Mobius ICO Review: Linking Apps and Tokens, Developers Wanted

What is Mobius?

Mobius tries to link the world of blockchain with the real world, or at least with Big Data about the real world. The multitude of ICOs focus on the smart contract or their back-end engines, touting the smart contract as their main feature. Mobius goes further- its founders want to connect the blockchain infrastructure to the so-called oracles, mechanisms that bring valuable, verified real-world information so that it can be processed by the smart contract and safely recorded on the blockchain. Without such information, most smart contracts are powerless or have only limited use.

• Mobius Website
• Mobius White Paper
• Country of origin: USA
• Ticker: MOBI
• ICO Dates: 22 Nov.2017-22 Dec.
• Hard Cap: $38.8 million or 266,400,000 MOBI
• Funds raised: TBA
• Industry: Distributed apps, Blockchain Infrastructure
• Funds accepted: BTC, XLM, ETH
• My Rating: 2/5

Mobius Social Media

• Blog
• Official Mailing List
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Slack
• Telegram
• Github

Mobius Overview

Mobius is an up and coming ICO aiming to spread the blockchain to everyday users, through the influential power of apps. At the moment, the blockchain can work through all kinds of data and conditional statements through what is known as “smart contracts”, constructs of code that perform actions without third parties. But passing data onto the contracts is hard. Mobius tries to solve that problem- to use the easily available data flowing through apps and connect them through the blockchain.

The founders give more detail in this (lengthy) video interview:

With the Mobius product, app developers will have an intuitive way of connecting existing tech with smart contracts- in other words, “disrupting the app market”. In this, Coindesk compares Mobius to projects like ChainLink and IOTA.

The Mobius Team

• David S. Gobaud
• Kurosh (Cyrus) S. Khajvandi
• Monis Rahman
• Jackson Palmer: Advisor
• Jed McCaleb – Advisor

Perhaps the most notable name behind this project is Jackson Palmer, listed as an advisor. Palmer is the creator of Dogecoin, and a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency community. He stands firmly behind the idea that cryptocurrencies are not for the elite, but should be spread as widely as possible.

Palmer certainly knows about scams and thefts, since those happened years ago on the Dogecoin Reddit thread. So hopefully, his presence as advisor may be beneficial to the team.

Curiously, despite the low price, Dogecoin is one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies.

Jed McCaleb is the founder of Stellar, continuing the influence of his platform with the Mobius project.

About Mobius Token

The token for the system is not an ERC-20 token, instead, it uses the Stellar.org token standard. It is related to the Stellar Lumens digital ecosystem and requires the use of one of the Stellar wallets.

When the ICO ends, the MOBI token will head straight for a decentralized exchange, Stellar Distributed Exchange.

The token distribution would only sell 30% of tokens at the ICO:

• 5% of MOBI will be sold in a pre-sale at a discounted rate to the token sale.
• 30% of MOBI will be sold in the token sale.
• 32.5% of MOBI will be reserved for the community to grow the network and reward contributors.
• 32.5% of MOBI will be reserved by the company for growth and R&D.

To use and move the MOBI token, one would need a Stellar account and some minimum amount of Stellar Lumens. Given that the ICO is open to XLM users, that may not be such a big problem.

The total number of MOBI minted will be 888,000,000, although most will remain locked in reserves. The price at ICO ranges from $0.12 to $0.16 depending on bonuses.

Investing in Mobius: The Pros

Mobius solves a problem that few other startups have spoken about. This is the problem of oracles, or how to supply true, relevant information to smart contracts. For now, smart contracts work with a limited supply of data, but Mobius promises to bring in developers and new ideas on how to achieve automatic payments based on the current usage of apps.

The other advantage of Mobius ICO is that it is a diversification from investing in ERC-20 tokens and the Ethereum ecosystem.

At the moment, a handful of ICOs offer ways to integrate a token into the app at a future date. Mobius goes a step further- it aims to create modular, high-level tools and ease developers into integrating any blockchain for easy, low-fee payment. According to the white paper, Mobius has already integrated the usage of several prominent ERC-20 tokens as well: Golem, Augur, Iconomi, Status, Storj and Credo. In the future, expanded support should allow for integrating more digital assets into apps.

In 2017, using Bitcoin or altcoins is still extremely difficult and counter-intuitive at times. Most tokens do not have any use beyond raising funds. For MOBI, there is at least the hypothetical use it could become an in-app means of payment.

The white paper states that the MOBI token would be the major means of payment in a future dapp store, and probably increase in value with more usage.

The Risk of Mobius

The MOBI token will have a long way to go before reaching an exchange where real traders move. The risk is that MOBI is traded mostly on the Stellar Decentralized Exchange or other smaller markets, with much lower liquidity and few users. Owning and using MOBI, you would be exposed to the risk related to Stellar Lumens, a digital asset with somewhat higher volatility.

The biggest risk is that Mobius has bet its fate on the organic emergence of a group of developers ready to create popular apps. But this process may take years, and other ICOs have bet on the same- developers ready to build new apps. Lisk is a competitive, well-staffed project that has yet to attract application builders, so at the moment, Mobius is far behind in the game.

While Mobius has a limited, though operational app store, most of the apps seem to bet on betting and gaming, as well as price speculation related to cryptocurrencies. It is still early to tell if apps for other areas of interest would show up in the store.

Final Thoughts on Mobius

Mobius offers intriguing ideas, such as using tokens for login credentials. With the current infrastructure of REST API, a login mechanism may be built that requires various combinations of token ownership. This step may find “work” for many tokens that otherwise do very little beyond being traded on exchanges. Governance and anti-trolling mechanisms may also use tokens, as well as on-site reward systems.

At the moment, platforms like Status (still in development) also aim to become the go-to app store that links the blockchain to everyday use. But anyone can aim to become the leading app store, and this event may be years ahead in the future.

While Mobius is a curious project that takes into consideration the modern internet infrastructure, it may be best to buy a smaller amount at the ICO and later buy some of the tokens through the secondary market.

Therefore, we rank Mobius at 2/5, for having a clear idea with a high chance of implementation, but an idea that would need years to grow into real-life implementation and usage.

One thing is certain, Mobius has caught the early whiff of integration between big data, distributed ledger technologies and trustless systems with transactions resembling those of vending machines. So while now the multitude of tokens mostly sits idle, in the future digital assets may do much more work.