This series of reviews expands on the projects covered in my Badman ICOs series giving a more in-depth look at the aspects that matter when deciding whether to invest in a project. The second project to be covered is Acorn Collective.

Brief

Acorn Collective plan to revolutionize the current crowdfunding paradigm by introducing a blockchain powered funding platform. This will enable any project throughout the world to raise funds from anywhere else in the world as long as there are no local laws against possession of Blockchain assets and the project is legal in its country. The advantages over centralized crowdfunding will be zero fees, the inclusion of automated and personalized digital marketing campaigns and increased investor trust due to the immutability of distributed ledger technology.
You can check it out here for more general information about the project.

Hype

Acorn Collective has a relatively large social following, with 32.1K twitter followers, 32.0K telegram members and 1.1K subscribers to r/TheAcornCollective. The website looks the part, and is easy to navigate and presents it’s information well… exactly what you would expect from a top tier project.

The project has been featured in various relevant news publications(Forbes,Coin Telegraph and Hacker Noon) and has a number of partnerships including the European Crowdfunding Network and Bancor among others.

Competition

The only real competitors in the crowdfunding field are an opensource Eth based project called Weifund, Starbase which launched on HitBTC in December with no working product and has a daily trading volume of less than $1,000 and Elixir. Elixir seems to be the most established of the three with a listing on Kucoin and a market cap of $11.4 Million. The project seems to lack the vision of the Acorn project, and with a team of only 2 co-founders and no advisors, it may be a long time before the Elixir project finishes development.

The Acorn already has exchange listings confirmed and if it hits hard cap, it will have a market value that is 3 times larger than Elixir’s, instantly putting them higher in the rankings on launch. This means that Acorn doesn’t necessarily have the first mover advantage, but will most likely be in first place shortly after ICO.

Tokenomics

The Acorn Collective network utilizes a utility token (OAK) which has a total supply of 65 Million tokens with 25 Million being made available in the ICO. The token price during ICO is set to be a flat rate of $1.40 with no bonuses which makes a fair playing field for all investors and reduces the chances for a dump upon launch. It’s worth noting, the max supply is relatively low, and if Acorn were to hit somewhere in the top 20, the individual token price could reach as high as $1,000 or more.

The token will be used in all transactions within the Acorn ecosystem, including crowdfunding and marketplace spending, as well as external purchases through the Acorn payments gateway. The team has gained regulatory approval for the classification as a utility token with no objections to Acorn’s legal advisor’s verdict that real utility means real demand for the token.

Team

The Acorn team looks good, with Co-Founder Peter-Andreas Kurtz having 40 years’ experience in the finance industry while working for top European banks in Frankfurt, as well as London, New York and Hong Kong. CCO Ed Lobbett also stands out as the Co-Founder and CEO of Hoppr, a digital marketing and rewards based app.
The rest of the team have their own respective strengths but the main strength in the team comes from the advisors. The advisors include David Ives, the former CTO of Crowdcube - one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world - and Ian Scarffe, the founder of Binkplus – a renowned start-up incubator based in Poland.

Summary

The Acorn Collective project seems to be leading the field in terms of crowdfunding and with a sold out pre-sale and exchanges already lined up for straight after ICO, it wouldn’t be too much of a push to see them getting increasing adoption after the platform development is completed towards the end of 2018. The team has mentioned a number of projects that are interested in using the platform on launch and only time will tell how big these partners could be. In summary, the Acorn Collective looks like a very promising project and is one I won’t be hesitating to invest in.

Thanks for reading, you can follow me here or here to check out my blog:
Badman Crypto (Phil Stephenson)

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