11 reasons Why It’s a Good idea to contribute to the Futourist Token Crowdsale

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Futourist

7 min readJan 26, 2018

If you have been following the crypto market over the past year, you have managed to see the flood of new ICO’s and an enormous growth in blockchain field. The numbers are impressive and sure show the possibility of blockchain disruptive power. However, when it comes to contributing to a blockchain startup, one must evaluate a project really carefully before investing in it.

Stated below are 11 reasons why we believe it is a good idea to contribute to Futourist Token crowdsale and take your part in travel/tech industry.

1. Working Product

Unlike many other blockchain startups, we have a solid starting point. With an existing and working platform called Open Hours, we have more than 1 million monthly users. OpenHours is spreaded in more than 20 countries over the world, it comes with a native app and it has an excellent infrastructure for the purpose of scaling to a platform that covers the whole globe.

Even the Ethereum developers are lately emphasizing — product, then ICO. A lot of teams raise previously unimaginable amounts of money before they have anything to offer except a whitepaper and website and only then they start developing something. These amounts of money bring us to our second point.

2. Realistic Hard Cap

Having one of the smallest hard caps out there, we got potential to have a normal, organic growth. We also don’t have to justify an exaggerated market cap that is immediately worth a few 100 million dollars without any product behind. Futourist will therefore have a lot of space for future growth which will enable us to raise awareness about our platform and mission.

3. Travel industry

Travel industry is growing every year. In the first 10 months of 2017 there have been an estimated 1.1 billion tourists traveling around the world and UN World Tourism Organization is expecting 1.8 billion tourists by 2030!

This is a great opportunity for Futourist platform as a lot of those tourists will potentially use our platform for reviewing different places, looking for great deals, information and other things.

4. Solving the problem for content creators

Content creators and reviewers bring enormous benefits to business owners, but at the moment financial benefits are one directional — towards the businesses.

The irony is big — On one side, there are only a handful of people who have managed to turn their content into profit, while the majority of content creators are left out without anything. On the other side companies and platforms that produce insignificant amounts or literally no content but can monetize their user’s free content are the ones that are worth the most.

As we can see, the existing worlds of content creators and businesses who benefit from their work have never been more out of balance. Our vision is to change the perception of content creators value and bring balance between them and the world of business. From reviewers, influencers, writers, photographers and other content creators, everyone needs to get rewarded.

5. Video reviews

One of our main focuses besides photos and texts will be video reviews. Video is the future of information sharing, because of the speed and convenience of how the information is created and perceived. And as a bonus, video reviews are trustworthy and hard to fake.

The numbers show us that videos are growing insanely in last few years as 78% of people watch them online every week and 55% of people watch them online every day. With the video trend not looking to slow down, it is estimated that by 2021 every second a million minutes of video content will cross the network. Overall 90% of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision-making process so that is another reason that we are going in the right direction.

6. Token Utility

FTR token is not a one-dimensional token. It’s use is not meant for holding it and waiting to increase in value.

In order to keep the token circling it will have multiple uses inside our micro-economy system. Our token model is built around supply and demand between businesses, reviewers and other participants in Futourist micro-economy. Token in its utility form acts as a value transfer tool between business participants and ordinary users that bring value to the platform. Participants in the Futourist micro-economy can use FTR tokens in various ways. The core of it is that reviewers get rewarded with FTR tokens, and businesses give away FTR tokens in order to incentivize review creation through contests and many other features (1:1 chat and tip4tip, travel lotto — giveaways, bucket list, achievements…).

7. Dealing with abuses (fake reviews etc.)

Dealing with abuses is one of the most common questions that we get.

To protect our users against diverse abuse scenarios, Futourist will deploy multiple layers of security and protection based on:

the Futourist protocol itself,
auxiliary protection systems including the existing OpenHours architecture and infrastructure,
unsupervised machine learning to identify new abuse patterns,
possible use of third-party systems,
ultimately, human involvement and decision-making.

Concerning fake reviews specifically, there are many factors of how to slow them, if not completely shutting them down. We can’t guarantee 0% abuse, but we have many layers of protection to stop it (as it was already written):

moderators that will be rewarded for curating and detecting fraud,
starting with pilot contests in order to receive data, learn from that and implement machine learning,
plain, short text reviews will have lesser weight than reviews with video and photos which means less reward for that review.

8. Great community response

We had and still have an overwhelmingly positive response from our awesome community :)

We get messages from travelers, bloggers, reviewers, photographers, crypto enthusiasts, people that have heard for blockchain for the first time and many others… There are also many influencers that have written us for possible collaborations and other people that want to help us in many different ways.

A very good indicator that we are also going in the right direction is our Futourist Community Competition. We have started it with the purpose of rewarding our supporters with Futourist tokens. You can read more about it in our blog post and join the Competition here.

9. Commercial blockchain project

A lot of current blockchain projects are not meant for wider, commercial use. Ranging from financial to software industry and others, they specialise in a field that is focused on particular, niche groups of people.

I want to point out first that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

Our opinion is that these projects will have a harder job attracting broader public to start using blockchain technology in everyday life. That is what our project is aiming at — for people to start using blockchain technology without overthinking what they have to do. People need to see that it works and that it doesn’t have to be complicated for practical use.

That is why Futourist is designed to bring people from different places to interact on the platform and spend their creativity, effort and time in return for a real reward. One of our ultimate goals is to bring benefits of blockchain to everyday users.

10. Futourist payment card

One of the steps to achieve commercial use of blockchain will be our Futourist payment card. People will have a chance to pay for their drinks, food and other things with Futourist card. They will have the opportunity to quickly put Futourist tokens for use. Futourist card will enable users to pay with tokens anywhere where the card is accepted, without having to convert tokens on exchanges.

Isn’t it great to think that you will be able to review a bar and in return receive tokens with which you will buy a drink at the same place? :)

11. People around the Futourist team

One of the main reasons why our project stands on a firm ground are our advisors and experts. They have a ton of experience, public trust and successful projects behind them. That should give anyone a lot of confidence to believe in Futourist platform.

Our main advisors and experts are: