Orvium ICO — Tokenizing the Orvium Publishing Platform
This is the fifth and final part of the Orvium ICO review. In the first few parts we’ve discussed various important topics around the Orvium platform, their vision, the overall scientific publishing industry and what problems arise with it. In this part we will have a final look at one of the most important factors of every ICO: The token sale conditions. If you have followed my articles for a while know you know that I always empathize the ICO token sale terms. No matter how promising the project, without a fair offer to the investors an investment won’t happen. In order to know if we’re looking at a promising deal here, let’s check out the token sale terms as well as the utilization of the platform token.
Utilization of the ORV token
The ORV token will be used for several tasks on the Orvium platform. On the one hand authors and researchers can use the ORV as a form of payment. This allows them to submit manuscripts and award other peer-reviewers with ORV tokens if they take on the work of reading through the work and giving them feedback for potential improvement factors. Additionally, manuscripts can be reviewed by users of the platform at any given time. This allows people to dig deeper into the nearly finished work and earn tokens based on the quality of their feedback.
Another huge positive attribute of the Orvium platform is the copyright aspect we’ve talked about in-depth in the previous articles. Authors are now capable of directly earning ORV tokens through their work which is published on the Orvium platform. This brings us to the payment-system Orvium is planning to integrate with the ORV token. Users of the platform are able to directly purchase certain scientific research articles (if the licensing model requests it) and of course purchase whole journals in specific scientific sectors. These purchases will directly benefit the author and rightful copyright holder of the requested work. By completing transactions via the ORV tokens no middleman is needed between author and consumer. This actively reduces the price of scientific work and journals and benefits those who actually produced an researched the content in the first place.
By implementing this variety of use cases for the ORV token the demand for it will certainly be present as soon as the platform goes live.
ORV Token Sale
Alright, last but not least let’s have a look at the token metrics for their ICO. In order to get a little overview of the things, lets look at some individual metrics before we go deeper into it:
- Token: Orvium (ORV) [ERC20]
- Total Token Supply: 379,000,000 ORV
- Token Distribution: ~60%
- Token Distribution Total: ~227,400,000 ORV
- Token Price: $0.10 per ORV
- Hard Cap: $20,000,000
- Pre-Allocation Round: Juni — July 2018; +10% Bonus
- Public-Allocation Round: July — August 2018; 0% Bonus
That’s it for the raw token metrics for now. Interesting and important to mention however are the vesting periods of the ORV stacks the team and the company itself is keeping (20% for company reserves, 10% for the team, 10% for the advisors): Both vesting periods will be 3 years (6 months cliff) for the company itself as well as the team members.
Looking at these numbers it seems like the ICO is well thought through. The only thing that bothers me is the lack of information how many tokens were up for purchase during the pre-alocation round of the ICO which included a 10% bonus. Based on the fact that 227,4M tokens are up for sale at a price of $0.10 per token and the hardcap is fixed at $20M it seems like a +10% bonus is calculated for the entire sale.
Besides the minor lack of information the amount of tokens being distributed to the public (60%) is a major plus in my books. It seems that projects are trying to give out more and more tokens and % of the company in order to establish trust of potential investors. This surely is a step into the right direction and certainly something I always look at when researching ICOs.
Another positive factor that I want to mention is the expertise their team and advisors bring to the table as well as their marketing incentives in the public blockchain sector. There are already various events booked for the coming months which team members of Orvium will visit. This brings great publicity and awareness to the project and certainly is something a lot of teams neglect during and shortly after their ICO.
Overall I have a quite positive outlook on the Orvium project. I do see it as a “very” long-term investment of about 3–5 years (yes, that’s long IMO in this fast paced market) which can yield huge returns if the team pulls through and realizes its ambitious vision. Based on their expertise and networking possibilities (seriously, check out their team!) Orvium has the potential to have a tremendous impact in the scientific publishing industry and who knows, maybe we all subscribe to scientific journals on the Orvium platform with our own ORV tokens soon!
