Gluon ICO Review
Tags: ICO, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Icoreview

Hey everyone,

Most of you probably know me from Stratis and you have most likely heard about Gluon, the first verified ICO on the Stratis Platform.

Just a small heads-up: over 7,500 people have already registered for the ICO. So before you read all of this, be sure to sign up first! You can do that over here for the public sale and over here for the private sale ($25k minimum).

Update 19 March, 2018: GLUON Token Sale Rescheduled to May 2018 due to recent developments at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). You can read the announcement over here.

Update 7 May, 2018: I released my update on GLUON ICO Review. You can read it here -> https://medium.com/@khilonecrypto/update-on-gluon-ico-review-e11a82e5a92

In this article, I’ll tell you more about the upcoming Gluon ICO. The topics I’m going to cover are:

Gluon and Stratis

Who are Gluon?

How does Gluon work?

Gluon’s blockchain on the Stratis Platform

The team

Roadmap

Social media

$GLU Token

Token sale information

Projected use of company funds

Conclusion

Disclaimer: Never take anything I say (or anyone else on the Internet says) to be investment advice. Consult with a professional, and extensively do your own research before ever investing into anything.

Gluon and Stratis

Gluon is the first verified ICO on the Stratis Platform. On January 17, 2018, Stratis announced their partnership deal with Gluon. From Stratis’ release statement:

We started this journey with the desire to use our flexible blockchain development platform to meet the needs of real world financial services and businesses, and in offering deployment and support services to Gluon before, during, and after their ICO, we are pleased to say we’re doing just that. We have watched Gluon from afar, recognising that they were not simply another whitepaper idea, but a remarkable product with existing funding, impressive revenue and a global presence with offices across the US, UK, Sweden and India.

Who is Gluon?

Gluon’s platform establishes an interconnected network of vehicles. Using the platform, individuals and businesses can connect their vehicles and businesses with manufacturers, parts suppliers, repair shops, and other service providers within the network. Not only can customers diagnose their vehicles themselves, order parts, and request bids on repairs, but they can also schedule repairs and send and receive payments for services and goods.

Consumers can tune their vehicles for optimal performance and/or regulate their use. Repair shops can diagnose vehicles more cost-effectively and accurately order the correct parts. Records of vehicle servicing, repairs, diagnostics and smog tests are all stored in Gluon’s secure blockchain, based on the Stratis Platform.

How does Gluon work?

To get a closer view of how Gluon works, take a look at this video.

Gluon’s blockchain on the Stratis Platform

Gluon’s blockchain solutions will be built using the Stratis Platform and its Smart Contract system.

The team & advisors

You can find information about the full team and advisors on Gluon’s website.

Sameer Misson is the Founder & CEO of Gluon. A skilled executive with extensive experience in the automotive industry. He has over a decade of experience in company creation, growth and strategy optimization. Having worked with start-ups and automotive companies his entire career, he understands the challenges facing the automotive industry and hopes to innovate in order to solve some of them. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and government from the University of California at Davis and is currently pursuing a JD in his spare time. He speaks English, Punjabi, Hindi and Spanish.

Chris Trew, Strategic Advisor. Founder and CEO for Stratis. He is a consultant, architect and technologist with over 10 years’ experience in Enterprise IT. Chris’s background includes extensive experience in the financial sector, working for some of the top financial institutions as well as in the Legal, Aviation and Local government sectors. Chris is also a backend developer specializing in C# and ASP.NET technologies. He has been involved in blockchain technologies since late 2013. Most recently Chris has worked as a volunteer developer in his free time on the Blitz project, in the course of which he has developed The Viral Exchange, a social exchange that allows people to earn BTC and Blitz by completing social interactions such as tweets, sharing and likes. He also created the Fitalize platform that allows people to earn Blitz by walking, using hardware fitness trackers such as Fitbit.

Roadmap

You can find Gluon’s full Roadmap over here.

Social Media

$GLU Token

When considering investing in any ICO, one of the key things to research is the usability of the token in the project. You should be asking yourself if a project really needs a token: if your answer is no, I would advise walking away from that investment.

The whitepaper states that the token usability gives a consumer deep discounts on all Gluon products and on services from participants that have joined Gluon, such as manufacturers, repair shops, etc.

From an investor’s point of view this isn’t appealing to me, so I contacted Sameer Misson (CEO of Gluon) and asked for more information regarding the usability of the $GLU token. I got a satisfying answer:

We will build value with our token as the platform grows in adoption. The tokens are not only used as a payment/settlement protocol, but also for fees associated with running the sidechains such as emissions, records and loyalty incentives. All cryptocurrency payments and settlements within the platform will need to utilize $GLU for securing records into the blockchain or to conduct settlement/payments between parties. We have even more usage in mind but those will be revealed in our roadmap.

Gluon also mentioned something about a reward system; I asked for additional information about this as well.

If you explore automotive forums, you will find a deluge of information. These are DIY guides and videos, reviews of parts that have been written and rewritten many times over. Our goal is to create a community source of information and reward people for creating content for specific vehicles. In addition to this, loyalty rewards for purchases, for distributors and manufacturers are poorly run in today’s systems. Once you connect a manufacturer to a consumer, loyalty and rewards can be tracked to the individual level instead of simply the middleman and distributor involved. Being from the manufacturing world, I can attest to the level of discounts that manufacturers are willing to offer consumers, but these do not always trickle down or get used in other areas.

Token sale information

Whitepaper

Hardcap of $45 million

700 Million total token supply

65% of the tokens for sale

Private sale with a 10% discount for a total of $10 million, minimum of $25k

Private sale starts 5 March, 2018

Public sale with no discount total of $35 million, no minimum, maximum around $5–$10k

Token price $0,10

Public sale starts in May, 2018

People from the US are allowed

Utility token (From Sameer: We are 100% confident that we are a utility token, and our position is of firm and solid footing on that end. Simply labelling tokens utility is a very dangerous concept, we understand how it will be used and are certain it is not a security. We are working with two law firms: Stoel Rives, LLP and Dellenbach Venture Counsel)

Token on the Stratis blockchain

Funds in $STRAT, $BTC and everything that Changelly supports

Unsold tokens will be burned as well as an equal proportion from company supply

Projected use of company funds

35% of the token supply will go to Gluon. Gluon will be using these funds for:

80% of the company reserve is locked through Smart Contracts:

Unlocked Company Reserve (49M Tokens, 7%)

Company Reserve A (49M Tokens, 7%, locked for 1 year)

Company Reserve B (70M Tokens, 10%, locked for 2 years)

Founders and Employees (70M Tokens, 10%, locked for 2 years)

Conclusion

As you all know, I am a big Stratis supporter and the fact they handpicked Gluon as their first ICO already gives me a lot of confidence in Gluon. But as always it’s important to do extensive research, which I did. After my initial research I had some unanswered questions. I talked with Sameer and he managed to give a satisfying answer to all my questions.

As mentioned earlier Gluon is not your typical whitepaper idea ICO, but a remarkable product with existing funding, impressive revenue and a global presence with offices across the US, UK, Sweden and India.

Regarding investing, I never give any advice and I never will. Of course, I will tell you why I like Gluon myself:

Established company

First Stratis ICO

Game changer in the automotive industry

Working product which has a great use case

$GLU token has good usability

Fair hardcap ($45 million, R&D is expensive) and unsold tokens will be burned as well as an equal proportion from company supply

Great team with the backing of Stratis Platform

Chris Trew as advisor

It’s important to always do your own research. I am happy to give you the tools:

If, after doing your own research, you want to invest, you can register for the private sale over here and for the public sale over here.

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Cheers,

Khilone

https://twitter.com/Khil0ne