Now that’s Camp Shares (CS) description out of the way. Let’s get to the moderation. Individuals who meet the requirements and pass the KYC, and stake a minimum of 10,000,000 PLG (equivalent to $1,000 USD during the ICO) for Camp Shares (CS) will be eligible to become Moderators.

All users can flag violations of Pledgecamp platform Terms of Service, concerns about projects, concerns about other users violating terms, and so on. Moderators are the ones deciding the fates of those projects and users.

Every time a statistically significant amount or rate of flags come in for a matter, a jury of 12 Moderators is randomly selected to decide the fate in 24 hours via consensus mechanism.

The exact description to this mechanism is best read from the whitepaper on your own, but needless to say this governance mechanism is well thought out and incentivized, which I’ll get to next.

The Moderators will be compensated for their time by paying out the listing fees charged in PLG within that month to the Moderators. Payments happen at the end of each month, and are based on the average amount of Camp Shares (CS) held by the Moderator during the month.

Monthly payments are needed to make sure Moderators are worthy of the payment and have been on-duty during the month, as not voting for three times in a period will be penalized with no payout for the period.

The payout proportion for an admin is based on the Camp Shares held on average over the month divided by the amount of all Camp Shares over the month, so if you hold 5% of all active Moderator Camp Shares (CS) you will get 5% of all the listing fees paid during the period.

Global Inclusion

Creators and backers from all around the World will be able to create and back campaigns, and this also includes the 38% of adults worldwide, who don’t have access to the financial system.

We’re keeping this point short right here, but the impact of this is not to be taken lightly.

Hire Trusted Vendors

Pledgecamp is building a network of companies that can help projects deliver to their backers. Creators will be able to find and vet key partners with the histories and reputation of the partners on blockchain.

This is great for projects as previously they would have to go out and find their own partners through trial-and-error, and this where a good portion of those unexpected incidents happen that we covered before.

Track Funds

Funds used with the trusted vendors are easily traceable as they happen through smart contracts. Backers will be able to verify on their own, that funds are being used as promised.

Great way to ensure transparency for the backers and build confidence.

Guarantee Payment

Since payments to vetted vendors are made through smart contracts, vendors can lower the risk profile that is usually involved while working with young startups.

We see this could potentially also make vendors offer lower rates than they normally would at these cases.

Overall this introduces a new dimension to crowdfunding and through healthy competition could offer better prices to creators as there are vendors to choose from.

Knowledge Center

A decentralized knowledge base that is crowdsourced and incentivized by creators or reputation. Creators can learn or ask about crowdfunding specific things or problems they need a solution to in their project.

Creators can incentivize replies with PLG tokens or vendors and users can answer or solve the problems to build their reputation on the platform.

Conclusion: The solution of Pledgecamp potentially solves all the biggest problems in the market today and could very well accelerate the global growth of reward-based crowdfunding. Key values would be forcing and helping projects to plan out their roadmap as Pledgecamp platform is not incentivized by the success of the crowdfunding campaign, but also the delivery to the backers through “Backer Insurance”.

In general the concept is very impressive and thought-out. Creators will be more likely to succeed thanks to vetted vendor network, added accountability and knowledge center to learn from.

The token utility and Camp Shares “sink” for Moderator position, make it a decentralized platform with it’s own governance system to maintain it.

It will be smart to have a credit card integration, like Simplex, for backing campaigns that would convert to PLG in the backend, which would remove all friction and make it viable against Kickstarter.

Points: 10/10

Team

The founding team, Jae Hoon Choi, Edmond Lee, Samuel Pullman, have been publicly working together since 2013, unsure if there was any previous projects they worked on before that together or not, but coming close to 6 years of working together.[4]

Podo Labs campaigns on Kickstarter

Relevant industry experience includes 4 successful crowdfunding campaigns, raising over $2M USD in total, which puts them among the 1% most funded teams on Kickstarter with their company Podo Labs.

Going deeper in the research reveals that one of their successfully funded campaigns has yet to deliver the products. Having searched the community, this has been brought out as a weakness and reason not to support Pledgecamp.

Perhaps if we had personal experience backing that particular campaign, we would also think like that, but if we keep our focus on the Pledgecamp side of things, they most likely learned a lot from that experience.

Without having first-hand experience with all the issues crowdfunding a project, both success and delays, this project would not have a concept as strong as it is today. Not to mention that both Podo Labs and Pledgecamp share the same investors, which is a bullish sign in our opinion.

Conclusion: Team has industry experience of 6 years, capable of delivering results with 4 successful crowdfunding campaigns. While one of the campaigns is still in limbo of delivery delays, which hurts the public perception, but provides a valuable lesson to come up with the concept. Hurts our overall score a little, but is not a deal breaker. Considering that their private investors from Podo Labs are still openly supporting the team.

Points: 9/10

Advisors & Partners

There’s 15 advisors listed on their website, but including all the partners the list would be longer.