What is STOX?
STOX is a new prediction market; built on top of Bancor, which is built on top of Ethereum. The project is trying to enable people to bet on real world outcomes ranging from finance to weather. It is being developed by invest.com. They plan to have their 3,000,000 user base to be the initial users of the platform.
The founder of STOX is also the founder of invest.com. He developed invest.com in order to give everyone the ability to find and share investment strategies while trading on it simultaneously. The rest of the 20 member team has similar skills and ability.
Pros
STOX already has the track record of an already operable platform. Invest.com has a decent UI and they have 3,000,000 users ready to use STOX. The UI that STOX looks like it will be seems much smoother than the Augur beta. Another pro about the team is that have experience in building an investment platform. All they really need to do is add crypto currency to it. Now cryptocurrency is not an easy implementation by any means but the experience they have will be helpful if anything.
STOX being located outside of the US is also a big help for its growth and development. What is going to help STOX the most over its competitors is the fact they already have a large user base to test with. This will give them instant use cases while other projects have to lure users in. Also having been an established mainstream company they also have faced legal regulation; meaning once legislation is passed they will have up to date codes for the project.
Cons
The cons for STOX are pretty large cons. STOX is built on top of Bancor which is on top of Ethereum. The simple explanation is that there are more intermediaries. Fewer intermediaries the better. The 3,000,000 user claim does not mean there are 3,000,000 active users, it probably only means that there are 3,000,000 accounts open.
If STOX plans to be used widely and be a very active site then handling all of the transactions on the Ethereum network will be very difficult. Traffic is one thing that is going to have to be solved. Finally, I think the fact that they don't have a ready to use platform and the fact that they plan to open it in the future, makes it no different from any other project with a flashy website.
Conclusion
STOX is appealing in the short term. If added to Bittrex might see an initial spike, then a down period for a while, then three weeks down the line a sudden pump. Long term though only time will tell. I don't think STOX is intrinsic by any means so it will really come down to the deals and partnerships that it can form.
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