Zebi (ZCO) ICO Fast Facts

• ICO Crowdsale Start Date: 5th March 2018
• Maximum Discount: 30% for pre-sale only (already ended) with ‘appropriate’ discounts to be announced during the token sale
• Platform: Ethereum ERC20
• Amount Raised (Valuation): Max hardcap on crowdsale is US$10M (for 30%). Circulation supply in the first year will be 500m. Initial marketcap will be $16.67m USD.

Zebi (ZCO) Utility

Zebi aims to solve the problems associated with storing and sharing high value or sensitive data: immutability, trusted verification, consent, security and privacy. They will achieve this by securing the records at their source and facilitating secure and seamless data exchange (taking into consideration consent) through Data as a Service (DaaS) APIs.

To secure data at its source, Zebi offers their private blockchain solution Zebi Chain™. This private chain is installed at a Data Provider’s premises where it provides “immutability to the source of truth data”. It can integrate with a public blockchain to increase its trustworthiness.

The Zebi Chain™ solution is already live in production. It is currently deployed to protect digitised land records for Andhra Pradesh (an Indian State Government).

Zebi Data Gateway is their solution to facilitate secure and seamless data exchange. The gateway will connect to Zebi Chain™ installations, individuals whose data is stored on the private chains (so they can give/revoke consent to access their data) and data sequesters. Data will be able to be exchanged instantly and will use a blockchain system driven by smart contracts. This blockchain is used to store the logs of any request/data exchange on the network for accountability and transparency.

The token associated with Zebi is the Zebi Coin or ZCO. It is a utility token which is used as payment for all transactions in the Zebi ecosystem.

Zebi is strongly invested in the security and privacy of the data stored in their ecosystem. This is vital given the type of data they are looking to handle (health, land, education records just to name a few). They are have already achieved ISO 27001 Information Security certification, which is no mean feat.

Zebi (ZCO) Team

Co-Founders Babu Munagala (CEO) and Sudheer Kuppam are both graduates from Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. Babu has almost two decades of experiencing working the original big data company - Oracle. Sudheer has worked at the Vice President level at intel and has spent most of his time advising, or being a member of, the board for dozens of companies.

It is great to see co-founders with such a mix of experience with large multinationals as well as IT start ups at the grass roots level. Babu’s experience at Oracle is hugely beneficial to an organisation looking to create the new big data platform for India. I am also interested to see what contacts/networks, knowledge and guidance Sudheer is able to bring from his advisor/board member experience in other tech companies.

The rest of the team have equally impressive backgrounds

• Kalyan Muppaneni - Previously an Enterprise Architect with Intel (for 15 years!) and currently CEO at Pi Datacentre.
• Phani Arega - VP Engineering: Previously at Tata ($150b Indian megaconglomate), a Dell subsidiary and a decade as a manager at Oracle.
• Gopal Bang - Business Operations: Previously an Operations Manager at Hitatchi before founding his own offshore shared services team.
• Renuka Rathode - Product Strategist: Is currently an active member of the startup/entrepreneur scene in India, leading and mentoring numerous startups through her program. Also has a background in HR, marketing and business development.

Overall, the core team has a wide range of skills and experiences where each individual is able to bring something to the table.

The advisers bring fantastic experience from global top-tier companies. Some of the highlights include:

• Vasu Parameswaran - held roles such as Senior Engineering manager, principal Engineering manager, principal scientist at companies such as UBER, Microsoft, Nokia and Siemens. Also a P.H.D in computer science from University of Maryland.
• Rao Surapaneni - Principal engineering manager at Microsoft and M.B.A from University of California
• Murali Abburi - Managing director Graticule Asset management Asia and ex Vice President JP Morgan
• Phil Mui - Senior Vice President Salesforce P.H.D from MIT and degrees from Harvard and Oxford universities.
• Prahalad Thota - Senior Vice President Wells Fargo, Ex Vice President Charles Schwab, ex regional director PayPal, ex Director Capital One Services
• Chandra Mallipedi - Hardware Quality and reliability engineeringFacebook, Engineering manager Amazon Labs

Zebi (ZCO) Roadmap

Zebi is starting in a great position. They have:

• already launched their Zebi Chain™ product,
• a multi-year contract with Andhra Pradesh, an Indian state government with 50M population, and
• further proposals in the pipeline with Telangana and Maharastra, Two Indian states with a combined 110M population.

Zebi has released a roadmap detailing their intentions for each quarter over the next three years. I appreciate projects that give this level of detail to investors. This well thought out roadmap gives investors confidence and allows them to monitor Zebi’s progress. Some highlights are:

• Q1 2018 - Zebu will use their current Land registry and Property records deployment to promote their services to other government agencies.This includes promoting Zebi Chain™ for Property, Education and Employments records.
• Q1 2019 - Implement Data as a Service APIs and Zebi Pay
• Q2-3 2019 - Improve the payment gateway options: initially integrating with other crypto exchanges before introducing their own crypto-to-fiat gateway.
• Q1 2020 - Implement Zebi Insights to fully utilise the large amount of data they have access to.
• Q3 2020 - Construct compounded smart contracts for use on the platform. This allows a many-to-many style of smart contract for scaleable growth moving forward.

Zebi (ZCO) Value

Zebi is looking to raise a modest $10m USD in the crowdsale for 30% of the total tokens. At full dilution, this values the organisation $33.33m USD. This is an extremely favourable price, especially for an ICO which could be the base for big data within the Indian government. On top of this, they are already over 2 years into product development with their private chain solution currently used by a local government in India.

I think they may have undervalued themselves. Providing that the token metrics are not changed before launch, this is heavily in favour of investors.

Zebi (ZCO) Transparency

Zebi is great at promoting their current achievements and explaining their goals at a high level. However, some answers are buried deep in external articles and telegram chat logs. This has been acknowledged by the team and they are addressing this. An updated version of their whitepaper has already been released which provides new details.

There is little technical implementation information available on the implementation of the Zebi ecosystem. As I’ve said before, I like to see technical details as it shows that the team have put in the thought and preparation required to launch a new product. I quite enjoy reading about how others implement their systems. Zebi are hesitant to release the source code this early into the development, which is quite understandable. Due to the fact that they already have their private chain deployed live, as well as a multi-year government contract, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Zebi (ZCO) Distribution

Of the 1 billion ZCOs in total, 30% will be sold in the tokensale and 5% will be used to cover the tokensale cost. With 15% is allocated for “distribution and participation in the Ecosystem”.

The rest of the coins, 50% of the total, will be retained by Zebi to be “released for purchase from time to time depending on demand”. This has recently been broken down further to indicate that ‘up to a maximum of 35% will be allocated to founders, team and advisers’. The remainder will made available to data providers and other partners. The entire allocation of these tokens retained by Zebi will be locked with an initial 18 month vesting period. Further, no more than 12.5% of these tokens may be released in any calendar year.

The allocation for founders, team and advisers is a little higher than usual. Although, given the size and seniority of the team required to complete this project, this might actually be quite reasonable.

Zebi (ZCO) Summary

There’s a lot to love about Zebi. The team is fantastic with the right mix of skills and experience, the value is great - $10m USD is extremely low. Cryptocoins may come and go but by integrating with Government, Zebi have themselves locked in for years to come. With a live deployment of part of their ecosystem with one state government, and more in the works, they are definitely in a great position to become the facilitator for transactions dealing with citizen records in India. They are not only using blockchain technology to provide a secure, auditable and tamper-proof history of these important records, but they will also be doing it at the scale required for India’s population. I believe that Zebi will be a fantastic product for the people of India.

Crypto Coin Disclosure

The author has no affiliation with the above token or with the promotion/marketing thereof.
She does not hold any tokens and has not participated in the private or public sales.
A third-party (not related to the ICO team) has requested and paid for a prioritised review of this ICO.

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