Universal Reward Protocol

The team has a good vision of the problem and tries to solve in a way that can bring a benefit for both sides – retailers and customers. Partnerships with one of the biggest retailers in the world and implemented protocols are important, as all the investors will want to see how it really works. On the other hand, there is not enough of hype around the project. A Technical Whitepaper will be released soon where the team is planning to explain their solution for the issue with scalability and transaction cost as the protocol was built on top of Ethereum blockchain.
Project that promises to solve customers’ data security issues, at the same time helping retailers to improve their services, definitely deserves attention.

Universal Reward Protocol is definitely a strong ICO project and has made serious strides in terms of both technological and business development. The URP team brings a considerable amount of quantifiable results to the table and set themselves apart from the majority of ICOs as a result. The development and successful deployment of the Occi solution alongside entering into working partnerships with multibillion European corporations such as Auchan, Carrefour, Galeries Lafayette, and Nestle is impressive. However, as with any blockchain project there are areas of concern, firstly the team is still relatively young and inexperienced in the business world with a number of team members in the process of building impressive employment histories. Also URP operates in one of the less attractive sectors of the blockchain as far as investors are concerned and lags behind high throughput blockchains, exchanges, and artificial intelligence projects in terms of marketability. This is evidenced by the relatively low valuations of its competitors and the team will have to work hard to attract revenues and ensure that a significant amount of value is retained throughout their ecosystem. Furthermore, if the team do reach their hard cap they need to have good finance-management post-ICO in order to avoid over-spending and bankruptcy.
Most importantly, the team’s impressive achievements do not guarantee that URP will be intrinsically valuable out of the gate as the token has little use for most purchasers outside of pure speculation. However, the team appears to have anticipated this and have incorporated a number of lock ups into their token sale. Private sale participants receive a 40% bonus attached to a vesting period of 6 months which starts 30 days after the reception of the main token stake, while Pre-sale participants receive bonuses of 25% to 15% and see their tokens being vested for 4 months starting 30 days after the main token stake.
In addition, the advisors’ tokens are locked for 12 months, while the founding team’s tokens are locked for 2 years, and the reserve tokens are split with 50% in 12 months lock-up, and 50% in 24 months lock-up. These conditions are designed to give URP a good level of resilience immediately after the token sale, however, this project still best suits the long term investor, and without a large amount of hype, the project may not attract a large quantity of retail investor funding or trading activity on the secondary markets.
As a result the team will be forced to aggressively drum up adoption and the 35% of tokens held in reserve will be used to lower acquisition costs for new retailers and brands as well as help to gain traction by rewarding any early adopters. URP should prove interesting for anyone looking for a longer-term project to participate in, or anyone with a stronger interest in the retail industry, also any unsold tokens will be reallocated to all buyers who participated in the token sale proportionally to their initial stake which is an extra bonus for token sale participants.

Positives
Distributed Data Storage: URP allows showers to decide which retailers they want to share their data with. This sensitive receipt data is isolated between the retailers while your navigation data will be available to every node on the network.
Utilizes IoT Technology: Since it combines blockchain technology with IoT technology, users are able to receive detailed data reports on their shopping habits while also having encrypted data that’s protected from unauthorized third parties and hackers.
Affiliated Businesses: So far, Universal Reward Protocol is backed by successful companies such as Nestlé, Carrefour, and Auchan. As time progresses, we can see URP be used by other companies that are willing to learn more about their shoppers so they can better advertise and promote their products to them.
Negatives
Data Protection: We would like to know how does Universal Reward Protocol plan on preventing shopper’s data from being used by fraudulent shopping sites and low quality retail stores?
No MVP: Until Universal Reward Protocol has a working product, it will be difficult for users to see how their platform works. They are planning to make an MVP by early 2019.