The white paper looks great, the website looks great, and the roadmap looks ambitious without being unrealistic. So, will they deliver? I think so, and here’s why. These guys aren’t pushing vaporware. The GRAFT main net went live January 16, 2018 and the team already has a mobile POS app in beta, GRAFT GUI wallets (IOS, android, windows, mac), and a Cryptofind app (locate and list businesses that accept crypto). They have also given an ETA of June for the release of “supernode” capability which will utilize proof of stake and enable many features of the Graft network. This is still a very young project, but the dev team is clearly working and making progress.

On top of that, the team doesn’t make a decent profit unless they increase the value of GRFT. The founders and team keep 8% of supply as an incentive. They only sold 6% of supply during the ICO (think money for dev talent and listing on good exchanges). 55% is PoW mineable, 4% went to marketing/promotions, and the remaining is reserved in a transparent wallet to be used as future needs arise. I know that people tend to be skeptical of ICOs, and for good reason, but how many pure PoW coins are listed on good exchanges? Very few. They don’t get listed because they can’t afford the listing fees. The GRAFT ICO doesn’t have any of the red flags that I look for in ICOs. The fact that the team has a budget to work with for marketing, development, and exchange listing only makes me more bullish on GRFT than I am on my other favorite PoW coins.

Now let’s look at the team.

Slava Gomzin, Founder: Author of “Bitcoin for Nonmathematicians” and “Hacking Point of Sale”. Worked for NCR Corporation for ~10 years in various roles. NCR is a company that revolves around payment systems from cash registers to POS terminals and ATMs. He also worked for several other tech companies, HP among them, in information security and payments roles.

Dan Itkis, Founder: CEO and co-founder of BIOMIO (mobile, web, and hardware authentication solutions including biometric). Worked for ~6 years as technical marketing engineer for a few companies including Intel and Tektronix. Worked as product manager for Cisco and Tivella, and director of product development for Moderro Technologies.

Kate Vasylenko, CMO: ~16 years experience in marketing. Currently CEO at 42DM marketing agency.

Brad Gleeson, Business development director: Currently managing partner at TargetPath LLC which is a consulting firm that handles strategic planning, marketing, brand development, etc. Gleeson has spent well over 20 years in business development.

On the development side, there are 8 experienced developers/engineers that each have many years experience and many projects under their belts. Two of which are previous Monero developers/contributors and one is an expert in machine learning with a PhD in computer science. The team also includes several technical, business, and legal advisers. Keep in mind that this is just the core team behind this project. It is a young open-source project that I expect to attract even more contributors in time.

Now for the negative (depending on your point of view):

While it is still very early for this project, the GRFT coin exchange price is currently at or near an all time low due to numerous attacks on the network that left many miners and ICO participants frustrated or panicked. The total network hashrate is still very low at around 8 MH/s (cryptonightV7) and has been susceptible to 51% attacks via Nicehash. However, there have been some updates to the difficulty algorithm and the network appears stable at time of writing. The team has also recently announced that they are “evaluating potentially switching to CN Heavy or a custom algo to further stave off the attacks”. I believe we have now crossed that hurdle and we are on our way to exponential growth and spectacular progress in gaining mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.