The information provided below is opinion of one or several ICODrops community members and not of the project’s administration.
We are not technical professionals or investment advisors.
Use the information provided below at your sole discretion and at your own risk.
I give you a review of the Seele project.
This review was written in the period of February 04-February 07, 2018. It is possible, that something has already changed.
1) The description of the product in one sentence
They are creating a multifunctional blockchain of new generation. At the moment it knows no equals with regard to its functionality.
2) Dates, amounts, terms, etc.
At the moment there is no any publicly available information on hard cap, dates, structure of sale or token distribution.
The answer to all such questions is “TBA”.
3) Metrics
The project came into my sight on January 25, that’s why there is an opportunity to have a look at the dynamics of some metrics over the 10-days’ period.
- As of today, the site exists for 20 days, which is not very long. I believe, that 60+ days is good enough and 90+ days is awesome.
- Site traffic is 360 per day (previously it was 85 per day). In my opinion, normal traffic for a site of a project a week before a sale is 1 000 per day.
- There are 15,000 people in Telegram (previously there were 2,300!). After 20,000 people start getting FOMO.
- Google Trends compared searches of Seele to searches of Elastos — the popularity of Seele is 60% from that of Elastos.
- BitcoinTalk was created on January 25, when the project came into my sight. There were 3–5 messages. Now there are about 100 messages. The speed is 10 messages per day. Most of them are the messages a la “nice project, I’m very intrigued/interested/excited”. The creator of the topic left one message, saying he apologizes for not being able to respond to everybody and asks to leave questions in the group or search information on the web-site.
- Medium — 210 followers. As of January 25 there were 2 publications. For now, they are deleted, but there are 4 new publications. One publication is a description of the technology and the other 3 — about the team’s trip to Davos economic summit.
- Twitter — 3 000 (there were 300!). It was registered in January 2018.
- Reddit is not active.
- Github was created 20 days ago. I did not assess the code, let’s leave it to specialists.
There were created many projects recently, that exist for less than a month, and the current ICO season started somewhere about the first half of December.
Why did I mention that? Because I have more credibility in the projects that were created in September-November 2017, than those created in December 2017-January 2018. It’s not because the latter exist for a shorter period of time, but because the former where created in the market, that was very unfavorable for ICO projects, and the team didn’t know, that in wintertime the conditions would be so favorable, as they are now. Thus, their history is more about “making the project”, than “raising the money”.
What concerns Seele, the web-site is rather new, but the LinkedIn profiles of the team members suggest that they’ve been recruiting people for the project since May 2017.
The countries are UK + China.
4) Important information from whitepaper
For me, being a person with good basic understanding of blockchain technology functioning, it was rather difficult to understand the offered technologies. I’ll list them below.
1. Novel Consensus Algorithm is an alternative to the existing algorithms (PoS, PoW, DPoS, Hashgraph and Algorand). In WP they describe the nature of algorithm and its advantages over the rest of them: it embodied all the best that other algorithms have. As far as I understand, their algorithm is based on asynchronous computing, up to 50% of which can operate outside blockchain. There is no any information about this algorithm on the Internet. It appears that it’s their proprietary development. The algorithm has a linear scalability with the node size: the larger the node size, the faster and better performance. The capacity of the node is what matters, and not its hashrate.
2. Heterogeneous Forest Network is compared to existing single-and multi blockchain structures. Their blockchain is a complex multilevel structure and its parts are connected with each other, but each part functions independently. It is believed, that such structure can meet the needs of the real world and fully support multilevel business processes.
The nature and the evolution of technology is clear:
Single chain — many equal chains — many chains with different hierarchy.
3. Value Transportation Protocol is a protocol of data transfer with features similar to existing Internet (network connection, transfer and viewing of data).
This technology allows to use: multilevel “self-explanatory” addresses (example: CHAIN://edu.pku.cs/account/data) and not random set of symbols in hashes; cache; access to network through vhttp protocol, which is a protocol for data and value exchange (access through classic http protocol is also possible without the need to connect to blockchain network directly).
4. Quick Value Internet Connection is a solution for eliminating large latency while working with the network (after all, transmission is based on blockchain and data has to be written in blocks).
5. Computing Integration is a technology for off-chain data storage. When business-processes and data of large companies start using blockchain, it can grow to an enormous size. This technology is a solution to such a problem.
In the whitepaper they also describe:
- technologies of interaction between primary metadata and public metadata (we change the primary source = all the rest changes as well);
- data protection and confidentiality;
- encryption;
- ready solution for developers, that enables the development, testing and deployment of smart contracts, applications and programs.
Token Economics:
- currency;
- nodes encouragement, because the more nodes involve in, the higher the system efficiency and shorter the confirmation time;
- transaction fees.
At the end of the whitepaper they specify some acute problems of all blockchains: loss of private keys, disagreement between Core team and miners, mistakenly frozen tokens, forks etc.
The team is planning to give more privileges to token owners and less — to miners. The network will be randomly selecting top nodes and give them the governing functions within a certain time frame.
ROADMAP:
2018
Q1 — validation of all algorithms and functional module startup.
Q2- data transfer and functionality testing in test network.
Q3- deployment and checkout of the mechanisms I described in the whitepaper topic.
Q4- rollout to public network.
In 2019 they plan to deploy Seele v1 and v2, as well as to integrate various spheres of life into their blockchain.
5) Team.
My task number one is to determine whether the information on the web-site is factually accurate. Whether these people are real, or it is a photo from Google with made-up name and history. It is particularly important to get an insight into the leadership.
Chief scientist can be found on LinkedIn, where he has 84 contacts. He also has his own page on the University of London web-site. I’ll live you a link not to copy-paste the information.
https://www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/wei-bi#profile=overview
Based on his profile from the university web-site he studied eyesight problems for a great while (approx. since 2016). At the beginning of 2017 he becomes CTO of Beijing Datong Blockchain Institute and Deputy Director of China Blockchain Innovation and Application Consortium — there are many employees of the latter on LinkedIn. Since 2017 he works as Chief Scientist SEELE.
His profile on LinkedIn suggests that he entered blockchain industry and developments in this sphere in 2016. He has 8 blockchain related technology patents.
Digital Currency Expert has his own web-site since September 2017.
The web-site says he works at UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies. On Twitter I found his photos taken in July 2017. It’s hard to say something about the foundation of China-UK Blockchain Association and the scale of this organization. On LinkedIn there are 2 employees of this organization and their profiles are not accessible. He is a PhD Candidate in High Frequency and Algorithmic Trading. He suits very well for the declared in WP job position. He was an advisor for such projects as Themis, Selfsell, Invest digital. Helped with Big Data projects to Citibank and Credit Suisse. Has 12 followers on Twitter. Has no posts.
Somebody, have a look at the desk on the photo he has on his web-site. What’s written there?
Dean of the BRI — I was not able to find any information about him except for the one on LinkedIn. Mathematics, programming, algorithms, data mining. For a long time has worked as senior manager-developer in major IT companies.
It is worth mentioning, that:
- 2 members of the team worked in Microsoft — one of the guys’ job title is Peasant, it seemed funny to me J
- the Chinese part of the team has very weak sketchy LinkedIn accounts. But I can tell from experience that Asians generally don’t use LinkedIn. Probably these accounts were created expressly for the project and it’s OK. But this makes it harder to check their authenticity;
- you can see strong ties with the City University of London and Peking University;
- all of them are titled technical specialists. You can have a look at detailed description in whitepaper (pp. 36–37).
- they even have a guy with mobile games development experience.
One of ICODrops members says, that a successful project should have a maximum number of Chinese wearing glasses. This team has it all
Advisors:
Both are professors of technical sciences at universities: one of them — in Oxford, the other one — in London’s Global University. I haven’t found any information showing they are related to the project. There is no any publicly available information except for the links to web-sites of the universities they work at.
Counselors:
Peter Du — crypto investor. His web-site claims, that he received a good ROI from the IOTA project, but I haven’t found any information on the web. His photo led me to the web-site https://www.acuteangle.com/, where he is stated as project investor, but his name is different (the surname is the same). It is possible, that the name was deliberately changed to the European one.
Adma Wong — crypto investor, founder of ChainTed venture fund (I was able to find only the Twitter of ChainTed, it was created on January 23).
It seems that the team, as well as advisors and scientists don’t belong to business community. An experienced businessman would fit the team perfectly.
6) Some Other Useful Information
I couldn’t figure out the role of partners. Did not find any collective mentioning or articles. It is obvious, that universities and professors of such a high level communicate and cooperate in one form or another but I would like to see some back references to Seele.
Chain TED Capital does not come up on Google.
Great Ocean Capital has a page on LinkedIn (Australia) with two founders/employees, but the company profile says they have 11–50 employees.
Medether is a health care company in London (1 employee on LinkedIn, their web-site is 2 years old, the traffic is 50 people per day). Some technological partner would fit perfectly into the list of partners.
Resume and my thoughts:
In the process of studying the project I’ve changed my opinion several times. It’s hard to come to any firm conclusion.
Cons:
- they declared a very massive project and one can’t help but wonder — “Is that even possible?”
- the absence of information trail of the project on the web. It seems as if they made the project public on about January 20.
- the major part of their team, advisors, counselors are just names and photos for me, because there is no sufficient information on them on the web. Who are these people? How public are they?
- they explicitly put themselves above all the existing blockchains, claiming they took the best from the existing technologies and will make it even better. I feel like in the scientific community it’s a little inappropriate to put your conception above all the existing operational products.
Pros:
+ if it’s technically feasible and will be completed, then it is one of, if not the most massive project I’ve ever met — it’s not a simple blockchain, it’s everything based on blockchain: the Internet, business, data, information, economy.
+ the team is very titled: professors, DSc, patents, huge experience, world’s top universities.
+ even if you are not a technical professional they explain in lay language all the existing shortcomings of blockchain and offer solutions to these problems.
P.S.
1 — I saw an article on the Internet named “Seely is a scam” — a simple copy-paste of another article named “How to tell if ICO is a scam”. Somebody rolls over on them.
2 — The information about scam is available on their announcement channel and other public sources. The team released the best statement one can make in such a situation. Yes, it is their mistake and they take all the responsibility for it.
This precedent is very disturbing, but nobody’s insured against such a situation.
Everybody involved in crypto currency knows the rules of the game: what they put at risk and what for.
As always, it is not financial advice. I wish you good luck and knowledge for choosing the most promising projects.