Hoard Invest ICO review - Fiat Gateway, Cross exchange and DEX trading. Low Fees

Webpage https://www.hoardinvest.com/

White Paper Link (https://www.hoardinvest.com/token/)

What is Hoard

• Cross-chain transactions and inter-exchange price matching.

• Instant transactions with masternodes and minable transactions for scalability.

• Dapps on the smaug network and possible ICO hosting. Airdrops to token
  holders for each new coin/Dapp

• Public or Private transactions

• Decentralized exchange where you always control your private key never the exchange

• Fiat Gateway.

• Multi-currency wallet where Hoard never holds your private keys.

• Merchant services — send and receive payments in any currency including fiat regardless of initial currency type.

• Low transaction and other fees. Fees will be very low and allow you to do micro transactions for zero or almost zero fees.

• Side chain for instant low fee transactions (think lightning network and plasma) with multi layered blockchain.

• Portfolio tracking.Participate in the ICO from the Hoard app (this is awesome!!!)

NOTE I have been following hoard for a long time and they are constantly evolving and updating. Be sure to check their telegram to make sure all info is still valid.

Hoard is many things combined. But the combination of all those things will allow you to transfer, buy, sell and swap any cryptocurrency for any cryptocurrency or even fiat currency, instantly with very small fees.

For example. Send a friend 1 BTC and he receives 1 BTC worth of ETH instantly. Instead of paying the usual $7 fee which can take an hour, plus possible conversion fees on top. Via hoard it would cost you a few cents.

Hoard will be a fiat gate way. It’s comprehensive secure wallet with offline cold storage where you control your private keys and a payment gateway all in one. It allows you to trade across exchanges and also offers atomic swaps.

Features offered by Hoard will often involve temporarily staking hoard (OAR) as collateral.

Many exchanges have apps but they are not up to standard and having several apps for several things can be very annoying and cumbersome.

Price matched trading and cross exchange trading. Basically you can get the best price without transferring your funds to an exchange, your asset never even needs to leave your personal wallet. A low fee structure all in one place allows you to move assets around your own personal wallets or to friends without paying the crazy fees some exchanges and coins demand.

This also removes the need for any liquidity base layer which much of the competition will use. Which is essentially a way to fake it rather than develop working technology and comes with addition issues.

Hoard wallet is a multi-asset storage application that will hold all premium cryptocurrencies.
The wallet is connected to our exchanges via the Smaug Network so traders can keep funds off exchanges and inside wallets while having the liquidity needed for real time trades. This removes the laborious and often expensive process of asset transfers, confirmation times and miner fees associated with exchange deposits.

There are other platforms out there trying to introduce a universal wallet and use a liquidity network. Ethos comes to mind. It is also trying to get a fiat gateway and banking licence. The universal wallet part of Ethos is a good idea but the rest of the platform is not. Hoard appears to be what Ethos should have been in the first place.

Safe cold storage. Hoard will also NOT hold your private keys where as Ethos will have an encrypted version of your private key. Hoard will offer an encrypted private key backup as a service.

Simple Rule-based Investing and simplified trading

Hoard is offering a unique product in the form of a rule-based investing engine that makes cryptocurrency investing simple and partially automatic.

Real world Applications

I will leave this one to your imagination, as there is so many uses. The main benefit being for cyptocurrency users and a gateway to mainstream adoption.

Smaug network features and the OAR token

Smaug network is simple but difficult to understand. You can check out the white paper for a more detailed description.
Basically it is another layer of blockchain that controls everything and makes the network and transactions work. It operates using Masternodes, Oracles and maybe even mining which track blockchains and verify and confirm transactions. This is what allows transactions to be instant and to have very small fees.

To take advantage of many of hoards features such as instant transactions or very low fee micro transactions, you must bond or stake and equal amount of OAR as collateral. This allows you to do trustless transactions. For example you want to go out for the day and run several errands and purchase several small items such as coffee etc the cost per transaction could be very high making take up to an hour to process.

With Hoard it will be instant and the fees will be very low or almost zero. Oar will be bonded automatically, once the transactions are confirmed on chain your OAR will be released. If you act maliciously by accessing your private keys and wallet and attempt to double spend that money you will lose your OAR.

Future versions of Smaug protocol should reduce the amount of bonding required or possibly even eliminate this requirement. The hoard team is already working on version 2.0 and said they could be able to eliminate bonding altogether. Smaug 1.0 bonding could still be used as it has some advantages. They also hinted at Smaug version 3.0 but we have no details about that yet.

The Team

You can read about the rest of the team on their website here.
Hoard team link

They have a well established team which is well balanced and experienced. They have an almost inexhaustible list of advisers because of Jason’s ties to the banking industry. Much of the core basic development is complete and new hires and team members are ready and waiting to get started.

Many of the team including Jason have built similar non blockchain systems for large banks or similar institutions. I really believe this is a team that has some of most relevant industry experience for this kind of project.

Hoard partners and OAR tokens

Hoard is partnering with INV Fintech. This accelerator is affiliated with technology providers, banks and venture capital organizations.
As an offshoot of the Bank Innovation blog, INV FinTech helps financial industry segment startups from around the world. They are basically a one stop shop for banks and financial institutions.

What progress have they made MVP etc

Eth and OAR wallets are complete with the BTC wallet being finalized. ICO engine and smaug 1.0 are still in development and are looking to be ready any day now or could even be complete by the time you read this. Many other features and upgrades to the current system are already under development.

Platform tools and services

Hoard will provide a trusted and secure bridge between the fiat money and cryptocurrency environments it is FINRA/MSB regulated and KYC/AML compliant.

Access to FDIC-insured savings accounts: these accounts will hold fiat currency in a savings account for later use and are federally insured to $250,000 USD. These accounts are provided by our banking integration partners but wholly owned by the end user. We do not have access to the funds.

Work is well underway with some of it being complete with apps that will offer simple trading tools etc. A toggle will be available to switch between simple and complex architecture for traders who seek more traditional trading tools.

ICO Token Sale and Fund Distribution

Participate in the ICO from the Hoard app. Right away even before the ICO starts you can try out their app.

Originally Hoard ICO was going to be one of the first fully compliant US based ICO’s. After meeting pretty much all the regulations and compliance criteria the SEC keeps delaying and delaying so Hoard has moved offshore for the ICO only. This means the ICO can start almost immediately. All the previous hard work is not wasted as it is all steps required in getting a Fiat gateway and other regulatory hurdles.

New tokenomics are as follows

• Pre-sale price $0.07 / 80M OAR
• Public sale price $0.14 / 120M OAR
• New soft cap = $4M
• New hard cap = $22.4M
• Max supply 300M
• Public sale opening date is TENTATIVELY slated for 9/15

Pre-sale minimum is $25,000.00 USD
Pre-sale maximum is $1,000,000.00 USD
Public sale minimum is $140.00 USD
Public sale maximum is $140,000.00 USD

No US investors are allowed.
No accreditation requirements.
No lockup period (coins release after public sale is complete).
Whomever invests must pass KYC/AML/ID checks.

The token metrics are pretty much how you want an ICO to be geared to allow for growth. The token price point is great and you almost cant ask for better metrics.

Vesting periods of 3 years for team tokens. Overly generous but very welcome for ICO investors. Shows hoard are committed to the projects success and not ripping token value from investors.

Roadmap

https://www.hoardinvest.com/status/

This is an older basic road map. You can see they have completed some stuff and have a working MVP expect to see an updated version soon. This gets updated often so please check in with hoard.

Benefits as a token holder and how Hoard makes money

There is many reasons to want to buy and hold hoard. This will likely cause the token value to go up because of the demand. It has several uses, staking, master nodes, oracles and bonding to speed up transactions.

The Competition

Have you ever heard people complain about coinbase and other similar services. They are not great and very restrictive with high fees. Traditional exchanges are pretty good but you do not control your private keys or funds and the fees are crazy for withdrawals etc.

Ethos Ethos is a cut down version of hoard and will offer a fiat gateway and universal wallet. Disappointingly they made the token next to useless for holders by trying to implement several useless prediction staking and betting systems, which in the end turned me off. Perhaps they can make it useful in the future instead of just as Gas for transaction fees.

Hybrid Block Chinese based or Hong Kong based — very similar to hoard but again a cut down version. Couldn’t work out the reason for buying the tokens. Lots of things didn’t make sense about hybrid block but the idea’s does. Basically some features of hoard but with some basic learning courses and teachings. This is kind of ok, but really you can find all that info for free or elsewhere and hoard aims to be so simple you wont need any of that.

Block Port
Again very similar to Hoard. This is basically a DEX (decentralized exchange plus social media added on. Similar to invest feed which has all but disappeared as the idea wasn’t really that exciting. Which basically just makes BPT a DEX with a few extra features.

Hoard
Overall if you take all the ideas behind these ICO’s hoard does it better and provides the technical details on how they will do it and how it works. I struggled to find this info on the other sites they just stated they are doing it and now how it works.

They also give you an in depth explanation on how the token works and why it may gain value by demand. I already know I want buy and stake hoard to take advantage of its features. The other tokens are doing it backwards, they want you to buy their tokens and speculate it will go up. There is not really another reason to hold them other than perhaps a small amount for gas transactions.

Concerns

Hoard does appear to be a bigger more complicated project than these other projects. But the way hoard and the token works they all inter combined and complement each other. Features will be released step by step, with stopgap measures such as initially running masternodes, oracles and servers themselves to start with (until tested public releases are ready) and partnering with other exchanges to provide early premium services.

Can they pull it off is the question. Comparing the questions and answers I got in the various telegrams I believe hoard has the most experience in the arena they are trying to compete.

Conclusion

I found the white paper incredibly detailed and complicated. It required several reads for me to understand. I also approached the team and they were able to answer my questions on the fly and quickly with a lot of knowledge. It is complicated because everything is interconnected and is either required for the other part to work or combined they enhance each other.

Hopefully my review has put it into more simple language. I felt the diagrams in the draft white paper needed work and they need a really good video and one pager to explain what hoard is.

You can really see how it works compared to the competition and how it will bring value. The fact they have already completed much of the regulatory work required trying to make the ICO US based is half the battle. Do not underestimate this.

The token metrics are very good and I excited to see and use what they produce.

Resources

Webpage — https://www.hoardinvest.com/
White Paper Link — (https://www.hoardinvest.com/token/)
Telegram — https://t.me/hoardinvest
Twitter — https://twitter.com/hoardinvest
Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/HoardInvest/
GitHub — https://github.com/HoardInvest

This is a very good video with Jason the CEO talking about hoard. Skip to about 7 mins when Jason starts talking. It is a good explanation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIJ-fUxckes

This is an old video now but it is still a very good one to see how switched on Jason is. He doesn’t skip a beat when asked a question.