Symbol: PST
Crowdsale opening date: 25 July 2017
Crowdsale closing date: 25 Aug 2017
Platform for Fundraiser: Ethereum
Country of Incorporation: Canada
My View
Personally, their white paper was unimpressive. Half of their paper wanted to explain why google is bad and the rest of the paper talked about the future decision making of their platform to a “imaginary” community. They stressed more on building their company, foundation and community hence their true value proposition was lost. Also, the github link in their white paper though 3 years old was empty. Much of their whitepaper seemed to be a copy of many other ICO whitepapers and had very little to offer in form of original technical innovation. The best they can come up was a beta search tool which again has Google as the default search engine packed with additional advertisements on top of what other websites offer and force users to get engaged for earning BAT. Which to me seems to be a non-starter from the beginning. My advice to a considerate investor in the post SEC directive is to be careful of investing in this project as their smart contract is not even public for security review and also they have a weak value proposition.
Value Proposition for Investors
Given the current crackdown on the ICOs, this token will have a hard time even for speculative buying. If ever they have any kind of POC you may get a chance to use the PST tokens. And the ideal place ever to trade these tokens may be decentralized exchanges but for that you must access exchange like EtherDelta (again it depends as to when their tokens will be listed there). The revenue structure explained in their ICO where they share some of the revenue in form of PST tokens may make PST tokens a security and hence it become a legal quagmire for exchanges like Kraken and Polonix to list such securities without a license from SEC.
Introduction
Presearch is building open, decentralized search engine which is an alternative search engine that is open, transparent, and that involves the community in product development, consensus and quality control. It rewards community members with Presearch Tokens (PSTs) for usage, contribution to, and promotion of the platform.
Tokensale
Maximum cap on crowdsale: 200,000,000 tokens
Total token supply: 1 billion (1,000,000,000)
5% sold in pre-sale 20% sold to early adopters
30% for future public sale
30% allocated for distribution to reward usage, contribution to, and promotion of the platform
15% retained by the dev, marketing and community teams
Standard: Ethereum ERC20 token
Purchase methods accepted: BTC and ETH
Analysis
Problem
The number of players (content producers, webmasters, marketers and businesses, organizations, etc.) in the internet ecosystem is all extremely crowded alongside that ramp, fighting to be seen, paying more than $50 billion per year for scraps of attention. While most users are happy to use Internet due to `free’ services, but just a handful of these services are responsible for the vast majority of usage. Many use Google’s search capability and may consider it a neutral resource that guides them to the most appropriate answers. They also have a vested interest in not developing better processes to prevent gaming of the system, and their automated algorithms are actually supplemented by human reviewers, which negates many of the claims to remain secretive to protect the quality of their results. In this whole process the players and the user community is left out in any key decision making on any changes in search algorithm having millions of $ impact on businesses and risk to user’s privacy.
Solution
The goal of this project is to build a community based concept of open, transparent and decentralized search results, where all stakeholders can help to confirm that platform is fair, to provide expected results, and create an ecosystem in which anyone can participate and incorporate Presearch into their workflows and business models.
Platform
Presearch will dedicate its time, energy and resources to get community consensus model right develop a framework for active participation in the decision-making and coding of their open search engine. Presearch will leverage its PST token (ERC20 Ethereum based token) to reward and incentivize the community to use, promote and contribute to the platform, enabling Members to benefit by using the system and to be rewarded for engaging with Sponsors, rather than being a product that is monetized by the search engine.
Key Features
- The Suggested Sponsors platform will enable businesses, organizations and individuals to reach group of open-minded web searchers with an innovative promotion at exactly the right time.
- An auction-based system will enable Sponsors to bid on placement using PSTs.
- Members will earn rewards for allowing themselves to be introduced to Suggested Sponsors and Engines.
- As open search movement grows, the organization will transition to a DAO that will serve as custodians for Presearch
Vision
Presearch wants to be a ground up, community movement, like Wikipedia with Human curation as an important strategy combined with scalable machine learning approaches. This curation and overall development of the platform will be incentivized with PST (Presearch Token) exchangeable tokens that reward participants’ efforts.
Initial Stage
In the beta release, which is more of a search tool than a search engine, the user can choose which engine they search from the Presearch interface. Google is the default option, minimizing switching costs for most users who already use Google. Users are exposed to alternative engines, including DuckDuckGo, social search engines, domain WHOIS engines and more.
Roadmap
Team
- Colin Pape — Project Lead
- Rob Calvert — Technical Lead
- Nolan Dubeau — Product Development Lead
- David Keefe — Lead Frontend Developer
- Corey Piitz — Senior Fullstack Engineer
Conclusion
Again, the team and advisors in the group are reputed and also I have one of my friends supporting their project. While their Phase 1 Search tool is unimpressive. Their Phase 2 Decentralized search engine has a great potential and should they raise enough funds and reach to the stage of phase 2, I hope they will have something interesting to offer. What a bit of skepticism and a bit of optimism with them luck.
p.s. Though the current SEC ruling may have some impact on this ICO being considered a Security. Though it is still open to interpretation.
Reference
Disclaimer: This is not investment or trading advice, always do your own independent research.
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