Blue Whale ICO Review — The Decentralized Ecosystem for the Self-Employed
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Today I want to take a closer look on Blue Whale Foundation, the first ICO and the ICON blockchain which could end in a big hype because the community of a new blockchain mostly celebrates the first ICO of its kind. Let’s see if BWX can reach the expectations.
But before I start — thanks for the love for my recent ones about AXenS and EdenChain. I appreciate the claps, shares, and comments!
Improving the self-employed economy
Blue Whale (BWX) wants to improve the life of a freelancer and small and medium-sized businesses. They want to build a blockchain platform where the target group can offer their work and get their payments fast. This all comes with mostly zero processing fees.
I asked Blue Whale CEO Will Lee if he could describe me the project if I were a five year old, here’s his answer.
We are building a new environment where people can do what they love and make a living without having any concerns.
Usecase
A good example is this handcraft studio. They offer spinning classes, but they don’t have the time and the knowledge to run their booking system. That’s why they use the services of Verlocal, which is entering into a strategic partnership with Blue Whale. They offer spinning classes, but they don’t have the time and the knowledge to run their booking system. That’s why they use the services of Verlocal, which is entering into a strategic partnership with Blue Whale. The problem Blue Whale is trying to solve is one that has been shared by Verlocal’s experience with freelancers.
Back to the spinning class studio: In the future, a customer can book a class over the widget that will be provided by the Blue Whale Foundation. Starting there the whole process of booking, processing the fees, etc. will be transferred, stored and processed on the ICON blockchain.
Besides the safety it allows Blue Whale to use the data anonymously to improve the whole network performance. How? Besides offering your class on your spinning class studio website, you can also include another placeholder that will be used to advertise another freelancer that is no competitor to your business. The more people the service use, the better will be the targeting of those placeholder offers. The good thing about that is: if a customer books this extern offer on your spinning class website, you will get a part of the revenue.
You can also earn tokens by verifying new freelancers and doing other jobs on the platform.
This whole thing will be the first use case of Blue Whale, but they are planning to include more products/apps like this booking services on their platform, but they didn’t specify which one until today.
Market advantage
So why in the world would a freelancer use the Blue Whale Foundation platform instead of businesses like Task Rabbit or Uber? In the end, most people don’t care if it’s centralized or decentralized. So that’s not the point to convince them. What might get them excited is making more money in the future.
For bringing the money from the customer to your business, you will have to pay credit card processing fees. In the US those fees are typically 2.9% + $0.30. If you make 10 Dollars, 0.59 Dollars will be gone thanks to those fees. If you would use Blue Whale, there’ll be no processing fees.
Additionally, gig economy services like Uber or Task Rabbit charge huge commissions upwards of 50%. Blue Whale could create a similar app, and the commissions would be brought down by about 90% for people using Blue Whale.
This is possible by using their BWX token to process the transactions across the network.
The Team
As I stated prior the Blue Whale Foundation is forming a strategic partnership with Verlocal, a company which has the entire freelance gig booking service already online and it’s growing at a percentage rate in the teens per month according to official sources. The team is in San Francisco, Singapore, Japan and just launched Verlocal Europe.
Blue Whale Foundation has announced that it is forming a strategic partnership with Verlocal to develop a proof of concept for blockchain-based applications for freelancers such as the WORK tools (i.e. CAM, DAN, Reward Bank) which Blue Whale plans to offer other DApps joining the platform in the near future.
Will Lee is the CEO and has a Stanford degree in Artificial Intelligence. Then we have Hawon Chung (COO) and Jay Choi (Head of Product), both worked for Oracle. In addition to that, they have former Samsung employees like Jay Park (Samsung VP) and a bunch of devs from the Verlocal team. Overall pretty solid squad.
On the advisor site, there are two from the ICON Foundation Council, Injong Rhee (Google, Former CTO of Samsung Electronics) and two others that are in leading positions for freelance/microtask companies.
For me, the team is a plus, the advisor site for me is neutral. No super hyper crazy name om board but two of the ICON council. Could be worst! But the most important thing is a good team — and Blue Whale has it.
Road Map
A well-planned timeline is always the key to a successful ICO. Blue Whale wants to launch their ICO + also announce a partnership with a “high profile Korean company” in May.
The BWX token will be listed in Q3 and Q4 they want to offer services on their platform in the US, Canada, Singapore, and Japan + additional Partnerships and also a first platform/service for entertainment. Other platforms for Education and Space Sharing are planned for Q 2& Q3 2019, and even the Mainnet want to launch until the end of next year. The crucial part will be the service offering to get traction. If they can’t attract enough customers, this project could face severe problems in the future.
ICO
BlueWhale wants to raise $41.6M and will accept ETH and ICX which is good because ETH is more common and people don’t need to swap to ICX.
50% of the money will be collected through the token sale, and they want to spend 36% for engineering and 36% for marketing & partnerships. Pretty right decision because they need to market their platform and possibilities soon to be successful.
Summary
Blue Whale has a lot of potentials. But I needed to dig a bit deeper into the whitepaper because the possibilities of the project aren’t easy communicated through the website. They could do better if they outlined the use case with a simple example and with that they could create a hype more easily. As you may know my opinion from my latest analysis — people won’t spent much time on ICO research. You need to catch them with a natural explanation and examples fast. And Blue Whale has a lot to offer. The team is excellent and has a lot of experience in the sharing economy area.
But on the other side we’re talking about a total sum of $41.6M. It might play out IF the market recovers until may. If not, they’ll need hype.
Whats super promising is the fact that Blue Whale will be the first ICO on the ICON blockchain. So hype might be guaranteed if the can explain their business better. I’m sure they will do it because it’s still a lot of time until the ICO in May.
I asked them why they chose ICON. The answer:
ICON is helping us regarding tech and marketing support.
I’m pretty sure that the people behind ICON are smart ones and they wouldn’t support a project without any potential, which is a good sign.
The success of Blue Whale will depend on a) if they can manage it to attract enough customers and b) if the timeline offers enough to fuel the engine until the mainnet launch at the end of 2019.
Here’s my final sum up:
✅ Blockchain Fit Platform & Product
✅ Experienced team
✅ Already a successful running business (Verlocal)
✅ First ICO on ICON
⭕️ Conservative Roadmap
⭕️ Medium High Hard Cap
The numbers on social are still a bit low, but I heard that there would be a bounty program that could boost the whole project. Afterall I’m excited to see what Blue Whale will do until the ICO in May. Until that, I remain to be bullish.
Thanks for reading 🙌
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About the author:
Philipp Steuer (B.Sc. Online Editor, University of Applied Sciences Cologne) helps big media brands like RedBull, Warner or Disney to tell their stories online. His journey into the crypto & blockchain universe started in 2013. TheCC team member. More than 200.000 people are following him across all social networks (e.g. Twitter), and one of his three published books is a free getting started guide for cryptocurrencies to enable everyone entering the space. His actual focus is on advising blockchain startups in running successful ICO’s, and he’s passionate about researching upcoming ICO’s.
Business contact: philippsteuer.com
