The Pigzbe ICO Write Up.
The Pigzbe ICO starts mid-day on September 5th. Learn more about it here
Is the team capable and experienced?
This is the strongest asset to the Pigzbe project at the moment. The team is pretty stellar. The CEO was one of Forbes 30 under 30 and he has experience in making little trinkets for children's education.
The other team members are legitimate as well even if they play up their education on their linkedin like the COO Adam Amos does by having his single 2 and a half month online course by the Harvard Business School show as his education. That's not to put him down, I would do the same if I were him, but it is a little misleading to show people ‘Harvard Business School’ while he only took one online course. Nonetheless the other members of the team have an interesting backstory as well. My personal favorite individual is the Cat Le-Huy, he is the CTO for Pigzbe and when doing research on his qualifications I came across a 2008 article from the Independent where it outlines Cat’s runin with authorities in Dubai and his potential 4 year stay in prison for an invisible speck of Cannabis authorities ‘found’ in some of the sand/dirt in his luggage.
Luckily for Cat his social standing in the UK and Germany allowed for a full on Press campaign and fundraising efforts which yielded over $100,000, enough to cover his legal expenses and to pressure the Dubai Authorities to drop all charges and kick him out into the streets of Dubai after being detained and abused for about two weeks. Now you may be wondering why all of this is important. “Why is this guy telling me all this? Why should I care?” Well if you are anything like me you would find this at least semi-amusing, and it demonstrate the level of connections and power that the leaders of the Pigzbe team have to their disposal. Many ICOs are lead by random no name nerds that have little to no real connections. Like it or not there is no doubt that knowing the right people can oftentimes be the difference between success and failure. Or in Cat’s case, freedom and prison.
Team Rating: Strong, Above Average, Qualified 5/5
Now let us look at the ‘Vision’ of Pigzbe…
According to the white paper, “Pigzbe is a digital piggy-wallet for children aged 6 and up powered buy Wollo”. Okay so kids get these ‘piggy-wallets’ (They trademarked ‘Piggy-wallet’) they play on them unlock their Wollo coins (which are really just a Stellar-based token) and then these tokens can be sold on exchanges (Bitfinex being the largest to have announced their planned listing of Wollo after Pigzbe won a competition in June. Along with half a million dollars.) This is a plus for sure but that doesn’t really mean that the ‘Vision’ is there. The ‘Vision’ of selling cute gadgets to families to educate their child about financial responsibility, whilst also trapping them into the Pigzbe ecosystem is questionable at best. I believe that the team knows this fact and that is why they are offloading the financial risk completely onto investors, whom will have to pay a pretty penny for their share of this Nerdy Piggy Bank/DApp. Only 2% of all tokens are being sold in the ICO at the hefty price of 12 cents. Making their total valuation come to 81 Million dollars. Okay so we have an 81 MILLION dollar company here? And that's the starting point? For investors most are anticipating that the value will rise so are we really supposed to believe that this children’s toy and the Wollo coins they unlock, are really worth more than 81 million fiat notes? With over 30 thousand telegram members one might think that they do have that organic base support that is going to be needed if these devices are ever going to gain the market traction which would justify such a valuation. Diving deeper we see that the 30 thousand telegram members are either all mutes, or they are bots. When the telegram admins slave away 24/7 to spam and respam the same links in order to avoid complete stagnation you know there is a problem. The only ‘organic’ engagement I have observed is from the run of the mill scammers and from 2 community members whom are required to speak daily in the telegram to earn entries into some contest for $12,000 worth of Wollo (Based on ICO prices, distributed post-ICO, Naturally). Every single time I asked a question in the telegram I got a reply from an admin about 10 minutes later that basically said “Oink oink! I love Pigzbe! Team is Great! I don’t know the answer to your question. Will ask the team!” And then the team doesn’t get back to me half the time and when they do they are very defensive. Oh and how about their Fund Allocation? It is the usual BS but with a flair. What I mean by that is the large allocation (15% of Total funds raised) for ‘Sales Tax’...
Pigzbe has successfully created the illusion of having community support and momentum, yet it has failed to deliver actual hype. For example the CEO was recently interviewed by Justin Wu and a the video was posted a few days ago. The video has yet to break 100 views at the time of writing this article less than 48 hours before the ICO goes live mid-day on the 5th of September. The week before an ICO goes live is where the most hype should be and they cant even get a telegram group interested enough to watch a 3 minute video? I do not think that there is enough people who actually want this thing. I dont think it will work. Not because the company and the team can’t deliever no its because the idea just is not marketable. What grandma is going to want to send her grandkids Wollo? What grandma even knows how to buy bitcoin let alone send them to binance then buy stellar then transfer them to a SDEX where she will have to buy Wollo and then send them to her grandkids? What is so bad about giving the kid a damn nickle?!?! Or hell VENMO THE FUCKING KID A NICKLE! Then get the kid the FREE Venmo Debit card and let him go wild. BTW the Wollo debit card that they are trying to get (I have not heard anything definitively about whether this will happen or not) will require the normal KYC and it will not allow purchases of Tobacco, Alcohol, Online Gambling, or Adult Entertainment! The only back up plan for Pigzbe if the market rejects their device was to enable black markets to have an ‘excuse’ for why they are buying shit loads of bitcoin then buy wollo and send it to ‘their kids’ who then go out and buy stuff with the card. But when the card doesn't work on anything fun then it’s going to be pitched for other crypto cards like tenx or what have you.
Long story short I think the idea is half baked and there is no justification for why they are doing an ICO. If this was really a great idea they would have kept it private held all of the coins themselves and then had complete control over pricing of the Wollo tokens. At this point I believe very firmly that the team is aware of this fact and they are just hoping to line their pockets while they can then dump this to the ‘community’ as it says in their whitepaper and back slowly away with their millions to fund other more promising ventures with.
This is not financial advice this is just my personal opinion.
If you have questions about this article PM me on telegram at @connora58 or tweet me at @CAlexanderFree
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Hope you enjoyed!
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