STORM

Today we’ll be doing a review of a coin that you guys have requested and that is Storm coin! It has a catchy name and a beautiful website, and it markets itself as “Gamified micro-tasks”. What does that actually mean. Keep reading!

there will be a video link at the bottom for those who prefer an audio version

OVERVIEW

The first thing you have to understand about STORM, is that this is not a game. Gamified/ or gamification means to introduce game like elements into a normal mundane task to make it interesting and engaging.

STORM is actually a freelancer market. Much like UPWORK or FIVERR where you can go and hire freelancers to do certain tasks e.g. create a website etc… In STORM, you are the freelancer, and there’s a list of smaller tasks called micro-tasks that you can do on the go e.g. whilst you’re on the bus, waiting in the queue for your coffee etc… and for doing those tasks, you get paid BOLT tokens.

The micro-tasks involves gaming, e.g. downloading a game and playing it, or shopping or doing questions and answers.

But where the similarity ends and STORM takes off and becomes better than your average freelancing platform.

To start, on a normal free lancing website, the middleman which is the freelancing website will charge high fees, ranging from 20%-40%. Storm only charges 1% fees. Also where traditional freelancing websites can take up to 5 days to release payments to the freelancer, Storm does the payment immediately. It can charge so cheap and work so efficiently because it is a blockchain project and everything is run by smart contracts.

They also gamify the entire process to make it engaging and rewarding for the freelancer in the following way.
Frist, the developers have divided the available tasks up into 6 different treks/ streams that you can choose to get involved with

Achievers-- who are more orientated to learning new skills
Disruptors—which revolve around tasks that tests, hack things in a good way
Explorers—which concentrate on self-expressive creative tasks
Socialisers—which involve socialising tasks e.g. referrals
Philanthropists—basically good-will tasks that benefit the community
And finally Players—who do set Storm tasks and enjoy rewards

If you were playing an RPG, think of these 6 treks as your character class.

Next, you can level up your character class.

This is done by a process behind the scenes known as an action-loop. How it works is it considers the BOLT tokens you earn as the equivalent of experience points. So the more Bolt tokens you have, the more experience you have in that particular trek. And the benefit of levelling up is, check this out, you get rewarded with more tokens

There are a total of 4 ranks you can rank up

Discovery, Onboarding, Habit-building Immersed, and Mastery.

TOKEN

Currently the BOLT tokens you receive can be converted into ETH, BTC or STORM tokens. But the plan later on after this transition period is that you will only be able to convert it into STORM tokens. What I’m not really clear about is why do you need both BOLT and STORM tokens. Why not just 1 token?

My guess is perhaps BOLT tokens are pegged to a stable currency so that the payouts of the users are stable, and not fluctuant like the crypto on the market like STORM. E.g. if you earn 1000 Bolt tokens today and it is worth USD$1 (this is just an illustration the numbers are not accurate), tomorrow when someone else does the same task, it will also be worth $1. Whereas if it was just STORM token, then if the market goes down tomorrow, then the 1000 tokens they earned might be only worth $0.70, so that would be a 30% difference in payout. That would cause a lot of unnecessary discrepancy in the project economy. So most such platforms have duo currency, one pegged to the platform payment like BOLT which is more stable and one pegged to crypto market like STORM which is more volatile. An example of a platform that uses it for this model is STEEM and STEEM dollars. That’s just my reasoning, I could be wrong because the whitepaper doesn’t actual explain the rationale for 2 currencies, but it is a well-used model and reasonable guess. I think.

DOWNLOADS AND USERS

Their website and whitepaper is abit outdated. But according to their data, in August 2017, they had over a million downloads from over 180 countries and over a quarter of a million active monthly users. So that’s a potential 25% use case of an app which is very good.

Also if you look at their growth chart on their website, its almost a linear line up, meaning, very consistent growth, not small pumps. This is a very healthy look.

I found a more updated growth report, this was from March last month, from one of their official blogs:

They now have over 1.5million downloads and have paid out 249BTC, 570 ETH and 13.7million STORM tokens. So the project and their community is growing very nicely!

TEAM

This is their team, and the website starts with the advisors rather than the team, which is unusual, until you see who their advisors are:

Charles Hoskinson—Founder of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum with Vitalik back in the day
Bill Shihara—Founder of Bittrex
Anthony Di Iorio—CEO and founder of Jaxx
Steven Nerayoff—chief token sale strategist not only for this project but also ethereum, lisk and Bancor.
Guy Benartzi—co-founder of Bancor

And more!

Wow! This is a star-studded advisor team, no wonder they want to show case them first.

The actual team comes after:

It’s a reasonably big sized team with lots of engineers, but you do have other roles e.g. business development and accounting to balance things out.

The CEO is a very young guy by the name of Simon Yu, they described him as a business prodigy who at the age of 19yo turned a $100 gift into a $500,000 business. But no details of this business was given. No actual work experience or blockchain experience given. I actually felt abit underwealmed reading his resume. But there must be a reason he is the top dog.

The people under him have lots of experience, for example:

Their CTO -- Sean Zhong has over 20 years of experience with software engineering, with prior experience at Amazon and Big Fish

Their COO—Arry Yu, has over 20 years of experience working at companies such as google, Microsoft, KPMG, and Expedia.

Their VP of product—Andy Kleitsch is the former Amazon principle product manager as well as vice president of product Kletisch which has led product teams across a wide range of mobile commerce companies including role of Principle Product manager Amazon Global payments and Senior product manager at AT&T wireless. He’s also got a long history of launching innovative fintech applications.

So very heavy weight team here. Lots of experience in big companies, they know what they are doing, lots of successful careers. And very oddly, a very young CEO with almost no working experience. I’m sure theres more to the story that goes beyond his resume. But I really like their overall team’s resume.

Partnerships include notable names:

They’ve also had good news coverage including sources like Forbes, Coin journal, Cryptocoin news, cointelegraph etc.
.

Roadmap:

There isn’t a nice roadmap on their website. They really need to update their website.

But there was a blog on 1st April that outlined some upcoming events, which includes the IoS app (it's only available on Google pay at the moment). Nice! I’l definitely be checking this out when it is launched. I do expect their downloads and active users to rise significantly once this is launched.

And they will also be doing an airdrop in June 2018!

By the way, on the social media I noticed there have been some false airdrop notices leading to phising wesbites asking for your wallet’s private key. These are scams, so do not join them, real airdrops will never ask you for your private key.
Also they state be sure to join their telegram community. But be careful when you search Telegram, because if you just type in Storm, you see a Storm token chat with only 265 members and that’s actually a fake telegram chat with their icon. The real Storm Token telegram group has over 9000 members, so make sure you join the right one. The community was very helpful, I had questions and they replied very quickly and it wasn’t sarcastic remarks (for once), it was actually very informative and helpful. So I really appreciate that.

Pricing + potential

When they had their ICO in DEC last year, a STORM token was worth $0.0113, At its peak in Jan, it was sitting at $0.24, so that was a massive gain for those who got in early. Currently its sitting at $0.029, and despites some pumps and dumps, overall you can see its found a strong resistance around the $0.025 mark. So it’s a very attractive entry price point I think.

The crypto market is a really funny market, you have projects who are only ideas at this point with no working product yet who are worth multi-billion dollar marketcaps, and then you have projects like this who has a working product and is growing well in its use case with marketcaps a fraction of those top coins. I think these projects with actual working products and small marketcaps are undervalued and good investments potentially.

STORM specifically has a lot of potential still to grow. They have yet to launch their IOS app which will be huge, we’re talking about 40-50% of the mobile user market, so imagine their users literally doubling in the next few months.
They are also currently only doing micro-tasks. Imagine if this became very successful and they could have a branch project doing actual freelancing work, competing with Fiverr, Upworks etc… With their transaction fees and transaction times, they would very quickly become very popular.

There was a presentation last year that talked about freelancing in America and in 2017 there was over 53million freelancers. Freelancing work is growing very quickly, at least 3x US growing workforce. At its current growth rate, the majority of the U.S. workforce will be freelancers by 2027. That’s huge. So basically, the STORM project itself has a lot of potential to grow, but the industry they are in as well also has a lot of potential to grow. I personally think this project is in early days and has a lot of potential to grow.

So that’s my thoughts on STORM. I hope you found thispost helpful, if you liked it please give us an upvote and follow to help us grow our channel as well as to make sure you don’t miss out on any of our coin reviews or news.

One piece of news for our channel. We are starting a Telegram group, woohoo!

I’m abit nervous because Im not very good at keeping up with social media, but I’d do my best. I’ve got a friend who will also be helping me run as well, and we will prob invite some of you active members to be admins too. At the moment, I am the only member in the group, its very lonely ahah, so make sure you join me, and we’ll be sharing updates and news as a community, there’ll be lots of good conversations and there are sometimes so many updates we want to share with you guys e.g. the last couple of days theres been rumors of Dragonchain being listed on Bittrex next week. It’s all over their social media, but its not a piece of news we would create a whole youtube video for, but now we have a telegram channel we can share these kind of news with you guys. And I’m personally looking forward to finally having a proper conversation with many of you. It’s gonna be great! So the link’s up on the screen as well as in our description box below, definitely check it out guys. :D

Lastly, I have to end by saying we are not professionals and this posto is not financial advice, so always do your own homework and make your own decisions.

Til, next time guys, take care and goodbye!