Summary

Project name: Refereum

Token symbol: RFR

Website: https://refereum.com/

White paper: https://refereum.com/RefereumWhitepaper.pdf

Hard cap: $25 Million for 50% of total tokens

Conversion rate: 1 RFR = $0.01

Maximum market cap at ICO on a fully diluted basis: $50 million

Bonus structure: No bonus for crowdsale, presale bonus undisclosed

Presale or white list: Presale ongoing, whitelist closed. Need to contact [email protected] for presale information. Minimum for presale is $20,000.

for presale information. Minimum for presale is $20,000. ERC-20 Token: Yes

Countries excluded: None

Timeline: Whitelist closed January 18, 2018, waitlist now open. Token sale starting February 8, 2018 (Please refer to Refereum’s website for the most up to date information)

Token distribution date: After token sale ends

Video summary (video is 7:04 long):

Project Overview

What does the company/project do?

Refereum is a platform that aims to reduce the costs of selling and marketing games by directly rewarding individuals for sharing games and embracing influencer sites. It hopes to replace the currently inefficient process for video game marketing and expensive traditional payment methods.



The video game industry is a $108 billion industry, however, recent years show that game budgets are shifting away from development and more towards marketing. In addition, top game distribution platforms enforce up to 30% cuts of all product sales, taking away value from game companies and impeding developers.



To accompany this, top game streamers and content creators are growing huge followings on the internet, yet have limited opportunities to monetize their followings.



The goal of Refereum is to build a three-sided network where developers benefit from lower costs and less hassle, influencers receive effective avenues to profit, and gamers can earn money sharing and playing video games.



The diagram below shows how Refereum works in a nutshell:

How advanced is the project?

The project has developed an open source game that demonstrates Refereum’s best practices on the test net. They have also completed Earn.Refereum.com, where streamers and gamers on Twitch/Discord are incentivized to play games for rewards including RFR tokens.



Here is a demo of Earn.Refereum.com (video is 3:18 long):

The roadmap is not very specific, but does highlight their goals out to 2020.



For 2018, the team’s focus will be scalability. They will be adding new features to Refereum that allow for the accommodation of more users as the network grows.



In 2019, they hope to provide developers with deeper integrations and rewards on the platform.



Through 2020, their goal will be to adapt to the needs of the community and investigate additional verticals.

What are the tokens used for and how can token value appreciate?

RFR token is designed to enable decentralized referral marketing and cash rewards in a global marketplace. Any users who share referral links for specific games with friends and followers can earn RFR tokens, which can be traded for cash or used to buy new content.



RFR tokens will have three main use cases on the Refereum network.



First, anyone can buy games on Earn.Refereum.com using RFR tokens, and verify these purchases on the blockchain. This provides incentive for users to refer their friends and followers and earn RFR tokens, so they can earn new games over time. However, games can still be purchased with fiat currency.



Second, game developers can pay in RFR tokens to feature their game on the marketplace and get more traffic. They can also share profits in the form of RFR with influencers who help sell the game.



For example, instead of using 30% of a game budget to pay traditional distribution platforms, they can choose to allocate 10% that goes directly to streamers who help distribute the game via referrals.



Third, sellers of digital goods can pay to list their products for distribution by paying with RFR tokens.



The more people that use Refereum’s network, the more demand there should be for RFR tokens over time, especially for influencers and game developers who make a living in this industry.

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Team

The team behind Refereum contains industry experience in the gaming industry as well as digital advertising.



Biographies for key team members are listed below:



Dylan Jones, Founder – Dylan has helped design games such as RGB and Battle Group 2 along with other Facebook and mobile games. He founded the co-working space Gamenest, and advocates for decentralized systems at global conferences as well as his meetups in San Francisco.



Alistair Doulin, CTO – Alistair has over 15 years of software development experience, including the management of teams and architecting large systems. He has worked on multiple game and engine projects including Battlestar Galactica, and runs Bane Games, a development studio in Australia.



Oleksii Matiiasevych, Smart Contract Author – Oleksii is the main contributor to Refereum’s smart contracts. He is a smart contract engineer at Ambisafe, also a “White Hat” hacker who saved and returned $1.4 million worth of Ethereum in the July Parity multi-sig exploit.



Sloane Earl, Business Development – Sloane started in the game industry as a traditional and digital concept artist, eventually working her way into a business development manager role at the game animation studio Plastic Wax.



Refereum’s advisors include Ian Dunlap, manager of the Unity Asset Store ecosystem, Koh Kim, an early member of the Google Play Games business development team, and Andrii Zamovsky, the founder of Ambisafe – a smart contract development company.

Opportunities

The idea of compensating gamers is a good way to build up a community and create traction. Refereum used this strategy to promote their own ICO and it is proving to be successful in driving market awareness.

Influencers are paramount in the gaming industry today. Twitch, the #37 most visited site globally according to Alexa, is basically built entirely from video game influencers. With Refereum, influencers should be able to bring in a lot more earnings.

The demo is showing a lot of promises with the referral model and ways that gamers can be compensated. The RFR token model makes sense.

Concerns

The roadmap is vague with the only milestone for 2018 being “add new features and scalability to the platform”. Without a detailed roadmap, we cannot gauge how well thought out the team’s strategy is.

The team did not disclose the range of bonus provided to presale participants. This makes it hard to see the cost basis of presale participants.

Conclusion

Overall, we like both the short- and long-term potential for this ICO. Our thoughts of the tokens for short term and long term are as follows:



For ​short-term holding



Good. The project has a promising demo, with the team, idea, and market awareness all being above average. Despite the recent market environment, we believe the project can be sold out with unmet demand.



For long-term holding



Good. We like the idea of the project and believe it can gain traction quickly because of its referral model and compensation to gamers. If the project is successful, the potential can be substantial because it would disrupt how the gaming industry compensates different parties and marketing strategy employed by game development companies.

For more information about the ICO, please visit the following links:

* The information contained in this article is for education purpose only and not financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions. This article is contributed by Victor Lai with the help of our intern Kieran O'Day.