ICO Analysis — 5 reasons why you should have a look at Blue Whale Foundation

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Crypto ICO Review - US/FR

7 min readMay 10, 2018

Blue Whale Foundation has been established to build a decentralized ecosystem to allow self-employed and freelancers to reap rewards and employment benefits from their contribution.

1. The freelancing market is growing and need to be disrupt

The difficulties faced by freelancers and part-time workers are increasing. For example, the absence of social protection and job security, or the endless uncertainty that accompanies this way of working.

However, the global market for self-employed and freelancers has grown steadily in recent years and is expected his growing in the future. According to research, the self-employed will account for 58% of the US workforce in 2027.

The peer-to-peer booking platforms such as Airbnb and Uber represent a large part of this growth. As a result, millions of people (the self-employed) around the world depend on these and similar platforms.

Excepted that, in addition to the problems mentioned at the begining, these peer-to-peer platform are adding new difficulties for the self-employed:

By charging high commissions fee : most of these platforms charge between 20% and 50% in commissions on each transaction made.
By charging expensive marketing and advertising costs: Facebook Ad and Google Adwords have CPC costs between $ 1.72 and $ 2.32 and CPA costs between $ 18.68 and $ 59.18.
By only offering a lack of security: these platforms offer no employment advantage which makes self-employment very precarious. A cessation of activity automatically leads to a decrease in income.

Blue Whale Foundation aims to revolutionize this economy of the self-employed by taking advantage of the blockchain to offer freelancers lower fees and social benefits such as paid holidays and pensions traditionally reserved for employees.

2. The WORK system

The WORK (Worker Optimized Reward Keeper) system is the heart of the platform. This system is based on three main components:

Contribution Activity Manager (CAM): It’s a kind of an activity manager that monitor the contributions of all participants within the network and rewards the Freelancers fairly according to their type of activities.All the activities are oriented around the growth of the platform, its quality and the trust that users can place in it. There are :

a Referral and a Lead generation activity which rewards the Freelancers who refered a user who made a purchase and the Freelancers who generate new freelancers on the platform
a double verification activity (Curation and Verification) which need the check of all new Freelancers and the check of all their work by present freelancer
an Arbitration activity which is activated when a customer and a Freelancer are not agree about the final state of freelancer work
A Reputation activity which which encourages Freelancers to rate the work of others Freelancers

Decentralized Associated Network (DAN): The main purpose of this component is to collect user data and build a decentralized ad network. User data will be collected from online traffic as currently realized by Google or Facebook. This will require the installation of SaaS tools (for example, booking widgets) on websites or social media accounts that will turn into a node of the Blue Whale network. Data collection and analysis will be done using Big Data and machine learning. Note that Blue Whale will take the privacy of the user’s data very seriously.

Reward Bank (ReBa): it functions as the central depositary that will receive and disburse the BWX tokens used to reward contributors. This bank will initially be financed with 20% of the amount of tokens sold at the ICO. In addition, 60% of net profits and rewards from Freelance Referrals will be held in this bank. These funds from the bank will be used as social benefits for Freelancers. They will be used, for example, to pay pensions in a lump sum or monthly or to offer paid holidays in the event of events such as sick leave.

3. A decentralized system, some Provinces, a federal architecture and a DAO

In order to ensure trust on the Blue Whale network and to through the provision of transparency on every activity occurring within the system, the Blockchain technology and smart contracts are used. Furthermore, making use of advanced cryptography, the network is kept safe from external bad actors.

As a decentralized solution, Blue Whale Network plans to create a network of various sharing platforms (also called blockchain node) which share the same philosophy but have their own unique form of governance. These individual ecosystems within Blue Whale Network are labelled “Provinces”.

Each province can use a white-label DApps (provided directly by Blue Whale) feature their own CAMs, DANs, and an access to ReBa, which are powered by the Blue Whale blockchain. This permits those provinces to offer the same contribution-based reward and employment benefits to the freelancers on their own sub networks. This is all done while keeping a degree of autonomy over their own province and the freelancers within it. The Blue Whale network will respect this autonomy.

These province may also choose to issue their own token to raise funds through ICOs — of which, 10% will be kept as a reserve with Blue Whale. If not, they must purchase 10% of their valuation worth of BWX tokens at the prevailing exchange rate.

This ensures that the Blue Whale main network, and its sub networks, continue to remain mutually-invested in each other.

This kind of governance and autonomy is like the Federal system. That’s why Blue whale as labelled his architecture as a “Federal Architecture”. The provinces are free to operate according to particular parameters outlined by the federal blockchain.

In addition, the main governance of Blue Whale Network is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) which has introduced a voting mechanism that will permit to address issues that affect the entire network. This voting mechanism will allow the participants on the network adjusting policies such as operating costs, savings rate into Rewards Bank, Referral fees, issuance of new coins, incentive/payout algorithm and penalties.

4 . A great team and advisors

The Blue Whale Foundation team is very solid and experimented. It consists of very different profiles such as engineers, experienced entrepreneurs or freelancers who have worked for companies such as NASA, Samsung, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and the Olympic Games.

Will Lee, the CEO, has a Stanford degree in Artificial Intelligence and is also the CEO of Verlocal. The CTO, Hyunjin Choi, worked for Samsung Electronics, NASA and graduated from Cambridge University. The COO Hawon Chung and the Product Manager Jay Choi both work for Oracle.Changsup Keum, the CIO is also the founder of bigpicturelabs, a company that designs the architecture of blockchain services. The project should benefit from his knowledge that is a real advantage. Jay Park, Co-Founder, is the former VP of at Samsung Electronics (during 8 years).

In addition to the Blue Whale team members, employees from Verlocal will also be working on this project to some extent.

Seven Advisors are also part of the team, including Injong Rhee, who works for Google and is the former CTO of Samsung Electronics, as well as several members of the ICON Foundation Board (Kyungjoon Lee & Jonghyup Kim) and Simon Yu the co-founder and CEO of Storm.

The team is spread across the globe as it is located in the United States (San Francisco), Asia (Singapore, Japan) and Europe.

5. Support from ICON Foundation and first ICO on the ICON Blockchain

Blue Whale is the first DAPP of ICON and the project have great relationship with ICON council members. As proof, Blue Whale was invited to participate in the ICON summit 2018.

Also, The Blue Whale token sale is the first initial coin offering (ICO) on the ICON Blockchain. Meaning the project receiving an advanced and strong level of direct support and cooperation with the chain’s development of ICON team.

The ICON blockchain is viewed as a competitor to Ethereum and the people behind ICON are very smart. They would not support a project without potential, which is a good sign.

ICO — Token sale

Begins on Thursday, May 24, 2018, at Midnight GMT and continue for one month or until Hard Cap is reached
With 25 million SGD raised from Private and Pre sales, we will only be raising an additional 5 million SGD (3.78 million USD).
Minimum Contribution & Maximum Contribution: TBA
Soft cap: 25M SGD
Hard cap: 30M SGD
Token price: 1 SGD => 800 BWX — 1 USD => 1,056 BWX