KoalaToken ICO: Can Blockchain Hide Your Porn-related Payments?

The author of the column is Alexander Savinkin, our investment expert and co-founder of Howtotoken. It’s #icobusted, where we scan the market for the newest and most remarkable upcoming ICOs and analyze them in-depth, with a focus on the viability of the business concepts behind these projects. This won’t concern pre-ICO/ICO price gaps, no gasps and groans about the team, and no code checking. Here, we will try to break everything down to see if there are any market prospects for the product if, and only if, that product can be delivered.

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KoalaToken

The adult industry is exactly the kind of one that needs anonymity, and KoalaToken is the blockchain startup dedicated to keeping it that way. Let’s find out if KoalaToken is set to save the your adult life from prying eyes.

Product

Koala is a little devil in a box – there are a lot of nice goals and good plans in it, but it sounds like they are desperately trying to convince investors of their credibility. Here is what they propose:

• Koala Payment Gateway is a sort of payment solution for the adult industry specifically.
• Age verification service(one verification for multiple web resources).
• Ad network (advertising) as a way of gaining value from user presence.
• Live video and cam platform.

With this list, it seems like they are trying to themselves, but if the payment solution and even one of those other goals end up working then they might have some potential. The Koala project presents themselves as a decentralized payment method for online and offline adult services. This might sound nice, but they don’t even have their own blockchain.

The Koala solution to the transaction problems is based on several improvements they provide; the first of them being anonymity. This is not an industry where you can operate without age verification, so it’s just a matter of who is going to store this information – some unknown platform or a respectable bank. But on the other hand, anonymity might improve customer/client relationships moving away from unnecessary shyness and mistrust.

Now let’s get to talking about the fees. Koala promises to get them under 1%, which is a really desirable figure. Would they be able to achieve this? Who knows. Chargeback and the unreliability of adult services are two sides of the same coin. With smart contracts, however, you first sign the smart contract and then exchange value. This could improve those deals on the person-to-person level or in an interaction with small organizations. There is no great breakthrough in services, but these small features might pile up to create something bigger.

Market

The adult industry could not be considered as a singular market, though some subindusties do interconnect. There is not much to say about tendencies either; everything goes online and new trends appear one after another. Now there is VR being implemented in this industry, and who knows what could appear next? Anyways, all trends still prevail because this industry is all about variety. There are a lot of business models, but most of online services are centered around subscriptions, commissions, and advertising . For them, it does not matter which type of content prevails so long as it does, making platforms always eager to try something new.

One of those innovations just happened to be related to the blockchain industry and cryptocurrency. Even now, PornHub accepts so many of them that it would be unproductive to mention them all here. The fact that the crypto world has already entered this industry leaves less space for maneuvers and more competition to meet.

If we’re talking about the numbers then we should mention the $568 million in revenue in adult websites in USA (as stated from an IBISWorld 2017 report) that has an average annual growth over 10%. The global sex toys market has reached a staggering $15 billion in revenue (according to a Statistic Brain 2017 report). That all means there is a lot of need for intermediary financial services. From the info regarding the notorious PornHub, we can see that it alone has more than 30 billions visits per year and an international revenue stream of $454 million a year. Those are some pretty juicy numbers to get, and there are already a lot of companies like this that can claim the same.

When talking about the competition, we should mention the conventional means of payment as well. It’s truth that some payment services are somewhat slow and expensive, but there are not that much people eager to change PayPal for crypto right now.

The market has also become overflowed with different coins and the adult industry is eager to test them out to see if they are credible enough without focusing too much on their specific specialization. PornHub accepts Verge, Tron, and ZenCash while Xhamster accepts Bitcoin, and there are at least nine camsites that accept Bitcoin as well. It’s really difficult to assess the rivals because there are no such a thing – it’s just a matter of the market becoming more and more crowded.

Summary

Pros and cons:
(+) Global and prosperous market
(+) Highly sought-after service
(-) No real partnerships signed on yet
(-) Tough competition
(-) Indistinct product strategy, low competitive potential

All in all, Koala is hardly a competitor to the existing payment solutions, it’s yet another wannabe in the queue right now. We can get deeper into the numbers, but that would appear counterproductive, as the project does not have any conceptual advantages and it has a rough market environment. Though Koala tries to get a piece of every aspect of the adult industry, we can clearly see that it still lacks in both aspects with widespread cryptocurrencies being used by companies while there is more specific and unique niche tokens present. Will investors consider this project further? Maybe, but we don’t think so.

Useful resources:

1. Pornhub statistics by World of Web
2. Adult & Pornographic Websites – US Market Research Report by IBISWorld
3. Sex Toy Industry Statistics by Statistic Brain Research Institute
4. Behind the Scenes: The Economics of Cam Sites by SpankChain
5. Pornhub starts accepting cryptocurrency by Shannon Liao
6. List of adult industry tokens by Cryptoslate
7. Where To Buy Sex Toys With Cryptocurrencies Like Bitcoin by bfg114
8. PayPal Is Seeking Faster Crypto Payments Tech by Nikhilesh De

All materials on this site are for informational purposes only. None of the material should be interpreted as investment advice.

The post KoalaToken ICO: Can Blockchain Hide Your Porn-related Payments? appeared first on The Ultimate Crypto How-to Guides.

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