EverMarkets Whitepaper and Team Review

5 min readFeb 14, 2018

This abbreviated report was written for a private group.

What is it?

EverMarkets is a decentralized platform to trade equity, bond, and commodity futures using blockchain technology.

Based in USA Palo Alto
Ticker: EVR/EMX
ANN thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2052149.msg — July 28 2017 — Project launched just as bitcoin became popular. Project timelines and whitepaper were detailed before this date à Less likely a scam.
Website www.evermarkets.com
Social http://t.me/evermarkets , https://twitter.com/evermarkets (June 2017), https://www.reddit.com/r/evermarkets/ (August 2017)
Whitepaper https://evermarkets.com/whitepaper.pdf v 0.81 Oct 31 2017

Github status TBA “We have a private beta on the rinkeby testnet. We will release code and beta closer to the public release of our tokens.”

Competitors Globitex, Bitmex (centralised), Bitfinex (Centralised)

Team

Jim Bai CEO - 3 year history of trading derivaties including managing a $1B macro book. He knows his markets. Degrees in CS and Computational Finance. GOOD but more managerial experience would have been better.

Mark Pimentel Head of Trading — Seems to be a programmer who specialised in algorithmic trading (bots). Was previously in other firms with a specialty in Quantitative Research and Trading. Degrees in Electrical Engineering at Carnegie . GOOD

Craig Austin CTO, Co-founder — 7 years head of research for Quantitative Engineering. Previously a programmer. BS, CS, Computational Finance at Carnegie

Jerald David — Chief operating officer — Was Chief Administrating Officer at GreenX, Director of Venture Management at CME Group (biggest derivatives group), Chief Marketing Officer for Dubai Mercantile Exchange
Was Vice President of Marketing for NY Mercantile Exchange and has a B.S. International Business, Franklin & Marshall College

Jack Tan — Chief of Asian Operations — It seems mostly his experiences have been as of a trader, so this is a big step up for Jack. Not so good for his role but he is surrounded by a good team

Eric Rogstad — Blockchain Dev — Has a degree in Comp Sci and Electrical Engineering. Has made a few apps as well and has done some trading. Not much particular blockchain experience listed on linked in but on his personal website he knows his stuff. Though more than one blockchain dev would be better .

Evan Rothmayer — Platform development — 13 years at Microsoft, Amazon, & other startups. Architect on DevOps and Cloud Engineering team of 130 engineers — big deal — he knows his shit. Lead developer on multiple “from scratch” product launches at Amazon. B.S. Computer Science, Iowa State University. He even has a patent

Ryan Hansen — BDM — Has worked with previous fintech startups to build them up from scratch.

Overall Team — 9/10

Advisors

Simon Kim

Head of a Korean blockchain investment company. Also advising for for Medibloc and ICON- big

Kevin Guo

Head of Dianrong — a P2P lending company. Most of his experience has been in financing startups. Not much noted regarding blockchain projects.

Howard Chao

Principal at Doon Capital where he invests in projects. Lists of projects are not specified.

Pang Chau

Experience in Quantitative finance — a good fit for this group and also has experience in dark pools which is what Evermarkets is based on.

Overall advisor score 8/10

Project and Whitepaper Analysis

What’s the EVR token for?

For collateral. So to trade a contract, you will need EVR rather than USD or BTC/ETH to place your order.
Holders of EVR can stake the token and receive a percentage of transaction fees. So there will be some sort of staking feature.
Holders can lend their EVR out to borrowers and receive interest. This is all done via smart contracts.

It’s not real time, it’s a periodic pro-rata call auction

Buys and sells are submitted by users, and then matched. However these orders are collected first and then matched LATER rather than instantaneously. The block or set of transactions are then processed by the matching engine and receives a fee.

What blockchains are used?

Ethereum for margin and ledger of transactions.
A separate DPoS chain will be made for order and crossing-related information to minimise load, known as the signatory chain

Why periodic call auctions?

Firstly, current APIs on exchanges are not fast enough for instantaneous transactions
Periodic or regular time-interval transactions eliminate speed advantages.
There will be minimal pumps or dumps over seconds to trigger margin calls.

Even the market engines can be ‘traded’

All EVR token holders can decide what the engines are rewarded or how they work. The aim is to bring harmony to the system and prevent gaming of the system by particular engines.

Marketing and Awareness Plan

Lack of liquidity from a lack of users is always an issue. Strategies are outlined below to attract users.

Creating a spinoff team will be created specifically to increase volume

Increase of volume is a priority rather than aiming for profits for at least 2 years. In terms of ROI expect price of the token to be steady, rather than go up in these 2 years.
Use dark pools to increase such volume and increase liquidity.

Achieving legitimacy

Gaining trust is a huge thing to do. Evermarkets are aiming to do this with keeping the platform simple and keeping things within the law.

Marketing

Marketing will be aimed at .. everyone. With 1% dedicated to marketing that’s about $500,000 total to spend. Is it enough money??? We hope so but more needs to be known about specific marketing strategies. All that is revealed is that dark pool members will be encouraged to join the group, thus improving liquidity and networking.

Allowing crypto and fiat pairs to initiate trades

The ecosystem relies on EVR token but BTC and fiat currencies will be allowed to start a contract. The final sale will be in EVR however.

Overall it sounds like the team are using their network contacts to build up the dark pool liquidity. I would like to know more about marketing specifics in the future. Score 5/10

Token Metrics — UNDER REVIEW BY TEAM AT TIME OF WRITING.

Hardcap 50,000 ETH or $50 million. Price to be fixed at time of sale. — A bit larger than what we like to see in any ICO

Price USD $0.15/EMX — This gives a total of token allocation of 333,333,333 tokens

Public allocation — 20% or 66,666,666 tokens

Team allocation — 9% with 4 year vesting period. Most other ICOs hold 1–2 years. This shows long term commitment.

Market Making — 60%

This is to improve liquidity of the platform and most tokens should be unable to be bought.

Overall score

8.5/10

I would like a smaller cap. Otherwise looks good.

MVP / Testnet

- Telegram channel admins claim that a testnet has been run, and that github code will be released closer to Token Generation Event.

Overall thoughts

Currently people are investing in blockchain infrastructure projects with solid teams.
Evermarkets seem to have a solid team, and probably what seems to be a MVP that hasn’t been shown yet.
There have been MANY other financial platforms launched and so there is much competition in the space
The Roadmap seems sensible and the depth of the team and potential contacts with the dark pools are a necessity for this platform to succeed. I don’t expect price rises until later this year. However this is good if you believe long term, as it would be steady growth rather than volatile up and down growth. The merging of institutional trading on blockchain and allowing lower fees may attract more and more traders. It’ll be interesting to see the space.
A testnet shown to investors before TGE will boost morale for investors before going into the ICO.
This is not a flip unless you have access to a bonus

Template based from thebitcoinpub with modifications
Report written for Crypto Round Table — www.cryptoroundtable.io

All commentary are of personal opinion and is not considered financial advice.