Ratings StopTheFakes

Mature core team, vision is good, beta product ready. I’ll evaluate this is low risk!

Good team and vision

This is a very good solution to something that is a problem for a lot of people. This could prove to be an invaluable tool for people. It has the right team leading it as well.

Mature team and a good project indeed. Best of luck team

It's great to be able to notarize any different events (correspondence in the messenger, photos with date and place, meter readings in a smart house, etc.). But there are a lot of products that already solve this problem with the use of a blockchain.

Anything else that the company plans to do in my opinion will not be in demand.

P.S. I read in a press release that the company intends to compete in the market of blocking pirated content on the Internet. This work consists of two different parts - the detection of pirated content and its blocking. Current products existing on the market find pirated content and block it in automatic mode (for example, GroupIB) and without the need to use any form of blockchain. StopTheFaces, without automatic solutions, be guaranteed to unable compete either in content detection or in blocking. Therefore, if in other markets the company still somehow can be competitive, then in the market of blocking pirated content - definitely not.

Good team and strong vision - will follow this to see how it progresses! Lots of competitors and development and a product with strong traction needs to be available and adopted.

Anti-Counterfeit & Copyright Infringement is a good blockchain use case. They have a good concept and a capable team.

I like this a lot, strong team , well though out timeline and roadmap and a sensible amount on the hard cap. Think this could be one that may be high up on the secondary gains post token sale as relatively low market cap and real utility that can be used quickly. Good project

Pros:

A great value proposition underpins this project.
Team is qualified and experienced.
Whitepaper is thoroughly written.
Financials make sense.
Roadmap is comprehensive.
Customs/Governments may potentially be onboarded resulting in a huge success of the project.


Cons:

The advisors do not have prior ICO experience form previous engagements.

First reviewed on 10 Feb 2018

C1. Great vision.

C2. The video on your prototype app is helpful in the understanding of how your solution works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIBwk2Unl6c

C3. There are aspects of your technology that are patentable, something which your team may consider.

C4. You may wish to work with the IIPCC (International Intellectual Property Commercialisation Council) to further commercialise your solution to other countries, see
https://www.iipcc.org/copy-of-about

C5. Best wishes.

-----

Updated review on 29 Mar 2018

C6. STF Telegram used to have at least 2438 members but has since disappeared. I would like the team to explain why they would choose to wipe out their community.

C7. New information relating to this ICO has emerged:
X1: https://shitcoinoffering.com/stopthefakes-ico-pinkertons-from-russia
X2: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3331919.0

C8. What is the status of your product?

C9. I am now revising this ICO from 454 to 131 and would like the team to respond by 8 April 2019.

Good vision but not sure how the technology can prevent counterfeit.

The project and team are sound. Might be a bit overambitious as a lot depend on the collaboration of trademark holders. When it comes to intellectual property there is a big discussion to be had on the legal aspect of things. Especially when it comes to digital products and materials.

Products like this will keep giving digital rights holders way too much power over their users. If the whole world downloads your content for free, there is something wrong with your business model. The success of services such as Spotify and Netflix prove this point. So instead of spending money trying to combat copyright infringement, they should put effort into giving the users what they need. All content, on demand, for a fair price.

Fake news are a really bad problem inside the digital world, I appreciate this idea!

Good team with relevant experience and vision!

It's a good idea, the challenge will be if people will adopt widely.

For a more indepth review see here https://cryptocoin.news/icos/ico-review-stopthefakes-io-fighting-counterfeiting-on-the-blockchain-3465/

Long story short: like the product, interesting and professionally looking team, all-in-all solid product, yet financial perspectives still have to be proven with a deeper research.

After reading the WP, I'm left with mixed feelings about this project. For the pourposes of this review, let's put aside my own views on DMCA and it's controversial nature and assume, that Copyrights as they are without any amendment shall be protected, and such protection has to be enforced.

First, I will try to describe StopTheFakes as brief as possible: Copyright Infringement Bounty Hunting Platform.

Than goes blockchain part (which is not that necessary, yet it has its use and such use makes sense). There is also some parts of centralized solutions here, so don't be fooled, it is partially private system with all cons and pros of it. First of all, this system is not serving the society, it serves only it's owners and their respectful clients. It may occasionally serve the society as well, by that would be a byproduct, rather than an integral part of business, when it comes to pure decentralized solutions.

Than comes the coin itself. All in all reasonable solution, yet some concerns in regard of the internal ecosystem arise due to very limited description of such. It is in general an arguable idea to have an autonomous ecosystem with a very limited means to interact with external markets on its own, and feed such system with the similarly autonomous currency, which has very limited natural liquidity anywhere else. You can always make your own market or market make at any external exchange, yet it is neither described in WP nor seen in financial projections.

Some aspects of the service design is not easy to understand at all, what in general means, that it's user base is limited. Just read the "Mode of operation" part, it take a bottle of Vodka or two to go through it, and it takes some brain cells as casualties in that process.

Personally, I'm not investing in this ICO, yet it may be a great long run for someone in the Copyright industry.

I like the team and vision a lot I am really attracted to the idea.

It's a good idea and professional team.
The main person in the project is the Doer. It is unclear, whether it will be possible to attract them in enough and qualification.Presently it is possible to order beautiful high-quality polygraphy and packaging. In most cases to distinguish a counterfeit from the original by sight rather difficult - it is necessary to be the expert in the field or even to hand over samples for examination if it concerns products or consumer goods.

Everyday products which are potentially dangerous to health and safety – such as food and drink, medicines, toys and household electrical goods - accounted for over a third of all intercepted goods. Fake goods pose a real threat to health and safety of consumers and also undermine legal businesses and state revenues. Industry world-wide loses large amounts to counterfeiters. These losses not only affect the producers of genuine items, but they also involve social costs. The ultimate victims of unfair competition are the consumers. They receive poor-quality goods at an excessive price and are sometimes exposed to health and safety dangers. Governments lose out on unpaid tax and incur large costs in enforcing intellectual property rights. The lack of information sharing is often perceived to be one of the main obstacles in the fight against counterfeiters. The StopTheFakes project intends to address this issue by detecting counterfeit and infringement of intellectual property rights, copyright, and relevant rights. This solution aims to bring together both retailers and consumers, hoping to form an alliance that the fraudsters cannot hope to fight against. There is a clearly defined and understood business model. STFCoin has a clear economy and its use in the project’s eco-system is justified. WP is informative and well laid out, there is a lot of background information. StopTheFakes’ site presents a core team of eight experienced people, plus six professional advisors. The website is very well done, featuring all the usual links for an ICO and it’s easy to use. By the way, the website has a section with the code for its Smart Contract! The demo beta version of StopTheFakes is available online at the website. Pre-ICO starts in 2 days and I hope that this project would not be overlooked by investors.

My elevator pitch for this ICO would be "Gamified microtask system that turns everyone on the planet into an agent to protect your intellectual property rights".

In as much as you believe intellectual property rights should exist, or are not a criminal attempting to ignore them for a living... then I think most people would believe the idea of Stop The Fakes is a good thing.

I'd give the vision 5 points if it didn't have potential scaling issues mostly due to it's centralization and creation of a closed system. Those I think may limit its growth potential and open the door for competitors to build a better and more successful system. In as much as they can evolve as they get users and try to grow they may be able to exploit first mover advantage here - really the winner will be the one that gets most customers and doers using the system.

There is also very little original tech here - it's a synthesis of existing things it just pulls them together in a convenient way tailored for a specific vertical - IP infraction detection and correction (maybe). Some of these things are already present in other dApps eg. microtask and piecemeal work marketplaces (e.g. STORM), copyright registration (e.g. Binded and Ascribe). The element I see as unique (so far) is using geo-tracking of infraction reports and big-data/machine-learning (AI) to detect trends and clustering of events. That could really help IP owners and be a strong value add.

In general I think it is frustrating that so many dApps are showing up that are re-inventing instead of reusing tech. That's because it is pretty hard and risky to integrate with other dApps. Ideas like District0x are hoping to solve that so apps with similar needs can collaborate and share functionality and data - well that's the hope.

If I was building this from scratch I'd look to divide into services where I could plug in existing blockchain services instead of building from scratch:

1. Identity system for doers (eg. Blockpass or Civic)
2. Microtasking marketplace (possibly Storm or something like it)
3. Copyright / IP registration
4. Analyze and filter doers submissions without human touch
5. Dispute arbitration (Sage?)
6. Suggest possible requests for IP owners
7. Enforcing violations detected

All these except perhaps the microtasking should be pluggable so that a given requestor can define how their requests and doers submissions are processed, checked and arbitrated.

By making 6 and 7 pluggable that would allow someone with no knowledge of this space to have others do all the work of driving STF for them. They could just upload an image and allow any third party to then create requests on their behalf to protect it, and any third party to then enforce compliance for them perhaps sharing any bounty with those parties - and the doer. These are things missing from STF and if added make it a lot easier to use and more scalable. As would making 4 and 5 able to use 3rd party services.

Imagine for a minute on of the worlds biggest industries and heaviest users of the Internet - adult entertainment (aka porn) using this service. The kind of filtering of doers submissions would be pretty unique - eliminating porn in users submissions would just not work, you need industry specific filtering. Ideally an adult video company would want to provide access to a canonical version of their product, or extracts of it, then have requests of a form appropriate for their industry automatically generated, subsets of doers made eligible (those legally allowed to and willing to access and search adult sites) and then perhaps experts in DMCA infringement enforcement dolling out the disputes and take down notices, perhaps collecting penalties as necessary.

Bigger companies and brands would probably not do that - they have their own in house people, but for everyone else it opens the market to even more people who are IP enforcement experts to use the platform.

Problems I see would be for doers either being overwhelmed with the variety of requests, requestors not being good at creating effective requests that doers can use - causing lots of human touch to validate and arbitrate submissions, or just a lack of submissions and quality requests. At that point you may need something like a BPO to manage teams of trained doers, or at least to recruit and train them. (That could be another service in the platform - recruiting and training doers either in a general or IP specific way). I guess only time will tell how well this works IRL.

As for the team of STF - well I think they have a bunch of people with very relevant experience in the problem domain. I can't say how good the single tech guy is or if they can execute. But in general I feel like they are above average.

The investment potential is driven in the short term by the hefty 40% day-1 pre-ICO bonus which has potential for a quick turnaround if you aren't interested in the long term. That's not so great for the participants in the public-IOC phase who get a maximum of 15% bonus.

Beyond the ICO we may see some pops as the product rolls out and hopefully gains adoption. Beyond that the only mechanism for appreciation in STF value is supply and demand for STF tokens. The more requestors there are buying STF tokens to pay doers the more demand there is and the higher the price is. Initial ICO valuation is 1 STF = $0.45 (without bonus) and the floor for doer payment is around $5 for the simplest task. That is also a problem because in some parts of the world $5 is 5 days pay and others it is the price of a coffee at Starbucks. Allowing regional pricing may be a feature they need to think about for the future. It seems like they will need a very large amount of volume to move the pricing up significantly. And if there was a lot of volatility they may need to deal with pricing rewards in local fiat not STF - or use a reserve to stabilize it for the duration of requests, or use an internal pegged coin not tradable outside of STF.

They have a demo of the UI accessible from the website that gives an idea of how it will look but it is certainly not the real thing. Some of the prior concerns I mentioned definitely apply - like discovery of appropriate requests by doers since any reasonably successful system will quickly have thousands if not millions of requests leading to a significant headache for all concerned. Matching requestors to doers will be an art in and off itself. But I give them an above average 4 because they have at least a UI demo and the alpha product should be available in Feb which is before the public ICO begins.

A thing noticeably missing from their website is any indication of content companies that are wanting to use it. I would hope at this stage the could have had some early partners especially in the aforementioned adult entertainment business, or physical product manufacturers such as fashion and cosmetics. That would give some real validation that they are creating a product that IP owners will want to use.

Note US Citizens and residents are not allowed to participate in the ICO for STF.

Very big vision but mass-adoption and technical delivery will be challenging in my opinion. Great team but not much of blockchain related track records.

A strong team looking to solve one of the biggest problems on the internet. I hope they succeed but it won't be easy.

How is this going to be enforced? There are already millions of copyright infringements happening every day. The main issue isn't spotting and tracking them, it's actually enforcing them. And while this project uses a bunch of examples on how it thinks it could stop it, there's actually no way to regulate this unless you get different law enforcement groups to agree on regulating these similarly.

This is a pie-in-the-sky idea. And unfortunately many of the advisors on this team don't stand up to scrutiny.

Product : The business process described happens outside of the Blockchain and I am not sure what value a requestor would receive from Doer storing the findings in the blockchain. Why a business have to take the transactional costs of the blockchain
Vision: There is nothing unique about the product and hence the vision.

Team
Dmitry Kostachev the Chief Technology Officer whose profile on their website has no LinkedIn profile

Attn: Igor Salikov
I read your article on the Medium. It is very general and no specifics about how this will change the current government and non-governmental process of stop the fakes.
I will ask you to explain me the working of your solution with reference to a specific food fraud case.
The bee population has been falling globally and the Honey production has multiplied 8 times during the same period of decline. The honey coming out of China was adulterated with Rice syrup and was dumped into USA at a much lower price. US imposed tariffs on Honey imported from China. Now the Honey from China was routed to other Asian Countries and being dumped into USA. Please explain me how your solution would stopthe fakes in this case. I am glad to change the ratings.

Team - experienced team, with some results; maybe some lack on BC area
Vision - going for the higher goal is noble motivation
Product - mass adoption is questionable - there will be fight with the lobbies. Put more legal disclaimers in WP

A very much needed project. Piracy and Counterfeiting is a tough nut to crack but hopefully with a good team, they should be able to get this right.

Idea is one I love and I think is needed in the market. Hard to tell if they're building their own blockchain to do it or are they going to be using someone already established protocols.
As far as I understand the project only aims to finding cases of infringemenet, but offers no punitive power. It may lead to a situation where infringement cases are reported but nothing gets done, as the fraudster is hard to find, pinpoint and punish for illegal copyright use. Reasonable softcap/hardcap that's what I appreciate. Some competitors in the market already though...

If this could be implemented in real life, it could change economy of the country like china and change the world for good. Team looks Solid.

Very good and realistic Soft Cap and Hard Cap. Only asking for money needed, that leave really good impression in the world of greedy ICOs.

Unique idea, wish you guys all the best.

Fighting against counterfeit is a good idea. I read the white paper and it's very comprehensive.
There are many other similar projects.
Good luck!

Excellent idea. Updated rating after a thorough review.

This will be a product with a real use-case. I see governments to support it and use it in order to fight counterfeit.

Team is legit, excellent roadmap with many stages (which is a must have for me for any project), and the best part for me regarding investing: Low total supply and low price.

Good concept that is definitely in demand at the market nowadays

Well, knowing and showing that there is some intellectual property rights violation does not mean anything. It will not let the IP owners return possible return commercial losses. The project does not solve any key problem there.