CloudMoolah — Game Payments & Distribution
Overview
- Total Supply: 500M MOO Tokens
- For Sale: 300M MOO Tokens
- ICO Price: USD$0.30 per MOO Token
- Soft Cap: USD$10M
- Hard Cap: USD$30M
- Pre-Sale Bonus: 50 ETH min 25% Bomus
- Public Sale: 01 March 2018–31 March 2018
Introduction
CloudMoolah is an intermediary that facilitates payments between game credit card companies and app developers. In South East Asia where the credit card penetration rate is less than 5%, and has actually declined since 2013 according to Asean Credit Card Ownership Index, CloudMoolah bridges the gap for the customers’ lack of access to credit cards for game developers.
The players servicing this industry with their own game credit cards are tech giants namely Amazon, GooglePlay, Samsung and Xiaomi. Off the shelf, these companies have their own pre-paid credit cards, CloudMoolah actually powers the others such as MOL Points (Money Online) and IAHGames to name a few.
Team
The team comprises of 3 co-founders, Benjamin C. (CFO/CIO), Jonathon Sze(COO) and Roland Ong (Chairman). Oddly enough, there is’nt a CEO position. Operating since 2016, the team stems mainly from IAHGames / game publishing background, with Benjamin, the CFO, with background in venture capital and private equity sectors.
The company has advisors of diverse profiles, C-level suites in each of their respective fields. I Would not go into detail in each advisor but would like to highlight Hal Bame is part of the advisor team who’s known to advise for other ICOs and was part of ESL, an early eSports company and Sony which can possibly help develop CloudMoolah’s roadmap and easier secure partnerships in the industry.
Developers
The project is’nt focused on their developers at this point in time, currently built on ERC-20 standards, there’s no highlight on any blockchain developers on their website or ANN thread, neither is there a CTO position on the team.
There is no technical specifications on the system architecture other than specifying MOO Tokens to be ERC-20 with the exception of a CloudMoolah Points (CMP) again another ERC-20 token which will be completed in a phase 3 of the development phase, due in 2020.
Finding experienced blockchain developers is proving extremely complicated for many projects, and is not necessarily a problem that money can solve with the current demand for blockchain developers, however a simple system might be sufficient for a blockchain use case as this.
Blockchain Application
In an industry where the go-to market timing can be less than 2 months from conceptualisation, developers often do not prioritise security and fraud. Game credits are often hacked resulting in loss of potential revenue and brand reputation, not to mention shortening the product shelf life.
With an immutable credit system, game credits potentially can no longer be hacked, this will however be solved only when CMP is being developed on the Ethereum Blockchain. Currently the intermediary solution is still MOO Tokens to swap with CMP on a centralised server which can be adjusted on the client side but MOO Tokens will be able to prevent fraud on the developer’s end for now.
Virtual goods marketplace is also something in the roadmap but not explained explicitly, perhaps a non-fungible asset, ERC-721 standard blockchain for storage and trading of virtual property. Personally I feel with CryptoKitties congesting the Ethereum Blockchain, this would’nt be a quick and easy to use system at the moment. Perhaps CloudMoolah would be in time to leverage Casper’s proof of stake speed to implement this when the time comes.
Market Analysis
With the large amount of gaming ICOs available in the market, CloudMoolah is uniquely positioned in between a game publishing and payments gateway solution while most gaming ICOs are focused on the gambling aspect.
Mobile gaming has always been on the rise and so is Southeast Asia with its ever growing mobile penetration, on track to grow at 20% CAGR, between 2015 and 2025. It is to note that due to Southeast Asia’s large and highly fragmented market that many Multinational Corporations have tried and failed to fully apply their business models or were not agile to adapt or had the network, most of these companies worked through distributors in many cases, i.e Blizzard and Asiasoft.
SEA seems like the core competency of the company being alongside tech giants which do not focus themselves or even sell their pre-paid credit cards in SEA.
Token Utility
MOO Tokens can be traded for CloudMoolah Points (CMP) which is the in-app game currency for gamers to spend in-game. Even though players can choose to still pay in fiat, using MOO Tokens as mode of purchase gives players up to 20% more CMP. MOO Tokens’ value are determined by market forces on the free market while CMP has a constant value of being pegged to 1 CMP = USD$0.01.
Developers are too paid with MOO Tokens (I’m assuming only for payments made by MOO Tokens), of which they can choose to cash out from the exchanges once it’s listed as they like.
Using Blockchain, CloudMoolah is able to eliminate chargebacks and reduce the risk of fraud. Eliminating these aspects, as an intermediary, CloudMoolah is able to reduce the charge to developers which can be as high as 30%.
Partnerships
Unity is a popular cross-platform game engine platform of popular games such as Pokemon GO, Assassin’s Creed and Super Mario Run. It’s the platform of choice when developers want to publish their apps across different platforms such as iOS, Andriod, Windows, Mac, Playstation, XBox or Nintendo Switch. This is where developers are able access CloudMoolah’s services by integrating their payment solution with just a click, giving millions of users access to CloudMoolah’s payment services.
The company also has access to more than 500,000 retail points, that carry one of their partners’ prepaid game credit cards. In Singapore, CloudMoolah will be joining up with TOG (Toy of Game) a video game and toys retailers that has 14 outlets in Singapore to implement an online to offline (O2O) strategy whereby MOO Tokens can be used to purchase products in stores.
TL;DR
Overall a safe ICO to participate, I would’nt with a shadow of a doubt think the experience in the team would’nt be able to pull the ICO through. The USD$10M soft cap shows that they’re confident in the token sale or have raised the amount through private investors during the pre-sale round which has a high barrier of entry (50ETH at 25% bonus).
The company already has a product and existing businesses, it is’nt like most ICO companies with just vapourware. That being said, I think the development to tokenise CMP can definitely be faster rather than taking a whole 2 years. Perhaps the company is still evaluating the feasibility on having CMP on the blockchain or possibly developing their own private blockchain in the future.
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