Hi there investors and welcome to this third installment of our ICO review series brought to you by Dean (@deanliu) and Dan (@tradealert), today we're looking at an exciting project called Futourist.
In a Nutshell.
Futourist is:
"The first block-chain based review platform that rewards you for your content. You create reviews, share and get paid".
Futourist intends to tap into the fast growing content industry, which is expected to be worth more than US $313 billion by the year 2019.
Their goal is to create a thriving ecosystem where businesses, content creators, curators and advertisers can mutually benefit and use the network to exchange value seamlessly via the platform's native currency: the FTR token.
Users are incentivized to create content through contests. A contest is a content driven campaign launched by a business participating on the platform or by the platform (Futourist) itself. Futourist can enable multiple contests at the same time.
Each contest has a budget (expressed in FTR tokens) which will be allocated to reward content creators for creating reviews. The reviews will then be monitored by a community of curators who can upvote the good and flag the spamming. The more upvotes a review creator gets, the more "power" they can accumulate and in turn the more valuable (and profitable) their contribution to the community becomes in the form of more content creation or more curation work.
You can think of the project as a cross between Yelp (reviews) and Steemit (rewards).
The problem Futourist is trying to solve is the following:
"At the moment the majority of users do not receive any kind of payment for creating content on the most popular review websites. Those reviews are converted into revenue, while users are not paid. We are here to change that! We will give you the power and the value of your content!"
Futourist is currently being developed on top of the Ethereum blockchain and plans on having an ICO on the 15th of February.
The purpose of this article is to try to determine whether or not the team behind Futourist can actually deliver on this vision. We'll first look at the team (I), the product (II) and the role of the blockchain in the project (III) before giving you our conclusion (IV).
I - The Team.
The co-founders of the start-up are three long-time friends from Slovenia. The CEO, Ziga Lukša, is also the founder and former head of Sailbrace an international brand of fashionable anchor bracelets who has proven experience in brand development and business building.
Futourist's core technical team is composed of a CTO, 2 full stack developers, a front-end developer and an A.I. specialist with experience working on A.I. for the United Nations. This team is led by Nino Kutnjak, a web developer with over 10 years of experience ranging from IT integrations, servers and client level to pure development. Nino is also very active on the project's Telegram channel.
Interestingly, the team is advised by Tim M. Zagar, the CEO of ICONOMI which is one of the earliest digital asset management platform built on the Ethereum blockchain and a very successful blockchain fin-tech company in Slovenia.
The team is also partnered with CoFound.it, a Slovenian VC platform with international reach responsible for launching many successful ICOs such as MAECENAS or SANTIMENT. Futourist initially planned to have its ICO through the CoFound.it platform but ultimately decided to crowdfund on its own. The two entities haven't severed ties though and CoFound.it is still involved in the project as an adviser.
Our impression is that the team is a good first look for the project and, given their experience, seems entirely capable of delivering on its vision. It's also worth noting that the project is being developed in Slovenia which is considered one of the friendliest countries in the world towards crypto currencies and blockchain innovation.
II-Product maturity and Competition.
Futourist's core proposition is to be a review dApp with a focus on video content (similar to Instagram Stories). Unlike many other projects built on Ethereum though, Futurist already have a working product to show for.
The Futourist dApp is being built on top of an existing platform called OpenHours. Open hours is "a hybrid service between Yelp and Tripadvisor that provides information about different businesses and services", the service has been in business for over 4 years now and already boasts a pretty solid network of users.
The first advantage of building on top of an existing app is that Futourist will be able to mine directly into Open Hour's user pool which spans over 20 countries and has nearly a million services and users in its database.
The second advantage is that Futourist gets to benefit from the expertise of the OpenHours dev team.Both start-ups are actually meant to merge soon under the Futourist umbrella.
As far as competition is concerned, Futourist's main competitors on the review app market will be giants like Google or Instagram but Futourist disposes of an unfair advantage over those two: its blockchain.
III- Blockchain role in the Project.
As we mentioned in the introduction, Futourist is based on the Ethereum blockchain and possess its own currency: the FTR tokens, a billion of which will be created during the ICO to provide liquidity to the platform's economy.
The question here is to determine why the blockchain was chosen by the developers and what value it adds to the project over traditional methods of storing data. After all, existing review apps like Yelp or TripAdvisor have been in business for over a decade without the help of a blockchain.
In the case of Futourist, the blockchain will be used to automate and secure an economy in which participants will issue and receive rewards in the form of FTR tokens for creating and curating reviews.
This economy is designed to be very inclusive and will involve many actors, ranging from businesses to content creators and advertisers, all of which will use the FTR token as a mean of exchange.
The in-built reward system for content creators is, in our opinion, the most attractive aspect of the Futourist project. First because the blockchain will allow the reward system to be trusted and auditable across the whole network. Second because it will remove the possibility of a central agent tampering with the reward pool (including Futourist itself). Finally because it provides a healthy incentive for the community to create good content in order to receive rewards.
However a reward system can only strive if it allows transparency and fairness; and that is in essence the reason behind the use of a blockchain.
If the reward will be distributed in a decentralized and transparent fashion, it's important to note that the content itself (reviews) will not be secured onto a blockchain (unlike Steemit for example) since the Ethereum network does not (yet?) allow for the storage of that much data. Instead, the content will be stored in traditional databases and subject to centralization which seems like a necessary compromise at this stage of development. It's worth wondering though if the project wouldn't be better suited for a more immediately scalable blockchain like Steem or EOS.
Despite this minor caveat, it seems like the scope of the project mostly justifies the use of a blockchain.
IV- The Community.
Futourist community is still small but it's likely this number will grow quickly once the app rolls out and the word of mouth starts spreading. Their telegram channel currently has around 800 members and the devs are responsive and eager to answers the questions of potential investors.
The team seems to take community building seriously as the crowdsale webpage indicates that 45% of the tokens will be reserved for this purpose with possibility to audit the management of this reserve via the blockchain.
V- Conclusion.
Futourist is an ambitious project which benefits from the experience of a stellar development and advisory team and strong economic principles. The community around the project, though small is enthusiastic and the project is ideally developed in a country favorable to crypto and blockchain innovation.
In our opinion this project deserves your full attention.
To learn more about Futourist, you can head over to their website to read their whitepaper or get to know more about their soon-coming ICO.
So that's it for today folks and we hope you've learned something new, don't forget to re-steem, upvote and follow @tradealert and @deanliu if you like our featured content.
Cheers,
Dan & Dean.