Havven ICO Review
Havven project (https://havven.io/) has gained some traction recently and came to my attention couple of times during the last month. As I’m always looking for ICOs with great potential, I’ve decided to have a closer look and asses whether to invest or not.
Havven (HAV) claims to address problem of cryptocurrency stability, by establishing decentralised payment network where users can trade in price stable crypto-currency.
Idea
The idea of Stablecoins is not new. Stablecoin is price-stable cryptocurrency, which’s value is pegged to another stable asset, commonly FIAT currency like US dollar. Solving price stability problem can definitely open doors for wider adoption in retail sector. Havven proposes to use decentralised, crypto-based collateral and issue two types of tokens — Nomins, the price-stable tokens, and Havvens, which will provide collateral for Nomins.
Idea is solid and puts projects in infrastructure category, which I believe has greater potential compared to dApps.
Idea rating: 8/10
Whitepaper
White paper (https://havven.io/uploads/havven_whitepaper.pdf) has a scientific look, but not so scientific content. It starts with high-level introduction to crypto, and continues describing general mechanics behind Stablecoins concept. It further explains concept of Havvens and Nomins, and introduces system of variable transaction fees to incentivise users to maintain so called Collateralisation Ratio. White paper closes with a brief section basically stating that proposed system should be validated via modelling and points reader to https://research.havven.io/ and https://blog.havven.io/.
Overall I’m missing technical details about proposed solution, and any details about the payment network part. The paper feels sometimes more like a light introduction to crypto and economy, rather than a technical paper backing a new crypto currency.
Whitepaper rating: 4/10
Concerns
Havven proposes to use Ethereum as a base network, but doesn’t come up with any suggestion, nor innovation, how to address scalability. Ethereum’s current TPS (roughly 10–15) might be an issue for proposed large-scale decentralised payment network.
Another concern of mine is, if Nomins are implemented as ECR20 tokens, what will prevent users trading these directly and avoiding the Havven network fees? Which in turn would remove the incentive for users to adjust the Collaterilasion ratio and brake the whole system.
Prototype
There’s no working prototype accessible to users at the time of writing. Model at https://research.havven.io/ didn’t seem very useful, there’s no possibility to influence any settings or enter own data-set to work with.
Initial implementation to Ethererum Solidity contracts is published on GitHub (https://github.com/Havven/havven). Havven states that these contracts are currently being reviewed by ZKlabs and Sigma Prime, no results available yet though, and the contracts are not deployed anywhere.
Prototype rating: 2/10
Roadmap
Project roadmap (https://blog.havven.io/havven-roadmap-2018-a66b40488ca3) proposes to start validation phase by issuing ether-backed Nomins, using proceedings from the ICO held by the Havven foundation as collateral. After that, move to Havven-backed Nomins in Q2/Q3 and adding support for other currencies in Q4.
I have not found any details about the proposed payment network, nor any plans about how would it be used by consumers. It’s unclear to me whether the project intends to develop anything else, apart from the actual smart contracts.
Team
In ideal team I would like to see team members with mix of very strong experiences from diverse backgrounds — previous ICOs or startups, experts on Blockchains & crypto and subject matter experts. Let’s see who’s in the lead of Havven:
- Kain Warwick — Founder. Business background, founded couple of projects, but all seem to be rather short-lived. Havven’s website boasts
Kain built the largest cryptocurrency payment platform in
Australia, with tens of millions in transaction volume.
I assume this is referring to the Kain’s other company Blueshyft, where he’s a CEO. After closer look BlueShyft does not seem to be a crypto-currency platform, but rather just a payment platform.
- Justin Moses — CTO. Currently Director of Engineering at MongoDB. This seems pretty impressive tech-wise, MongoDB being on of the well known players in DB space, but closer looks reveals that Justin’s focus was centred around front-end engineering, as well as his previous experience. Seems like Justin still works at Mongo though and I’m wondering if the plan is to fully focus on Havven in future?
- Jordan Momtazi — VP Partnerships, Kain’s colleague from BlueShyft, retail background.
- Tim Bass — Project Lead. Co-founder & CEO of Block8 — Australian blockhain incubator, operating from late 2016.
- Sam Brooks — Blockchain Lead. Currently CTO of Block8.
Other Blockchain developers all have relatively short background in blockchain/crypto, coming from Block8 and previously directly from University of Sydney.
What is also unclear to me is relationships between Havven and Blueshyft (where Kain is Co-founder & CEO, Jordan consultant and 3 other team members seem to be employees) and relationship between Havven and Block8 (where Tim is Co-founder & CEO, Sam is CTO and 4 other engineers work there too).
Team rating: 5/10
Advisors
One name that stands out for me is Matthew Di Ferrante, who recently joined Ethereum as Security Engineer and is founder of ZKLabs (http://zklabs.io).
Other names I’m not familiar with, and after looking at their background none of them stood out as particularly experienced in world of crypto or startups. What worries me more though, is that I didn’t find any document that would explain role of the advisors and how are they involved in the project.
Advisors rating: 4/10
Competition
There are other players in this space (crypto collateralised stable coins), including:
- Kowala (https://kowala.tech/) — no info about plans for ICO, seems privately backed
- MarketDAO (https://makerdao.com/) — no ICO, but started selling at $3 and at the time of the writing trades at $1045
- Baseoin (http://www.getbasecoin.com/) — no plans for ICO announced yet, too early
ICO
Tokens themselves are priced at $0.5, which seems slightly on the expensive side. Total supply is 100m tokens, 60% of which is released for ICO, 20% is allocated to team and advisors and last 20% between marketing activities, foundation and partners. This leaves us with 30m market cap for sale, with 50m for Havven in total. When compared to current total crypto market cap of about $463bn, it ends up being roughly 0.01%.
Havven partnered with TokenSoft to manage the actual token sale. TokenSoft being relatively young “whitelabel SaaS token sale platform”, founded in late 2017. I wasn’t able to find any track record of previous ICOs conducted.
Previous sales
One thing to keep in mind are previous rounds.
- Seed round (Aug-Sep 2017), 60% discount, limited to $500k
- Expression of interest (EOI), 30% discount, over $25m commited
These commitments take substantial piece from those 60% and altogether leave only $9,500,000 for the actual ICO main sale.
Escrow discounts
There are also discounts available when buyers decide to escrow their Havven tokens, in order to encourage long-term project support. These go up to 20% if you decide to put your tokens in escrow for 18 months.
Raising hard cap
At some point Havven announced rais of hard cap by another $10m (https://blog.havven.io/havven-sale-update-57a8cca94239), which I consider quite worrying as ICOs that raised caps tend not to do great historically, but after negative community feedback they decided no to proceed with the raise. I’m not sure what to think about this in the end.
Overall the ICO seems to be reasonably well structured, advised by specialised third parties.
ICO rating: 7/10
Community
Twitter @havven_io, with 9.6k followers, 8.3k increase in last month. While good increase, the overall numbers seems to be low and all the popularity quite short-term hype around the ICO.
Havven has quite a big Telegram channel, with 99k users. I assume this is mainly due to success of they AirDrop campaign (100,000+ participants), which required joining theTelegram channel.
Overall I feel the community is a bit young, acquired mostly during the AirDrop event, and missing that devoted core of enthusiasts and advocates.
Community rating: 5/10
Investors
I believe that having some institutional investors on board is good sign of healthy projects. Havven announced that BlockTower Capital is going to participate in sale (https://blog.havven.io/blocktower-set-to-invest-in-havven-37b9f6262049), amongst with other partners, but again no further details were disclosed, like amount secured or whether these investors will become part of the sale with same condition as others.
Investors rating: 4/10
Overall
Havven’s ICO is a tricky one, at least for me. I like the idea and believe there’s a need for Stablecoins in order to enable wider adoption of crypto by retail sector, and therefore I was very fond of this project and keen on investing.
After looking more in detail on the team behind it, their progress and plans, I’m not convinced any more. I would like to know a bit more about plans for building the payment network and how they plan to attract adopters. I would like to also see a bit more transparency about relationships between Havven and companies like Block8 and BlueShyft, as well as more transparency and info about their institutional investors. All-together I’m simply not convinced that what I see is enough to ask for $30 millions.
When looking at ICOs and deciding in which one’s to potentially invest, I’m looking for ICOs that I believe have potential to deliver 100x or more ROI. I think Havven is interesting idea and certainly it’s a project to keep an eye on in future, but for now I’m going to pass.
Overall rating: 5.5/10
Disclaimer: Information provided in this article is not investment advice, solely a personal opinion, without any warranty whatsoever. I’m by no means financial advisor or anything of that sort and most of all I probably got it all wrong! You should always do your own research, invest at your own risk and never invest money you can’t afford to loose.
