The HERO Token ICO by a Company Backed by Alibaba and Softbank

The ICO market today is very crowded, this we already know. It is hard to pick out the good signals out of the bad ones. Given the hype, I am now looking at projects that are being started by teams that have built successful projects before. Why? Because it reduces the speculative elements. If the team is good and can execute on their vision, then they automatically are much better than a completely new team because you've reduced your investment risk. Irrespective of the idea, it is the execution that is very challenging. How many people had come up with 'social media on blockchain' type ideas before Steemit actually built a product? Those are the kinds of projects I am looking to back in new ICOs.

PawnHero

Enter PawnHero. It is a company based out of the Philippines and creates an online pawn shop, so that anyone with a smartphone can pawn any asset that they have by shipping it to one centralized location. This drastically reduces operations cost including paying for the pawn shop rent, security, management, inventory, etc. In fact, the company has been so successful to scale that they charge around half of what traditional pawn shops charge, and have assets ranging from gold and diamond jewelry to scooters and paintings. All with the help of the mobile phone that is growing rapidly in Philippines and the surrounding areas of South East Asia.

PawnHero is backed by some of the largest companies in the region, including China's Alibaba and Japan's Softbank. I hope my readers know both these companies - the former being the largest ecommerce site in Asia and the later being one of the largest conglomerates in technology throughout the world. These are big players with serious ambitions. They are not interested in just a more efficient pawn shop (although the market can be surprisingly large). They want to reinvent how assets are monetized.

If you want to learn more about PawnHero, Bloomberg Philippines did a whole 25 minute segment on the company that went into all the details, from the founding vision to inventory management. You should watch that video if you're curious about the company.

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In a nutshell, PawnHero is a real company with real users and customers today. They are not 'just a whitepaper' idea that has become so common in the ICO world today.

From PawnHero to the HERO Token

With the experience of asset-backed loans, i.e. collateralized loans, the company wants to move towards an uncollateralized loan model. This can be a very different ball game, since the loans are not backed by anything tangible, and therefore if a default happens, you're pretty much left taking a loss. However, the company is building up user data like social media profiles, salary information, etc. and using machine learning to predict how likely people are to default, and charge appropriate interest rates.

This is definitely a technology play. The region lacks a standardized rigorous credit scoring systems like in the US.

I don't need to tell the readers about the market potential of South East Asia as one of the fastest economically growing regions in the world.

The good thing with this token is that it is backed by a real company in the region that knows and understands local problems and has a history of working in the region creating a product and solving a local problem. This reduces implementation risk for their new project.

The Token

Remember this is a South East Asia company. The HERO token holders get up to 20% of income generated by the company, paid quarterly as dividends. This is going to be one of the few dividend paying cryptocurrency tokens that is backed by the real world economy as opposed to purely blockchain-based economies.

The team is going to ICO 80% of all tokens, with a cap of 250,000 ETH for the ICO. There are bonuses for early participation. Each ETH gets you 200 HERO tokens (before bonuses).

Resources

Check out the website here.
All investors must read the whitepaper.
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