COTI Builds Another Digital Currency for Payments

In our Quick reviews series we introduce interesting initial coin offering projects that might inspire you to do your own research and decide whether an idea and its development is worth your investment. It's not an endorsement.

Today we are looking at COTI.

What problem(s) does it target?
COTI stand for Currency Of The Internet. It is advertised on the website as “Digital currency built for payments,” fast and scalable like Visa payments (thousands of transactions per second), secure and decentralized like Bitcoin. On top of this, it promises a “Trust Scoring Engine, Mediation System, currency exchange and decentralized governance.”
The COTI network will be powered by a distributed ledger called The Cluster, based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) data structure – the same technology that powers IOTA. In DAG-based networks, a transaction must validate the previous two transactions to be confirmed. The ecosystem is made out of four participants: node operators, end users, mediators, and merchants.

Who the team members are?
COTI was founded in early 2017 and operates out of Gibraltar. The CEO, Shahaf Bar-Geffen, is also the co-founder/former CEO of WEB3, a multinational digital marketing firm. Dr. Nir Haloani, CTO, has 19+ years of experience leading R&D teams at multiple tech companies, and co-founder Infima Technologies, which was later acquired by IBM. David Assaraf, COO, previously worked as the chief internal auditor at HSBC Israel. Their CFO is Yair Lavi, a financial specialist who was previously CEO and finance director at Plus500UK, an online trading platform.

At what stage the project is?
The community presale was completed, and according to data from ICOdrops, the token sale itself starts September 15th. According to a blog post by the startup, the team also pushed forward a new version of their whitepaper recently.

What the main future milestones in their roadmap are?
Their minimum viable product (MVP) release is set for September 2018, and in December this year is when the testnet should be launched. The mainnet launch is set for July 2019. The roadmap also expects mass adoption by December 2019.

Fundraising status:
Presale ended, raising USD 3 million in 27 hours, according to their website. Token sale is set to begin on September 15th, and their end goal is USD 30 million.

Most important partnerships?
Processing.com, a multicurrency processing company;
Bancor, a standard for a new generation of cryptocurrencies called Smart Tokens;
The WINGS Foundation, a provider of prediction and analysis services.

How large their community is?
A dedicated subreddit has 635 subscribers, while their Twitter account has more than 17,000 followers. Their Telegram channel, meanwhile, boasts more than 32,000 members.

What other similar projects are?
Varanida, Trilliant, UniFox