Astronaut Capital takes exposure in the Current token sale.

On the 21st of February, Astronaut Capital (ASTRO) released a report stating that they have become an investor in Current (CRNC). You can view the full report here.

Overview

Current Media is an established USA-based company that provides applications globally relating to several verticals of media. The platform itself curates the best trending videos, music and content for consumers.

Current Media initially launched their first iOS app in March 2017. The application allows consumers to instantly stream from third-party networks such as Youtube, Soundcloud, Spotify and more.

Through the above partnerships, the company claims to provide access to over 300 million songs and 1 billion videos. Active users rates point to over 200,000 downloads with the average user streaming 18 minutes per day.

Through the implementation of an ERC20 token (CRNC), Current believes that an incentive model for streamers will boost adoption of the app as consumers are ‘paid’ to engage with content.

Commercial & Technical Strategy

As an established platform, Current Media already have a significant active user base. The technical strategy moving forward is focused on successfully getting the market (business and consumer) to adopt usage of the CRNC tokens.

We believe the major use case of their commercial strategy and technical implementation to the be incentive-scheme for consumption of media.

Earning for streaming: One of the major marketing use-cases they have is the ‘mining’ of CRNC by simply playing and consuming content. The Current materials advise that the rate of which CRNC is ‘mined’ is variable based on the user’s contribution efficient and referrals made through third-party social networks.

Roadmap

Current have a roadmap that stretches out to Q4 of 2019. In brief, the major milestones are the following:

Q2 2018

Netflix and Hulu integration and playback

Offline streaming

Q3 2018

CRNC integration

Android launch

Q4 2018

iPad and SmartTV launch

Q1 2019

Launch of v1.2 allowing CRNC integration with other networks

Q4 2019

Launch of advertising platform

Token Sale

Current will be issuing 1 billion tokens under the code CRNC.

Private Sale — Approximately 35% of the tokens will be sold in the private token sale. No tokens will be sold in the public sale.

Team & Advisors — A total of 17% of the tokens will be held by the existing team and advisory board

Mining Rewards — A substantial amount of 35% will be utilized to stimulate and increase adoption of the platform and the CRNC tokens in the market

Community Growth — Current are seeking to allocate 10% of CRNC tokens to support further community growth through a ‘Claim your wallet’ campaign

Token Use

CRNC tokens are the vital driving force of the ecosystem:

Application users earn CRNC for consuming content according to the length of time and whether or not advertisements are ‘opt-in’ or ‘opt-out’

Users can become ‘curators’ by grouping certain media and content from different networks. Other users can then access such curated media for their own enjoyment. The curators are paid in CRNC for use of their playlist

In 2019, Current anticipate launching a service where creators can upload media directly to the platform and get rewarded in CRNC

CRNC will also be the primary currency for the payment of in-app advertising, premium services, and donations

Use of Proceeds

The use of proceeds indicates that the majority of funding will be utilized for development (40%). The remaining is split across operations, marketing and legal.

Team

The website and marketing material indicate that there are ~19 team members split across operations, legal and R&D.

Dan Novaes: Dan is CEO of Current. He’s had two prior exits from companies. Dan has been investing in the blockchain space since 2013.

Kiran Panesar: Kiran is Co-founder & CTO. Kiran has built and overseen sites that provide secure, scalable web services for tens of thousands of concurrent users, handling over 1 billion requests per month.

Nick McEvily: Nick is Co-Founder and CPO. With extensive experience leading software and design teams for the last eight years, Nick oversees the product design and development at Current.

Advisors

There are a total of eleven (11) advisors listed on the Current Media material.

Mark Cuban: Dallas Mavericks, MicroSolutions, Broadcast.net

Galia Benartzi: Bancor Foundation

Dave Hoover: Dev Bootcamp, Augur

Strengths

Current Media is an established company with an existing and active user base since 2017. Pg3 of the whitepaper indicates “The average user spends over 18 minutes per session and our Day 30 retention as of Q4 2017 is over 35% without any incentives built into the platform, well above industry standards at this stage.” If this figure is accurate, it is likely that consumer adoption and retention rates will improve significantly after commercial deployment of CRNC.

Advertising revenue for streaming services is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. By 2020, mobile revenue from video advertising will be $6.5b, equalling that of desktop revenue for the same. This growth provides further confidence of the long-term monetization model that Current is attempting to achieve with CRNC.

The competitive ecosystem for consumer and content apps have historically performed quite well, albeit, implemented in different ways. STEEM, a token which rewards quality contribution online can validate aspects of Current’s venture. In addition to this, KIN (launched by Kik), was offered in a token sale in 2017 for the purpose of rewarding content creators on a consumer-focused mobile app. Kik claims to have completed successful testing of a rewards system before the implementation of blockchain in their model.

The team and advisory board have extensive experience in commercializing consumer businesses.

Weaknesses

The Current iOS app has had approximately 200,000 active users. While retention rates remain quite high, some may believe such user growth to be less than average over a period of 9 months.

Based on the raising amount of $35m and a 40% allocation to development, this is a substantial amount of funding given the initial versions of the application have already been released.

Marketing may prove to be the largest form of expenditure for Current moving forward. We anticipate that Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) will be high going forward, particularly in the mobile space.

Opportunities

We see a significant opportunity for Current to off their newly built infrastructure as open source to other businesses seeking to monetize streaming revenue in the same way. Allowing third parties to integrate CRNC could spark significant demand in the token.

The roadmap highlights integration with popular video streaming services such as Netflix. Our expectation is that user engagement will increase substantially once this update has been deployed.

Threats

The smaller allocation towards marketing could inhibit short and long-term growth. Consumer-facing businesses (particularly apps) are generally subject to large acquisition costs.

The growth of the token may be inhibited if there is any delay in development.

There may be a learning curve for existing and new users of the Current app with regards to handling CRNC. This may initially slow market adoption.

Conclusion

Astronaut is attracted to Current Media as a speculative medium-term investment and believes that the established nature of the business provides a good level of support.

While we would not generally seek to gain exposure to direct consumer apps (B2C), we make an exception for the reasons listed below:

The Current token sale had significant private sale support, resulting in the public crowd offering being converted to an airdrop

The fact that Current is already established means that they can focus on building ‘on-top’ of what they have instead of starting from scratch

We believe the team and advisory board to be very competent and have a strong ability to execute on the roadmap

When looking at the long-term economics of the streaming segment, advertising and curation are strong components and a major catalyst for growth. We believe this plays heavily in Current Media’s favor

Astronaut is comfortable with the validation of market engagement and market support from similar businesses such as Steem and Kik. While we are optimistic about the same level of potential for Current, we will be monitoring the investment closely to ensure milestones are hit in line with expectations as outlined in the whitepaper.

In light of the preceding, the Astronaut Investment Committee (IC) have agreed to take exposure for the medium term with the possibility of further investment subject to the company delivering on product milestones.

On the 21st of February, Astronaut Capital (ASTRO) released a report stating that they have become an investor in Current (CRNC). You can view the full report here.

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