Winding Tree ICO Review and Líf Token Analysis
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Winding Tree ICO Overview
Significant inefficiency plagues nearly every segment of the travel industry. Five companies control the lion’s share of inventory. Priceline and Expedia, the two largest Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), control 95% of the OTA market in the U.S. Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport, the top three Global Distribution Systems (GDS), have a 99% combined market share in non-direct inventory in the air market. With only a few players dominating the market, the economic incentive for innovation and improvement is little to none. The Winding Tree ICO concept is based on the idea this concentrated and centralized state of travel distribution bears a strong cost on consumers and hinders the development of the market. As for small players, which Winding Tree contend are the main sources of innovation in the sector, the problem is particularly acute because the barrier to entry is so high.
Winding Tree ICO Value Proposition
The Winding Tree platform provides an open-source, permissionless way for inventory distributors (airlines and hotels) to connect directly with small-scale travel operators, without the fees and inefficiencies currently associated with centralized travel platforms. As a means to spur integration and innovation from within the market rather than attempting to enter from the outside, the platform is designed so that anyone can integrate the Winding Tree platform into their services.
One of the most important aspects of Winding Tree is that it is a public decentralized computing platform with the open consensus model, as opposed to a consortium model or one based on complete centralization. Winding Tree facilitates travel distribution in all of its different aspects by making it cheaper, faster, and easier for new business models to emerge in the travel industry by by-passing the inventory giants. To illustrate how the platform can do this, the inefficiencies of the currency airline inventory distribution infrastructure serves as an example. Currently, airlines must pay GSD fees to OTAs and B2B aggregators in order to access their platform and ultimately end customers. Airlines in turn pass these fees onto customers through higher ticket prices. Winding Tree eliminates these fees altogether by connecting the inventory distributors directly with the customers, eliminating the fees incurred by centralized inventory aggregators.
Líf is the ERC20 token at the core of Winding tree. The token has two primary functions. First, it is used for payments. For an agency (offline or online) to book anything on the Winding Tree platform, they will have to send a certain amount of Líf to the airline or hotel chain. Conversely, for an airline or hotel chain to access the platform and list inventory, they too will have to use Líf toward this end. As for the second function, Líf also serves as a governance token for approving changes to the platform. As Winding Tree is open-source, anyone can propose a change to the platform code, whether that’s an update to a smart contract or new business model. Below is a diagram of the token ecosystem:
Winding Tree ICO Team
Founder of Winding Tree, Maxim Mizmaylov, is also Co-founder and CEO of Roomstorm, a travel services company that offers cost-saving solutions to hotels and airlines in the event of overbooking and cancellations. He has 4 years experience as a leader in the travel tech industry and an additional 4 as a software engineer.
Jakub Vysoky is CTO of Winding Tree. He is a Co-founder and CTO of Roomstorm. He has over a decade of experience in programming and computer engineering.
COO and Co-founder, Pedro Renaud Anderson is in charge of securing partnerships for Winding Tree, which he already has a track record of achieving. He has over 4 years of experience as a BD Manager and Sales Executive with Attendify, an event app service.
Lead Blockchain Developer and Co-founder, Augusto Lemble, is in charge of smart contract development and security with Winding Tree. He has over 2 years of experience as a Full Stack Developer in the crypto space.
On the advising team is Willian Niejadlik, Co-founder and former CTO of Vayama, one of the largest travel inventory distributors in the market. William brings his breadth of knowledge and experience to the project as an industry insider.
Winding Tree ICO Strengths and Opportunities
One of the most promising aspects of the Winding Tree ICO is the number of partnerships already established prior to launching the ICO. The team have paired up with Air New Zealand and Lufthansa to test their distribution of airline inventory. The companies are highly interested in the prospect the platform holds to reduce transactional costs for both the airline and the customer. As for hotel inventory distribution, the Winding Tree ICO team have also partnered with Nordic Choice hotels to implement a pilot test for the company’s inventory in Stockholm. These partnerships are crucial for demonstrating the real world use case of the product and provide an incentive to other airlines and hotel chains to follow suite should it be a success.
As for the platform itself, a testnet is already available for trial. The Winding Tree ICO scores well by our metrics for planning their ICO launch only after having both established strong partnerships and released a testnet for public trial. As the project is open source and can be integrated freely, we think this lends an aspect versatility and adaptability that will be necessary for disrupting a market dominated by a handful of billion dollar corporations.
Winding Tree ICO Weaknesses and Threats
The Winding Tree ICO faces a tough road ahead disrupting the big airline and hotel industry distributors. The decentralized nature of the platform means that in order to capture the inventory of the world’s major airlines, each one will have to individually integrate the platform into their inventory systems on a company-by-company basis. But with major carriers already planning to test the Winding Tree platform, there’s always the possibility a successful product will see airlines lining up to integrate the platform themselves.
From an investment standpoint, the Market Validation Mechanism employed by the project increases uncertainty to a very high degree. After the ICO, the project will receive a maximum of $10 million regardless of how much money is raised. The remainder goes into a smart contract which buys back tokens (and burns them) at the following rate- (Total Amount Raised – $10 million) / Token Supply). Over time, the smart contract releases some funds to the Winding Tree team. If token holders return their Líf for ETH, the contract will be have no funds and the team will receive nothing. On the one hand, the advantages of this ICO structure are two-fold: over the two week period everyone has time to participate because there is no cap and hence no FOMO. It also creates a disincentive for whales- the more Líf they accumulate the more they increase the total supply, thereby reducing the percentage share they would have in a capped system. On the other hand, the final cap and token supply in the short term are unknown, which creates a relatively high level of uncertainty for initial investors.
The Verdict on the Winding Tree ICO
For a project that’s set out to make a big mark on the travel industry, the Winding Tree ICO holds a formidable hand. The project already has three partnerships with large enterprises in their target industry and a testnet online. The open source concept also lends a higher degree of adaptability to the project. While the challenges ahead loom large, we believe the Winding Tree ICO could well mark the beginning of a change in the industry. After weighing all of the pros and cons of the project, we’ll be making a small bet on the Winding Tree ICO.
Learn more about the Winding Tree ICO from our Telegram Community by clicking here.
Today’s Date: 12/31/17
Project Name: Winding Tree
Token Symbol: Líf
Website: https://windingtree.com
White Paper: https://windingtree.com/files/White%20Paper_EN_nov21.pdf
Crowdsale Hard Cap: Determined by MVM
Total Supply: Determined by MVM
Token Distribution: 75% to public sale, 20% to founders, advisors, employees, 5% to longterm foundation budget
Price per Token: First week 1ETH = 10 Líf / Second week 1ETH = 9 Líf
Maximum Market Cap (at crowdsale price): Market Validation Mechanism https://blog.windingtree.com/market-validation-mechanism-in-a-nutshell-ddba1d92be89
Bonus Structure:
Private presale 1: $50k at a 50% bonus rate
Private presale 2: $200k at a 30% bonus rate
Public presale 3: $1.25Mil at a 10% bonus rate
Presale Terms: N/A
Whitelist: TBA (Community Announcements Sign Up)
Important Dates: February 1st – 15th, 2018
Expected Token Release: Distributed for 7 days after crowd sale
ICO Review Disclaimer
The team at Crypto Briefing analyzes an initial coin offering (ICO) against ten criteria, as shown above. These criteria are not, however, weighted evenly – our proprietary rating system attributes different degrees of importance to each of the criteria, based on our experience of how directly they can lead to the success of the ICO in question, and its investors.
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Founding Team
This category accounts for the leaders, developers, and advisors.
Poor quality, weak, or inexperienced leadership can doom a project from the outset. Advisors who serve only to pad their own resumes and who have ill-defined roles can be concerning. But great leadership, with relevant industry experience and contacts, can make the difference between a successful and profitable ICO, and a flub.
If you don’t have a team willing and able to build the thing, it won’t matter who is at the helm. Good talent is hard to find. Developer profiles should be scrutinized to ensure that they have a proven history of working in a field where they should be able to succeed.
Product
What is the technology behind this ICO, what product are they creating, and is it new, innovative, different – and needed?
The IOTA project is a spectacular example of engineers run amok. The technology described or in use must be maintainable, achievable, and realistic, otherwise the risk of it never coming into existence is incredibly high.
Token Utility
Tokens which have no actual use case are probably the worst off, although speculation can still make them have some form of value.
The best tokens we review are the ones that have a forced use case – you must have this token to play in some game that you will probably desire to play in. The very best utility tokens are the ones which put the token holder in the position of supplying tokens to businesses who would be able to effectively make use of the platforms in question.
Market
There doesn’t have to be a market in order for an ICO to score well in this category – but if it intends to create one, the argument has to be extremely compelling.
If there is an existing market, questions here involve whether it is ripe for disruption, whether the technology enables something better, cheaper, or faster (for example) than existing solutions, and whether the market is historically amenable to new ideas.
Competition
Most ideas have several implementations. If there are others in the same field, the analyst needs to ensure that the others don’t have obvious advantages over the company in question.
Moreover, this is the place where the analyst should identify any potential weaknesses in the company’s position moving forward. For instance, a fundamental weakness in the STORJ system is that the token is not required for purchasing storage.
Timing
With many ICO ideas, the timing may be too late or too early. It’s important for the analyst to consider how much demand there is for the product in question. While the IPO boom funded a lot of great ideas that eventually did come to fruition, a good analyst would recognize when an idea is too early, too late, or just right.
Progress To Date
Some of the least compelling ICO propositions are those that claim their founders will achieve some far-off goal, sometime in the future, just so long as they have your cash with which to do it.
More interesting (usually) is the ICO that seeks to further some progress along the path to success, and which has a clearly-identified roadmap with achievable and reasonable milestones along the way. Founders who are already partially-invested in their products are generally more invested in their futures.
Community Support & Hype
Having a strong community is one of the fundamental building blocks of any strong blockchain project. It is important that the project demonstrates early on that it is able to generate and build a strong and empowered support base.
The ICO marketplace is becoming more crowded and more competitive. While in the past it was enough to merely announce an offering, today’s successful ICO’s work hard to build awareness and excitement around their offering.
Price & Token Distribution
One of the biggest factors weighing any analysis is price. The lower the price the more there is to gain. But too low of a price may result in an under capitalized project. It is therefore important to evaluate price relative to the individual project, its maturity and the market it is going after.
The total supply of tokens should also be justified by the needs of the project. Issuing a billion tokens for no reason will do nobody any good.
Communication
Communication is key. The success of a project is strongly tied to the project leaders’ ability to communicate their goals and achievements.
Things don’t always go as planned but addressing issues and keeping the community and investors in the loop can make or break a project.
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