Datawallet ICO Needs to Answer 7 Questions Before They Get My Money

Datawallet ICO has a lot of hype and backers behind it but I feel they need to answer 7 questions before they get my money.

So Datawallet, in a nutshell, wants to empower consumers by allowing them to sell their personalities (sorry, data) to companies who want to know this stuff. Datawallet wants to create a centralized marketplace for these transactions using decentralized technology. They claim to be the world’s most powerful exchange. We beg to differ & here’s why:

1. Why don’t you mention in your ICO that you’ve been around since 2015 & only raised $300K?

I find this fishy. If Datawallet have been doing this nearly 3 years, they should have a ton of successful data to backup their ICO. The white paper should be full of conversion numbers, revenues earned, real use cases on existing clients, not made up ones on their ICO website.

There is nothing in their white paper or website about the fact they’ve been trading for 3 years.

And how come they only managed to raise 300K in Angel Funding? How is that even possible for a company that claims to be the world’s biggest data exchange?

If data is the new oil, the most valuable commodity on the planet, as Datawallet claim, then how come VCs haven’t been tripping over themselves to offer these guys Seed funding? Something doesn’t add up here.

2. How come you let an ‘academic’ write your white paper?

Firstly, please allow me to pre-warn any potential investors thinking of investing NOT to read Datawallet’s white paper. Why? Because it’s not a White Paper. It’s not a business case. It’s 36 pages of a Data Architect’s wet dream.

Still not getting it? Imagine 36 pages of Use Cases that go something like this: User does X, System responds Y.

3. Where’s your soft cap?

Datawallet’s ICO site says their soft cap is hidden. My question is, why? Why would you hide a soft cap? Because you are nervous you can’t justify the values your asking for? Because your not sure what the minimum amount is that you need? Hiding a soft cap just looks like your insecure about the value of your business.

4. Where’s the proof consumers don’t want to give their data away for free?

Datawallet want to solve 3 problems. Problem no.1 is consumers being ripped off by big online companies stealing their data for free and then getting rich off of it. But I’m not convinced this is a actual problem for consumers.

Forbes quotes millennials as the most data driven, data savvy generation of all time. Millennials grew up online & they are used to exchanging their data (for free) in order to get data. Hence millennials research, price compare and are the generation most likely to use a public library.

So is Datawallet really solving a problem? Where is their research to back this up?

Datawallet expand on the user problem by stating that utilizing the Blockchain to record, store and encrypt a user’s data is part of the solution. But look at the graph below, millennials don’t really care about keeping their data safe.

5. Should I be investing in you or the server farms you’re going to need?

Datawallet claim they are the world’s biggest data exchange. Wishful thinking. But let’s imagine they were - how big would the blockchain need to be to contain all that data ?

If we recall Bitcoin’s blockchain is something like 150GB and we're talking about a max 20 million BTC. Now imagine 350 million Americans, each with a data wallet generating 30-40 pieces of data each per day. Now imagine that scaling globally. Is it feasible? And should we be buying shares in Google or Amazon for all the server space Datawallet is going to need?

6. Who are your competitors please?

There isn’t one single piece of information about Datawallet’s competitors landscape in their White Paper or ICO site. Why? Do they not know or simply don’t want to say?

7. Your platform can’t solve the big problem you claim you’ll tackle?

In their White Paper and website, Datawallet talk about how the data landscape is broken up into silos, walled gardens controlled by the big online players like facebook & google.

Datawallet state in the white paper “the silo problem is overcome by being able to deterministically combine datasets across the walled gardens of the internet.”

Exactly how are they going to do this? Is Facebook or Google or Instagram going to simply hand over their datasets so Datawallet can combine them? If you even need to think about the answer to that, you shouldn’t be a investor.

As always, the point of this review is not to bring the ICO down, but to urge the team to answer critical questions in the interest of investors backing them up.