A few weeks ago I tweeted: “If I’ve learned anything about trading in 2018, it’s how bad I want 2017 back.” 2017 was a magical time where it seemed like the bull run would never end. You could pick a coin out of a hat and chances were you were going to get huge gains. 2018 has proven to be a formidable market. While it is still possible to make money on short term trades, or the occasional sympathy pump, it’s a difficult time to trade.

I for one don’t have all day to babysit the books. I’ll still do the occasional short term trade, but mostly I’ve been looking for good masternode entries. Masternodes, especially in solid projects, are a great way to make some passive income in the bear market. I figure if I have to be bag holding, I might as well earn a little interest while I wait.

I’ve teamed up with Cryptopatush (@topkek1337xd) to take a look a AEG.

What is Aegeus (AEG)?

Aegeus is a proof-of-stake/masternode hybrid coin focusing on data storage, with an emphasis on privacy. AEG is based off of PIVX, which drew inspiration from DASH. The currencies that derive from these coins offer near-instant transactions with a great deal of privacy. They’re working on implementing a data storage technique using IFPS technology — which enables people to store larger data off the blockchain with all the security and immutability of the blockchain.

Premine or ICO?

Aegeus is doing something a little different; they had a premine of 21,000,000 coins. Those coins are being listed on both Graviex and, one of my personal favorite exchanges, CryptoBridge. These coins will be sold at market. The coins that aren’t sold will be burned via a token burn set to take place in July. They will be keeping 25% of the initial premine to fund future development and marketing. There hasn’t been a coin cap or a halving scheduled yet. At some point they will have to do a hardfork to determine those amounts.

AEG’s token burn will take place on July 1st. With that coin no longer being available, I would foresee scarcity rising. If demand isn’t met by the high ROI from staking or masternodes, I could see this as a catalyst for price action.

Block Rewards

The block rewards are 140 AEG, with an estimated block time of 60 seconds. The rewards are split 50/50, 70 will go to masternodes and 70 will go to stakers. This coin is very early and both the APR and masternode ROI are very high. How this will affect the future economy is hard to gauge, especially with the token burn. Frankly, I’ve never followed a coin that’s used this strategy before and I’m curious to see how it plays out.

Proof-of-Stake (PoS)

PoS rewards coin holders for having coins in their wallet and leaving their wallet running. The more coins you have, the more likely you are to receive the block rewards from any given block, but it’s not regular. AEG has an incredibly high APR currently (up to 1960%). This will lower over time as the token gets distributed and rewards are divided up among more users. With this high return, it is possible to buy a smaller amount than what’s required for a masternode and stake your way to a masternode. Check out their website at the bottom of this review for more information on staking.

Masternodes

Masternodes are my favorite way to earn passive income. The rewards are predictable and you don’t have to leave the wallet up on your desktop. In most cases, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is rented to run the masternode and the collateral can be stored in any wallet, even those offline. AEG’s masternode count is low right now, giving them an insanely quick ROI of less than a month. This is likely to change in the near future as more nodes will come online further dividing the rewards similar to how PoS will be affected.

According to the white paper, future block rewards will be divided with a larger portion of the rewards for masternodes to further incentivize masternodes. In speaking with the developers, this switch will likely take place before the token burn (July 1st). At which point block rewards will be 100 Masternode / 40 PoS.

Setup on AEG masternodes isn’t difficult. There’s a detailed guide on their website to walk you through the finer points, but if you’re familiar with masternodes, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s no wallet to compile.

Privacy

AEG offers the native privacy features of PIVX to send private transactions, as well as private messaging.

Decentralized Data storage.

The main focus of AEG is their IPFS data storage for the platform. If you want to read up more on IPFS, check out https://ipfs.io/. The IPFS network will be used to store the data, and the location of data is stored on the blockchain. AEG is working to develop a platform to access this data from from the wallet, or other platforms in the AEG ecosystem.

The goal is to be compliant with the recent GDPR legislation passed in the European Union, which also affects the majority of international countries. This data storage method could be extremely useful for enterprise applications as it is significantly more cost effective and offers a higher degree of security.

Decentralized Governance

AEG is working on a platform for decentralized governance of their blockchain utilizing masternode voting and other community initiatives. It’s still in its early stages but, if executed correctly, this can strengthen the community greatly and further decentralize the platform.

Exchanges and Listings

AEG is listed on Graviex and CryptoBridge. It’s currently listed on WorldCoinIndex and many masternode sites. Since they’ve recently achieved the 100k daily volume requirement for listing, I expect it will be listed on CoinMarketCap soon.

Drawbacks and Concerns

AEG is a new coin; it has been trading for about a month. There has been a steady volume ramp as well as steady price increases. This is most likely due to investors hoping to get in early and capitalize on extremely high ROI. This can play out in two ways: either more investors are introduced and the community grows with the ability to absorb the inflation caused by the high ROI, or the coin will devalue as supply outpaces demand. In some cases for early adopters, a price decrease due to inflated supply can be absorbed simply by the sheer number of coins they’ve gained from their initial investment via staking or running masternodes.

This can be compounded by lacking liquidity in exchanges. They will need to be listed on exchanges with more volume and see an even larger volume increase to be able to absorb the added supply.

Block rewards and halvings aren’t scheduled yet. While there’s no reason to believe the developers would do something to harm the future of the coin, some possible futures of the coin are still left to human judgement. Hard forks will be required to implement these changes. Forks can get ugly and exchanges can be slow to adapt adding further stress to the market.

As is normal with most coins this new, the majority of its features are still under development. It’s hard to gauge how a coin will develop — if at all — after the initial sale. I’ve spoken with members of the development team, and they’ve invested a great deal of time and effort into the project at this point, there’s simply no way to be certain what the outcome will be. Remember: this is crypto and it’s still the wild west.

Roadmap

Pros:

-Low cost masternode with extremely high ROI.

– Proof-of-stake rewards are high enough to be able to buy less than a full masternode and stake your way to a full masternode.

-Dedicated core team actively working and producing regular announcements.

-Easy masternode setup.

-Unique initial funding plan.

Cons:

-Extremely new coin yet to enter price discovery.

-Many features are still under development.

-AEG is entering into an already saturated market — added challenges to marketing and exchange listings.

-Low liquidity.

-Forks will be required to implement future changes.

Cryptopatush’s Thoughts

Given the short amount of time Aegeus has been trading, it is difficult to technically analyze. Sometimes your best option to value a coin in this scenario is to compare a similar coin to get a hint of how the price could develop.

The most similar coin I can compare Aegeus to is Nodium. Nodium is also a privacy coin with proof-of-stake and masternodes implemented. They both are currently trading on CryptoBridge.

The initial price of Aegeus was 200 satoshi (sat) and has steadily climbed. Nodium also bottomed at 200 sat when it was listed on CryptoBridge. Since then, Nodium has made a steady rise to an all time high of 2900 sat, but retraced to a price of 2100 sat. Aegeus has preformed very similarly; it’s currently around 2600 sat. If I had to take a guess, I would say AEG will run a little more until the buyside is exhausted and retraces similarly to how Nodium behaved — which is healthy overall for future price action of the coin.

Unfortunately before a coin has truly entered price discovery, it’s extremely difficult to gauge what the fair market price for a coin will be. The fact that the token burn has yet to happen leaves some uncertainty to what the total supply of the coin and this makes it hard to judge the total market cap and it’s overall scarcity.

Do your own research.

Visit their website: aegeus.io

Follow them on twitter: @Aegeus_Coin

This is not investment or financial advice, we are not financial advisers. This review is meant for educational purposes, and independent research should be conducted.

DISCLOSURE: @topkek1337xd and @CryptOJsimpson were compensated by AEG to write this review. Cryptopatush and CryptOJsimpson work to provide unbiased reviews and present projects in a fair way. However, in full transparency we will always disclose when we have been compensated to write a review.