APEX ICO
People sell their own data to companies they choose to. Data ownership passed to consumer. Makes data selling legal & with consent. More accurate data to improve customer experience so more effective for marketing. Good for both companies and users - removes the need for middlemen for data analysis (middlemen replaced with Al). APEX wants to give the power back to the consumers and cut the middlemen also in the process of making this industry more transparent and efficient in means of dollars. So the consumer controls everything but they also receive tokens/rewards the more they give permission to companies to use their data. Consumers will also get rewarded if they open the received messages from their preferred brands. Also if they click on the link of the message, they could also receive more rewards.
All kinds of personal data are being sold these days by big companies like Google, Alibaba, Facebook etc. These companies make huge profits while most people don't even know what's being sold about their private lives. The biggest problem might be that we don't even know what the 3rd parties will do with our private data and why they're paying such huge amounts for these data. APEX will try to solve this problem.
A big part of the advertising budget is wasted as the majority of the (potential) customers don't like the ads, look at them or don't even trust the banner ads.
COMPETITORS:
This looks like a competitor for Basic Attention Token (BAT), it's using the Brave browser and it's all about privacy. Also you can choose if companies/websites get to know your data or not, and they have an integrated wallet to pay your favorite youtubers.
LAW
- GDPR on may 25th 2018: consumer data laws, require consent and awareness, more privacy and tighter security. (includes EU).
- Japan and China also had similar recent laws in 2017.
Laws are indeed making it more difficult for businesses to acquire quality marketing and consumer data. These data are mostly also in centralized databases which have big security and privacy risks. No need for examples, there are scandals every couple of months of how consumer data is being hacked from big companies.
All these data businesses make a revenue of $ 2.8 trillion annually, which shows how big the market is and it will probably grow in the future.
APEX
For customers: designated app (ios & android) where you control your data, choose companies to share data with.
NEXUS:
For companies - a website: machine learning & al, target audience, data analysis, data collection, marketing automation. More accurate data. Example of the website.
• Need to verify id, if not, receive only 20% of the award (to promote data accuracy & loyalty).
• Neo-based so attracts the neo community too.
Partners:
• Alibaba cloud
• Neo
• Amazon web services
• Microsoft accelerator
• Oracle
• Microsoft azure
(imagine if google partners up with them)
We gotta admit, they have amazing partners!
TEAM:
(they have very relevant roles to what they're trying to achieve in their whitepaper)
- Ceo - Jimmy hu: Built internal marketing analytics for Microsoft.
- Tiger yang: internal data analytics at Microsoft.
- Richard wang: ali baba & microsoft - finance & machine learning
- Robert Xu : worked for ali baba for the analytics and personalisation. Master in statistics.
- RPX (red pulse) founder is on their advisors list.
The team looks quite experienced. Also I've never seen any blockchain company with so many advisors from so many successful projects. I almost have the feeling that they put everyone they greet as an advisor!
Made by Chinapex, apparently a huge company but only 270 followers on Twitter, but pretty big team.
App is released in 2018.
TOKENS
First partners and consumers who'll start using the app will get free tokens, not clear how much of the tokens yet. Consumers can cash out their tokens directly from the app.
APEX will also take 5% of all token transactions from the enterprises to make profit in order to ensure the further growth of APEX.
- Private pre-sale got 50% discount (not so fair to be honest)
- Public pre-sale had a minimum investment requirement of 1333$, so we can invest less with the actual ico.
- Main ico (crowdsale) is somewhere in January
1 NEO = 1,000 CPX (NEO's current price is 63$, but let's take an average of 65$ for simplicity)
65/1,000= $ 0,065 cents per CPX.
They don't mention the total token supply, so let's calculate it.
Private presale; $10 million at 50% discount, means $ 0,0375 per token.
10,000,000 / 0,0375 = 267 million tokens (rounded up from 266,66)
Public presale; $4 million at 20% discount, means $ 0,052 per token.
4,000,000 / 0,052 = 77 million tokens (rounded up from 76,9)
Crowdsale; $11 million at 0,065 (no discount)
11,000,000 / 0,065 = 170 million tokens (rounded up from 169)
Total tokens is 514 million approximately, might be a million less without the rounding offs.
Usually, the private presale investors are locked up for 6 months or 1 year with the tokens, to make sure that they won't dump it after the ICO. In this case, I didn't read anything about tokens being locked up. So they got 267 million tokens at 4 cents (rounded up), and we get 170 million tokens at 7 cents (rounded up). There is a possibility that the price will decrease if they dump it after the ICO, however, the probability is very small, as big private investors usually invest for the long term.
With APEX, only the bonus is locked.
HYPE
Apex has:
- 1600 followers on Twitter
- 4000 people in the telegram group
- Neo is an early investor (this might hype it up in the future when APEX is more popular)
- I've seen around 100 comments on 4 different reddit blogs which isn't that bad.
- Asked in 4 fb groups about this project, nobody answered. But most people answered with what they liked about other hyped ICOs.
In general, the hype might be less than desired.
Also, I’m not sure about how they would make this ico mainstream and make people use it because it doesn’t say anything about that in their whitepaper. Good idea but is it going to be widely adapted?
I can post more of my notes like this because I do prior research on ICO's before investing in them. Would you guys like that?