Nexus & "Social Coin" ICO - A Steem / Facebook Competitor About To Launch (And Faceplant) - Week 1 ICO Ongoing, ICO Buyback Structure

Nexus is a yet another social network running on block-chain technology.

It's founder, in a video that did not exactly increase my confidence, lays out how Nexus is conceptually more or less a knock-off of Steem (minus the rewards) here.

Nexus/SocialCoin's ICO is running now, having started earlier this week. They are offering a 40% bonus, or 700 SCL per Eth.

Nexus/Social has an interesting ICO structure. They have correctly identified that most coins/tokens get dumped on exchanges after ICO, cratering rather strongly on trading day 1. The Nexus team is distributing no tokens directly to themselves and using a buy-back structure to attempt to eliminate this volatility, encouraging initial investors to buy-in:

If this structure is successful, more ICOs may begin to manipulate markets with use it.

SocialCoins are fixed at 50 million, making it eventually deflationary.

Nexus does not appear to mint/mine Social Coins from users contributions. In other words, there is no reward system. You have to buy them if you want to use them, which in my opinion, is a pretty huge and pointless feature. They've taken Steem, turned one of the key features into pre-paid Facebook or Amazon Coins, and called it a day.

At least with Steem, we can create value from the blockchain in the free-market. The mental threshold to charity is lower when the perceived opportunity cost is lower, and Steemit achieves that. A lot fewer rewards would go out each day if they had to be pre-paid.

What's the point of either creating or browsing no-content garbage like this when Facebook already exists and has a massive network effect? I see no reason to swap to this platform for a self interested, rational market.

Oooh, look, an iPhone unboxing and a vacation announcement! Much wow, so invest.

One of the largest differences I noticed with Social was they have an "integrated ad platform". I know we're probably mostly against this philosophically, here at Steemit, but the reality is that if unobtrusive, this could be a key revenue stream for the platform and perhaps its users.

The quality they are "ensuring" is the quality of being able to extract money from you.

On the other hand, how often are ads "unobtrusive"?

Nexus already has functional iPhone and Android apps:

However, these apps aren't exactly "catching fire" yet:

Now, having said all that, Nexus/Social has some a few features Steemit should rip off.

Nexus supports instant/direct messaging, which is a function we currently have to go to Steemit Chat or (blerg) Wallet Transfer Messages for. Steemit should really consider adding this function.

Nexus also claims all account balances will be immediately accessible in Fiat via a Visa debit card, not unlike the rather popular Paypal Visa debit card. This would substantially help in onboarding and offboarding crypto-unsavvy consumers. I think it would help out a lot at Steemit, where I am still amazed to meet new users that haven't heard of Bitcoin occasionally.

Nexus also claims decentralized storage, but I'm not able to effectively evaluate this claim at this time.

Note: I am not now, nor do I intend to invest, in Nexus/Social.