Name: Newton Project
Symbol of Token: NEW
Website: https://www.newtonproject.org
GitHub: no
Documentation: whitepaper (available in several languages)
Status of ICO: in progress, completed 2 stages of the 3
pre‐sale: 1 March — 30 April 2018, collected 500 ВТС
private sale: 1 — 31 July 2018, collected 3500 ВТС (according to the comments of team)
public sale: it has planned for October, the exact date and price of the token are still unknown
100 billion tokens were issued in total, 10 billion of them owned by the team, 30 billion sold in the presale and during the private sale, and 60 billion will be available for public tokencache.
Investor from all countries except China, the United States and Puerto Rico will be able to participate in public sale after passing KYC.
Brief of project
The team of project is going to create an e‐commerce platform Newmail, which is based on blockchain technology. According to the founders, this platform could replace Alibaba, Amazon and other giants. Besides Newmail the company is going to launch other platforms in seven different industries in the future.
The main idea of the project is uncomplicated, although it is very difficult to understand it from whitepaper. They want to create a competitor to existing trading platforms by dumping. Now consumers buy goods in online stores at a set price and without bonuses, and the platform charges a high fee to sellers for the using of the platform and advertising costs. On the Newmail marketplace, which is sponsored by the nonprofit Newton Foundation, there will be no fee for sellers to exceed 10%, and buyers will receive tokens for purchases on this platform.
To earn less money from sellers and subsidize from reduced profits of buyers are not the most innovative ideas. In addition, the project has numerous competitors in the field of e‐commerce on the blockchain (Elysian, Elementh, Flogmail, Keyrpto and others).
What does blockchain have to do with?
At first, the use of blockchain technology in this project looks somewhat far‐fetched, because it is unclear how the problems that the team of project is going to solve with its help, interfere with sellers and buyers. According to the comments of founders, the blockchain technology should solve the problem of protection of trade in goods, allowing to record in the blockchain their main characteristics and verify their authenticity.
Now non‐digital assets are mostly recorded manually, for example, by marking. The project plans to use machine vision and technology of deep learning, allowing quickly extract several characteristics of non‐digital assets, including weight, volume, size, and some random characteristics. The unique digital identifier will be created and recorded in the blockchain based on this information.
This allows buyers to check whether the item they have received is the original at any time. Because such operation is expensive, it will be applied only to some goods, but the list is planned to be expanded over time. Also the blockchain is planned to be used for realization the concept of Neviot — the Internet of things and New AI — artificial intelligence in the Newton network.
The team of project and advisors
The company is registered in Singapore. The team consists of only 5 people и 6 advisors.
The founder of Newton Project Xu Jizhe was announced as a co‐founder of the Elastos project, the ICO of which was held in early 2018, but he could not be found on the Elastos website. Assistants in the chat of project explained this by the fact that he has left post, when created a new project. There are some reviews of ICO Elastos in the Internet, where Xu Jizhe defined as the co‐founder.
Also he is presented as founder of Zeuux — communities for free use of the software. But It is not possible to visit the website of this company. There is the user with this name in Twitter, presented as Founder Zeuux, but he has female photo and null account with 7 followers. The last posts were made in 2010. This page on Facebook also has only 7 followers.
Li Shubin — co‐founder of Newton Foundation is presented as General Director OkBuy. This is a major Chinese online store, that sells clothes and shoes. There are no information about the management of the company on the official website of OkBuy. But on the other website Li Shubin is presented as General Director. There no some people with these name, appearance and position on Facebook and LinkedIn. OkBuy is listed as a partner of the NewtonProject project.
Xia Wu — chief architect of Newton Foundation and co‐founder of Zeuux — the same company with 7 followers on Twitter and Facebook.
Advisors:
Han Feng — co‐founder of Elastos, on their official website, he is presented on their official website.
Li Songbo — ex technical director of Sina (NASDAQ: SINA) and allegedly a partner of the DFJ venture fund ((there is no information about it on the DFJ website).
The partners of project are two companies, that conducted an ICO in early 2018 in related areas, but judging by the price of tokens (below the ICO price), have not achieved serious success yet — Elastos and DCC.
Friendly to investors
The project is friendly to investors, it has accounts in all social networks, active followers, comments and publications. There are 14,000 people in basically chat of Telegrams. It has separate channels for different regions.
http://joxi.ru/p27Qj89uo8YBDr
The team of project quickly gives detailed answers on questions in chat rooms.
Positive indicators
- The test network has launched (you could see it on the official website after registration)
- According to the comments of team, the project has large private investors. Tokens have sold at 3500 PTS on the pre‐sale and the private sale. Because there is no fee wallet, this information could not be verified.
- News and updates are released weekly, the team of project is sociable.
- Website is multilingual and friendly to investors from different countries (the site supports multiple languages, the translation is not from Google).
- The road map is not tightened:
Q3 2018 — official launch of the test network and wallet;
Q4 2018 — launch of NewMall.
Negative indicators
- Whitepaper has only 14 pages. Basically, it describes in general terms the strategic vision of the economy of the future using blockchain, the Internet of things and the technical features of the project. To obtain answers to other questions you could only in personal communication with members of the team. There is nothing like a business plan for the development of the project in the official sources.
- The project code is not presented on GitHub, about progress of development your could judge only from the words of the project team.
- There is no yellowpaper, which usually reflects technologies, using in the project. Although you could find description of technical issues in a whitepaper and on the website
- There is no legal expertise of ICO.
- There is some doubts about the team’s experience.
- It is strange, that neither the exact dates of the public token‐sale, nor the price of tokens and Soft/Hard Cap are unknown. Date of listing on the stock‐exchanges is also not announced.
- In general, there is almost nothing about the token‐sale (neither in the article, nor on the site), except for the description of the distribution of tokens and three rounds of sales.
Evaluation of project
The project has ambitious goals, but it is not clear how it will compete with existing trading giants and smaller competitors (except for dumping, which is not a sustainable competitive advantage). It seems that team and advisors have a good level. But there is no the necessary information for the investor on the website and in whitepaper. Bearing mind the terms, stated in the roadmap, and the launched test network, it is possible that the project token will appear relatively quickly on the stock‐exchanges. The long‐term prospects of the project are unclear, but the project is suitable for short‐term investments. Rating 7 out of 10.
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