After looking at 38 token announcements, we’re picking Bubbletone as our ICO of the Day. Bubbletone is a mobile network platform that allows for global roaming with local rates.
Premise
Our smartphones have become an integral part of our daily lives, so when we travel to another country, many of us either immediately buy a new, local SIM card, or pay for roaming. Neither of these options is ideal – getting a new SIM card is a hassle, and using roaming with our own sim card often results in heinous fees.
Bubbletone aims to solve this issue with the power of blockchain. By building its own blockchain, based on Graphene, the same high throughput blockchain technology behind EOS, Bitshares and Steemit, Bubbletone aims to allow for easy cross-border mobile network payments and subscriptions via smart contracts.
Mobile network providers would issue smart contracts which constitute Offers, onto the blockchain. A traveler in the relevant region for the provider could select the Offer and then pass their identity and payment information to begin a direct prepaid subscription with that provider, thereby becoming a local user.
Besides mobile network plans, Bubbletone also envisions that other value-added services to be offered through this same architecture.
Team
The team behind Bubbletone has ample experience in the telecom industry, mostly in MVNOs, which do not own physical network infrastructure, but rather enter into business agreements with other operators to provide network service to their customers. This experience is directly applicable to Bubbletone and led to them designing this platform.
Besides telecom experience, the team also has significant engineering and blockchain talent, and has very rudimentary MVPs which can be seen on their website.
Bubbletone claims to have advisors who have connections to the telecom industry, but its hard to say how close these relationships are, as most of them do not list Bubbletone on their Linkedin profiles(or if they do, it is along with 5+ other ICOs)
Token
Bubbletone has its own blockchain, with its own native cryptocurrency as well as smart contracts. Having its own Graphene-based blockchain allows Bubbletone to have a strong scalability.
Bubbletone is raising 35,000 ETH and selling 50% of its tokens through its crowdsale.
Risks
Bubbletone has a relatively ambitious goal of providing a very cool service – roaming internationally at local prices. If anyone is going to pull this off, we think its this team, as they have strong experience in the MVNO industry.
However, that doesn’t negate the fact that getting network providers around the world to change their business practices and use a new, untested platform is going to be a significant challenge.
Bubbletone claims to have partnerships with over 80 network providers around the world but its hard to verify these claims. We also did not see much evidence of existing partnerships with network providers on their website or team information.
Summary
Bubbletone is a promising project that could have a big impact on the mobile industry if its successful. Its team, with strong experience in the telecom industry, has a very detailed technical plan of how they will go through with this.
The biggest risks with this project are not on technical side, but rather with business partnerships. We see the biggest challenge with this project as being getting mobile providers to sign on to a new platform which requires them to change their business practices.
Because the system does seem to have benefits for both network users and providers, it’s possible that those hurdles may be overcome.
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