I hope it could faster than the other so the improvement and the expectations of the investors won't be in vain. A lot of ICO projects is too good and promising but let's just still hope the dev and the manager will gladly meet the expectations of the investors.
I would also like to share (again) some thoughts on this project and try to cover different aspects from a strategic point of view. Hopefully some of my points could be useful for future investors doing their DD.
At the very end of the post you will find a brief summary ;-)
As you should know who is writing: My name is Jens - a 35 yo Senior Consultant working with an award-winning management and strategy consultancy located in Düsseldorf, Germany. We advise tech-startups, DAX enterprises and institutions mainly in Germany and Europe on how to become and stay competitive in the global race against high-performing teams. In my spare-time I run a performance marketing company and invest in several projects and companies around the world. You can also follow me on twitter if you want to see the face responsible for this wall of text -> @nureinschritt
As I am an investor in SONM (and also hodling some gnt because I believe in the fog) please make sure to do proper due-diligence before investing your money - this post is of course not an advise.
Passive income, highly disruptive cross-section technology, long-term HODLingI came across the SONM project around two weeks prior to their ICO. As I do not have much free time to ride many waves I was looking for ICOs with at least a good use-case to further diversify my portfolio and hodl some time but what I found in SONM really surprised me! There was this highly motivated team with that kind of idea you want to be a part of.
For those of you just looking for the next pump&dump coin with fortune over night: Please move on since you simple do not deserve to be part of this! Imagine yourself crowdfunding not a piece of bullshit but a real world changer - the next big thing! As you are reading at least till here you seem to be involved - congratulations. I guess you made a wise decision!
For those of you mentioning Golem as the direct competition: I go with the team as they stated during their last Q&A live session on Youtube: Golem aims for the niche of providing resources for special computing while SONM aims for the general computing market. That is why a running CS:GO server by Team Stratis is so incredible awesome. It proofs its reliability - and on top the SONM team is already very experienced in distributed computing which is not so common as many teams are experienced in blockchain or ICOs in general but not in the underlaying tech regarding their piece of work.
Passive incomeThe token holders of $SNM will have a share in the sales of computing power on the marketplace. Imagine gaining a percentage of eBay's auction fees. This was falsely described in the white paper as "dividends". Real dividends (as meant by the SEC) would describe a situation where you would gain percentages of the whole eBay Inc. We are simple talking about some kind of a kickback- / referral-like concept.
This means: Nice passive income for token holders and some intrinsic value of the token which will serve as the currency on that marketplace - and it will be big. Why?
Highly disruptiveReferring to the widely known predictions from Gartner (also included in the business overview on sonm.io) the cloud computing market will raise to 385bln US$ by 2020. From my daily work in a technology consultancy I can copy that. Half of our guys advising on bimodal IT and how to build an efficient architecture also using cloud services.
The SONM will disrupt the whole portfolio of Amazon Web Services - from EC2 to S3 - guess what happens to the token value if market cap reaches x% of that. As Golem aims for a different subsegment and the market is incredible big the question of "who will win" is kind of obsolete as we as investors win either way - the cake is more than big enough.
Long-term hodlingAs with most ICOs without a working product in the moment of the token release, the price happened to dip after hitting first exchanges. I personally invested only a real small amount of money during ICO and accumulated a lot more tokens during the last months. I really hope that the first listing in bigger exchange occurs together with one of the next software releases in order to penetrate the news with upcoming stories on an omni-channel approach. This combined with the growing visibility of fogcomputing and blockchain in general will kick it in the upcoming months and years.
It simple doesn't matter if the token is at 1k, 2k or 4k sat. It doesn't matter if some exchange lists the token or if we will be longer able to buy the dip. Even if Binance would disappoint their customers by breaking their word and refuse on listing the token because they heard some FUD - that would not mean a thing to the product the team is focussed on. The next first bigger and more clever exchange will be glad to have picked it up in some month.
Organizational structureUnfortunately there are not as much insights available for the moment as I would like to see as a strategy consultant. Obviously the team follows an agile approach for developing the product. At the moment there are no insights on the framework but they are obviously scaling towards at least four teams for different parts of the product. This might not be optimal from an agile perspective but as I am not familiar enough with the scope they should have their reasons. Some public product backlog or a story mapping canvas could serve stake- and shareholder communication.
Nevertheless the most important fact for me is the will to improve continuously. They are constantly listening to their growing community on telegram and slack (over 3.5k in slack i guess) and already delivered several improvements - also regarding transparency towards us the investors. They also got heavy support which could easily discovered doing DD - therefore a ++ rating from my PoV.
Thoughts on FUD, "SCAM" and uninformed bitcointalk questionsI fully understand that people get nervous when it comes to money and most of the guys yelling lost money in some way: The young kid spending his parents money in an ICO which dipped because of needed development time and bad communication. Or the bunch of pre-ICO investors: That was not cool - luckily you got the possibility to request refunds.
From a professional point of view everybody has to admit that failures happened before and during ICO phase. But to be honest - that simply doesn't change anything regarding the product and the ground-shaking concept beneath it.
IF the team would have scammed you they would not gather bunches of awesome support guys on their telegram - join it! They would not have build a working prototype. They would not have released alpha and patched it already again. They would not hire more and more developers. They would not have awesome and reliable advisors on their board who do not want to have their names burned by a scammy russian ICO. Please - what more do you need? That hype on "ICO scams" simply fucked up your minds. The team now has millions - but of course they want billions and SONM project is one of those rare projects in the ecosphere which could become an unicorn.
So please - do your own research. Do not believe in Lambo pictures on the one hand or FUD-spreading people on the other. For myself I feel grateful and blessed to were able to become part of the project as a small investor.
Brief summary- Fog computing will disrupt whole cloud computing market (385bln US$ by 2020) - imagine x% share for fog.
- What will AWS do while we rent power of iPhones, watches and microwaves to the SONM?
- Golem is not a real competitor - both aim for different purposes.
- SONM aims for general computing - proven by smooth running CS:GO server on alpha.
- Furthermore the alpha got patched already - next release 0.3 is expected to happen during the next weeks.
- Every application fitting inside a docker container can be run right now! In the fog!
- Token has multiple intrinsic values and fixed supply. Buyback of tokens by team will start Q3 2018.
- Token is not a security according to SEC because token holders receive "only" parts of a fee.
- The accidentally description of this shares as "dividends" caused delay in listing with bittrex after SEC happened.
- Doesn't matter which exchange lists when. Read the details. Go ahead.
- Well-nown Dr. Paolo Tasca and Ilja Frankstein joined advisory board - great articles already published.
I could continue like this and remind you of the awesome video from the great cryptolark (YouTube "SONM - the Golem killer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cybQCnKAN_w) or the interview with Dr. Tasca at bitcoinmagazine (
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/sonm-universal-fog-supercomputer-powered-ethereum-blockchain/). If you want to share your ideas not only on SONM but also on highly disruptive cross-sectional tech and how agile approaches can get the shit done while celebrating transparency and failures - join me on twitter (
https://twitter.com/nureinschritt), linkedin or telegram.