After reviewing 40 token announcements, we’re picking Tink as our ICO of the Day. Tink is a social networking platform built on the ICON blockchain that uses social verification.
Premise
3/5 Decent
Today’s digital world is dominated by social networking platforms. From Facebook to Twitter, to LinkedIn, our work and social relationships are defined by these social networks. But as anyone who has staged a Facebook photo or cropped an Instagram shot knows, our public identity often is a bit different from our real self.
This can lead to issues with work, relationships, and more. Employers want to make sure the people they hire have true work histories. Advertisers want to make sure the facebook profiles they target are real, and singles looking for dates want to make sure the person they want to date is like they say they are.
Tink aims to bridge this gap between our digital and real selves through social verification. Instead of relying purely on people to self-report their personality or work history, other users can verify that their profiles are true, or “compliment” them on having certain positive traits. This is similar to how LinkedIn can allow users to endorse people for skills or give recommendations but would also apply to personality traits.
These social verifications would be done anonymously. In addition, users will have full control over their own profiles and how much is visible. Whereas in today’s social networking platforms users give up their data for free, on Tink, they could sell their personal information for tokens.
Team
3.5/5 Not bad
The Tink team has good educational backgrounds and technical experience. The two founders both went to Carnegie Mellon and the rest of the team went to top universities in Korea. Many of the team members have professional experience at leading tech companies such as NAVER, Samsung, and some of them have startup experience.
The founder has some experience with social networking platforms, having founded “Starpals”, a photo sharing service in his college days.
Besides the founder, the team does not seem to have significant experience with social networking or social media platforms.
Token
4/5 Good
The Tink token is used as payment for personal data.
55% of the tokens will be sold, and there will be a hard cap of 20,000 ETH. There will be a vesting period of 1 year for the team.
Risks
2/5 Risky
The team is quite technically strong, so although there is currently no MVP we dont think in terms of engineering it will be difficult for them to code up the platform.
The risks we see are more along the lines of socio-economics and business. By socio-economics we mean that their system design depends not just on a technical product, but a technical product that fulfills certain social needs. While we do believe a need for social verification exists, it’s hard to say if the system they are desigining will fulfill that gap as well as they hope.
Business-wise there are also large obstacles to overcome. The current social networking ecosystem seems to be quite full, and Tink seems to have significant overlap with some other major apps, such as Facebook or Linkedin.
Summary
Tink is an interesting project trying to solve an issue facing todays‘ social networking platforms – who we say we are may not always be who we really are. Through social verification, and incentivizing the sharing of verified personal data, they aim to allow for better relationship matchmaking, better employee hiring, and more.
We like the idea behind the system, although there do seem to be significant risks with starting up a social networking platform. As Google can tell you – the network effect is quite powerful. If Tink can avoid being in direct competition with today’s platforms and instead create a product that complements them, they may do quite well, and maybe even make our world a little better, more trustworthy place.
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