ICO Alert Report: BitClave

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Published in
9 min readJul 27, 2017

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PRE-SALE PERIOD

July 25th at 11am GMT through August 1st at 11am GMT

Includes a 50% discount before the soft cap is reached and an additional 35% discount after the soft cap is reached. The pre-sale will end in 48 hours if the $1,500,000 soft cap is reached. You can contribute with ETH or BTC but must register an account with BitClave prior to contributing.(1) According to the BitClave slack the soft cap has been reached(2)

CROWDSALE PERIOD

Crowdsale to begin on September 15th. Further details to be announced soon by the BitClave team

TOKEN DISTRIBUTION INFORMATION

There are a fixed 2,000,000,000 total CAT (Consumer Activity Token) ever created, with 1,000,000,000 available for purchase across the pre-sale and crowdsale

BitClave will use a web application to facilitate the contribution of BTC or ETH and receipt of CAT tokens. You may contribute with ETH or BTC, but must use an ETH or BTC wallet to do so. Exchange wallets should not be used for any ICOs.

BitClave is distributing ERC-20 tokens (CAT tokens). An ERC-20 compatible wallet MUST be given as a receiving address regardless of whether you contribute BTC or ETH.

Tokens are expected to be distributed within one week of the completion of the crowdsale, but the team reserves the right to wait four weeks before doing so. This would only occur if there were complications with the pre-sale or crowdsale, which the team does not foresee

All further details to be announced soon by the BitClave team

ALLOCATION

50% of total tokens available for purchase across the pre-sale and crowdsale

10% of tokens going towards community grants

10% of tokens reserved for the team

30% of tokens reserved as a long term budget

USE OF PROCEEDS

38% will go towards development (rollout of the solution and adjustments)

7% will go towards administrative needs

37% will go towards expanding adoption. This includes the growth and maintenance of the world-wide community

5% will go to advisers for growth-hacking, public relations, partnerships, affiliate programs and more

5% will go towards legal expenses

8% will be reserved for unforeseen costs

TOKEN PRICE & LOCKOUT PERIOD

The token price for the pre-sale is $0.025 (including discount). Now that the soft cap has been reached the token price has decreased by a further 35% and is $0.0175

Further details about the crowdsale price will be announced by the BitClave team soon

TEAM

Alex Bessonov, CEO: Senior Executive with over 20 years of experience in the security, privacy and blockchain industry. Former CSO of LG Electronics.

Patrick Tague, CTO: Associate Research Professor in the ECE Department at CMU. Expert in mobile, embedded, and wireless security.

Emmanuel Owusu, Chief Architect: PhD from CMU. Expert in the fields of security, blockchain, Internet of Things, public policy and privacy.

Vasily Trofimchuk, Project Management: MSc in CS, MBA. A serial entrepreneur. Expert in game theory, blockchain and management.

Yan Michalevsky, Security Architect: PhD from Stanford. Entrepreneur, expert in computer systems, software security and privacy.

Andrey Shashlov, Core Developer: Full stack developer with focus on Android and iOS. Entrepreneur and innovator. Blockchain enthusiast.

Eugene Kaganovich, Data Architect: Full stack developer with deep knowledge of Java. Expert in protecting enterprise data in the cloud.

Mark Shwartzman, Data Scientist: MSc from University of Tel Aviv. Expert in video compression and data science. Bitcoin enthusiast and developer.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Email: info@bitclave.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitclave

Facebook: http://fb.me/bitclave

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/6399312/

Telegram: https://t.me/BitClaveCommunity

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtibs4mNHqbPn-NGnFtK6yg

Slack: http://slack-bitclave-com.herokuapp.com/

Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2005370

All of the above information can be found on the BitClave website, whitepaper, or in their contribution terms(3, 4, 5)

What is BitClave?(5)

BitClave is an active search ecosystem platform (re: decentralized search engine) that allows for businesses to market directly to consumers who are interested in their products. Through BitClave’s offline and online advertising solution there would be no need for intermediaries who charge exorbitant fees and deliver less than adequate results for advertisers. BitClave aims to connect an advertiser interested in a marketing a product with a consumer who is actually interested in that product vs. the “shotgun-style” approach that is advertising today.

Some Brief Context

Whether you’re talking about online (e.g. website and search engine ads) or offline (e.g. mail, billboard) advertising one thing is clear according to BitClave: the process is broken. The aim is no longer to target an audience who have some level of potential to purchase your product. BitClave states some key issues with the current process:

  1. Market dominant companies like Google and Facebook can charge exorbitant fees for advertising because their base of users is so high. At the same time, these businesses who are purchasing advertising are getting no guarantee their advertising will convert to sales
  2. It’s estimated that 50% of ad traffic is fake. This further contributes to businesses not receiving any conversion on advertising purchased
  3. The more expensive advertising gets for businesses, the more expensive products get for customers. As the price-per-customer continues to increase for a business, so must the price of the product the business is offering for sale

BitClave even goes so far as to argue that the ones controlling the process (Google, Facebook, etc.) are missing a huge opportunity for advertising conversions simply because they’re not incentivized to offer advertising that results in conversions. Instead, these industry titans focus on increasing the price of their available ad space and consumer data offerings.

BitClave aims to uproot the current advertising process by directly connecting the consumers searching for product/service information with businesses offering those products/services.

How Does BitClave Work?(5)

The BitClave technology can be broken down into three broad components:

  1. A scalable, anonymous and secure search ecosystem
  2. Functional and trusted data privacy
  3. A mechanism to transact valuable data, with attestation (re: a legally binding witness/acknowledgment)

Imagine you are a small business owner selling some widget, gadget, pizza, pie or software service. You have a finite amount of resources to attract customers and you know the current advertising system is not going to earn you a great price-per-customer ratio. By using the BitClave system you would be given a curated list of consumers searching for your type of product. Whether you’re an online or physical business, you would be able to view and evaluate (based on a set of metrics provided by BitClave) whether or not each of these consumers was worth your money to advertise to. Essentially, you (the advertiser) are utilizing a precise targeting solution provided by the BitClave ecosystem to advertise to your your potential customers.

Technological Specifications

According to the whitepaper, BitClave will be using a distributed blockchain-system called BitClave Active Search Ecosystem (BASE). This allows for the storing and managing of “vast amounts of data” like customer activities and attestation points that are needed for the BitClave ecosystem to function. These are stored in as new blocks are created on the blockchain. Whether it’s purchase decisions, attention to some application, or a particular wifi network that is used, BitClave aims to use the decentralized component of blockchain technology to protect the privacy of consumers. Rather than a company receiving and selling personal information to advertising companies, the customer/contributors to BASE will have total control over what data is created, shared and accessed. The process of data storage on BASE is completely anonymized and consumers are incentivized to contribute data to the blockchain. As this database grows so does the power of the decentralized search engine described in the small-business-owner example above.

Consumer Activity Token (CAT)

It is important that BitClave is able to incentivize both parties to use the ecosystem. The Consumer Activity Token utilizes Ethereum smart contracts and is the vehicle by which BitClave plans to incentivize consumers and advertisers to participate in the ecosystem. Consumers are incentivized to contribute data, but also benefit from more curated products/service advertising. Businesses benefit from more direct access to potential customers and are given a more measurable return on investment towards advertising. BitClave imagines CAT being exchanged back and forth between users and businesses for providing these key pieces of data. For example, by signing up for a retail membership club and providing shopping preferences a user could be incentivized with CAT.

The two main components of BitClave that are used in this process are an “Anonymized Activity Ledger” and a “Token Exchange”. The Anonymized Activity Ledger is the decentralized record of customer activities, whether they be online or offline. The anonymity of this blockchain component ensures customers can hide their identities while still willfully allowing data on their own activities to be shared to the ecosystem. This is done under what BitClave calls their ‘Activity Ledge Anonymity Mechanism’. For example, third parties and advertisers are able to perform analytics operations without knowing whom has contributed the data.

The Token Exchange is the mechanism by which consumers or other parties are rewarded for contributing data to the Anonymized Activity Ledger. Users earn CAT through the smart contracts utilized in the Token Exchange.

How To Participate?(5)

Users

Data from users can be contributed in a few different ways:

  1. Account Profile: These profiles are updated with data and are tied to things like biometrics (e.g. fingerprints) or 2FA for security purposes. Users can continually update and configure their accounts to send data like their location to the ecosystem
  2. Applications Built On the Ecosystem: As the network grows BitClave expects for many third parties to contribute and allow for data like retail purchasing behavior to be easily incorporated by users.

Businesses

As businesses look to advertise to potential customers they must have an easily filtered and precise search engine to use. BitClave refers to these parameters as ‘Attestation Points’ (AP). These are essentially types of activities that are contributed by third party applications contributed by willing users:

ARRIVE/DEPART: Will know when a customer arrives at a store and leaves a store

LOCATION: A (consumer-side) publishing of their location

BUY/SELL: Contributed via a customer or retailer’s point-of-sale device. Indicates something has been purchased by a consumer or sold by a business

INTEREST: A (consumer-side) publishing of interests like shopping preferences, items of interest, or more standard personal preferences

OFFER: A (business-side) publishing of offers that are available to consumers

Upon willing contribution by the user, and without knowing the user’s identity, a business can quickly and specifically search for the above metrics to perform retail analytics operations. These could occur online or offline and would be stored in the blockchain. BitClave foresees other implementations like activity sharing across groups (e.g. multiple stores bundling promotional information to target to willing consumes).

ROADMAP AND SUMMARY(5)

BitClave envisions the development of their platform and ecosystem to occur across this timeline and for these reasons:

  1. BitClave will deploy the BitClave Activity Search Ecosystem (BASE) which will act as a platform with browser and app-based core applications; a collection of APIs, libraries and SDKs that will allow for external developers to build on top of the platform.
  2. The initial design of the platform will focus on the “INTEREST” and “OFFER” activity parameters outlined above. The team envisions users will utilize the mobile app to create a list of interests and receive offers from businessess based on those interests. The team will gradually add further activities to the search engine.
  3. Once the platform has grown to include what BitClave determines as a sufficient amount of consumers and businesses, they plan to shift the focus towards marketing to small and medium-sized businesses in order to continue to build out the retail side of the marketplace. These will likely include businesses who already inherently market to consumers heavily (auto sales, real estate, hotels, etc.)

Summary

BitClave is aiming to develop a decentralized search engine that links consumers to businesses through blockchain technology. Consumer data is protected and participation is rewarded through native ERC-20 tokens (CAT), and businesses have the ability to cut out the middle-man in the advertising process in order to achieve better conversion rates on every advertising dollar spent. BitClave will be providing the framework for users and businesses to connect directly, while allowing for third-parties to build on top of the framework in order to benefit the ecosystem and adoption of the platform as a whole.

Disclaimer: This report is intended to provide market intelligence. This is not investment advice and does not constitute any solicitation or endorsement of any investment. Any investment you make is done at your own risk and at your full and absolute discretion. The contents of this report are the property of ICO Alert. All rights reserved.

References

(1) How To Participate, BitClave google docs, BitClave (2016–2017) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-a0-f15bwkzhOwZVOm-gC4el9qni0qHnfTdomm5QSlQ/edit

(2) BitClave Telegram App, Telegram App, (2016–2017) https://t.me/BitClaveCommunity

(3) Fundraiser, BitClave, (2016–2017) https://www.bitclave.com/fundraiser

(4) Contribution Terms, BitClave, (2016–2017) https://fundraiser.bitclave.com/tos

(5) Whitepaper, BitClave, (2016–2017) https://www.bitclave.com/whitepaper

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