I first heard about Storm X a while back and initially I loved the idea of the project. I loved the idea of it for a couple reasons. First off, it's an actual working project that people can actually use today. In the crypto space so many projects are grand ideas that will never come to fruition and Storm X is actually working. Secondly, I loved that it's a project that makes sense to people and people can wrap their head around. in the crypto space there's a lot of amazing projects and techologies but oftentimes the technical scope of the project is something laymen like myself and many of you don't fully understand, everyone understands the idea of cash back crypto on purchases with your favorite retailers. And lastly, I liked that they didn't try to reinvent the wheel. Cashback programs are already popular, people already use them, so improving upon that concept by making it crypto instead of fiat, and also gamifying it and allowing people to earn interest staking the coin made a lot of sense to me.

After being a part of the project for a while, and thinking more about it, it seems a lot less appealing to me and here's why.

4 Problems With Storm X

1 Storm X Has No Mote

So here's the biggest problem I see with Storm X, they have no moat. What I mean by that is right now Visa and Mastercard are thinking about getting into crypto. You also have large exchanges like Crypto.Com, Coinbase, Binance, and others rolling out their own debit cards. I think it's not an if, but a when, in terms of these companies offering cashback on their cards. If this happens, Storm X loses. If you can get crypto cashback just for spending without jumping through any hoops, versus having to go on Storm X and specifically shop through a portal, I just don't see a lot of people continuing to use something like Storm X. The company has no moat, this is a space that inevidably someone bigger and more established will get into and have a much more streamlined system for allowing people to get crypto cashback for purchases

2 The Community is Ridiculous

Now this could be said about much of the crypto community and a lot of coins, but the coins that seem to have people the most divided are the coins that have communities with ridiculous expectations, communities that shill their coins in a cult like way, and communities that have ridiculous price expectations. If you head over the the Storm X Sub Reddit, people are calling for a $10 Storm X in the short term. Just looking at the market cap currently and coin supply, not only would the crypto market have to grow substantially as a whole, but Storm X would also need to be a Top 20 coin to even begin to make this a reality. While anything is possible, I don't think this is likely, yet people are throwing out this price target as a sure thing. Beyond that the community seems to only want to look at positives about the coin and overall just seems like a big circle jerk. Why this is a bad thing, even if a good coin has a crazy community, when people hear about that coin and go checkout the subreddit for that coin or what people are doing and everyone is blindshillers, it turns people off to that coin. That's not something I want to be part of.

4 Gas Fees

Now I realize we can't really blame Storm X for Ethereum gas fees and yes many coins have this problem. That said it makes Storm X unusable and in the grand scheme of things businesses who rely too heavily on a third party may fail because of that, and I think that may be another issue Storm X has. So just to Stake your Storm X requites an action on the Ethereum network. I think when I initially staked my coins I had cheap fees and it cost me about $17. Here a couple weeks later though in order to unstake my Storm X it's going to cost me $80 to $150 in gas fees. Add to that I don't have enough Ethereum in that wallet to perform this action so it would also cost me another $60 just to send $30 in gas, just to be able to unstake. Again, this is more of an Ethereum problem than a Storm X problem, but Storm X decided to build upon and keep their platform on the Ethereum network as opposed to the Binance Smart Chain which would actually make it usable, so there is some fault there.

4 The Affiliate Program Sucks

So affiliate programs can be amazing things for a business. Amazon has grown in large part because of their Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, same with Shopify, Netflix, and many others. Storm X has an affiliate program which is great, the catch however is for you to earn a commission you need to be a Gold level member meaning you hold 310,000 Storm X tokens, that's over $18,000. That's probably more than most people have in most cryptos, let alone in a sub 100 coin. As if that wasn't bad enough though, not only do you need to hold $18,000 in Storm X, but whomever you refer also needs to hold that much or you don't get paid your commission. The chances of you holding that much Storm X as well as a new user you refer is next to zero, so this affiliate program isn't really feasible and therefore won't drive adoption.

Initially I was really bullish on this project and this coin, however after thinking about it for a few weeks, I'm no longer bullish on, or wanting to be a part of this project or this community and as soon as I get $30 more worth of Ethereum over to that wallet, or I catch a day with low gas fees, I'll be exiting.