TGO
Network Project Analysis 25/03/2018
Pin Protocol ICO Analysis
By: Gas Trader
In today’s current market
environment there is a major demand for
a reputation protocol that is not bound to
individual applications or platforms. For
example, one seller may be well
respected in the EBay community with
hundreds of reputation from other users
on the platform but that information is
not easily transferrable to other
platforms such as Airbnb and Uber and
do not offer tangible benefits to the
reputation holder. Sharing economy
platforms are growing rapidly (see figure
below) and Pin Protocol could be at the
forefront of the borderless consumer
reputation system that will allow
companies to offer better pricing and
services to clients that are lesser risk.
Source: DHL Trend Research, 2017
Pin Protocol allows asset
providers to access network-wide
reputation scores and incentivizing their
users through rewards in the form of
$PIN which are spendable on any
provider using the Pin Protocol.
The Team
The protocol is being developed
by Spin, a company focused on
stationless urban/campus smart mobility.
In 2017 the Spin team raised $8 million
from VCs to pursue bike sharing in the
US market and have since pivoted
slightly to e-bikes and scooters. With
around 700,000 riders currently on the
network Spin will provide a large testing
ground for the Pin Protocol.
Derrick Ko is the founder and
CEO of Spin and has experience at
Microsoft, Kicksend and Lyft. He has
extensive start-up experience and
successful exits. Euwyn Poon has
experience at several start-ups, one of
which received funding by Y
Combinator, Facebook and Amazon
alumni. Their head of engineering,
Benny Wong, has worked at Motorola,
Samsung and Fitbit prior to his time at
Spin.
The most notable advisors are:
Gee Chaung, Josh Frasher and Matthew
Liu. Gee is the co-founder of both Ink
Protocol – a similar reputation system
but specific to marketplaces and Listia –
an online marketplace. Both Josh and
Matthew are co-founders of Origin
Protocol which is trying to be the
underlying protocol for decentralized
sharing economy marketplaces. These
advisors are incredibly important as both
the experience in the sharing economy
and the relationships those projects have
built will be vital in the success of Pin
Protocol.
The Investment
The scope of the project is
absolutely massive and by beginning
development early they position
themselves well in the market for
TGO Network Project Analysis 25/03/2018

upcoming projects to adopt the but without token metrics or a public
reputation system to both save money whitepaper this is a respectable group
and have access to a massive database of size and I fully expect it to grow rapidly.
users. By having Spin use the protocol as With that being said, it is important that
a testing ground this is one of the few with the release of these deliverables
projects that will have users right from they are analyzed carefully by the
release. The Origin Protocol founders community and fit the potential market
being advisors to the project allows us to size and impact on the space
speculate that a partnership could be in accordingly. It is not uncommon for
the works. Origin Protocol also has a projects in the early stages to “test the
massive project scope and is trying to waters” before deciding an their hard
revolutionize the sharing economies caps. It is important to be critical of the
where middlemen currently extract a hard cap, token distribution split
massive amount of value there is a real percentages and vesting schedules of the
possibility that users migrate onto their team/advisors when these metrics are
platform. Ideally these users would rely released. Lastly, there does not appear to
on Pin Protocol for their reputation be a public MVP available.
system. Traditionally these reputation
architectures require users to stake a
small amount of tokens in order to avoid
fraudulent accounts and this would mean
the tokenomics for the project could be
stellar (Note: This is speculation at this
point in time).
Barriers
There is potential for other
companies or sharing economy asset
providers to create a new token on their
own platform. However, over time as
Pin Protocol develops into an identity,
reputation management and incentive
protocol the cost to develop their own
token increases and reward significantly
decreases. Pin Protocol can benefit from
the network effect by being once of the
first reputation systems to market. That
being said, the market would need to
reflect my belief that there is a need for a
reputation protocol for this project to be
successful. Since this protocol does
incentivize users there is no reason to
believe that both providers and
consumers in sharing economies would
not adopt this rapidly.
Currently, the telegram only has
~600 members (at the time of writing)