When you combine a great team, strategy, technology, product-to-market fit and track record of execution, you’ve got the ingredients for a great success. In reviewing a number of cryptocurrencies to include in our groups fund, part of my due diligence process involves making sure that cryptocurrency groups qualify in at least 4 out of 5 on this list:
- Team
- Strategy
- Technology
- Product-to-Market fit
- Track Record of Execution
When it comes to meeting the criteria above, there should be few exceptions. Fundamental questions arise around each of these points such as:
Team
How long have the team members known one another? Have they worked together in the past? If so, for what period of time and through what kinds of circumstances?
Strategy
Do they have a well thought out strategy? Is their strategy too similar to that of their competitors. Do they know who their competitors are?
Technology
Is their technology unique or hard to duplicate? Is their approach scalable? Do they have any ‘technical debt’?
Product-to-Market fit
Since most early cryptocurrency groups are operating with a whitepaper alone, you’ll most likely have to do you own product-to-market fit for them. If they have a working product, ask them to see any customer feedback they can share.
Track Record of Execution
Does the team or any of its members have a track record that shows they’ve accomplished or executed anything to completion in the past? If so, how was it received? What was the projects impact, level of innovation and creativity?
Here are 5 cryptocurrencies that meet most of the criteria mentioned above and that might also be worth positioning in sooner than later:
1. Qvolta
Qvolta is a global P2P exchange platform that allows users to quickly and easily convert cryptocurrencies into the fiat currencies, and vice versa. We have created Qvolta as a direct response to a huge market problem that exists in the global cryptocurrencies market. In the majority of countries around the world individuals are not able to quickly (within 5–10 minutes) and conveniently convert cryptocurrencies into fiat money.
While some exchange platforms are available, most lack the scale and ofer unsophisticated tech solutions, that lack security and are challenging and complicated to use. in contrast, Qvolta will provide individuals a reliable and convenient platform to quickly buy or sell cryptocurrencies with help of the most popular payment methods for the fiat currencies available in the country of his/her residence. Initially two cryptocurrencies will be available for the exchange — Bitcoin and Ethereum, with later envisioned addition of Monero and other altcoins. (website)
2. Starmine AI
Starmine is a robust and highly scalable platform for constructing, trading and exchanging advanced algorithmically generated on-demand datasets for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts. Datasets remain at the core of most advances in ML and Al. A dataset is typically made up of rows and columns, similar to an organized matrix or spreadsheet. Specifically, columns contain features along with continuously valued attributes or scores. These features and their scored attributes are stored as ‘supercolumns’ and can be automatically engineered, traded or exchanged by machines without human intervention. This can also be done with full anonymity using Starmine tokens to execute and transact smart contracts where each dataset or each individual feature column in any dataset can be treated as a tradable store of value which is transacted between machines or humans.
Starmine AI supports 200+ enterprise data customers for unsupervised machine learning, artificial intelligence, advanced pattern recognition, context-controlled clustering, hidden relationship discovery or visualization for the Financial Markets (Stocks, Cryptocurrencies, Options, ETFs), Life Sciences/Drug Discovery, Entertainment, Automotive, Travel, Energy, Education, Advertising etc. (website)
3. Paypie
PayPie brings ultimate trust and transparency to the financial markets by introducing the world’s first credit risk assessment based on blockchain accounting. The platform challenges Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion’s status quo by assessing businesses credit risk profiles through a built-in algorithm that accounts 150 data points from live financial data hashed on the Ethereum blockchain. PayPie is a faster, safer, and smart contract-powered credit scoring and lending platform for banks, lenders, and invoice factoring companies.
The platform solves the problems of fraud and inconsistencies which exist in isolated accounting systems by allowing for real-time audit and analysis of financial statements on the blockchain. This analysis will be done using a decentralized single ledger approach and will consider the all-time historical accounting information of participating businesses to safeguard and transform the way credit risk is assessed by lenders, investors, and other financial institutions. All inputs will be bound to the blockchain in a triple entry accounting structure, which will secure the entire transaction-checking process generating reliable and unbiased data. (website)
Science wants to use their expertise at company building to help select blockchain entrepreneurs in their efforts to become the software giants of the next century. They believe token holders should benefit from access to a stream of new tokens from Science’s carefully incubated portfolio companies. In turn, investors should as a result, participate in any upside from ownership of the Science Tokens, as the proceeds from dispositions of portfolio companies are anticipated to be used to repurchase those tokens via a buyback program. (website)
5. Papyrus
Papyrus is a fully comprehensive and highly scalable decentralized ecosystem for digital advertising which radically improves programmatic advertising stack to provide efficient, transparent and mutually beneficial environment for users, publishers, advertisers and decentralized application (dApp) developers using blockchain architecture. (website)
There’s a part of the due diligence process that’s more of an art than a science. It’s when you include another valuable but less tangible component, namely the Story. There was once a time when our fund was solely focused on traditional stocks and some of those were called ‘story stocks’, but that is of course, a another story. Happy crypto trading!
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