COTI ICO Review

Recent payment systems have a number of weak points like the lack of volume and scalability or lack of trust between the sides. COTI project seeks to create a decentralized and scalable payment network for global trading, which would set a standard for a “next generation” payment system that would be trusted, instant, viable and supporting a multi-currency wallet.

COTI network was designed to create a payment network that would be widely used by consumers and traders as the basic method for payment. According to main idea of the team “COTI is the digital currency alternative to traditional payment systems like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal”. The team identified the key objectives that the payment network should satisfy.

They are:

According to the whitepaper COTI payment system grants high capacity of transactions and low tariffs. At the same time, the system is easy managed and provides a decentralized structure of services that users expect from payment platforms such as dispute settlement. COTI will achieve high transaction speed throughout, using a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of transactions, known as a cluster.

Moreover, COTI developers are in process of creating exchange’s infrastructure and a consumer wallet. The exchange and consumer wallet will be implemented later in 2018. The detailed information on the technical components of the project can be found in the technical whitepaper.

Since the project’s began in 2017, the COTI team has focused mainly on learning and developing this solution that is not implemented yet. The team keeps this in private and hasn’t published anything specific (no information on GitHub.com).

In regards to the roadmap the team will launch a working prototype of the platform and the wallet after the crowdfunding (hard cap is $30 million) is reached.

COTI team pays attention to the legal aspects of the project that will let the COTI currency become global. As cryptocurrencies are not regulated yet, the team is working with regulators all around the world to come up with relevant frameworks. COTI defines its currency as a non-security and the coin sale is not illegal. Besides that, COTI adheres to KYC and AML procedures and has a mechanism of consumer data protection (the process of the mechanism is not specified).

Overall score: Good

According to whitepaper and token sale summary COTI digital currency - (COTI) - is the center of the network, that manages the cooperation between consumers, traders, mediators and node operators. As the team declares COTI should be a cross functional tool for payments, fees, mediation, merchants and also stimulate node operators.

The total supply of the token is at 2 000 000 000 COTI, its price is $0,1 per token. The token allocation is shown below in line with the token sale summary:

All collected funds will be divided in: research and development (30%), cybersecurity (5%), licenses and capital requirements (12%), legal and compliance (9%), marketing (15%), merchant services (8%), market maker (7%), COTI fund (7%), operational expenses (7%).

COTI token is based on an ERC-20 token, that after the mainnet launch will be transferred into the COTI coins, but the token issuing is planned after this years launch. Also, the team plans to issue extra tokens (2,000,000,000) for further development.

As it was declared in the official site, the project succeeded during a pre-sale stage and collected over $3,000,000 in 27 hours.

Overall score: good

The team looks diverse: it has skilled specialists in tech, economics, finance, mathematics, software, social media. Some of them worked for IBM, HSBC, Credit Suisse. The team has three experts, that are responsible for social media management. However, the team doesn’t have any experience in ICO projects.

Among 17 advisors (most of which are from banking and venture funds) the most experienced person is Greg Kidd, who participated in various startups including Ripple Labs, Coinbase, Square and Twitter, that signs a great advisory background for COTI.

COTI team is very active in social media: Bitcointalk has 41 pages of project’s discussion, Telegram channel has over 35,000 active members, 17,200 followers in Twitter and almost 25,000 on Facebook. COTI has an active page on Medium. COTI is listed by rating agencies such as CoinSchedule, ICOBench, ICOMarks, ICOBazaar, ICODrops and others. But the lack of activity and technical information in specialized source Github (as it was noted previously) leads back to the idea that the project hasn’t yet been fully developed.

Overall score: Great

Total Supply 2,000,000,000 COTI

For Sale 600,000,000 COTI (30%)

Soft Cap No

Hard Cap $30,000,000

Additional Emission 2,000,000,000 COTI

Accepted Currencies BTC, ETH, fiat

Token Type ERC-20

COTI Price $0,1

Sale Starts September 15, 2018

Sale Ends October 1, 2018

Bonuses Yes

Bounty Yes

After careful studying we can conclude that the project doesn’t look like a scam, because it has good technical and legal ideas, large and qualified team and strong advisors. Social activity is pleasantly surprising and the fact that the project managed to collect more than $3 million in pre-sale shows that investors believe in the project.

At the same time, COTI sets itself as a generally accessible, fast, simple and convenient payment system with global cryptocurrency. It will be the “next generation” payment system. But neither the statements of the team nor the whitepaper explains how the project, which doesn’t even have a prototype yet, could be preferable and competitive to such payment systems as Visa, PayPal and MasterCard. Another concern connected with COTI token, that is supposed to be a world stable cryptocurrency. As of now, COTI is a risky ERC-20 token, and it’s not clear when they will be converted in unique COTI tokens and how they will avoid volatility on the market.

While left waiting to see if the team does produce a truly high-quality product, as the development of its technical components needs time and patience.

Click here to visit COTI page in the list of upcoming ICOs.