After our first community chosen analysis, we decided to pick a project that recently made some noise with its unusual team composition and unusual ICO settings: Storm. Is it going to bring the light to worried flippers? Is it going to electrify the portfolio of the courageous hodlers? Let’s see that right now.

[UPDATE: The ICO has been postponed to Tuesday November 7th, 1 pm UTC]

[UPDATE2: The hard cap is now 120 000 ETH, down from 206 295 ETH]

What is Storm

Storm is actually the short version of an umbrella of decentralized applications and features starting with “Storm” in their name. Storm Play is an app which allows users to access to the Storm Market, a decentralized micro-task marketplace. This is managed by the StormX team, who is already behind the Bitmaker app. To use the Storm Market via Storm Play, you will use Storm tokens that will be ultimately sold during the upcoming crowdsale.

Storm Marketplace, which is the core of the project, aims to be a kind of gamified freelance platform where “Makers” and “Players” meet each other to buy and sell tasks. Unlike centralized platforms such as Upwork, Fiverr or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Storm Marketplace runs on its own (because it is decentralized) and subsequently charge only very small fees.

Unlike previously cited freelance platforms too, gamification is a very important aspect of Storm’s ecosystem. Makers post tasks on the market and Players execute those tasks in exchange of different kinds of rewards (including money) that make the whole thing a fun experience.

How it works

Well, they do not go that much into the technical details, but they explain pretty well their philosophy about how the users should be involved in the Storm platform. First, micro-tasks are not proposed to anyone using the service. The network chooses who is able to do what by relying on many parameters like the personality of the user and its experience with identical or similar tasks.

Depending on if you are an achiever, a disruptor, an explorer, a socializer, a philanthropist or a player, the platform will propose to you different types of tasks. The smooth running of the tasks is assured by what they call “action-loops”, which are procedures to ensure that task assignations are relevant and that the user’s progression to the mastery level is done properly.

To gamify the progression of its users, Storm uses “Bolts” as units of a rewarding system. Users can earn Bolts by doing micro-tasks and by doing training tasks to improve their skills. As their experience increase, they are assigned more micro-tasks. But your experience level on the Storm market is not tied to your Bolts, they are an artifact of it. You can actually use them to get “boosts”: “Within Storm Market, Storm Players can use their balance of Bolts for boosts. Boosts give the Storm Player access to more micro-tasks for a certain period of time” (p. 14).

This is a very interesting and innovative concept. It looks like a reversed Fiverr mixed with a RPG. You apply to “job offers”, you earn money and it is fun. The blockchain technology ensures a secure, fast and cheap environment for everyone.

ICO characteristics

Start November 7 – 1 pm UTC [UPDATED] End November 20 – 6 pm PST Total supply 10 000 000 000 STORM tokens Conversion rate 1 ETH = 26 950 STORM Soft Cap / Hard Cap 120 000 ETH Distribution 65% investors – 25% team – 10% incentivization. Use of funds / Tokens Release When the tokens are bought

More on the token distribution

So, there was a little drama about Storm’s presale that was ended when StormX team confirmed that early investors didn’t get a 100% bonus but a 53% bonus “on average” with a 90 days lockout. This sound ok, but remember that those distribution rules lack legal backup, so if you wish to Flip hard that token (like 100% of it), we recommend that you don’t wait for ages before doing so, because there is a lot of tokens that have been sold before the public crowdsale and only a tiny part of them are officially locked. Here is the complete distribution for investors, as described in this blog post:

Limited Private Presale: 1 500 516 092 tokens

Limited Private Presale Bonus: 798 601 008 tokens (90 days lockout)

Early Access Presale: 945 000 000 tokens (100 ETH personal cap)

Early Access Presale Bonus: 141 750 000 tokens

TOTAL Presale: 3 385 867 100 tokens

TOTAL remaining for the upcoming crowdsale: 3 114 132 900 tokens

So yes, this is less than half of the distributed tokens for all of us guys.

Note that, in order to participate in the crowdsale, you must be registered on the whitelist. The whitelist registration is open to everyone (except US and China) for a few hours now at the time we are releasing this article. Go register by clicking here. There is a KYC, so prepare your IDs!

Team

The team backing the Storm project is pretty heavy. Among the leading and technical staff, there are very experienced people already involved in the crypto industry. Remember that StormX already published Bitmaker, so they know what it is all about and will have no issue, we believe, to bring the smart contract technology to the gamified micro-task idea.

But the most amazing part is the advisory board, which reunites big names of the crypto ecosystem. Among them, there is Anthony Di lorio, founder and CEO of Jaxx and Decentral, Guy Benartzi, co-founder of Bancor, Jeff Pulver (pioneer of VoIP) and some notable players in the investing and banking industries.

Roadmap

This is a weak part of this project. The global roadmap seems to have been omitted, so you won’t find it on the website or in the whitepaper. The only accessible roadmap yet is the ICO one, which is now pretty simple since the only important date is the beginning of the crowdsale (October 20).

However, there is a small paragraph in the whitepaper about future plans:

“In the future, the Storm Market will use “Storm Tasks,” the smart contract templates for agreements made between Storm Makers and Storm Players. Storm Tasks will be ethereum-based smart contracts, written in Solidity, that will aim to facilitate micro-task transactions in the Storm Market. Processing for Storm Tasks will reside on top of the Ethereum blockchain […] In the future, StormX intends to launch additional categories of micro-tasks and smart contract use cases within the Storm Market, such as the ability to learn about or sample retail products via “Storm Shop,” or perform small projects or complete any other gamified micro-task or similar freelance job that a Storm Maker seeks to have completed via “Storm Gigs.” Storm Shop and Storm Gigs are envisioned categories of micro-tasks within Storm Market that StormX aims to further develop in the future“.

Interview with the CEO Simon Yu

In a recent blog post you announced the decrease of the personal cap for the Early Access Presale, which is now 100 ETH per registrant instead of 350. Is there a personal cap for the public crowdsale as well and, if yes, do you already know how much it will be?

Good question. There is no personal cap on the actual crowdsale, the 100 ETH per person is only for community appreciation.

As we spent quite a long time to do due diligence on our project, we’ve had some users who have been backing our projects since July. In order to reward our most loyal user base, we allowed our early community members to sign up.

The community member participants will all be able to participate earlier than the normal people as even if you don’t get in the community bonus round you’re eligible straight into the crowdsale.

Many people asked about when the tokens will be released, and I could see that the answer given was “immediately”, can you elaborate on this? Will the tokens be available as soon as they are purchased and if yes, is it the same for those who got early access to them (meaning, will early purchaser be able to trade tokens before the main crowdsale happens)?

Yes and we have to give credit to Rui our CTO who is an excellent developer. If the participant’s Ether is confirmed on our side the tokens will be sent back to their address immediately.

The users will own Storm tokens when this occurs.

You didn’t publish any roadmap yet about the development post-ICO of StormX’s project, but we can read intriguing things in the whitepaper about “Storm Tasks”, “Storm Shop” and “Storm Gigs”. Can you elaborate on those features?

With the current Bitmaker soon to be rebranded as Storm Play, we’ve done a really good job with growing both users (1.2M+ downloads across 187 countries) and brands such as Uber, Hulu, blue apron available on our product. Our next big update will be a SDK both on iOS and Android that will allow developers to put Storm Play on their apps to grow this network and also allow developers to grow their monetization and earn cryptocurrency.

Storm Gigs will start with machine learning tasks. The Gigs feature is our biggest focus and we’re currently seeking partner AI machine learning companies to source jobs and utilize our platforms for our alpha. Storm Gigs will be an extension and allow more earning opportunities. We will continue to build the gamification layers and also allow individual skilled jobs like Taskrabbit.

Useful links

Our advice

StormX’s project came a bit unexpected on our radar and got our attention for good reasons. First, the team is very serious and passionate. They already have a working product which is highly related to what they want to achieve and they are supported by quite big players in the crypto world. As if the investing indicators were not green enough, their idea is simple, realistic, with no serious competition around.

Now lets talk about the numbers involved in the ICO they propose. The hard cap is around 60 million $USD, which is a bit high for something that is not involving tremendous research and development. But the good news is that a lot of it has already been raised more or less privately, which means that the crowdsale may close before everyone has a chance to buy their share anyway. About all the pre-crowdsale events, it feels indeed a bit weird that more than half of distributed tokens are issued before the crowdsale, but this is not the real danger. The only real issue of this ICO is that tokens are released as soon as you buy them. This means that we will likely see STORM tokens being traded by early investors during or even before the crowdsale. I think such a situation never happened before and I have to admit that it is an interesting perspective, because it means that, maybe, the public is going to get a bonus anyway by trading on exchanges. If that happens, the only loser will unfortunately be StormX, because they may not sell all their tokens, which means less ETH for them, but more tokens in the reserves for eventual future incentivizations (or burning, depending on what they choose).

However, we don’t think the ICO will fail in any way, because Storm is clearly the next big project of October. We chose to give a 7 mark to FLIPPING, since the probability of the demand exceeding the offer is still very high despite the fancy distribution, and we will give a 8 mark to HODLING, because whatever the price you get your tokens, you can be sure about two things: 1) The project will be seriously developed and 2) The use of tokens totally makes sense in a gamified context like proposed by StormX, which make us to believe that the team is going to make them a valuable asset in their ecosystem.