IDAP: The #1 Crypto derivatives exchange of 2019

Ratings at a glance [8.7 out of 10]
Team — 9/10
Project Vision — 10/10
Project Stage — 7/10

Forbes, CNBC, Cointelegraph all believe that institutional money is going to enter the cryptocurrency space. The question to ask is whether the crypto market is mature enough for them to trade? Does it have the depth and the tools to support institutional trading?

IDAP (International Digital Assets Platform) is a full featured exchange for crypto assets that caters to diversified trading and investment needs. IDAP will be the first exchange to bring the complete derivatives product ecosystem to crypto asset market and all the necessary trading tools and techniques.

IDAP is a platform built by traders for (institutional and retail) traders instead of being built by technologists for traders. At its core, there is a desktop app that traders can use. IDAP will also have a web version.

I have resisted the temptation of comparing against existing players, because idap is not competing with them. idap wants to capture the new market of institutional investors who are looking at crypto but haven’t entered it.

Team [9/10]

The team comprises of 4 founders who have significant experience in derivatives market and an impressive educational background. There are 8 people who are part of the team and idap continues to hire the right talent to deliver the vision. The team has partnered with an external firm to build the core trading engine, who has experience building scalable financial trading systems.

The line up of advisors is equally impressive. Each one is an expert in their field and will add real value to the project.

While the founders have some experience in crypto markets, they have not worked on any crypto project.

Project Vision [10/10]

On the institutional side, idap has a full fledged desktop app that will enable trading in derivates and spot. The unique feature is that an institutional desk will be able to define limits for traders — deposits and withdrawals will disabled for the traders, thus solving the risk that is associated with misuse of trading funds for the institutions. I expect this to bring in an entirely new set of institutional investors to the crypto markets.

IDAP will be building a high performance low latency platform that will enable the growth of derivatives products.

IDAP is building a full fledged ecosystem for everyone, right from ICO funding, spot trading, F&O, swaps, ETFs and crypto indices, OTC and margin lending.

Project Stage — [7/10]

Currently the main trading engine and desktop version has been developed. I saw the desktop demo that includes spot and derivatives — the demo is impressive, includes spot, futures and calendar spreads. The desktop environment is oriented at the advanced crypto trader and has the core functionality built in.

This is clearly not a whitepaper ICO, but they need funds to complete the product development, hire more people and rope in institutional traders. The progress of development is more than satisfactory for the stage that they are in — private sale.

They will be sharing a video with the community soon on the demo platform.

I am expecting to see a full timeline from the team as we get closer to an ICO.

Community

The team members and advisors have strong contacts in the institutional trading side. This augurs well for the product as it will be lapped up by institutions and adopted by traders as the product becomes live and receives good reviews.

Risks

idap.io is currently at a private sale stage and hence there are risks associated with such an environment. These risks include

1. Licensing — The team is in the process of getting various licenses from government of Estonia where it is based. These licenses are expected to be received in a month or so.
2. EU regulations — The team will have to comply with EU regulations on data handling, cryptocurrency trading, etc.
3. Product new — Several features are new that the market has not seen. We need institutional investors to adopt this platform, and to that extent the real growth will happen when they enter the market. We don’t really know when they will come in.
4. Product development — While the product is in a decent shape, it is not finished yet and needs adequate testing. A cryptocurrency exchange has a lot of testing to be done before they can go live. The team expects idap.io to be functional close enough to the unlocking date of the tokens, sometime in September.

Personally, I believe that the risks are worth the returns at the pre-sale stage and many of these will be mitigated before the ICO.

Growth Potential

Cryptocurrency exchanges generate a lot of profit and give high returns. Hence there is a natural tendency to invest in exchange projects that are managed by reputed professionals

IDAP has the most friend tokenomics that I have ever seen in a project

1. 75% tokens for public — Out of a supply of 1 bn, 750 mn i.e. 75% are for the public (private sale +presale + public sale). This is extremely high and rewarding in the long term as there will be very limited increase in circulating cap over the years. In fact, you will see below that the circulating cap will decrease due to token burn.
2. Reference price — In addition, the team has set up a reference price to be used as a payment for trading fees. The reference price will be 1.5 times the ICO price or market price, whichever is higher. This means that as soon as the platform goes live and people start trading, at a minimum we would have a 50% appreciation on ICO price.
3. Token burn — 20% of the fees received as tokens will be burnt until the total tokens become 500 mn. This ensures a slow and steady growth of token value to the investors who continue to HODL the tokens.
4. Core use — The value proposition of a desktop app to the serious trader, along with several good derivative products will lead to huge exchange volumes. For a 50% discount, there will be huge rush for tokens.
5. Consideration for retail investors — This project gives a discount to early supporters, but it is not a rich get richer scheme (avoiding mentioning names here). About 66% of the total tokens will be left for crowdsale. Early supporters get a chance the contribute more for the risks that they take, but a major part of the tokens are left for crowdsale.
6. Free trading + token lockup — Anyone buying 20000 tokens at ICO stage and holding them will receive free trading. I believe this will be a significant incentive for most investors to lock up tokens for a long time, since it is a double benefit, price appreciation + free trading

Personally, I am invested in this project and I believe in its potential.

If the team delivers as per the whitepaper and the crypto market sees an influx of institutional investors, say the overall marketcap becomes 2 trillion, then this is likely to be a 50–100X ICO in 2 years. We should see the team deliver good returns even in a bear market.

How I discovered this project?

There is an interesting story about how I got introduce to this project. Kept it at the end for those who are still reading. Last weekend, I visited a blockchain and crypto conference in Mumbai. I won’t get into further details about the conference, but a few sessions were good.

Here, I met Awanish, a really simple person, wearing the idap.io t-shirt as part of the audience. Instantly, I could recognize a spark, and was keen to know more. We discussed a little bit about idap.io — the trading platform, the vision, the core team and the advisory team. I am no financial whizkid, but I have cleared 3 levels of CFA, I have developed a training tool for Indian fixed income markets a long while back. To my surprise, I was outclassed in my financial markets knowledge and was clearly struggling to catch up to Awanish’s ideas while sounding knowledgeable and trying to understand the grandeur of idap’s vision and his commitment to create wealth for ico investors.

Later, I reviewed the whitepaper and also spoke to Awanish to clarify some doubts. Given the global nature of this industry, it is difficult to connect 1:1 in person with most CEOs. I can say that Awanish is someone who is values driven, someone who is keen to create an ethical business and rewarding investors who believe in idap.io vision. He is someone not only looking at short term growth of the tokens, but also in the long term.

Yes, I am going to invest in the ICO, in the private sale — you can get more details on the same in the telegram channel. The risk is high, but these guys are building something that is an equivalent of Binance in the crypto derivatives stage, and have earned my support. You can also invest in pre-sale or in the ICO at 3 cents.

If you have any questions, do let me know. I will be personally meeting Awanish again (and maybe the team), whenever possible.

The opinions mentioned in this article are my views to get feedback from readers on my investment strategies. This article is not an invitation to invest and should NOT be construed as such. Cryptocurrencies and tokens are a very high risk asset class, and ICO investment is even riskier. If you intend to invest, please do your own research before further investing and invest only what you can afford to lose. The author is not a financial advisor and the assumptions and calculations used by the author could be incorrect. The author does not take any money, cash or crypto to promote the tokens / currencies, but may be invested in them.