Republic Protocol (REN)

Opportunities:
Following the rapid growth in cryptocurrency, there is now significantly more funding coming from institutional investors, who perform large transactions and very much value the service of a dark pool. Republic Protocol would be able to serve the demand from this trend.
Currently, there are firms offering dark pool services, but none of them are established household names. A lot of trust is required to use their services because significant amount of money is involved. With Republic Protocol, there is no need for trusted intermediary.
Cross-chain atomic swaps is a big theme for blockchain this year. It is one of the ways to solve the blockchain scaling issue. If successful, the potential for this project is substantial.
The advisors of the project can help open doors in cooperating with other blockchain projects. We believe Kyber’s guaranteed liquidity asset swap platform would complement very well with Republic Protocol.

Concerns:
The project is at a very early stage, with GitHub activity starting only from December 2017. An early internal prototype with the Testnet for Bitcoin/Ethereum-based assets is scheduled to come out in 2018 Q2. Therefore, Republic Protocol is essentially a white paper project.
Aside from the CTO, the developers of the team are all fairly inexperienced with less than a year of working experience.
We are unsure whether the team can solve the challenging issues encountered by the project, including automatic swap, a trustless trading system with hidden order book, and computations that are verified through zero-knowledge proofs.

Conclusion:
Overall, we like the short-term potential but are neutral about the long-term potential for this ICO. Our thoughts of the tokens for short term and long term are as follows:
For ​short-term holding:
Good. The idea is solid and much needed in cryptocurrency trading because large traders value privacy and don’t want their trades revealed.
Only 5,000 ether is being raised from the crowdsale. This is likely going to create unmet demand and buying pressure once the tokens are listed on exchanges.
For long-term holding:
Neutral. We like the idea, but the project is still at an early stage so we are unsure whether the team can execute well and fulfill the project’s vision. If the project is successful, the potential is substantial as it can cooperate with pretty much any decentralized exchange to offer dark pool services.