Top Network
https://icodrops.com/
https://t.me/IcoDropsReport - ICO reviews channel
https://twitter.com/ICODrops - Twitter
https://t.me/joinchat/FoisO0k4-XXBkPEikfdgow - English chat
Top Network is a decentralized open communication network, built using the blockchain 4.0 technology.
Metrics/timeframe
The token sale will occur via Huobi Prime on March, 26 at 13:00 GMT and will have 3 rounds. Each round will have different allocation and prices: 0.00177 USD, 0.00213 USD, and 0.00255 USD for 300, 450, and 750 million of tokens correspondingly.
The personal hard cap is 1000 USD.
The public sale will offer 7,5% of the total supply for roughly 3 400 000$ USD (considering the highest rounds' price). Hence, the total market cap reaches about 45 million USD (six months ago the plan was to raise 29 million for 22% of tokens).
The admins in the official Telegram group position themselves as the community administrators. As per them and the team 14,5% of the tokens was sold prior to conducting an IEO on Huobi during the seed and the private rounds for 0,0032 USD, 0,0034 USD, and 0,0035 USD with the lockup periods of 1, 6, and 9 months and the following vesting. The FAQ states that the total amount raised for those tokens was 8 million USD.
Social metrics
The official Twitter page is not mentioned on the project's website, but it can be found by Twitter's search. The first post was published on July 18, 2018, there are 9,3 thousand subscribers (six months ago there were 3,3 thousand). The activity is higher: news, likes, repost seem organic.
The official Telegram was incepted on June 21 and now has 13 thousand subscribers that actively ask about the technical side of the public sale's process. Six months ago the group had 3.5 thousand subscribers, who were mostly inactive. There are also groups on other platforms.
There is also an official blog on medium, which has recently increased in quality; a subreddit with 3 thousands of followers and timely topics; a channel in discord with 1.5 thousand participants (there are mostly news and announcements, the users do not actively communicate).
Key players
The team:
The senior-level staff of the project is comprised of 5 people, the majority of which comes from a Chinese company Webex (founded in 1995, an online system for video conferences & online meetings that was eventually acquired by Cisco and currently acts as its department). The rest of the team is mostly technical specialists, and the number of them looks impressive - 69.
Steve Wei is a co-founder and CEO. Steve has been a co-founder of the Dingtone (https://www.dingtone.me, a messenger with 10 million downloads from Play Market, about 500 thousand reviews and the overall rating of 4.5, among other features, the app provides users with free USA phone numbers) messenger from 2012 (for almost seven years). From 2011 until mid-2012 he acted as a GM of the Internet Innovation Center at Huawei. Prior to that, he was a co-founder and president of Cenwave, a large player on the market of software for video conferences and services in China that was acquired by Huawei in 2010, for seven years. Steve started his career path in WebEx, where he spent seven years.
Noah Wang is a co-founder and CMO. Noah's LinkedIn profile doesn't mention any information except for that he studied at Yale.
Taylor Wei is a co-founder and VP. Taylor acted as a lead engineer & architect and VP in Dingtone for 6 years. He was also a tech lead and team lead at Cisco Webex for five years. Prior to that, he worked on similar positions within Webex itself in China for five years.
Peter Wei is VP of Engineering. Peter is a co-founder and he occupies a similar position in Dingtone (for about four years). Previously he worked as a Director of Engineering in a Japanese company TrendMicro (digital information security and management). He acted as a manager and worked in R&D within Webex for six years.
Kelven Yang is Chief Architect. Like his peers, Kelven worked at Webex and co-founded Dingtone. He worked in Citrix (an American company founded in 1989 that specializes in the development of software solutions for virtualization, building computer networks and cloud computing) for five years.
Advisors:
Eric Yuan is a co-founder and CEO of Zoom Video Communication (a popular communication platform valued at 1 billion USD that plans to go public in 2019).
Mark Greene is a former СЕО of FICO (an American analytic company founded in 1956 that is focused on credit score systems).
Roger Lim is a founding partner at Neo Global Capital crypto fund.
Kevin Hsu is a founder of BlockVC.
Investors:
The project has 24 funds that invested in it, some of which were well-established on the ICO market:
- DHVC (Zilliqa, Mainframe, Merculet, Origin, AELF, Quarkchain);
- Neo Global Capital (NKN, Zilliqa, Bluzelle);
- Fenbushi Capital (Kyber network, Merculet, EOS);
- LD Capital (Egretia, PCHAIN, QuarkChain, EdenChain, Aelf, Eloncity);
- Alphacoin (ZIL, Mainframe, Edenchain, IoTeX, DATA, Apex, Hydro).
Ontology is mentioned as a partner. Previously, the project positioned itself as a part of the Ontology ecosystem with the availability of connecting TOP's dApps to the ONT network.
Technology and idea:
The project proposes a high-speed DAG-like blockchain platform for real-life businesses.
The platform features VPN, VoIP, voice and video calls, cloud storage, CDN, messaging, video streaming, IoT data exchange.
TOP Network provides a decentralized, open and secure connection infrastructure and a standardized protocol that allows developers to build and deploy communicational & social apps in a straightforward manner.
TOP Chain is an efficient public blockchain platform with the consensus mechanism "parallel PBFT", which is able to process a large number of transactions for the real world business. Initially, that will be done for TOP Network.
Architecture:
A two-level sharding, two-layer VM, zero commissions, instant transactions, integrated security, and privacy are mentioned.
MVP:
Currently, the team has Top Testnet 2.0 with a wallet and an explorer. The network features smart-contracts and an improved consensus. A fully-fledged MVP Top Testnet 3.0 is scheduled for release at the end of April.
The project's Github doesn't have any public repos, those will be provided closer to the mainnet's release, which is planned to occur in Q2, 2019.
The team has developed three products for communication: Dingtone, CoverMe, SkyVPN, that have more than 45 million users. After the launch of TOP Network, these apps will be the first in the ecosystem, including a billion of voice-calls yearly via Dingtone, roughly four million users daily on CoverMe, and 300 thousand VPN on SkyVPN. Migration of already existing users to the TOP-ecosystem is a significant advantage for the project.
Addendum / summary / opinions:
To summarize, we have:
+the project is interesting because there is a possibility of transferring a large user base (several millions of users) to the blockchain technology;
+the team is well-experienced in the project's niche. There are already available products for Dingtone, CoverMe, SkyVPN;
+the testnet is up, though the team doesn't specify its MVP;
+the token price in USD is lower for the public sale participants;
+the project survived the latest worst six months of the bear market;
+the lockups act as a protective measure from a dump for the public sale participants;
+this is a first IEO on Huobi.
-several investment funds that were popular during the previous season, but aren't as popular anymore. There is no information about their internal agreements and the planned timing for liquidation.
-according to the report made by SEC, only ten exchanges provide the real trading volumes, and Huobi didn't make it to that list. 3,4 million is a large amount of money in terms of the current market.
While Binance Launchpad became a certain trademark for quality projects and price multipliers on listings, Huobi's IEO (or any other exchange's IEO) has to prove itself and we will soon find out whether or not it can do so.