Disclaimer: I have nothing to gain from steering anyone any direction, nor am I affiliated with DopeCoin or Smoke Exchange.
Why “DopeCoin” and their team’s ICO “Smoke Exchange” will explode in 2018
First, let me give you a little background on DopeCoin’s founder.
Adam Howell, or Dopey as he is referred to by the DopeCoin community; created DopeCoin in 2014 with the goal of providing the Marijuana industry with innovative payment and advertising solutions.
Adam is an extremely successful entrepreneur who has been involved in 2 separate million dollar startups and has lived in 14 different countries.
What is DopeCoin?
DopeCoin has evolved since its introduction in 2014. Initially it was a Scrypt Proof of Work coin.
In Autumn of 2014 due to community suggestions, DOPE was turned into a hybrid ProofOfWork/ProofOfStake coin with a short ProofOfWork period and 10% ProofOfStake.
On January 17, 2017 Adam put together a new 6-man development team and rebranded the currency as DopeCoin Gold, changing the system to Scrypt ProofOfStakeV3 with 5% annual interest.
The current Circulating supply of DopeCoin is 116,845,228 and it has a Market Cap of $22,408,928 USD or 1,624 BTC.
DopeCoin is currently listed on 2 exchanges: Bittrex and Cryptopia.
The past year has been a huge success for this new DopeCoin Dev team as they have been drawing more attention than ever by announcing the Smoke Exchange ICO (we’ll get to that later) and the PayPal esque “CryptoBillings.com”
Crypto Billings is a crypto-currency payment gateway for e-commerce sites.
As of January 2nd, 2017: Crypto Billings is in its infancy as it currently only accepts DopeCoin. Crypto Billings is in the process of developing support for Bitcoin, Ripple, Litecoin, and Dash. The team is open to considering the addition of other popular cryptocurrencies but for now DOPE will remain the exclusive marijuana themed cryptocurrency supported.
Tokens from the Smoke Exchange (SMX) will also be supported when the advertising platform is launched.
This Payment gateway is being developed as a standalone product and as a tool to use for their Smoke Exchange Project.
Now Let’s talk about the Smoke Exchange.
An excerpt from the ICO’s white paper:
“The Smoke Exchange is a self-serve advertising platform for the marijuana industry. It will connect advertisers and publishers directly and make advertising opportunities readily available and affordable for cannabis businesses. Research indicates that the legal use of marijuana is on the rise globally, and statistics show a steady annual growth in the industry. However, the industry is prohibited from using traditional advertising platforms such as Google AdWords, Facebook, Taboola and Outbrain...”
The Smoke Exchange will operate strictly on crypto-currencies which will be internally converted to SMX (Smoke Exchange Tokens) which can then be used to exchange for ad space directly from a publisher. Deposits and payouts will be available in SMX, DopeCoin, BTC and ETH.
The DopeCoin Team has released the following roadmap for the first Quarter of 2018:
First is the further development of CryptoBillings.com by adding the rest of the accepted currencies.
Followed by the release of the beta version of Smoke Exchange which will be available for use for new advertisers and the general public.
Afterward, business development and customer acquisition will then become the main focus as the team will attempt to grow the platform.
THIS is why I believe in the success of the Smoke Exchange project:
There is an always increasing amount of statewide and countrywide marijuana legalization legislation. (Demand for this product is increasing)
Because Marijuana advertisers are not allowed to use the major advertising platforms, there is a huge platform void that needs to be filled for vendors to connect with their customers, build their brands, and unleash their massive marketing budgets.
The current alternative is hiring an ad agency; this is not only expensive, but also ineffective due to lack of traffic quality control.
Allowing advertisers to deal directly with publishers cuts out the middleman and lets advertisers accurately gauge the quality of traffic they will be receiving.
This project will benefit DopeCoin because advertisers and publishers who decide to pay or be paid in DopeCoin will receive a 10% bonus.
As I mentioned, the smoke exchange is currently in the ICO stage, which means you can purchase the tokens before they are available to trade on an exchange at a fraction of the speculated future value. My research and educated speculation says that DopeCoin and The Smoke Exchange will have an extremely successful 2018, which will mean the same for early investors...