The latest ICO to sell out in seconds is Santiment which had a unique way of organizing their token sale as during the first stage only “whitelisted community members,” around 700 of them, were able to claim 75% of the total cap set at 45,000 eth according to an explanation by the start-up.

It then moved to stage two where a token investors pool of sorts was able to claim 25% of the cap, with whatever was left to be claimable by the general public.

None was left. The pool sold out in seconds, reaching the 45,000 cap, which aims to fund Santiment towards their goal of taking on Bloomberg Terminal.

The start-up wishes to create a crypto data feed that provides the latest news as well as more detailed information towards ICO projects plus algorithmic attempts towards data analysis of sentiment.

They claim to already have a working alpha mobile app with the finished version expected to be launched sometime next year. Besides the price, the app gives a bar-line measure of sentiment aspects according to their website image pictured above.

In a marketing paper they call a whitepaper, Santiment describes three aspects to the project. Firstly, they will have a curated stream of content which includes token sale analysis, market research, due diligence and regulations.

The second aspect is a SAN database which they describe as “an open database with everything traders and investors need to know about a project, it’s founders, and it’s economics.”

The content will be crowd-sourced, “but the submissions themselves will be curated and verified by our team of analysts,” they say.

The third and perhaps most interesting aspect is datafeeds, specifically blockchain datafeeds, which they describe as “datafeeds that monitor blockchain behavior as a proxy for community trends.”

They don’t quite say how they intend to achieve any of this, without any detail whatever provided in the whitepaper, leading us to more correctly, in our view, call it a marketing paper.

Nor do they give any estimates of how much any of it would cost. Specifically, regarding blockchain datafeeds, although bots can do many things, they can’t quite know anything we haven’t told them, so they will need someone to input what blockchain addresses are relevant to traders, and that would require quite a bit of research.

As well as many employees on an on-going basis. Bloomberg, for example, has 19,000 employees which make their terminals relevant to investors.

The crypto-space is, of course, smaller, but what they are promising requires significant talent, especially when you combine the blockchain part with the curating of the crowdsourcing part as well as the curating of the data stream. So the big question here is how does this work on the medium to long term.

They have a token of course, SAN, which can be used to pay for premium content and subscriptions as well as to stake in return for free access to Santiment services while also being given to market experts and crowdsourcing contributors as a reward.

Explaining it slightly further they say “SAN tokens can be locked and staked to give holders, at the sole discretion of Santiment, access to a limited but ‘free’ stream of content and datafeeds.” As well as:

“SAN tokens are required for use in Santiment auctions. These auctions involve selling highly valuable raw datasets, crowd sentiment datafeeds, and exclusive content to the Santiment community.”

So, basically, the ICO appears to have funded a new start-up with no users or ready to market product to the tune of $11 million in what appears to be a seed-funding round without the token holders being given much in return save for at the discretion of Santiment.

Nonetheless, the idea does sound interesting and the service is both useful as well as needed, but it hardly has any barriers to entry, will likely face fierce market competition, and will need a significant level of non-coding related talent to really deliver on its promises and to deliver returns on investment.