Author: Alphan Maina (Page 4)

Online gambling and betting suffers from centralization and a lack of transparency. You can’t tell whether the games are rigged or not, to the benefit of the service owners. Here would come in the Blockchain, which provides a tamper-proof, honest, verifiable and auditable service. Trust would come first, at last. However, the current available solutions are still in their infancy and do not offer satisfactory performance. They’re plagued by slow speeds and long downtimes. MyOddz, an ICO project, proposes a P2P betting platform with raffle, poker, bingo, casino games and much more.

MyOddz ICO Description

MyOddz.bet platform promises zero downtime, full verification and auditability through decentralized Smart Contracts implemented on the Ethereum blockchain. Traditional casino games such as Craps, Roulette, Slots, Poker, Dice, Coin Flip and Bingo will be available on the platform. The company also aims to develop its own proprietary games with unique design. Plans to alleviate slow transaction speed include using the Raiden network and established sports results APIs.

As usual, the ERC20 tokens will be distributed in an ICO crowdsale. Named ODDZ, it will enable holders to claim a share of profits proportionate to the number of ODDZ tokens held in wallets once a quarter. 85% of total profits will be shared, 0.25% will be donated to myetherwallet.com. The rest will be spent on marketing and various company needs. ODDZ will be available on exchanges after the crowdsale ends.

Once tokens are distributed, profits will be shared on first quarter after launch. When an initial period of 3 years ends, voting tokens will be airdropped via smart contract to each individual wallet. With them, you’ll be able to vote whether MyOddz should move to a model where 99.75% of all future profit will be distributed to token holders, or whether should the 14.75% profit to the house time should be extended. Announcements about all of these events will be made on social media beforehand.

The MyOddz ICO Team

I’ll make this clear, the whole presentation of MyOddz is unprofessional. The whitepaper  and the website are littered with spelling errors, unnecessary whitespaces and poor punctuation. Team presentation is no different. Nevertheless, I’m getting a honest vibe from these people. Not a group trying to dupe you into yet another pyramid scheme. Adding a husky dog to their team roster is certainly a lighthearted, funny touch. Aside from that, there’s nothing remarkable about the collective, except Marvin Beaver, who composed music for FIFA 99, Wipeout and Need For Speed. The CEO has 20 years of experience, but there is no list of the successes he claims to have. I don’t doubt there are some, but how can I know if they’re not spoken about? Website and team page could use an overhaul.

Social Presence, Summary

What strikes me the most is the rough form of this ICO. It looks like an unfinished work. There is no roadmap, but the whitepaper claims that there will be one soon. Team has a graphics designer with over 15 years of experience, yet the website looks very plain, and documents are text-only. You might say to not judge a book by its cover, but their Facebook page, or what I believe to be their fanpage, has merely 40 likes. And there is another betting related page called MyOddz with 35 likes. I think that speaks for itself. More money, time and work needs to be put into this project in order for it to be presentable. Simply, MyOddz is not ready.

The IoT, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology booms are very lucrative. Some institutions, such as Maverick Research, believe that these solutions, in addition with Artificial Intelligence, will replace today’s centralized platforms and business models. Demand for such products is outpacing their production. Market for blockchain is expected to exceed $3.1 trillion by 2030. There isn’t enough developers to meet the needs of the market. Crowd Machine’s App Studio will make it quicker and cheaper to create apps, no programming knowledge needed. Goal of this ICO is to create the Crowd Computer, a global, decentralized app execution engine, which would include a peer-to-peer network of Crowd Virtual Machines (“CVM”), that makes it easy for anyone with an idea to develop blockchain apps.

Description of Crowd Machine ICO

In addition to the aforementioned App Studio, Crowd Machine will allow to share the created apps via a Crowd Share repository, a GitHub-like system that can make it easier for developers to monetize their work. The lengthy whitepaper explores each service offered by the ICO in depth, making points about security and the current market situation. It can be a tough read, especially for someone not acquainted with the technologies touched upon in the document.

Regarding the token itself, I’ve had a hard time finding information about the sale. It turns out that it will begin on 21th February 2018. The token is named CMT. Price will be around 6000 CMT per ETH, with BTC payments accepted in addition to ETH. A presale discount will be available, and will amount to 60% to 70% The market cap is quite huge, and in my opinion there is absolutely no need for such a cap. It’s set at $200 million soft, $338 million hard. What makes me suspicious is that there is absolutely no description of how funds will be allocated post-sale. There no information about how CMT tokens will be converted into fiat or ETH, and the road map doesn’t include plans to list tokens on cryptocurrency exchanges.

 Machine Team

Apparently, this project has 27 employees. However, I can only see resumes for 11 of them. There are no LinkedIn links on the website and I had to conduct a Google search to see what’s their work history. The CEO has his LinkedIn account deactivated. From the little information I’ve gathered, the team is solid, with experience in blockchain and cryptocurrency. But this is not enough. Crowd Machine lists their competitors: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Google. The company is trying to bite off more than they can chew. I don’t believe that a team of twenty-seven members can compete with these giants.

Crowd Machine Media Presence, Summary

Not much remains to be said about Crowd Machine. Less that 500 likes on Facebook, only a few on Twitter. Under five hundred Telegram members. A four-page thread on bitcointalk.org. The only thing of note is that the CEO spoke at various blockchain and cryptocurrency related expos.

In my eyes, the project is underdeveloped. Reading the whitepaper made me feel that the ideas presented need to be fleshed out more in order to have a chance with the aforementioned industry titans. There is no real-life application demonstration for the key aspect of this project, Crowd App Studio. For Crow Machine to become successful, they need to fix all these glaring issues. A great concept isn’t enough to get to the top. I’d invest only if the ICO gets a total makeover.