The Electroneum ICO is well under way with their website currently displaying sales of over 569 bitcoins.

What is Electroneum?

They're aiming to target the globes 2.2 billion smart phone users with their new coin that can easily be mined on smartphones. It's been built on its own blockchain and has now launched its ICO to gain funds for the project.
They're aiming to make crypto currency easier to understand for the average person. They feel that its far too complicated for the average person to get involved with crypto and hope to make crypto accessible to all. Users will be able to control all aspects of the new currency from their smartphone.
The new platform will use the CryptoNote algorithm, used by popular currencies such as Monero and ByteCoin.

Mining

The new crypto currency will be available to mine with a simple app. Rather than the user being presented with an option of either buying an expensive mining rig or sending their ID to a random exchange to buy coins all you'll need to do to get started with Electroneum is download a free app.
Installing the app (from Apple or Android) means that the user can start mining the currency instantly, even when the app is running in the background you'll still be gaining coins. They claim that the app will use very little bandwidth so will be cheap for the user to mine and won't require any technical ability.

High coin supply

They're going to have a total supply of 21 billion coins, they claim this is so that transactions will be based on just 2 decimals, so that transactions will have a similar feel to FIAT transactions. Rather than with bitcoin you often see transactions such as: 0.000472 which can look strange to users with little knowledge of crypto currency.
One of their main selling points seems to be that the new currency will be much easier to understand with the simple 2 decimal place payment system and the easy to use app for mining.

Target Market

The team claim that they have 2 main targets for their marketing:

Gaming (computer gamers)

The retention rate of multiplayer online games after the first 30 days is just 20%. They'll be targeting this market so that gamers can use the new virtual currency to transfer some of their earnings to new games by monetizing their in game currency. The new platform will target game company owners by offering them a commission on any exchanges they generate when players exit their game.

Gaming (gambling market)

Many gaming companies now accept bitcoin as a form of payment. The problem is many people find bitcoin complicated and hard to purchase.
Over 2 billion people in the world still don't have a bank account, this is a market that gaming companies are desperate to target.
Electroneum state that their new currency will help to solve this problem by allowing users to mine coins from their mobile phone which could then be used for gaming. Winnings can then be paid back to the users wallet.

The Team

They have a team of experienced developers lead by Richard Ells. Richard Ells founded a successful digital agency 20 years ago.
He also more recently, in 2013, founded Retortal.com. Retortal has a team of 40 developers and designed a social media management platform that's use by fortune 500 companies. Retortal is currently valued at over $50 million.

History

• January 2015: Richard Ells buys his first bitcoin and starts his interest in crypto currency.

• August 2015: The retortal team begin building their own crypto currency, forked from cryptonate.

• January 2016: Their crypto currency still hasn't been named but is working in their server rack.

• April 2016: They start using their first GPU miner.

• July 2016: Bitcoin has trebled in value since Richard's initial investment. The team decide to start developing a crypto currency that improves on what is currently available.

• August 2016: They decide on the open source Bytecoin improvements in cryptonote as the initial basis for their new currency.

• September 2016: The team decide that mobile ubiquity should be what the currency is built around. They start naming it "Electron".

• January 2017: The team have formally raised the initial investment needed to launch their crypto currency, planned for the Summer of 2017.

• March 2017: They have a working model of their crypto currency and claim to be doing something that nobody else in the world is.

• June 2017: Discovering that there's already a small currency named "Electron" they decide to rebrand themselves as "Electroneum" to guarantee that they differentiate themselves from them.

• Jule 2017: Electroneum limited is formed and takes full control of the project.

What will initially be ready after the ICO ends?

The team is raising money via the ICO so that they can have a more ambitious plan but they claim that all the items needed for them to launch are already available and have been extensively tested, such as:

• The blockchain: The technology behind all crypto currencies.
• APP based wallet: Allowing access to the platform without any prior knowledge of crypto.
• APP based mining: Allowing non technical users to mine the currency straight away.
• Offline wallet: a completely secure offline wallet safe from hackers.
• Windows wallet
• Windows miner: Allowing users to mine from their PC.
• Mining pool software: To make mining easier, with open source so that others can develop their own pool.
• Blockchain explorer: Used to verify payments on the blockchain.
• Third party API: So that third parties can accept the currency as payment.

Why should you invest?

Electroneum state that their new currency will be much easier to use than those currently on the market and aim to appeal more to the mass market.
The team behind the currency have a history of founding successful companies and are already a properly registered British company.
Duncan Logal, he CEO of Rocketspace who helped huge companies such as Uber and Spotify has also publicly tweeted that this will be the first ICO that he's investing in.

Roadmap

The official roadmap will depend on the amount of funds that is raised but they say that the general roadmap will be as follows:

• Global translations of the app.
• Integration of a global SMS system authenticate users and make the transfer of coins even easier.
• International promotion of the new platform.
• Development of a GUI CPU miner that is capable of running in Windows and a more accessible GUI wallet for Windows.
• They'll be building a virtual currency exchange app. The desktop version will be available by Their GitHub open source repository.

Electroneum ICO Details

• Token sale date: 14th of September to October 31st.

• Coins available for the sale: 6.3 billion.

• Price $0.01 per token.

• Payment methods: Bitcoin or Ethereum.

• Bonuses:
  28th of September-4th of October- 30%.
  5th-11th of October- 20%
  12th-18th of October-10%

• Additional 1% bonus on top for the entire sale by using my affiliate link here

Unsold coins

Any unsold coins at the end of the ICO will be used as a mining bonus. It's common in token sales to destroy unsold tokens but Electroneum say that they have decided that there's no way for users to verify that this has happened so they're taking a different approach.
They say that by increasing the mining bonus will increase the amount of users mining which will then increase the price of the coins.

Conclusion

They have a solid team behind them with a great track record. The high token supply may be an issue for some but their point on making crypto payments similar to FIAT with a 2 decimal point system does make sense.
Update 8th of October: The website now shows a huge total of over 45,000 registered users with total sales of over 14,000 ETH and 1100 Bitcoin. This looks set to be one of the biggest ICO's of the year.

Links:
Referral link: 1% additional bonus when using my code
Whitepaper: http://electroneum.com/overview-white-paper.pdf