Opportunities:
Change has a strong team with experience working in Fintech companies. It also has a number of legit advisors, including the former CEO of DHL Global Forwarding.
Although it doesn’t benefit Change’s business directly, Change has an official partnership with a sovereign government, Estonia. This is going to provide validation to Change’s concept and put it steps ahead of many other blockchain projects.
Change has a very ambitious goal of providing pretty much all the services that a traditional bank provides. If successful, the upside to the business and token value can be substantial. It also allows many financial services to be paid using cryptocurrency.
Concerns:
Most members of the team are working on Change and other startups at the same time, meaning they are not working in Change fulltime. It is unclear how they are going to allocate their time between different ventures.
CAG tokens are not necessarily for purchases in the Change Marketplace, at least in the beginning. Users can use all major cryptocurrencies. This is going to reduce the need for CAG as a utility token.
Competition – there are a number of blockchain projects in similar space as Change
Debit card – Tenx, Monaco, Tokencard, Xapo, Mobi, Centra.
Wallet – Metal, Status, Everex, Omise GO, Pillar.
The roadmap is vague. In the white paper, the only milestone after ICO is “delivery of first Change crypto cards; beta for marketplace launched”. This may indicate the lack of detailed planning for the team in terms of the execution and carrying out the game plan for the project.
Conclusion:
Overall, we are neutral about both the ICO’s short- and long-term potential. Our thoughts of the tokens for short term and long term are as follows:
For short-term holding:
Neutral. On one hand, the project has good awareness with the partnership with the Estonia government and strong team of advisors.
On the other hand, presale is stalled at around 30,000 ETH. With a minimum contribution amount of just 10 ETH, there is not much to prevent small contributors from participating, so the pre-sale is essentially a public crowdsale. It seems to us that the project doesn’t have enough demand to fill the hard cap, especially in this market environment.
However, the crypto market can change very quickly and given the 1-month crowdsale period, Change has plenty of time to raise funding, hence the neutral rating.
For long-term holding:
Neutral. We believe the team underestimates the challenges with legal and regulatory issues. With the lack of details in the white paper, we are unsure of the execution abilities of the team.
What’s likely going to happen is that Change will realize there are a lot more legal hurdles than they initially thought. They will need to expand slowly, country by country after getting all the relevant licenses in each jurisdiction. Therefore, it may take a long time to realize the team's vision.
Change also has a very ambitious goal of providing many different kinds of services under one umbrella. Generally, the more ambitious goal a project has, the more likely it will fail. Therefore, we believe Change is more of a high-risk high-return play.
