DAV Network (DAV) ICO Analysis: An Ecosystem for Autonomous Transportation

Executive Summary

Project Description

The DAV (Decentralized Autonomous Vehicles) Network aims to provide a blockchain-based ecosystem where autonomous vehicle services can be made available to customers. There will allegedly be many different applications on the network for the various use cases likely to be found in the niche. For example, when the DAV Network becomes fully functional, a customer will — reportedly — be able to rent a drone and use the drone to, say, send something to another person elsewhere for a fee. Similarly, in the future, the owner of a self-driving car may decide to rent his car out and make some extra cash using the DAV Network. To make the process stress-free for all parties involved, the network plans to employ service providers in the ecosystem. These people will be in charge of cleaning the vehicle, and making sure it’s fully-charged and operational.

The network is expected to have three major components. Firstly, there will be a decentralized discovery component that will arrange vehicles, service providers, and clients under a section. Secondly, the DAV Network will provide a library of standardized communication protocols for different scenarios regarding the vehicles in the ecosystem. Smart contracts will facilitate on-chain communication while the protocols mentioned above will handle off-chain communication. Lastly, the network claims they’ll provide a series of specialized smart contracts that will enable trustless cooperation between buyers and sellers of services in the ecosystem. These smart contracts are supposed to facilitate multi-party contracts between buyer and seller, and if necessary, between arbitrator, insurer, and other related parties in the network.

The token, DAV will be ERC20-compliant and it will serve as the governing currency on the platform. It is expected to have the following use cases: consumers will pay for on-demand transportation services using DAV; vehicle/service/infrastructure/insurance providers will receive payments for their services in DAV; and developers/contributors will receive DAV tokens as bounty for contributing to the open-source network.

Existing Product

The project has a prototype of the Drone Missions App, along with a DAV CLI and testnet, a developer portal, and a block explorer; interested parties can check them out here.

Dav Network GitHub page.

Hard Cap and Valuation

Some of the information is still missing, but here are the details that have been released:

Hard Cap: $38 million

Token distribution: 40% — token sale, 25% — bounties and partnerships, 20% — long-term budget, 15% — team and advisors. Team tokens are to be vested for 12 months.

Price Per Token

1 DAV = 0.0001 ETH

Important Dates

The presale is ongoing at the moment with the minimum contribution of 1,000 ETH, and interested parties can send the project an email.

The token sale will begin on April 30, 2018, at 14:00 GMT and will run until May 13, 2018.

Q1 2018 Completion of first autonomous drone delivery.

Q2 2018 Completion of first autonomous boat mission.

Q2 2018 Completion of first autonomous vehicle charging.

Q4 2018 Decentralized discovery.

Q4 2018 Decentralized communication.

Q4 2018 Decentralized non-autonomous ride-hailing service release.

Marketing Power

As at the time this post was published, DAV Network had over 10,700 members on Telegram, over 3,000 followers on Facebook, over 3,200 followers on Twitter, 1,600+ subscribers on YouTube, over 600 followers on Medium, 320+ Reddit readers, and 200 followers on LinkedIn.

Prominent Advisors

Giovanni Lanfranchi

• Vice President, Global Technology Services at IBM.

Alan Messer

• CTO of Global Connected Consumer Experience at General Motors.

George D. Zamka

• Former Space Shuttle astronaut and Executive at Federal Aviation Administration.

Jerome Ferguson

• Director of Autonomous Systems at UPS.

Priyanka Khaitan

• Head of Emerging Technologies at SAP.

Dr. Greg Colvin

• Lead Ethereum Virtual Machine Developer

Dr. Scott Horowitz

• Former Space Shuttle astronaut & NASA Associate Administrator.

Nick Johnson

• Creator and Chief Developer of the Ethereum Name Service.

Jay Adelson

• Serial entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Equinix.

Team Members’ Areas of Expertise

Business experts

Noam Copel, CEO and Founder.

• Founder of Gold Lock — a software based encryption system for mobile phones — for 13 years.
• Founder of VidPay, a marketing platform, for 2 years.
• Co-founder of Metacafe, an entertainment platform, for 2 years.

Tal Alter, CTO and Co-Founder.

• Author at O’Reilly Media for over a year.
• VP of Product Management at Somoto, a mobile distribution and advertising company, for almost 2 years.
• R&D Director at Somoto for almost 5 years.
• Founder of Green Any Site, a socially responsible shopping site, for 10 months.

Andrew Grunstein, Head of Research.

• Director of Military Cyber Products at Gold Lock for 10 years.

Rachel Hercky Linnewiel, Head of External Relations.

• Transportation/Air Quality Planner at North Central Texas Council of Governments for almost 3 years.
• Statutory Planning Coordinator at Waxman — Govrin Engineering for over a year.
• Master’s Degree in City/Urban, Community and Regional Planning.

Target market experts

The project’s target market is related to autonomous vehicles, an emerging market that is relatively untested as of now. As a result, it is near-impossible to be an expert in the niche.

Marketing experts

John Frazer, CCO and Co-Founder.

• External Relations Lead at Ethereum Foundation for over a year (ongoing).
• Marketing Manager at SanMar Canada, a T-shirt company, for almost 4 years.
• Consultant Marketing & Strategy at Neville DeGrance Consulting for 3 years.
• Marketing Director at Condition 30 for 3 years.
• Product Manager at Quantum Charm Publishing for 3 years.

Joe Lopardo, CMO and Co-Founder.

• Co-founder of Matrix Mining for 10 months (ongoing).
• Founding Partner at Sequoia Marketing for almost 2 years.
• Partner at Tricent Capital, a venture capital firm, for a year.
• Senior Enterprise Sales Executive at Contently, a B2B marketing tech company, for over 3 years.
• Business Development Specialist at Sterling Medical Devices for over 2 years.
• Co-founder & CMO at urJELLY for almost 2 years.
• Co-founder & Owner of Plush Engagements.

Legal experts

No team member with legal expertise.

Software engineering experts

Shahar Frank, R&D Team Leader.

• Dev Team Leader at CognitiveID for 8 months.
• Dev Team Leader at DoIT International, an IT services company, for almost 2 years.
• Dev Team Leader at Budgetao for over a year.
• Software Engineer at AOL for almost 3 years.
• Team Leader at Browzwear Int., a 3D fashion design tool, for over 3 years.
• Senior Software Engineer at Proficiency Ltd. for almost 5 years.

Lior Shkoori, Product Manager.

• Co-founder of Fi Club — The Wi-Fi Sharing Economy.
• Product Manager at ironSource, an app distribution and monetization company, for almost 3 years.
• Marketing & Account Manager at ironSource for almost 2 years.

Anatoly Tokalov, Senior Developer.

• Co-founder & CTO of AbiliSense for 2 years.
• Fullstack Developer & Founder of BunnyBearXYZ, a mobile game company, for almost 3 years.
• Software Engineer at PeoplePost, worldwide hotel serivce, for almost 3 years.
• Web Developer at Salestech, a trading platform, for a year.
• PHP Developer at WebsPlanet, a website builder, for 2 years.
• Software Developer at VeriFone, an electronic payment solution company, for almost 4 years.

Abhishek Singh, Senior Developer.

• Co-founder & COO of Svrround, a live streaming video platform, for 2 years.
• Post-Doctoral research Fellow for almost 2 years.
• Founder & CEO of Imly.in for 2 years.
• Manager of Corporate Services at Lintas Media Group for a year.

Iurii Ieltsov, Head of Design.

• Freelance Product Designer for over 5 years.
• Senior Designer at Zfort Group, an IT service provider, for almost a year.
• Art Director at ArtJoker for 3 years.

Blockchain development experts

No blockchain development expert on the team. However, two of their advisors are on the Ethereum Foundation, pointing to some blockchain development expertise that may be useful to the project.

Token sale structure experts

No token sale structure expert on the team. One of their advisors, Eyal Hertzog, however, has some experience from his time at Bancor.

Token economics experts

Same as above.

Conclusion

Strengths

• Promising and emerging industry.
• Very strong advisor team with connections to notable companies (SAP, NASA, IBM, GM, SAP, UPS).
• Sizable team with lots of successful projects and a community of open-source contributors.
• Already established partnerships within the DAV alliance with several autonomous vehicle industries.

Potential risks for investors

• Still long developmental roadmap ahead.
• Considerably high hard cap.
• They have some strong competitors in the IoT field (IOTA, ITC, INT).
• Regulations are yet to be established for the market.

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Disclaimers:

• Nothing written in this article is a legal or an investment advice.
• Information is provided on a best-effort basis and is subject to change without prior notice. Be sure to verify everything you read with a project team.

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The analysis was produced by Research Center team members: Alexander Bugaj, Mark Jedd, Eugene Tartakovsky.

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