Opportunities:
Quantstamp had a successful audit with Request, which was a smoothly-run ICO. This speaks to the team’s capability in blockchain development/audit.
This is one of the projects that can help drive blockchain adoption and the potential is huge. Right now, smart contracts are unsecured by default. Smart contracts need to go through expensive and prolonged audit process, which is hindering the adoption and usage of smart contracts. This needs to change and Quantstamp is a good candidate to tackle the problem.
Even if the software only has limited functionalities in the beginning, it can be a good first step in a manual audit because it can potentially save a lot of time for the auditor.
In the Telegram, Quantstamp has indicated that they will buyback if token prices drop below ICO price (tokens will be put into a reserve which the team can release in the future), indicating that the team is confident in the project.
Concerns:
The project is still at an early stage. According to the white paper, mainnet release won’t be until August 2018, which is 9 months after the end of ICO and pretty far away.
Presale participants receive up to 100% bonus, which leaves a bad taste in some potential participants’ mouth. People are now more concerned about ICOs with large presale discount/bonus because those participants are willing to sell their tokens at a much lower price than crowdsale participants. For example, even if QSP tokens drop to 25% below ICO price, those who received 100% bonus can still generate a 50% return.
We believe that smart contract audits cannot be fully automated because human judgment is required to understand the logic and intent of the smart contract. Software can spot bugs that cause the contract to not function, but it cannot detect errors that cause coins/tokens to be sent to the wrong person, or wrong formula being used to calculate payoff in a smart contract, etc.
Since the problem that Quantstamp is trying to solve is large, there are other competitors – Etherparty, BlockCat, ZeeplinOS, and Agrello. All of these projects aim to lower the cost of smart contract development. Quantstamp may not be the winner in this space.
Conclusion:
Overall, we are neutral about this ICO’s short-term potential but like its long-term potential. Our thoughts of the tokens for short term and long term are as follows:
For short-term holding:
Neutral. Even though crowdsale are contributing 63% of the hard cap ($19 million out of $30 million), they are only receiving 54% out of all the tokens allocated to ICO participants. We believe that unless you get in the presale, it is not attractive for short-term holders to contribute into the ICO.
Note that this is based on the current market environment. The ICO market can change dramatically by the time crowdsale begins.
For long-term holding:
Good. There are lots of potential for this project, and if successful, it can really lower the cost of using smart contracts. With the team showing their competency by successfully auditing the Request ICO, we believe the project has a good chance to gain traction when the protocol rolls out.
