What is Simple Token?

In short, Simple Token seeks to allow businesses to tokenize their consumer applications, businesses, or products without having to pay for or develop their own blockchains. Simple Token can allow start ups to become tokenized without the need for an ICO, which are expensive and time consuming.

Circulating Supply: 272,000,000

Maximum Supply: 800,000,000

Market Cap: <$100,000,000

Rank: 146

Major Exchanges: Binance, OKEx, Huobi

Does it Have a Working Product?

Simple Token’s Open ST protocol is currently version 0.9.1 with 0.9.2 coming out over the next few weeks.

The most exciting new product that Simple Token has released is their ostKYC platform.

What is ostKYC?

KYC stands for Know Your Customer. KYC along with AML (Anti-Money Laundering) are two legal processes that ICOs are required to go through in order to prevent/reduce fraud, money laundering, and scams. This process is tedious, time consuming, as well as expensive. From The Simple Token blog, KYC can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take days to sift through all their applications.

How Simple Token ostKYC works

Simple Token has solved this issue by partnering with Cynopsis Solutions to ease the process of KYC. The platform was used during Simple Token’s ICO and many people complimented them on the ease of the whole process. Simple Token claims that they were able to process 2,000 applications in the last 24 hours of their token sale.This product is not going to appear impressive for the average investor. However the ICO market is big and as this grabs more attention it will be HUGE. This product requires purchases of OST tokens off exchanges. For more information on their pricing of ostKYC platform click here.

Roadmap: February is a BIG month for Simple Token

OST has come out with an updated monthly roadmap in the middle of January. They provided many details on things to expect in the future and were on time with their development and release of ostKYC (released at the end of January).

Simple Token announced that they are adding 20 new team members to its team. That will bring Simple Token’s employee count up to 50!

February Releases:

ostKIT alpha: Expected Late February

Simple Token blockchain toolkit will allow any company to design, brand, and create their own token economics on the Open ST Protocol and OST management software. The early version features will include token management platform, token planner, and many more found here.

ostSCANNER (I think it was formally known as ostExplorer):ability to scan blocks, which will include insights on side chains

ostCAMPAIGNS: A standalone product that will be implemented into the ostKIT in the future. This product allows companies to use enterprise-grade email marketing capable of processing millions of monthly transactions. Billing will only occur in $OST.

Q2 2018:

ostWALLET : Consumer facing universal wallet to be completed

: Consumer facing universal wallet to be completed OpenST Protocol version 1.0

The Team:

As I mentioned before, Simple Token’s team is currently 30 members with an additional 20 being hired (click here if you want to work for them). The team is based in Berlin, Germany and Pune, India. There are several open marketing positions, which indicates the team will increase the marketing of their product. A few team members have worked on projects together in the past.

I will not go into full detail of the entire 30 member team but I will give a brief description of the notable ones.

Jason Goldberg- CEO and Founder: Jason Goldberg has 18 years of entrepreneurial experience in internet companies having started successful companies such as Hem.com and Pepo, a social media app with over 100,000 downloads on the Google PlayStore and thousands of daily users. It should be mentioned that he has had some unsuccessful ventures (Fab.com). Failures are a part of growth and he is obviously capable of building successful products so I choose not to let his failures overshadow his successes.

Sunil Khedar- Founder and EVP Technology: Sunil has worked alongside Jason Goldberg at Fab.com, Hem.com, and Pepo, where he is the Founder and CTO.

Benjamin Bollen- Chief Technology Strategist: Ben worked on Hyperledger for a year before joining the Simple Token team.

Advisors:

The team currently has 12 advisors which I will list below. Most of them have been advisors/members of other crypto projects and some have even been early investors/entrepreneurs during the birth of the internet. Simple Token also has 3 independent advisors for their OpenST platform.

Trent McConaghy: Founder of Ocean Protocol, BigchainDB, founder of IPDB foundation

Founder of Ocean Protocol, BigchainDB, founder of IPDB foundation Brian Lio: Founder and CEO of Smith + Crown (crypto financial news website) and a fellow at the Singapore University Social Science

Founder and CEO of Smith + Crown (crypto financial news website) and a fellow at the Singapore University Social Science Rick Dudley: President of Vulcanize (blockchain technical guidance firm), has worked with ConsenSys previously

President of Vulcanize (blockchain technical guidance firm), has worked with ConsenSys previously Jehan Chu: Co-founder of Kenetic Capital (have funded ICX, OMG, AirSwap and many more)

Co-founder of Kenetic Capital (have funded ICX, OMG, AirSwap and many more) Gil Penchina: Angel in Brave, Ripple, Filecoin, Civic, EOS, and Paypal in 1999. Co-founder of Pryze.com and former co-founder of Fastly

Angel in Brave, Ripple, Filecoin, Civic, EOS, and Paypal in 1999. Co-founder of Pryze.com and former co-founder of Fastly Sebastian Quinn-Watson: Advisor and market lead on projects such as Viberate, Bankera, Powerledger, Airswap and more

Advisor and market lead on projects such as Viberate, Bankera, Powerledger, Airswap and more Gary Nuttall: Founding partner of Team Blockchain

Founding partner of Team Blockchain Mark Bonchek: Founder of Shift Thinking and faculty member of Singularity University with over 50 articles published in HBR, and is the first person to receive a PhD from Harvard University on topic of Social Media

Founder of Shift Thinking and faculty member of Singularity University with over 50 articles published in HBR, and is the first person to receive a PhD from Harvard University on topic of Social Media David Bohnett: Founder of Baroda Ventures and founded Geocities.com, a website which once ranked 4th in the world in terms of trafficked websites in the early 90s

Founder of Baroda Ventures and founded Geocities.com, a website which once ranked 4th in the world in terms of trafficked websites in the early 90s Thomas Power: Board member to companies involved with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. 200,000 twitter followers.

Board member to companies involved with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. 200,000 twitter followers. Adam Jackson: Advisor and investor to early blockchain projects. Co-founded Doctor on Demand.

Advisor and investor to early blockchain projects. Co-founded Doctor on Demand. Matt Chwierut: Research Director at Smith + Crown

Investors

Simple Token has 13 different investors from many different countries. I will not go into detail over each one but state a few that stand out at me.

Tencent: Tencent is the company that owns WeChat. What is WeChat? WeChat is a huge platform that ranges from messaging to e-commerce to tinder-like dating apps. WeChat is based in China and has 900 million monthly users. The company is also the owner of MOBA-games, (League of Legends) and brought in $624 million of revenue in gaming micro-transactions.

Tencent is the company that owns WeChat. What is WeChat? WeChat is a huge platform that ranges from messaging to e-commerce to tinder-like dating apps. WeChat is based in China and has 900 million monthly users. The company is also the owner of MOBA-games, (League of Legends) and brought in $624 million of revenue in gaming micro-transactions. Kenetic Capital: Kenetic Capital has invested into a plethora of different cryptos including Kyber Network, Air Swap, ICON, and OmiseGo

Kenetic Capital has invested into a plethora of different cryptos including Kyber Network, Air Swap, ICON, and OmiseGo #Hashed: Hashed is a crypto investment firm that has 4 cryptocurrencies in their accelerator program; ICON and Medibloc being the most notable. Hashed has invested into successful blockchain companies such as QTUM, OmiseGo, EOS and more.

Partnerships:

It’s hard to believe, but Simple Token already has 21 partnerships! Granted, there aren’t any Fortune500 companies. But the team has indicated they will announce bigger partnerships in the coming months.

Simple Token recently announced 11 new partnerships during their OST Startup day.

Most of these partnerships are small start-ups in their nascent stages. To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed with them at first, and question whether all of them will succeed. It doesn’t matter if these start ups succeed from Simple Token’s standpoint, what matters is that there’s a demand for the OpenST protocol and tokenization.

What stood out most to me was the range of products that these companies were producing. Anything from a fishing social media app to Virtual Reality apps to Healthcare apps.

Furthermore, the start ups are located all over the world, from marketing companies in Asia to fashion apps in Europe to a small fishing app in Tennessee. There is a demand for Simple Token across the globe.

Here’s a list of some of the start ups and their links below.

Pepo : Jason Goldberg’s other venture that currently has 100,000 downloads. Pepo seeks to use Simple Token to reward/incentivize people on their app to produce quality content.

Jason Goldberg’s other venture that currently has 100,000 downloads. Pepo seeks to use Simple Token to reward/incentivize people on their app to produce quality content. Gushcloud : An Asian marketing and entertaining network that connects 12,000 influencers and creators. They currently operate in 8 countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and Thailand). They hope to use the token to incentivize online influencer marketing

An Asian marketing and entertaining network that connects 12,000 influencers and creators. They currently operate in 8 countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and Thailand). They hope to use the token to incentivize online influencer marketing Digital Knights : Scouts and evaluates developers globally to ensure your company has partnered with the right people. Currently based in Germany and Switzerland.

Scouts and evaluates developers globally to ensure your company has partnered with the right people. Currently based in Germany and Switzerland. InterviewBit: A start up focused on training/preparing people for interviews in the Tech industry. They help connect you to the right people, refresh your coding skills, and practice interview questions. InterviewBit was started by someone who worked on Fab.com alongside Jason Goldberg.

A start up focused on training/preparing people for interviews in the Tech industry. They help connect you to the right people, refresh your coding skills, and practice interview questions. InterviewBit was started by someone who worked on Fab.com alongside Jason Goldberg. ConnectScale : A small start-up based in Tennessee that seeks to create a social media app based on logging fish caught, their weight, and location of where you caught them. Currently the app has about 1000 downloads in the Google PlayStore. Talk about a niche market.

: A small start-up based in Tennessee that seeks to create a social media app based on logging fish caught, their weight, and location of where you caught them. Currently the app has about 1000 downloads in the Google PlayStore. Talk about a niche market. Two articles have been written by Simple Token on Look and LytePay.

Others include: Korhal.io, Treat, LicenseRocks, ToMoRRoW, lookhave, tribecoin, Radmule, 704games, tesloop, Floship, and Xain.

Social Media: The team is very active on social media answering questions on their subreddit, Twitter, and Telegram.

How is the Token Valuable? How can it be used?

As of right now (as far as I know), there are three uses for the Simple Token.

The tokens need to be purchased by a company in order to tokenize their coins on the OpenSt Protocol. These tokens would be “staked” in order for them to create value of their branded tokens. These tokens are therefore removed from circulation. The more companies that use Simple Token’s platform the less tokens are in circulating supply.

2. The tokens are also needed to be purchased by companies who want to use the ostKYC platform

3. Tokens are needed in order to use ostCAMPAIGNS.

Token Supply:

OST currently has ~250,000,000 coins meaning it has 550,000,000 coins not yet in circulation.

A breakdown of Token Allocation can be found in the picture below:

More information on Simple Token Accelerator Program can be found here. Basically these tokens will be used to help promising start ups with their product developments.

Simple Token has created a Google Spreadsheet with a forecast of the Circulating Supply. The spreadsheet shows their expectations of the size of companies that will be using their protocol.

Whether or not you agree with their forecasting is for you to decide. However what you will notice is that Simple Token expects a peak of 414,000,000 Tokens in circulating supply by January 2019, followed by slow decrease in supply until mid 2020. Please take their forecasting with a grain of salt, no one knows (including themselves) whether or not this forecast is accurate.

As Simple Tokens need to be staked on OpenST Protocol in order for businesses to create their own tokens the supply of Simple Tokens will decrease over time. The takeaway from this is that as more companies use the Simple Token protocol the less Simple Token’s will be in circulation (hence the slow decreasing supply after January 2019), the higher the price will be for 1 Simple Token.

Why would people use Open ST protocol?

Companies try to minimize costs of everything, the same will be done for blockchain. It is not a matter of if businesses will want to use blockchain/tokenization, it is a matter of when. Blockchain development is time consuming and expensive. OST seeks to reduce those costs to make it easy for companies to create a token economy for their business. Think of other products that companies use in order to reduce their own costs; Salesforce is used for CRM instead of doing it in-house. Shopify simplifies the process of online stores. Wordpress and WIX make it easy to create a website/blog without the need for development. Simple Token seeks to do this on the blockchain and tokenization.

How many Tokens would a company need to purchase?

The conversion rates are determined by the company themselves and is determined before minting. Here is a link to a video demo of how it would work.

(This is my example and I could be totally wrong about this use.)

For example, a food review app wants to use Simple Token’s platform to incentivize users to create better reviews of restaurants and meals. The food app, let’s call it ZELP, purchases 50,000 Simple Tokens @ $1 to create their own Z-Coin. Zelp determines that it wants one of it’s tokens to be worth $0.001, so it creates a conversion of OST/Zcoin of 1:1000. ZELP is now in possession of 50,000,000 Zcoins to be used on its website.

A person might be given 500 Zcoin when they sign up for their website. When they read a review that they found very helpful, they can give that person an upvote or Zcoin. If a person receives X number of Zcoins they can be rewarded with discounts at restaurants or other rewards/prizes determined by ZELP.

Other examples of potential that the reddit community have come up with can be found here:

Video Game Credit

Disney Dollar

Simple Token’s Coffee/Bike Shop example

Negatives:

Trying to be impartial, I’ve compiled a list of potential negatives (depending on how you see it) of Simple Token.

Marketing: Simple Token’s marketing hasn’t been the greatest in comparison to other crypto’s. However, Jason Goldberg has stated he’d rather let the product speak for itself. They are hiring more people for marketing so hopefully this is resolved in the coming months.

Questionable Partnerships: Simple Token’s partnerships are all quite small and startups that may never succeed. It would be nice to see Simple Token gain some more traction with developed companies. That being said, I think they are oriented towards startups (for the time being) and there is a demand for their product, which is really all they can ask for. Simple Token is a start up oriented towards start ups.

Adoption: This one is kind of tied to partnerships. This is a risk for any of cryptocurrency or startup for that matter.

Final Take:

Simple Token has a ton of things coming up in February that puts in a prime position to garner some attention and price action. There is an obvious demand for their product as 21 startups have partnered with Simple Token. This token is at a low market cap with plenty of room to grow. The community is great and the Simple Token team stays in contact as much as they can. Furthermore, Simple Token has met all the deadlines they have set for themselves. The fact that they are hiring 20 more people must mean they have something brewing behind closed doors. I expect a very prosperous and successful 2018 and beyond for this token.

** Note: I am invested in this project. None of this is meant to be taken as financial advice, I am just providing people with my in-depth research of the project. Please do you own research and feel free to message me or check out their subreddit with any more questions.