AllStocks — ICO Review

Link: Website| Whitepaper

The primary goal of AllStocks, as the name suggests, is in allowing all traditional financial instruments to be traded on the blockchain. The project aims to achieve this via a number of hybrid methods that will expose cryptocurrency holders to stock options. First and foremost, a cyptocurrency exchange will be setup which allows both fiat deposit and withdrawals on a decentralized system. If done correctly, this will be the first major exchange of its kind since fiat processing is normally done on fully centralized exchanges.

AllStocks aims to be more than just a simple hybrid exchange however. In their development roadmap are plans to set up additional niche trading platforms covering a variety of traditional stock options, a payment processor and also a remittance wallet. Whilst slightly ambitious, if the team can pull this off then the platform would be on track to dominate current leaders such as Bitfinex and Kraken which are both limited in the options they offer, and suffer from centralization.

Almost all important actions and data within AllStocks applications (such as token transfers) will be stored on the blockchain on a decentraliezd ledger, mostly on the Ethereum platform. In fact, every underlying asset will be associated with an underlying custom smart contract and stored as an ERC-20 token. This will prevent centralized manipulation and allow immediate transfer of assets between platform participants. Furthermore, such a system guarantees that order books represent real underlying assets without the need to trust the exchange that they’re not fabricating orders.

AllStocks Versus The Competition

Whilst the idea of offering a hybrid exchange to access traditional investments through the blockchain isn’t exactly new, most projects such as Qurrex that aim to do this are still under development with release schedules far into the future. AllStocks on the other hand has a working prototype already live. Decentralized exchanges such as IDEX, whilst embodying the spirit of trustlness, don’t offer access to traditional stocks; projects such as Blackmoon crypto only offer very limited exposure to traditional stock market assets via the blockchain via index funds.

AllStocks is set to be on track to be the first professional hybrid exchange that will offer full access to both traditional stock instruments and cryptocurrency assets, whilst allowing both classes of assets to be stored as ERC-20 compatible tokens on a decentralized ledger. Furthermore, the scope of the project is wider than just facilitating token purchases as an exchange. The team plans to allow actual fiat-to-fiat remittances through the platform. This in itself would be huge if done right, since currently transferring money into cryptocurrencies and back out again is a very complicated task. Doing direct fiat-to-fiat transfers in a decentalized system could potentially change crypto as we know it by allowing mainstream value transfer between individuals without the need to directly purchase cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as an intermediary, as is the case currently.

ICO Details

The crowdsale already began on April 15 and will last until June 30, or until the hard cap is reached. The base rate is 1 ETH per 500 AST tokens. Various bonus structures are in place, and if you purchase from the date of publication of this review (May 11) you’ll receive a 10% bonus. Total token supply is fixed at 50,000,000 AST, of which 50% (25,000,000 AST) are reserved for the token sale.

The hard cap is set as $20,000,000 USD. The thing that attracts me the most with this ICO is the low amount allocated to the team — a mere 10%. This allows most of the funds to go directly into marketing and platform development.

AST Token Utility

The utility of the AST token is that every token represents an underlying asset of stock. In effect, whenever you trade AST, you are trading a token that is backed by actual stocks. AST will be the central token used throughout AllStocks and its associated future services such as the remittance service, stock exchange and payment processor.

Originally published at icoveteran.com on May 11, 2018.