing cannot – it provides greater transparency and security for gold owners and verifies the amount of gold being held by each person whilst cross-checking with daily gold list custodians who physically store the gold in a fully insured vault in Singapore.

Why is this important? It means every gram of gold only has one owner and is completely traceable.

HelloGold have already delivered on many fronts. Their app is already available to download on Google Play and gold purchase trails are already unddrway in Malaysia.

They have also recently partnered with blockchain startup Aeon credit who have agreed to provide financing to customers at competitive rates.

It’s the first certified Shariah compliant online gold platform in the world, during the token sale they attracted investment from heavyweight venture-capital firm Fenbushi Capital with Bo Shen from the firm also joining the advisory board.

As for the team it includes CEO Robin Lee who is the former CFO of the World Gold Council with a strong background in financial roles.

Roger Ward also has vast experience working in the gold industry, having most recently worked at the World Gold Council developing strategy and managing complex projects in London. Other team members have come from roles at the Royal Bank Scotland Group, Wolff Olins PLC, AEON Group and Wykeen Seet was the VP at Bangkok Bank in Thailand.
At the time of writing one HelloGold (HGT) costs $0.008512, making it a bargain.
It is currently trading on EtherDelta, HitBTC and Coss.

https://www.hellogold.com/

Cindicator

Cindicator is a decentralised analytics platform powered by ‘hybrid’ intelligence. The project raised a cool 55,569 Ether in the token sale earlier this year with over 4,000 participants.

Cindicator uses the wisdom of the crowd to determine answers to market changes. By aggregating opinions from a wide range of forecasters in different countries with different professional backgrounds, personal experience etc the platform can accurately quantify and provide accurate predictions when hedging trades.

The team behind Cindicator is what makes it a very promising token to watch. Names include Charlie Shrem COO at Jaxx, who is also a founder of the Bitcoin Foundation, Anthony Diiorio Founder at Jaxx and Ethereum, Marcus Killick Chairman of the Gibraltar Stock Exchange, Evan Cheng Director of Engineering at Facebook, Anton Govor head of strategy at Moscow Exchange, CFO and co-founder of changelly Konstantin Gladych.

The current price of one CND token is a steal at $0.016822. Trading is taking place on both HitBTC and Mercatox.

https://cindicator.com/

VeChain

Established two years ago in Singapore VeChain is a product management platform built on the Ethereum Blockchain. They aim to revolutionise how products are processed through the supply chain by simplifying how manufacturers manage, collect and share data with vendors and consumers.

VeChain is already making waves by securing some very promising partnerships. Recently they were accepted into an incubation program launched by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). They have also partnered with the world’s largest freight company, Kuehne & Nagel. The firm has a yearly revenue of around $21 billion. VeChain will help smartify parcels with chips linked to data held on the Blockchain to make tracking, managing and global collaboration more efficient.

VEN token is currently trading on Binance, Liqui, HitBtc, Coss, OpenLedger DEX, Kucoin and EtherDelta at $0.25 per token.

https://www.vechain.com/

Tronix

Beijing-based blockchain startup TRON is a protocol for the global digital entertainment industry. It provides developers with the infrastructure for app development and smart networks which in layman’s terms means TRON is developing a worldwide free content entertainment system built on the blockchain which will enable users to publish, store and own media in a decentralised manner.

Tron’s founder Justin Sun is no stranger to the entertainment industry and was named in Forbe’s China 2015, 30 under 30.

He was also a former Chief Representative at Ripple and has since turned Peiwo, a streaming app into the leading live-streaming app in China. He will also bring the apps 10 million active userbase into the TRON ecosystem giving the project a solid user base from the get go.

Other members of the team include Jihan WU, CEO of Bitmain, Shuoji Zhou, partner of FBG Capital, Chaoyong Wang and founder of ChinaEquity Group.

The price of one TRX is currently $0.001956 and can be purchased on Binance, Liqui, Gatecoin, Mercatox, HitBtc and EtherDelta.

https://tronlab.com/

Request Network

Fin-tech firm Request Network has made waves in the last couple of months when it raised a cool $33,600,000 in their initial coin offering. Unlike many Blockchain firms they were actually founded in 2015 and started receiving support very early on from ING bank. Request Network aims to become a decentralised network for payment requests allowing businesses or anyone for that matter to request monies from just about anywhere. It is looking to position itself as a payment provider like paypal, stripe etc with one of its main uses being invoice management on a distributed ledger.

Notably Request Network was the first ICO to be incubated by the well known American-based seed accelerator YCombinator.

Not only is Request Network utilising the Ethereum Blockchain but also other technologies including Civic, Aragon and 0x. The team behind Request Network also have great experience in the finance industry having founded money transfer service Moneytis. Gilles Fedak co-founder of iEx.ec also sites on the advisory board.

As blockchain starts being implemented into mainstream services it is crucial that tools and services are available to simplify and automate migration from traditional billing and invoicing systems through to blockchain based approaches. We Request.Network will be that bridge.

Request Network is trading at $0.054420 per REQ token on Binance, Kucoin, Liqui, Gate.io, EtherDelta, Mercatox and IDEX.

https://request.network/

Utrust

Similar to Request.Network and dubbed the “payments platform of the future” Utrust aims to take the benefits of PayPal and weave them in to Blockchain technology to create the ultimate online payment gateway that will protect buyers with mediation and sellers.

Utrust is a member of the Crypto Valley Association and is also supported by the Swiss government.
The team behind Utrust come from a variety of backgrounds including finance, banking, UX and cyber security.

The price of one Utrust token is just 6.5 cents through the crowdsale and is expected to be trading on EtherDelta very soon.

https://utrust.io/

Start-up from the heart of Berlin has pioneered decentralized mobile mining by combining blockchain with regenerative energy

Envion AG has created a technology for the first truly mobile data-center that uses low-priced local energy to mine a broad spectrum of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.). By harvesting locally available clean energy right at the source, envion can operate at lower costs than competitors and at the same time reduces the CO2 footprint of the blockchain industry. Envion aims at decentralizing the highly-concentrated mining market (China holds 80% in Bitcoin mining) and at bringing control of the market back to the users. That’s why envion gives 100% of its mining profits back to its community.

Current challenges in the energy and blockchain industries

The blockchain industry is suffering from an ever-increasing energy demand. This can mainly be explained by the fact that transactions take up high amounts of mostly fossil energy. At the same time, Envion sees an ever-increasing production of clean regenerative energy, which frequently gets lost due to maxed out energy grids. This results in locally available excess energy, as solar power plants produce overcapacities. These overcapacities can now efficiently be used by envion’s innovative mobile mining units.

Envion’s solutions

Envion has developed fully automated (“industry 4.0”), mobile mining units (MMU) inside standardized intermodal shipping containers that can be shipped to virtually any location in the world within days or weeks, decentralizing the blockchain infrastructure. Envion mobile mining units are designed and built to operate at remote locations near energy sources such as solar plants, wind turbines or hydropower plants. This allows envion to make use of energy overcapacities in a profitable setting. The mobility of the MMU furthermore allows for targeted placement of the units at sites requiring thermal energy and can be used for heating. This way, envion recycles energy consumed in the MMU for external heating purposes in buildings or greenhouses and achieves revolutionarily low electricity prices.

Envion’s MMUs can be integrated into a smart grid and flexibly move energy demand closer to energy supply and hence, take the burden off the grid.

Investment opportunities

Envion’s ambitious goal is to have the lowest cost structure in the blockchain mining industry. By combining GPU-based mining with ASIC mining, investors in EVN tokens receive a 161% ROI after administrative deductions, according to envion’s whitepaper. Its unique position as the only truly mobile mining operation combined with a tested, optimized and streamlined technology puts them among the top players, even in this highly competitive market – but with considerably lower risks involved. The key aspect here is that, following a community-approach, 100% of mining profits will directly go to the EVN token holder community. 75% of this will be distributed to token holders on a weekly basis, the remaining 25% will be re-invested in MMUs to keep on growing the profits for the community. The pioneering company does not stop here, however, they construct and operate mobile mining units for third party operations as well. This means that third party investors acquire envion hardware, while 35% of these profits go directly to EVN token holders.

Altogether this looks like the best way to invest into the high dividend blockchain industry and at the same time minimize risks as envion is not dependent on a single market player.

The investment period (ICO) starts Dec. 1st, 2017. Visit www.envion.org for more information.

We’re are very excited to announce that Krypton Capital, a blockchain specialized investment fund, has decided to invest heavily and partner up with Gladius. Additionally they have made a large purchase of tokens. Their large investment will help us develop our technology in a much quicker time frame.

Krypton Capital has become a part of the Gladius team and long-term strategic growth partner. Additionally they will be providing Gladius with a number of key resources to help with company growth including:

• Cybersecurity experts well versed in the DDoS and CDN industries
• Development team experienced with blockchain solutions
• Global data centers with extremely high traffic and throughput
• Connections to large enterprises and national governments for future partnerships

Founder and CEO of Krypton Capital, Ilan Tzorya says that “This is one of our best investments, we believe in the team and the product. Gladius utilizes the Blockchain as solution for serious online problem.”

This deal marks a key milestone in the Gladius journey and the future is looking brighter than ever before. With all of the resources Krypton is bringing to the table, our project is gaining a significant edge in the industry.

And as a reminder, the Gladius token sale is currently in presale phase, with the public presale beginning November 24th and a hardcap of 12.5M. Be sure to register now for the whitelist!

11 November 2017, Zug Switzerland highly anticipated ICO, trade.io announced it has licensed advanced technology from Modulus, a leading provider of financial technology products for over 20 years. Modulus has provided its services to The Nasdaq Stock Market, Microsoft, and Google, amongst many other top names, in addition to millions of individual investors and traders around the world.

The arrangement provides trade.io the ability to tap into Modulus’ expertise and innovative technology as it completes the build out of its platform & exchange. From a Modulus standpoint, it allows them to support trade.io’s team which includes expertise in blockchain & artificial intelligence.

Richard Gardner, Founder & CEO of Modulus on the partnership, “The general trend in the financial industry is undoubtedly moving towards blockchain technology. We were impressed with trade.io’s experience and approach in blockchain, artificial intelligence, and high performance computing, all of which align with the core competencies of Modulus.”

Charles Voltron, Chief Technology Officer at trade.io commented, “In working with Modulus previously on a few projects, I can vouch for the fact they are best of breed in terms of financial
technology and innovation, and our entire development team is excited to be working with their company going forward” Voltron concluded, “While blockchain development in finance has grown by leaps and bounds, we’re still in its infancy stage, and trade.io is becoming more and more one of the preeminent firms in this space.”

trade.io’s pre-ICO has begun and will run until November 25th, with the ICO starting November 28th until December 15th. Visit trade.io to sign up for more information.

“Everyone wants to fund promising companies. DropDeck wants to remove the barriers that keep average funders away from the greatest opportunities,” said the CEO Alon Vo, “There are a lot of existing platforms for you to do that, but we want to build your favorite one. DropDeck is the one-stop shop that changes the way people fund companies worldwide.”

More and more companies are running ICOs, mostly operating overseas. Doing due diligence and verifying sources can be challenging. Some platforms rate and rank ICOs, but how the ratings are made, what they are based on, and by whom are often a blackbox. DropDeck seeks to fix this problem..

DropDeck prioritizes inclusion and decentralizes the funding process to the extreme. Anyone can participate in funding, searching for promising companies, evaluating people, performing due diligence, and enforcing repayment. A.I. algorithms are utilized to rate and rank all participants. The consensus mechanism makes sure only the best performing ones are eligible for participation and reward. Token rewards and smart contracts incentivize all participants to do their best to fund companies and reward funders. In the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition, DropDeck earned recognition and support from world-class AI experts, and made findings in complementing AI applications with blockchain features.

The market for funding ICOs, startups, and SMEs is over $300 billion. As capital flows into the DropDeck economy, the token value will increase exponentially. Up to half of the revenue in tokens will be burned, increasing the token value by depleting the total supply. Also the team and advisors have been working with 15 exchanges to guarantee token liquidity.

After substantial interest, DropDeck quickly sold out the private sales with no marketing, raising 3,300 ETH.

To participate in the Whitelist Presale and Crowdsale, supporters are required to register by November 20th (13:00 UTC) at https://DropDeck.io/whitelist.

Please stay tuned on Bitcointalk ANN Thread, Bounty Campaign, Medium, Telegram, Twitter or Facebook, and register for our newsletter on DropDeck.io.

Official links:
– Official Website: https://DropDeck.io
– Official Whitelist: https://DropDeck.io/whitelist
– Official Blog: https://medium.com/dropdeck
– Official Telegram Channel: https://t.me/dropdeck
– Official Telegram Supergroup: https://t.me/joinchat/FkbmT0JJD2sOsL79fiAlQg
– Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/dropdeckio
– Official Facebook: https://facebook.com/dropdeck
– Official Bitcointalk ANN Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2255643
– Official Bounty campaign: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2275147
– Official Discord: https://discord.gg/XDc785E
– Official Kakaotalk: https://open.kakao.com/o/gChBCmC

White Papers
– English: https://bit.ly/DDWPver2
– Chinese: https://bit.ly/DDWPChinese
– Korean: https://bit.ly/DDWPKorean
– Spanish: https://bit.ly/DDWPSpanish
– Russian: https://bit.ly/DDWPRussian
– Vietnamese: https://bit.ly/DDWPVNese
– Turkish: https://bit.ly/DDWPTurkish

—-(End of Press Release)

MEDIA CONTACT
NAME: Alon Vo
EMAIL: alon@dropdeck.io / team@dropdeck.io
Telegram: alonmust

• Bitcoin was scheduled to upgrade mid November following SegWit2x proposal
• Major bitcoin developers dropped their support for the upgrade
• Developers behind SegWit2x announced today they are calling off plans

The Bitcoin block size increase has been suspended after the organisers behind the scaling proposal called off the attempt earlier today.

The news surged Bitcoin to a record high of $7737 with altcoins also seeing a rise in price.

Mike Belshe, the CEO of BitGo who was one of the leaders of the SegWit2x proposal announced today that the proceeding could divide the Bitcoin community and set back its growth.

“Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x.”

You can read the full email here.

Segwit2x gained early support from startups and mining pools who seeked to increase the block size this month.

The email was also signed by other notable figures pushing for Swgwit2x – Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik
Voorhees.

Although the increase has been halted for now, the group aims to increase the block size at a later date with more support.

Did you miss the news as it broke? Monitor the Bitcoin news as it happens using our real-time app.

Hello Gold is a Shariah compliant gold investment app that allows anyone to buy and sell Gold hassle free. Its built on the Ethereum Blockchain with an aim to help the millions of low to medium income people from emerging countries save in Gold as apposed to their unstable local currency.

We spoke with Robin Lee, the CEO of HelloGold(former CFO of the World Gold Council) to find out more since the successful token sale which raised 17,149 ETH.

---

Can you briefly explain what HelloGold is?

“The amount of money in a person’s wallet should not be a barrier to his ability to access financial products that the rich enjoy. HelloGold wants to remove affordability and accessibility from the equation through the democratisation and digitisation of financial saving and loan products using real assets starting with gold” Robin Lee CEO HelloGold.

HelloGold has created an easy way for mass market customers to preserve their wealth by buying gold through a secure mobile app

How do customers purchase Gold, do they have to buy HelloGold tokens? Or only in RM1?

HelloGold is currently only available in the Malaysian market – we have plans to expand in 2018. For our customers, there are 2 ways to buy gold:

HelloGold app customers can log in and buy gold 24/7 once they have cleared the KYC process and topped up the app with cash using online banking. Prices track global market spot price and are updated every 5 minutes throughout the day. App customers can buy from as little as RM1. Customers buy, store and sell the gold which is physically vaulted down in Singapore. They can also gift the gold to another account holder, have the gold physically delivered or take a collateralised loan against the gold.

For people that are comfortable using crypto currency, HelloGold has recently launched our gold-backed token (GBT). Each GBT is fully backed by 1g of PAMP 99.99% investment grade gold vaulted in Singapore. GBTs will be available for purchase directly from HelloGold over the next few months to enable us to gauge demand

Why is Blockchain technology needed for buying Gold? What benefits does it provide to the consumer?

HelloGold uses blockchain technology to provide 3 benefits:

Transparency

By publishing the smart contracts and incorporating a blockchain explorer (transaction navigator), it will be possible to review the full list of anonymised transactions and calculate the amount of gold that HelloGold is holding on behalf of customers. This, in turn, can be compared not only to the amount of gold published in the customer gold list (anonymised) but also against the records managed by our custodian.

Security

HelloGold has incorporated several security mechanisms to protect customer accounts. All connections are encrypted using HTTPS. Internal API calls between the core components are secured with additional secret keys and firewall rules that limit interactions between trusted systems. For external facing APIs, for example APIs used by our mobile application, the API calls are further secured with a combination of industry standard OAUTH and secure tokens for each mobile device. The addition of a distributed record adds a further level of security from internal and external attempts to alter account data without leaving an audit trail. The smart contracts are being developed with best practices in mind following constant review of public audit documents. This should ensure that customer accounts are true and accurate.

Access

In addition, the Ethereum smart contracts enable HelloGold to create GBT, tradeable on any exchange which accepts them.With HGF’s gold-backed token everyone will only need the equivalent of a fraction of a dollar to save through gold (GBT works to 18dp). This will make the HelloGold platform available to everyone anywhere in the world

Do you think HelloGold will change how we buy gold in the future?

We are only at the start of our journey to impact the lives of the underserved and unbanked in emerging economies. Since our public launch in April, HelloGold has changed the way for over 4,000 customers when it comes to wealth preservation by providing a modern, convenient and cost efficient access to gold.

We have ambitious plans to expand the use of the product with both new partners and into new markets, to change how more people are able to access affordable financial products that were previously only accessible to the wealthy

Can you share any future plans or partnerships ?

We outlined our expansion plans in the whitepaper that we wrote for the recent token sale, full details can be found there.

In short, HelloGold plans to expand into new geographic markets, specifically Thailand, China, Indonesia and Philippines plus expand the product with new features/technology, asset classes (eg silver/platinum), partners which will enable us to serve new customer segments.

We are also increasingly approached by potential partners in other regions like the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as Africa to consider expansion into those markets.

Who’s your target market for the app?

The ultimate customers of HelloGold’s platform, are those are not well served by their existing financial institutions and the unbanked. Financial institutions already provide a variety of easy ways for the high net worth and mass affluent market segments to invest in assets like gold so that they can diversify risks at the portfolio level but they do not enable the less affluent customer the same access. HelloGold targets two key market segments: the consuming middle class and the emerging middle class. In ASEAN and China alone, these two groups comprise 55% of the total labour force of 814m people. They saved approx. $505b in 2016, of which we estimate that $212b was in cash deposits.

Why are you running HelloGold on the Ethereum Blockchain over other similar technologies ?

HelloGold is using Ethereum as it is currently the most widely accepted platform that offers all the benefits of a blockchain (full traceability, non-repudiability etc.) and multiple source language implementations that encourage integration. Ethereum will handle only the parts needing consensus, transparency and accountability. Other services will continue to be provided using existing technology.

HelloGold needs a transactional blockchain with a powerful system of smart contracts which have the ability to ensure that a transaction can combine with the results of previous transactions to provide auditable consistent results. To date, Ethereum is the only stable system that has achieved widespread adoption. The decades of experience of our senior development team tell us to avoid anything experimental to run a live system.

Will you be expanding into other metals such as Silver?

Yes. We intend to create other real asset-backed tokens over the next 12 months.

What are you looking forward to in the blockchain space in 2018?

In HelloGold we are looking forward to moving our app backend onto the Ethereum network to provide our customers with greater security and transparency over their gold holding.

HelloGold intends to add different real asset backed tokens and providing more support to entities which support the twin objectives of 1) increasing mass market use of blockchain technology and 2) democratising access for the underserved and unbanked to financial products through the digitisation of these products.

Overall, we think that the blockchain space will continue to develop and mature through 2018. If the pace of change is as rapid as 2017, the industry will be significantly different at this time next year

HelloGold App Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hellogold.app&hl=en

HelloGold App Store:

https://itunes.apple.com/my/app/hellogold/id1193095204

Pizza delivery restaurant chain Papa John’s now offers customers the option to pay using Bitcoin at their Manchester City Centre store.

The American based company operates as a franchise so it’s not yet clear if other franchisees are rolling out the new payment method but this is definitely a promising start.

This isn’t the first time Papa John’s and pizza made the headlines, back in 2010 a developer named Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two Pizzas in exchange for 10,000 Bitcoins which was worth just $25 at the time but at todays exchange rate $70 million dollars!

The price of one Bitcoin is now around $7,000 or £5411.

If you fancy paying for your next Margarita in Bitcoin then head down to Papa John’s on Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN.