Quadrant Earns “Positive Rating” From Independent Agency ICORating

Mike Davie | Quadrant Protocol
Quadrant Protocol
Published in
5 min readJul 3, 2018

Ahead of our public token sale, we hired ICORating to conduct an objective evaluation of our ICO.

We are immensely proud that ICORating assigned the Quadrant Protocol a “positive investment” rating.

The ICOs ratings sector is plagued by “pay-to-play” services. Not so with ICORating. They are explicit that they will evaluate an ICO as they see it. We subjected ourselves to this objective process because we wanted our community to have the benefit of a reliable review.

We encourage you to read the full rating here and to participate in our ongoing public sale.

If you want a quick overview, we have extracted these highlights from the report.

One key thing to note is how ICORating emphasizes our up-and-running testnet. That in itself is pleasing, but especially so because we have not been standing still. We will soon be making announcements about our development progress.

Highlights

Introduction

Based on the analysis performed and issues identified we have assigned the Quadrant Protocol project a “Positive” rating. At the time of writing the testnet (MVP) was already available which is a possible indicator of the team’s serious intentions.

“The project has the following strengths which are worth noting:

  • Availability of testnet (MVP).
  • Participating in a significant and fast-growing market (the blockchain industry).
  • Highly skilled and vastly experienced founder.
  • Ambitious idea.
  • The economic potential of the token is notable.”

General Information about the Project and ICO

When analyzing the ICO’s general information, ICORating said:

“We note that intended distribution of funds between R&D, Business & Network Development, Operations & Security, Treasury, and Legal, Accounting & Compliance is healthy, taking into account the project’s nature and its key features and current stage of development.”

One potential, low-level issue:

“Forecasts of marketing activities and plans for product promotion are not covered in the whitepaper, and it is impossible to analyze or draw the relevant conclusions regarding potential market exposure without them.”

Roadmap

When analyzing Quadrant Protocol’s roadmap, the team at ICORating noted:

“The testnet was already available at the time of review, having been released on May 14th, so the risk for potential investors is reduced when compared to projects without an MVP before/during their ICO.”

Market Outlook

In terms of market competition, ICORating concluded:

“Where Quadrant is designed to really stand out from competitors like Ocean, Streamr, Synapse AI and IOTA, is by providing Elons with the opportunity to innovate using a diverse array of mapped data sources. Pioneers are intended to create data products based on data provided by Nurseries. Elons can then take those products, find linkages and create mega Constellations that can be used by companies to effect real change in the world, all while being fairly compensated.”

Referring to the same potential competition, ICORating said:

“It is worth noting that all of the above competitors have valued themselves higher than Quadrant while offering less features or being in an earlier stage of development. Given that Quadrant offers more features and has already released a testnet, we believe that it is more likely than not that the Quadrant project has a great opportunity for future growth.”

The only issue highlighted by ICORating was the absence of competitor analysis in Quadrant’s whitepaper. However, it is important to note that no direct competitors were discovered.

Team

In analyzing the composition of the team, ICORating raised the question of the team’s experience. However, in light of the testnet’s success, ICORating concluded:

“[Quadrant Protocol] seems technically complicated and we’d like to draw attention to the fact that the ability of the team to deliver such a complex project can be witnessed as the MVP has already been released. If the testnet hadn’t yet been released, we would have doubted the sufficiency of the project team’s experience.”

Investment Risks

The following summarizes the investment risks found by ICORating. All risks were assigned a risk level of medium or low.

Decrease in token price (low)

There are no fundamental factors indicating that the token price will face significant pressure and the bonuses are relatively low. However, the team does not disclose the amount of funds raised during the presale round and the terms of the ICO are still unknown, so the exact number of tokens sold with a discount is unclear.

Roadmap (low)

The roadmap only covers the technical aspects of the project, and does not specify the business development process in much detail or the team’s plans regarding market coverage/number of platform users, etc. We note that there are some business-related milestones on the roadmap, but we believe that there might be more than what’s mentioned.

MVP (low)

The testnet has just been released so currently there is no comprehensive feedback or response.

Legal/commercial (medium/low)

Data reliability and information security are extremely significant issues for all countries and industries, and all stakeholders around the world might be interested in the internal details. However, blockchain is a solution designed for reliability and security.

— Smart contract code not available for review (medium)

There are links to GitHub through the whitepaper, but the link itself is not provided and the account is impossible to find in open sources. We note that it is impossible to review the contract for the ICO.

— Development (medium)

The team has quite ambitious plans concerning the length of time between the different stages. Between the MVP release (which is a significant stage of the project) and other stages there is a very short amount of time. The application, adoption and beta-testing/performance improvement of a product for enterprise use all require significant time and effort from the team.

— Whitepaper (medium)

Absence of competitor analysis; Whitepaper doesn’t include information about bonuses, all data was received from the Project team; Forecasts of marketing activities and plans for product promotion are not covered in the whitepaper and it is impossible to analyze or draw the relevant conclusions regarding potential market exposure without them.

— Team composition (medium)

The team has ambitious plans in terms of product complexity. Apart from the founder, the other team members appear to have limited experience, as they are all relatively young & their job experience consists of mainly working for this founder on a different project. But since they already have the testnet (MVP) available, their expertise must be decent and we can downgrade this risk to Medium.

ICORating’s full report can be found here.

Quadrant Protocol’s Token Sale is now live. Join us in building the new data economy. Purchase your eQUAD tokens here.

If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to our team via our Telegram channel: https://t.me/quadrantprotocol

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