Sether ICO, information and analysis/outlook

What is Sether?

Sether uses smart contracts to allow marketers to be able to better interact with their social network audiences. This could encompass anything from Customer Targeting, to Bounty Campaigns, to PR and much more.

In order to best analyze this ICO opportunity, there are 6 questions I'm going to answer and rank from 1-10 (the closer to 10 the better). At the end I'll have an overall index of my confidence in this ICO and I'll take a shot at what I believe the potential growth could be within the first year.

Although I'm trying my best to use the data I can find to offer some insight, please note that this is also influenced by my personal opinion (especially when it comes to the 1-10 scores and weights) and there are no guarantees in crypto. I am not a financial adviser.

1. How much competition exists in this space?
   It seems like the opportunity is a fairly unique one. There are a couple tokens out there that do have some similar characteristics. Basic Attention Token (BAT) is currently the 52nd ranked Cryptocurrency on coinmarketcap.com with a market cap of $690,491,000. BAT is creating a browser called "Brave" that will create an environment where advertisers, publishers, and users can interact utilizing tokens. ReddCoin (RDD) is currently ranked 65th with a market cap of $529,340,315 and aims to allow users to transfer funds from social media platforms instantly and for free. Although it seems to be oriented more towards end users, it seems this same technology could easily be used between publishers, marketers, and users.
   Although these (BAT/RDD) have some similarities, Sether looks to position itself differently by offering a platform for marketers that utilizes big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and behavioral science. There is an alpha version of the program available via their website (https://www.sether.io/alpha) that any potential investor should check out.
   Competition Score: 8/10 Weight: 0.15

• How promising does the website/whitepaper look?
  As far as the look of the site, there aren't any major red flags but it's also not knocking my socks off. I did notice one UI issue when scanning the page, but it seems to be in a part of the page that was recently updated and is not thematically a problem throughout. The content of the webpage is very informative, it walks through all the necessary information such as what the offering is, what the product is, what the market is, and has a roadmap and whitepaper that are easy to find. The whitepaper is 38 pages of detailed information on the project. I would always recommend reading through the whitepaper if you are thinking about investing. Overall, the site and whitepaper were very plain to look at but did have solid content. There is one claim on the website that I'm going to have to reach out for clarification on. They claim that they are distributing 11,000,000 SETH for a price of .003 ETH each with a hard cap of 33,000 ETH. However, there is a current bonus of 40% for buying in which would mean 1 ETH gets you 466.6 SETH instead of 333.3 SETH. It does not seem clear what supply that extra SETH is coming out of if the math only accounts for 333.3 per ETH if the hard cap is met.
  Content/Look Score: 7/10 Weight: 0.1

• What platform/successes have they experienced so far?
  The biggest takeaway here is that they do have a working alpha version of their product as mentioned above. I was able to play around in the system briefly and it seemed to work fairly well for an alpha. This always is a great thing to see as a potential investor because it shows that this is a real initiative that has had real time/effort poured into it. The timeline they present looks great. The only caveat is because this is such a new project, you can't really look historically to see how good they are at meeting their timeline. The first item is the alpha testnet for January 2018 so we at least know they were able to implement that.
  Platform Score: 8/10 Weight: 0.1

• How does the ICO timing look in relation to the overall crypto market?
  This might be one area where we have to weigh in a negative factor completely out of the company's control. If you are a firm believer in blockchain technology and it's adoption like I am, and if you like the project/team then from a long term view this score may not matter to you so keep that in mind. The truth of the current situation is with growing uncertainty regarding the future of South Korea's cryptocurrency accessibility, you have to be cautious on how you're investing your money. This is no fault of Sether, but it does factor into the short term success you may see here. If you're unsure what I'm referring to, see the below article from Reuters. The overall Cryptocurrency market cap already plummeted by about $100B when the news broke leaving many investors on edge.
  https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-southkorea-bitcoin/south-korea-plans-to-ban-cryptocurrency-trading-rattles-market-idUSKBN1F002A
  Timing Score: 6/10 Weight: 0.1

• What sort of profit potential exists for this ICO?
  Currently, the ICO is selling 1 SETH for .003 ETH. The total supply of SETH is 20,000,000 coins. At the time of writing (not necessarily publishing) this post the price of ETH is $1,229.10. This means that the cost per SETH would be approximately $3.69. However, for the time being they are offering a bonus of 40% SETH which would mean the valuation of SETH would be lower per. To muddy things more, it sounds like they will be distributing 50% of the company's tokens (3,500,000 out of 7,000,000 company held) proportionally among investors at the close of the ICO. This means that if this ICO sells out, there will likely end up being a circulating supply of 14,500,000 at the end of the ICO. However, as mentioned above, I do need some validation on where exactly the bonus 40% of tokens are coming from. If they do in fact take in 33,000 ETH, mathematically that 40% must come from outside of the 55% public supply they are selling. So either they are going to cap before 33,000 ETH is reached or they are going to distribute more than 14,500,000 tokens at release. If they are taking that 40% bonus from the company share (4,400,000 SETH) and then distributing an additional 50% of what company share is left (1,300,000) that would mean 16,700,000 circulating supply if the ICO sells out to the hard cap. This would mean that at the current ETH price and hard capped ICO, we'd be looking at a $40,560,300 market cap and $2.43 per SETH out the gate. That valuation would put SETH at rank 317 on coinmarketcap currently. If they are in fact selling less ETH than posted to accommodate this 40% bonus, they would then only sell 23,571.43 ETH for a market cap of $28,971,642.86 and $2.00 per SETH (371 coinmarketcap rank).
  The website for Sether boasts about a market opportunity where social media marketing spending is projected to be around $14B in 2018. They also note predicted U.S. programmatic display ad spend will reach around $32.6B. Since the market cap we're looking at seems to be in the low 8-figure range, it's easy to see opportunity to grow here. That being said, it is important to note the comparison between social media marketing and currency coins that have been extremely successful. Whenever a new currency coin has entered the market, if it has a unique selling proposition that is enticing it has also benefited from the fact that the banking/currency space is vastly larger than the social media marketing one. $14-$32 billion is certainly nothing to laugh at, but just keep in mind that the currency coins are flirting with multi-trillion dollar marketplaces. To put this in perspective, as of April 2017 JP Morgan Chase had a market cap of over $331 Billion dollars, that's a single bank (albeit the biggest bank) with more than 22 times the size of the entire social media marketing industry (10x programmatic display) outlined in the Sether website (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264905/top-10-banks-by-market-capitalization/)
  Profit Potential Score: 7/10 Weight: 0.4

• What level of confidence should I have in the team surrounding this ICO?
  The best way to evaluate the team would be to check out the LinkedIn profiles for each member. One of the first things you'll see is that John McAfee is a special adviser to this project. Love or hate the man, he does have a reputation for being able to pump a crypto. It appears that he actively sought out involvement in this project from the outside because he noticed it and believed in the concept (https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/943480226297860096?lang=en). As far as the core team, they seem perfectly solid as far as I can tell. The only thing I would caution is it seems that most of the team originates from the same organization called mWare (http://bigconnect.io/). Sometimes it's appealing to see collaborations that reach a little further. That being said, I would anticipate that their expertise in big data analytics at this organization positions them well for this project.
  Team Score: 7/10 Weight: 0.15

So, here's my conclusion for these guys.

Total Indexed Score: 7.15/10

• This is simply calculated by my score for each section times that sections weight

My estimated profit potential? 1,205% - 2,283% growth within a year ($31.70 - $47.62 Per Coin)

• Calculated low end as (RDD Market Cap - Larger Initial Market Cap Estimate)/ Larger Initial Market Cap Estimate. (529,340,315 - 40,560,300) / 40,560,300
• Calculated high end as (BAT Market Cap - Smaller Initial Market Cap estimate)/Smaller Initial Market Cap Estimate. (690,491,000 - 28,971,642.86) / 28,971,642.86
• Note: There is no actual way to predict % gains accurately, if someone did figure it out, they would just make billions of dollars and not tell you. I felt this comparison was the best shot I had with the data out there.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I started writing this several hours ago and was interrupted, so you may notice some numbers are from this morning/afternoon. This is my first ICO review and I'd love feedback on the framework I used. Best of luck to any investors out there that choose to go for this ICO

ICO Website:
https://www.sether.io/
ICO End date: February 14th, 2018
Minimum buy-in: 0.1 ETH