The following is an objective review of the Omnitude ICO

The review is based on certain criteria, which we think are important for an ICO project to succeed. We measure a successful ICO by short term and long term ROI estimation. The following is not financial advice.

Introduction

Regarding volume and value, global e-commerce sales in 2016 were estimated to be worth $1.86 trillion and are projected to grow to $4.48 trillion by 2021. The e-commerce industry can utilize Blockchain technology to allow it to be more secure, efficient and transparent.

For instance, today, every e-commerce business secures and stores our identity information on private servers. That means that our information is vulnerable to hacks, and we also need to submit our information again to any new e-commerce business we interact with. Our identity information can be securely stored in our wallet by using Blockchain technology, and an attestation to it held on the public ledger. Our information is submitted once and is kept securely in our wallet. Projects trying to solve the identity issue include Civic, Uport, and others. Blockchain can also be used to track the supply chain of a product or a shipment in an unforgeable way and by doing so reduce the pirated and counterfeit market of goods, such as medicines, motor parts, food and more. Companies including IBM, Vechain, and others are trying to disrupt the supply chain industry. More examples of how blockchain can be used in the e-commerce industry are given in our evaluation.

Omnitude is to build an e-commerce ecosystem by creating a tool-kit that will address many of the flaws in the e-commerce industry and allow developers to develop applications for the e-commerce industry. The infrastructure for those apps will be Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source blockchain project launched by the Linux Foundation. Since all apps will be based on the same infrastructure, all apps will communicate with each other seamlessly.

ECOM, Omnitude’s native token, will fuel the Omnitude ecosystem. Omnitude completed a successful presale of 4.2M USD, and now wishes to raise 20.8M USD more in their public sale.

Let’s get going with our evaluation!

Problems in the e-commerce industry and the potential use of Blockchain Technology

Imports of Counterfeit and pirated goods are worth about $500M USD a year or approximately 2.5% of global imports. These goods include food, machine and auto parts, chemicals, medicine, perfumes, handbags and more. You don’t know the origin of the product you purchase, and to avoid buying a counterfeit product your only option is to trust the reputation of the companies you buy from.

The solution

Many blockchain projects are trying to use a distributed ledger to track the supply chain of products. An unforgeable cryptographic identifier can be added to a product or a shipment (e.g. painted 2-D graphene security tags, which are quickly and easily readable by smartphone). This identifier can be tracked at key points by trusted “witnesses” and recorded immutably into the Omnitude blockchain. When the customer or the retailer receives his shipment, he can scan the identifier with his phone and verify the item’s history matches the seller’s claim.

Personal data stored on many servers- is prone to security breaches, costly

Customers must usually provide details about their identity (e.g. name, email, phone, address and payment details), and about their preference information (e.g. style, sizing, delivery times) when buying products online through a merchant. Usually, the identical information must be provided each time they buy from a new merchant. Each merchant must also expend effort and incur costs to record this data and safeguard it properly.

The Solution

Omnitude offers a single identity solution, Omnitude Identity (OID). A customer will just need to submit their personal data once while dealing with all future businesses on the Omnitude infrastructure. The first time the data is entered by the customer it will be verified by the merchant and then encrypted and recorded in the Omnitude blockchain.

Each time the customer transacts with a merchant, he will be able to submit from the Omnitude client app the identity and preference information already verified by the first merchant.

Participants who record the identity of a new customer (OID) will be paid with ECOM by the merchants who use that customer identity in the future.

Phony Customer Reviews

Buyers rely on customer reviews of the products they buy and businesses they choose to interact with. Businesses have a great incentive to receive good feedback from reviewers, it is crucial for their business success. For instance, currently, businesses can choose to attract phony reviewers by committing to a full refund for the product in exchange for a 5-star review from the buyer. It is estimated that 33% of online customer reviews are phony.

The solution

Omnitude’s proof of interaction (POI) will provide the means to establish that a reviewer has a verifiable interaction history with the merchant they are reviewing. Every time a customer with an Omnitude identity (OID) interacts with a merchant with an OID, a record will be encrypted and recorded into the blockchain by the merchant. When a customer wishes to submit a review of an online merchant, their private key will be used to verify from the Omnitude blockchain that the customer had dealings with the merchant. If they have, the customer will be allowed to submit a review. While personal details of the customer will not be public, certain information as how many transactions the reviewer had with the merchant and over what period of time will be public to help other customers validate the review.

A customer will be incentivized with ECOM by the merchant for writing a review. In return, a customer will pay ECOM to the merchant for encrypting and recording the interaction between the parties into the blockchain.

Hyperledger Fabric

The Omnitude ecosystem will be built on top of Hyperledger fabric technology, the open-source, global, a collaborative project hosted by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger is a permissionless blockchain protocol which enables business to customer (B2C) and business to business transactions (B2B). The Hyperledger architecture provides core blockchain services on which the Omnitude ecosystem is built. The Omnitude ecosystem will be made up of a variety of entities, including merchants, customers, suppliers, couriers, and affiliates. The ECOM token will fuel this ecosystem.

The Linux Foundation founded Hyperledger in 2015 to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Rather than declaring a single blockchain standard, it encourages a collaborative approach to developing blockchain technologies via a community process, with intellectual property rights that encourage open development and the adoption of key standards over time.

Omnitude is also aiming to build an open-source ecosystem where app developers will be incentivized to build apps on top of their blockchain to service the Omnitude e-commerce ecosystem.

Heperledger incubated codebases and other technologies as core elements, its contributors include IBM, Digital Assets, Inter and more.

Members of the foundation include top blockchain industry companies (ConsenSys, Onchain, R3, and Digital Asset), top technology platforms companies (Cisco, IBM, Intel, Hitachi, and Fujitsu), and top financial services firms (CME group, J.P Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Swift).

Hyperledger Fabric is one of the blockchain projects within Hyperledger. Like other blockchain technologies, it has a ledger, uses smart contracts, and is a system through which participants manage their transactions.

Where Hyperledger Fabric breaks from some other blockchain systems is that it is private and permissioned. Rather than an open permissionless system that allows unknown identities to participate in the network (requiring protocols like Proof of Work to validate transactions and secure the network), the members of a Hyperledger Fabric network enroll through a trusted Membership Service Provider (MSP).

Hyperledger Fabric also offers several pluggable options. Ledger data can be stored in multiple formats, consensus mechanisms can be swapped in and out, and different MSPs are supported.

Hyperledger Fabric also offers the ability to create channels, allowing a group of participants to create a separate ledger of transactions. This is an especially important option for networks where some participants might be competitors and not want every transaction they make – for example, a special price they’re offering to some participants and not others – known to every participant. If two participants form a channel, then those participants – and no others – have copies of the ledger for that channel.

Omnitude is to create an ecosystem and an easy to use app development toolkit based on the Hyperledger Fabric technology.

The Omnitude Ecosystem

Omnitude Foundation

Omnitude is an open-source project being developed by the Omnitude Foundation, a UK based organization whose mission is to develop and grow the Omnitude ecosystem. The Omnitude foundation is the issuing authority that grants Omnitude IDs to any party wishing to participate in the Omnitude ecosystem.

The Omnitude Foundation will be governed by a board of 5-10 individuals who are either investors, founders, partners, advisors or team members of Omnitude.

Core Principles

Open

Any entity participating in e-commerce (e.g. merchant, customer, supplier, courier, affiliate/ referrer, or Omnitude specialist) will be able to join the Omnitude ecosystem. They will be granted an OID by the Omnitude Foundation and will run a full or partial node. Each new full node will improve the security and reliability of the Omnitude ecosystem. Omnitude will be a permissioned network where nodes are run by known whitelisted organizations or individuals. Depending on the role of the participant, the Omnitude Foundation will assign to that OID the appropriate level of access required to use the ecosystem.

Secure

Additionally, Omnitude will prevent unauthorized parties from ascertaining the identity and patterns of behavior of any other participant by inspecting the ledger. Omnitude will allow ecosystem participants to make certain details of a transaction confidential so that they cannot be accessed by anyone other than the stakeholders in the transaction.

Periodically, the Omnitude blockchain will also anchor to transactions on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. This will allow Omnitude’s blockchain to benefit from the added security provided by Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s consensus algorithms and blockchains.

Transparent

Omnitude will provide deep searchability, backward in time through many transaction layers, to fulfill the requirements of retrieving data stored on its blockchain. Omnitude will use ‘anchoring’ which is the creation of a proof linking off-ledger data to an Omnitude blockchain transaction. Through anchoring, this proof can be used to verify data integrity and timestamp without relying on a trusted authority.

Core Features

Hyperledger

Omnitude will be built on top of Hyperledger. Choosing to use Hyperledger will provide the fully-vetted, open-source architecture, and transparency, longevity, interoperability, and support, needed to bring Omnitude to mainstream commercial adoption.

Hyperledger allows for many blockchain networks, and for many network ledgers, each serving a different goal and without a need for anyone network ledger to rely upon any other network for its core functionality. This level of network independence requires an addressing system that allows transactions on one ledger to discover and utilize appropriate transactions and smart contracts on other ledgers.

Identity and audibility

The Omnitude Foundation will manage user OIDs and authenticate all participants on the network. It will be possible to use access control lists to provide further layers of permission through the authorization of specific network operations. For example, a specific user ID could be permitted to invoke a smart contract application but blocked from deploying a new smart contract. Omnitude will use a cryptographic certificate to encapsulate a participant’s confidential data (e.g. Single Identity, Single Reputation, Proof-of-Interaction and Delivery Cycle Data). This certificate will be registered with the Omnitude Foundation, which will be able to issue and revoke OIDs. From each OID, the protocol will be able to generate security keys for participants when they undertake transactions on the network, concealing the identities of the transacting parties and providing privacy support to the network.

Private transactions and confidential contracts

If transaction patterns can be observed and interpreted, shared ledgers risk disclosing confidential details about business relationships that should not be revealed to competitors. Even a given participant’s relative volume of trade is commercial information that should not be revealed by a system supporting trade between parties. Omnitude will conceal the identity, transaction patterns, and terms of confidential contracts from unauthorized third parties by encrypting transactions so that only the stakeholders can decrypt and execute them. In this way, Omnitude will allow for competing business interests (or participants requiring private, confidential transactions) to exist on the same permissioned network.

Omnitude token – ECOM

ECOM is the way to pay fees in the Omnitude ecosystem. Customers, Merchants, Nodes, and suppliers will require ECOM to participate.

Specific use cases of the ECOM are given above under the ‘problems in the e-commerce industry and the potential use of Blockchain’ section.

Token Sale

Hard Cap- $25M USD

Presale ($4.2M USD for 10% of the tokens) – successfully concluded. Max bonus given: 15%, no lockup.

Public Sale ($21.8M USD for 45% of the tokens) – ongoing until the 31st of May. No bonus. KYC required. Unsold tokens will be burned.

Token Allocation- $100M ECOM will ever be created. 55% distributed to the public via pre and public sale, 33% Omnitude Foundation, 12% core team and advisors.

Team and Advisory tokens are vested for over 5 years. 20% release each year.

Roadmap

At the time of writing the team has been working on Omnitude for a year.

The team accomplished a proof of concept of an online store managed by the Omnitude platform, it has partnered with Swisscom Blockchain AG and CS-Cart (an online store software serving 35,000 businesses)

Q4 2018: Launch of Omnitude phase 1, developers will be able to develop apps based on the Omnitude blockchain.

Team

The team consists of 20+ full-time team members.

Core Team

Chris Painter– Co-Founder and CEO

Chris brings 12 years of experience in design, development, and e-commerce. He founded pixel by pixel in 2009, a company offering development, design and advertising services to new and established businesses. The company grew from a one-man business to a 16 person digital agency, serving national and international customers.

Vladimir Kalynyak- Co-Founder

Co-founded CS-Cart in 2006, CS-cart offers downloadable e-commerce software, an all-in-one tool to manage an e-commerce business. It is now serving 35,000 online stores worldwide.

Robert Belgrave Co-Founder and Advisor

Co-Founded WireHive in 2012, offering digital agencies and their brands hosting services, engineered to suit their exact digital requirements. WireHive works with top brands, Honda, Vodafone, Atlantic Records, and others. Robert is also an advisor at Dadi, a blockchain company that recently launched a successful ICO.

Advisory Board

Simon Cocking

He is the chief editor at the Irish Tech News. He writes regularly for IrishTechNews, Sunday Business Post, Irish Times, and others. He started four companies, two co-ops, and one national sporting organization. Serves as an advisor to many ICO projects.

Sally Eaves

Official member of Forbes Technology Council, CEO of Sally Eaves Consultancy, a consultant agency specialized in emergent technologies. Co-Founder of Shivom (A new blockchain project, the ICO is to launch soon).

For all team members and advisory board, click here

Pros/Cons

Pros

Built on-top of Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger is an open source blockchain project led by the Linux Foundation with contributors including IBM, Digital Asset and Intel, and a board which consists of top blockchain, technology platform, and financial companies members. Hyperledger Fabric, one of the Hyperledger projects, allows for many blockchain networks, and for many network ledgers, each serving a different goal and without a need for any one network ledger to rely upon any other network for its core functionality, a custom-made blockchain for each purpose. While allowing full interoperability between the different networks. There is no doubt that blockchain can solve many flaws in the e-commerce industry, it is described further in our evaluation. Hyper Ledger could be the adopted technology that will be used by many businesses. Omnitude is the first project aiming to create an ecosystem based on this innovative and promising ledger.

The team has 9 years of experience in the e-commerce industry

Omnitude founder, founded Pixel by Pixel in 2009. The company offers development, advertising and design services for e-commerce companies. They are very familiar with this industry to build the right product, and they have a 9-year history of business relations with their previous e-commerce customers, in order to offer them their solution and penetrate the market.

Cons

Market penetration- broad focus

Omnitude is aiming to offer a broad solution to many problems in the e-commerce industry. This will be done by allowing developers to develop apps on top of the Omnitude blockchain. For that approach to work properly, a great community of developers needs to be formed. It is a big task to create a community from scratch. On the other hand, if the community is not successfully developed, the team could build the apps in-house, though it will take them much longer to accomplish their vision of a new e-commerce ecosystem.

CryptoPotato ICO Evaluation – result

Team & Advisory board: Core team has great experience in the e-commerce industry, lack of reputable advisors/investors from the crypto world. Score 7.5

Stage of the project: Very ambitious project. Proof of concept launched (Demo available), version 1 of the platform- Q4 2018. Score 7.5

Project potential: aiming to create an e-commerce ecosystem based on Hyper-Ledger Fabric, very ambitious and challenging vision. Score 7.5

Community and Media: ~19,950 Telegram members, ~13,800 Twitter followers. Score 9

Token use: ECOM will be used to fuel the Omnitude blockchain. Score 9

ICO: Hard Cap – $25M USD, $4.2M USD sold in the presale with a 15% bonus (No lockup), Team/advisors tokens are locked for 5 years (vested, 20% released each year). Score 9

Whitepaper: Whitepaper describes the concept of the platform in a very general way. Technical details about the project are missing. Score 7

Backend and Technology: The infrastructure for this project is Hyper-Ledger, one of the top blockchain projects, the backend of the Omnitude blockchain is not detailed in the whitepaper. Score 8

CryptoPotato Omnitude ICO score: 8.06/10

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