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Lightweight intro, first the history, then the current documentation, finally some closing thoughts.
The Jetcoin Institute (JI) was founded by Eric Alexander in 2014, the same year the project acquired its first sponsorship representing the Italian football (soccer for NCAA/NFL fans) club A. C. ChievoVerona. They had an active online presence with multiple URLs however I can’t find an archive of any of these sites for further research. Either because the archives are broken, they redirect to the current site (jetcoin.io), or are for sale for 3,300 USD by GoDaddy.
The JI youtube account has 734 subscribers as of Jan. 5th 2022 and shows periods of activity and inactivity in the projects past. They peaked in activity and videos released during the 2017 crypto-bull run. On Christmas day 2018 they released their last video before a 855 day hiatus, returning some 8 months ago during the peak of the most recent bull run.
The white and lite papers the JI have released give a general overview of the business, and it is a business, not a dao or other decentralized structure. Their business plan requires 3 types of entities: the content producer, the NFT-holder, and JI. The content producer is the athlete/actor/musician that plans to sell IP and image rights. The NFT-holder can be in it to “own” a piece of the content producer’s legacy, to profit from fractional ownership of the IP, or a bit of both. JI is the mover and shaker of the operation. They buy the IP rights, mint NFTs to represent portions of the purchased rights, sell these tokens to the NFT-holders, and then set up interactive systems where NFT-holders can claim profits and enjoy themselves.
One of these interactive systems was Stadia, released in 2014 long before Google’s 2019 Steam competitor of the same name. It was a football-focused app that gave real-time game information and social media integration. I think. There are very few unique articles about it, and the only site ever mentioned, stadia.club, is dead. I can’t find a way to download it or confirm it’s still live which makes me suspect it isn’t. The only application I can find from the JI is Jetcoin 3.0 (registered on the Google Play Store with 100+ downloads).
Stadia was mentioned once in a previous version of the whitepaper and kept that relevance up with a single mention in the current version of the whitepaper.
Speaking of that old version of the whitepaper, let’s turn our attention to the current documentation. Beginning with the new whitepaper, which is 27 pages but less than 3000 words making it a quick read. It gives some useful info but frustratingly leaves a fair amount of ambiguity to the project. It ends with a bibliography of 4 sources, all of which are used between pages 6 and 8 and have nothing to do with jetcoin, cryptocurrency, or anything useful to potential investors. Instead they are 3rd party articles from mainstream media. One is an LA Weekly article titled “Top 10 Music Manager Who Fucked Over Their Clients” whose whole title is included in the url. You heard me correct, this whitepaper contains no useful references and the F bomb. Professionalism.
The most useful info in the whitepaper occurs on the penultimate page which gives a breakdown of the JET allocation. It has a fancy 3D pie graph but leaves the reader confused on the purpose of the 3% liquidity fee and 1% marketing fee as well as the recipient of these fees. A liquidity fee is a relatively complex legal term whose definition seems to change from country to country and precedent to precedent, not something the average investor will know offhand. It also mentions a 15% allocation for the “Team” separate from a 10% allocation for “Operations/Dev” which begs a question. Is the project hiring separate devs to run the crypto side of things? Why are the devs receiving 2/5ths of what the marketing team receives?
Similarly the Distribution/Utilities page doesn’t explain how it interacts with JETs split-chain issuance: 80 million on Ethereum mainnet, and 40 million on the BINANCE smart chain. Is it safe to assume the 3% allocation for the legal/compliance treasury is split such that 2% is on the Ethereum mainnet and 1% on the Binance smart chain?
The Litepaper is a marketing powerpoint that realizes it’s goal much better. It hypes you up for the project with images of sponsored teams and beautiful McLaren electric cars. Unfortunately it has a small error of an omitted word on the 3rd page:
Add in the word ‘relationship’, easily fixed, but it (and other small errors like consistent capitalization on the Utilities listed on page 8) shows a lack of polish that consistently shows itself in every facet of the project. While inconsistent capitalization and broken syntax in a marketing document may be embarrassing, a similar error in code could cause vulnerabilities that aren’t caught until millions are missing from the Jetcoin treasury. And the devs are working with 40% of the budget the people making this document had.
In closing, I want to highlight that JI being a business isn’t a negative. And it having a niche use case in being a platform for distributing fractional IP and image rights means it simply be at the ground floor. If it can clear these hurdles, produce a transparent business plan, and up the professionalism of its documentation it could become another dynasty of the NFT ecosystems ala SuperRare or Decentraland.
(And just to stir the pot of PUBLISH0X a bit, if you read or have read another contest article that didn’t mention the litepaper slip up perhaps they skipped over it without realizing. Or perhaps they didn’t make it 3 pages into the version of the whitepaper designed for easy reading. Maybe Jetcoin lacks polish because we don’t scrutinize coins thoroughly)
