Prospect

As the foundational public blockchain of mainland China, and with NEO thriving in the same period, Metaverse has a long history compared with several emerging public blockchain projects. Although currently Metaverse has not achieved the same amount of success as NEO, and their ecological dAPPs are relatively mediocre, the ability and reliability of their team have been tested time and again. DPRating has made a quick review of ETP in the OKEx voting list released on June 20th. The overall rating of the project is a B grade, which is higher than standard.

At that time, the market value was at a bit of a low point, with the price 0.7 USD per ETP. After the DPRating evaluation was released, the price of ETP rose rapidly. It has risen more than four times so far, and is currently hovering above the $3 USD mark. The overall market capitalization ranking has risen to about 50 in the world, returning to a respectable level.

Under the current bear crypto market, DPRating reminds our viewers that ETP prices may have an appropriate correction in the short term period; but if the market picks up, and considering that Metaverse has focused energy on development for over 1 year, if there is a positive correlative news in the market or the dAPP ecosystem is gradually strengthened, then the price of ETP still has room to grow in the long-term.

Project Abstract

Metaverse is a non-profit, open source blockchain project dedicating in digital assets and digital identity through blockchain technology and enabling all Internet applications at almost zero cost in the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) approach for the convenience brought by digital finance.

Investment Rating: B

Based on the project fundamental perspectives and various related information, DPRating gives Metaverse ETP a B grade investment rating.

As one of the early public blockchain projects in mainland China, Metaverse has certain first-mover advantages. Although the demand for commercial Internet applications is high, the competition is also fierce and the ecological development of the chain is relative slow. The incentive mechanism for ETP is abundant, and the design is relatively reasonable.

As a team that entered the blockchain development area in the early stages, the professional team has a rich development experience. CEO Eric Gu is a senior blockchain and digital asset expert. CTO Chen Hao has the dual experience of traditional network services with high concurrent architecture experience and public blockchain architecture. The early development and maintenance members of the project are mainly from the Chinese blockchain startup company ViewFin. However, the official website does not have information on investors and consultants, which is consistent with the characteristics of other earlier projects.

The activity in the community is moderately robust, and the recent Telegram group chat is active. The project performance is basically normal, and the frequency of code updates and library uploads are average. We believe the current market value is at a moderate level.

Risk Rating: Medium

Based on the current disclosure information of the project, the risk rating of Metaverse ETP is medium.

According to the enterprise search and LinkedIn data, the main body of the project company, Shanghai Ruolin Software Technology Co., Ltd., matches the members of the ViewFin Metaverse team. The member disclosure information is clear and can be verified in various channels with high transparency.

On the risk of project progress, the SuperNova version of the main network was officially released in June 2018, and overall, the team released the development results of the past period in the main announcement, which is in line with the plan and roadmap.

The main risks of the project will come from the competition risk. Although Metaverse belongs to the group of early public chain projects, the ecological construction is relatively weak. In the case of a general recession in the market, the subsequent public blockchain competition will face a severe test.

1. Project Fundamentals (35%)

The main net of Metaverse was launched in February 2017. As one of the earliest public blockchains in China, Metaverse focuses on social and commercial needs, building on the core infrastructure like intelligent digital assets and digital identity, value intermediary (Oracle), and asset trading. Different from other blockchain projects that use technology as a starting point, Metaverse mainly orients to business needs to abstract general requirements into models and constructs the underlying built-in smart contract BISC (Built-in Smart Contract) to reduce the technical risks of commercial applications, which form a fast and convenient BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) for building blockchain applications.

Features: Digital Assets, Digital Identity, Value Intermediary, On-chain trading.

· Metaverse Smart Token — MST

· The issuer registers him or herself, and the MST symbol is globally unique

· Proof of Assets (PoA) mechanism: Provide proof of assets to prove the authenticity of digital assets

· Mining Token Rewards: Miners can configure MST mining sites to release MST tokens through mining

· Digital Identity — Avatar

· Digital Identity (DID): An EOS-like account system that can be bound to the primary private key

· Identity Ledger and Identity Terminal

· Reputation and Profile

· Value Intermediary — Oracle

· Provide a trust data feed

· Oracle itself is a special kind of Avatar (Digital Identity)

· On-chain Trading — Exchange

· Option 1: Graphene technology

· Option 2: 0x agreement for on-chain settlement and off-chain matching

· Review and Analysis

Metaverse, as one of the early public blockchains, has certain first-mover advantages and a similar positioning with the NEO public blockchain. Metaverse has digital assets and digital identity as the core, providing a foundational infrastructure for social and enterprise application needs. However, due to the slow development of the main net, Metaverse did not establish a rich ecosystem.

Metaverse digital asset has two standards, including MST (like ERC20) and MIT (like ERC721), which can meet the basic needs of various project applications, but innovation is relatively weak.

· Consensus Mechanism and Economic Model

ETP is the token representing the utility of Metaverse. Metaverse’s consensus mechanism can be split into two stages. The first stage is the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, and in the second stage it will switch to an improved version of the DPoS algorithm which is called HBTH-DPoS.

First Phase: Proof of Work (PoW)

· Ethash algorithm

· In theory, mining a block on the Metaverse blockchain should take an average of 24 seconds (actual time is around 30 seconds), the initial reward for mining each block is 3 ETP, and block rewards decrease by 5% for every 500,000 blocks mined

· While time approaches to infinity，amount of ETP mined is infinitely close to 30 million ETP

Second Phase: HBTH-DPoS

· The DPoS algorithm implemented is from Graphene

· Add the concepts of Token-Height and HeartBeat

· Deal with the problem of voter apathy, increase the cost of intruder

ETP deposit and deposit reward distribution

ETP tokens will be distributed as rewards through PoW mining, and Metaverse also innovatively introduced a built-in ETP lock function on the blockchain that rewards depositors. This concept not only has an incentive effect on the Metaverse economic model, but also helps Metaverse migrate to the DPoS consensus mechanism and contributes to the development of financial applications based on the deposit lock function.

The deposit lock reward details are specified below:

Just like time deposit interest and combined with the time of mining a block calculation, results in weekly interest at 0.1%, monthly interest at 0.66%, quarterly interest at 3.23%, semiannual interest at 7.98%, and annual interest at 20%.

Review and Analysis:

Metaverse is the first PoW public chain project in China, and the mining algorithm uses the same Ethash algorithm as the Ethereum system. It means that the Ethereum mining machine can be used to mine ETP tokens, thus reducing the mining threshold. This is beneficial for the development of the ETP mining ecosystem.

Currently, ETP price is demonstrating a remarkable increase, with mining earnings exceeding that of Ethereum’s, so ETP will gradually increase the difficulty of PoW mining. A note about deposit interest rewards: if based on yearly deposit interest rewards, the daily interest rate is lower than 0.055%, in the reasonable inflation level.

Overall, the economic model and incentive mechanism of ETP are very comprehensive and reasonable, which are conducive to the formation of a virtuous cycle and feedback. ETP is the token of Metaverse, but because of the lack of ecosystem on the chain, the function of platform-type token is not so obvious. The current stage is just represented by the attributes of currency-based tokens.

2. Team（40%）

Core members introduction:

Eric Gu (Founder, CEO)

The founder and CEO of ViewFin, the founder of Metaverse Foundation. His Chinese name is GU Ying, and he is a senior expert in Fintech and Digital Assets and a well-known opinion leader in many of the primary blockchain ecosystems. As a lifetime member of the Bitcoin Foundation, Eric is one of the earliest evangelists who introduced blockchain knowledge into China. Also he is the main translator of China’s first blockchain book “Blueprint for a New Economy”.

Chen Hao (Co-founder, CTO)

He has experience with traditional network high concurrent architecture and public blockchain architecture, leading team design and implementation of the public blockchain Metaverse, and realizing digital asset trading system. He used to work for Accenture as a senior software engineer.

Jiang You Ming (Co-founder, R&D Vice-President)

He has experience with business models design, budget planning, risk control management, and blockchain related trading projects design. He used to work for HuaAt, a leading Big Data solutions provider, with customers including China Unicom, China Telecom, Haier, banks, etc.

Project Consultants and investors

Metaverse was released in 2016, which is one of the earliest blockchain projects. At that time, the official website did not have information on investors and consultants, which is consistent with the characteristics of earlier projects.

Review and Analysis:

Metaverse project development members mainly come from ViewFin, a blockchain startup company in China (Shanghai Ruoling Software Technology Co., LTD). Eric Gu is the founder and CEO of ViewFin, a well-known opinion leader in many of the primary blockchain ecosystems, and he has rich experience in the industry. ViewFin currently has 82 employees which can be searched on LinkedIn and has sufficient developers.

3. Community and Activity (20%)

Google Trends

Google search interest index is floating up and down at number 25, the index reached 100 during the period from October 15 to 21, 2017.

Google Search Index

WeChat Index

WeChat Index shows that the latest interest index of Metaverse is 346447, and overall interest index is on the rise.

The Popularity of Social Media and Community

Until 9th August, the exposure of Twitter reached 15.4K, the interactive rate is rarely low. There are 3632 people in total who joined the official Telegram channel, and many of them stay active on the channel.

PR Activity Summary

4、Modification Item (-10%-10%)

Market Capitalization

Between July 11 and August 9, 2018, Metaverse ETP’s price traded between $1.24 and $2.20 USD, and the minimum/maximum price in that time range was $1.24/$2.69.

The market capitalization value was between 45 million dollars and 130 million dollars in that same time period, the medium market cap value is 54 million dollars, and the 7-day moving average is around 107 million dollars.

The trading volume ranges between 6.5 million dollars and 22.3 million dollars, the medium value is 17.8 million dollars, and the 7-day moving average is around 10.7 million dollars.

Currently, there are 16 exchanges in the market, including Bitfinex, supporting ETP market circulation.

The key data is shown as following (since February 2018):

Commitment Check

Metaverse’s roadmap is shown on its official website:

Until now, the execution results seem promising, and the SuperNova main net was released on June 18 of this year.

According to the roadmap and its weekly report, the Metaverse team started the following tasks since the first quarter of 2018:

l Main net upgraded to Version 0.8.2

l Metaverse continues to develop its on-chain exchange, digital identity design, and cross-chain services

Generally speaking, the plan and roadmap look aligned with the original roadmap.

Code Auditing

In code auditing data of July, Metaverse overall grade is 2.5, and the key hub is docked at https://github.com/mvs-org/metaverse

Stats are shown as follows:

There are 43 overall requests in July, 1 version upgrade with the version 0.8.2 being released, and 7 active developers for the current month.