Of course, it will be down to the individual brand to provide a post-purchase experience that encourages re-buying and loyalty, but Ambrosus’ coin ecosystem, through incentivising consumers to repurchase by rewarding them with $AMB, develops a native loyalty program to increase retention.

Ethical purchasing

Ethical purchasing practices have been steadily increasing in the UK over the last 14 years.

In 2017 alone the value of ethical spending grew by 3.2% to £81.3 billion, whilst ethically sourced food and drink saw a 9.7% rate of growth. At the same time there was a 30% increase in vegetarianism and a 150% increase in veganism.

Ethical Consumer Markets Report 2017

The Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) operations now extend to 12% of the world’s wild marine catch. There was a 16.1% growth in sales of Rainforest Alliance labelled products (a £330 million increase in revenue). Consumers buying free-range eggs is up 32%, the organic food and drink market grew to £1.81 billion — a year-on-year increase of 3.8%. The food service industry spent 19.1% more on organic products in 2016…

What does all this have to do with Ambrosus?

This increase in not only consumer behaviour, but NGO and sector growth demonstrates that the demand for ethically sourced, traceable products is on the rise and shows no signs of shying.

The Ambrosus protocol therefore presents a solution not only for the end-consumer like you and me, who are conscious of the products that they consume, but also for NGOs such as the MSC to monitor the sourcing, production and sale of sustainable products.

Partnerships

It’s no surprise then that much-maligned manufacturer Nestlé have been in preliminary talks with Ambrosus regarding pilot projects in what could be an attempt to rectify their reputation, and with Fabiola Dionisi, Global R&D Program Leader of Healthy Lipids at Nestle S.A., a scientific advisor on the Ambrosus project, it seems this might have some legs.

At the same time rumours are abound concerning confirmed partnerships with 3 large companies currently under the covenant of NDAs. As with all rumours, online detectives claim to have deciphered who these companies are: GlaxoSmithKline, Deloitte and German software company SAP.

I don’t claim to be able to testify to the veracity of those rumours — I can’t — but given Ambrosus’ focus, and the (minuscule amount of) information that has been leaked, I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that these are the companies that they would be in talks with.

The team

I’m not about to extoll the virtues of every member of the Ambrosus team, you can decide whether you like them for yourself here.

Who I will talk about, however, is their latest acquisition, Stephen Croncota.

Up until just recently Stephen Croncota was the Chief Marketing Officer for Versace, a position he also previously held between 2003–2006.

As well as a stint at E!, Mr. Croncota also served as the Senior Vice President of Warner Bros. where he oversaw the creation of Cartoon Network as Creative Director. An impressive résumé.

In the press release concerning Croncota’s appointment, Ambrosus wrote:

At Ambrosus Croncota will oversee branding, advertising, social media, digital marketing, public relations, events and creative services.

An appointment of this stature is a clear signal that the company’s marketing is about to step it up a notch. And if I were a lesser man and paid too much attention to rumours, I might suggest that this move must be tied to game-changing announcements planned for the near future.

But that’s not me. It might be you. It’s not me.

The market cap

Ok, you’re not just in it because you like the technology or the team. The reason you’re thinking about buying $AMB is because you are wondering whether it might sky-rocket in the future and make you a tidy sum of money.

Don’t worry, it’s ok. That’s what we’re all thinking.

So can you?

The current circulating supply of $VEN is around 500M, with $WAN and $AMB circulating around 100M and 140M respectively.

At the time of updating this article $VEN is trading for $4.04, $WAN for $4.46.

$AMB is trading for less than a tenth of the others at $0.40.

Taking the aforementioned currencies as ‘industry benchmarks’, it seems that $AMB may be dramatically underpriced. That said, market value is an indication of investors’ perceptions of the business’ prospects. And the current price must be taken as a fair reflection of present interest in the coin.

It’s worth noting that the other two have announced considerable partnerships, whilst Ambrosus have remained decidedly cool on the matter.

But with big announcements in the pipeline, the appointment of a new CMO, a burgeoning market… I personally expect interest to increase sharply, and the price of the coin with it.

Finally, for long-term hodling, with a total supply of ~360M, as (and if and when) demand for $AMB increases, your individual coins are likely to increase in value due to scarcity.

AMBERnomics

On May 4th Ambrosus’ tokenomics were outlined, with 4 tiers of masternodes announced: Apollo, Hermes, Atlas and Perseus (each with their own functions in the network) under the umbrella of AMBERnomics. Users must pledge a certain amount of AMB in correlation with the amount of data they wish to store in order to operate a masternode.

The key is to engineer a model that rewards “healthy” network behaviour, while punishing misconduct to a cost-prohibitive degree for would-be bad actors. - Angel Versetti

Ambrosus’ own network (AMB-NET) use IoT sensors to collect supply chain data, which is parsed by Proof-of-Authority consensus protocols, which in turn are authenticated by the network’s most senior masternodes.

The idea is that enterprise level businesses will operate the Apollo masternodes on the AMB-NET in order to give them, “greater sovereignty over their sensitive data.”

$AMB is then used to fuel AMB-NET, tethering supply chain data to the blockchain.

Nectar

Much like NEO’s GAS, Nectar will be used to price $AMB transactions. In order for actions to take place on AMB-NET, users will have to pay in terms of Nectar, with more intense computational tasks costing more Nectar. This has been introduced in order to promote price stability throughout AMB-NET, though how exactly this is achieved and how it will take in the real world isn’t quite clear yet.

Set at a floating rate, the idea behind this is that network fees won’t ever get too large in order to increase adoption.

Though there have been no clear figures on ROI for node holders directly from Ambrosus as yet, an incredible Redditor known as MidnightOcean has made calculations based on the information available to produce potential revenue models for holders.

Here’s a snapshot: