ICOrating

GOLOS Project Review (golos.io)

ICO dates (01.11.2016 – 01.12.2016)

Web: icorating.com

Email: info@icorating.com

Twitter: @IcoRating

1. PROJECT DESCRIPTION 3

2. BUSINESS MODEL 4

3. THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF THE PLATFORM 7 Tokens 7

GOLOS 7 GOLOS POWER 7 Gold backed by Golos (GBG) 8

Voting system 9 Authors rewards 9 Curation rewards 9 Flags 10 Delayed Payouts 10 Payout Distribution 10

Consensus Algorithm 11 Mining in Golos 11 Transaction Fees 12 Performance and Scalability 12 Censorship 12

New Golos features not mentioned in the documentation 13 Proposed Changes to the Steemit Economy 13

Pro & Cons 13 Original innovations presented by Golos that were absent on Steemit: 14

Code 15 Starting the Golos Network 15 ICO 16

Bounty 17 Escrow 18

4. TEAM 19 Proof of developer 19 Experience 19 Management 19

Dmitry Starodubcev (LinkedIn) - Economics 19 Marina Guryeva (LinkedIn) - Partnerships 20 Konstantin Lomashuk (LinkedIn) - Business Development 20 Vitaly Lvov (LinkedIn) - Finance and Audit 20

Tech 21 Valery Litvin (LinkedIn) - Blockchain development 21

Advisors 22 Valentine Zavgorodnev (LinkedIn) 22

Conclusion 22

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5. LEGAL 23 Guarantees to investors 23

6. SOCIAL MEDIA 24 Feedback 24

The Crypto-community 24 Announcement 24

Bitcointalk 24 Website 25

7. SUMMARIES 25 Advantages: 25 Disadvantages: 25 Rating assessment 26 Rationale 26

Advantages: 26 Disadvantages: 26

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1. PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Golos is a decentralized social network for bloggers and journalists. This project was born in the form of a licensed copy (aka offshoot) from the project Steemit, inheriting from all its primary features and opportunities for writers, bloggers, journalists and readers. The main difference between Golos and Steemit is that Golos is aimed at the Russian-speaking community.

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2. BUSINESS MODEL

Golos is a Steemit-based social media platform, focused on a Russian-speaking audience. Golos’ concept repeats the Steemit model. It allows users to capitalize on posting unique material. Golos contains nothing new in terms of ideology or business model; it’s a traditional franchisee. Consider the project from two points of view: a) from the point of view of a creator who is planning to post their content and profit from it and b) from an investor’s point of view who is planning to capitalize on the growth of the platform’s popularity and increase Golos’ token price. What is the creator’s point of view? If you look at the results of successful posts on Steemit, in which donations can reach several hundred dollars, you get the impression that Russian-speaking bloggers and authors now will be able to start making reasonable money for their creativity.

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At this point it’s necessary to slow down and understand that Steemit is a multi-language platform, and English-speaking users are the majority. We should also remember that English is used all over the world, as a business language: this explains the high levels of income. The Russian-speaking audience is much smaller. Golos’ founders write that Steemit’s number of Russian-speaking users does not exceed 3%, which does not give a wide opportunity to profit from posting material in Russian. Nevertheless, adapting this service for use by Russian-speaking users rather than losing them outright due to lack of localized support, is a logical move. However, let’s take a moment to consider the business model of providing authors with stable revenues from donations. The stability of this business model has not yet been confirmed within the Western market or the Russian market. The project comes under a new type of monetization wherein people have to volunteer to donate money to the authors based exclusively on the emotional responses they get from content. The long-term success of this format of content monetization among a Russian-speaking audience has not yet been proven successful by anyone. At the moment, it’s difficult to evaluate the success of giving donations to authors while the platform runs in its current beta-testing mode. This is due to the fact that the price of tokens has not been established, and the opportunity to earn just by content creation seems uncertain. Now let's try to look at the attractiveness of this project from the point of view of an investor. Again it makes sense to look at the Steemit results, or rather, the value rate of Steemit tokens.

It’s obvious that, apart from the specific ‘hills’ in value, (which ultimately can be ignored since they are an extremely speculative) Steemit shows absolutely no bullish activity. Given the growth of the platform’s popularity, a lack of serious movement in the token’s price (except for July’s speculative slides), this looks strange:

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In other words, in terms of investment, Steemit hasn’t brought in huge results. At the same time, the tokens’ rate does not show negative behavior - rather, it’s pretty stable. Given the scale of the service and the fact that currently its audience is mainly from the crypto community, when it goes beyond these limits, an influx of new, outside users could push up the rate. In this sense, the project looks very attractive in the long term. Back to Golos. In this case, the size of the audience is much smaller, but it has the same kind of users. Since the Russian-speaking market is less used to paying for content than Western audience, there’s not a lot of reasons for the company to expects results different from Steemit in the medium term. In the long term, however, there are chances for the tokens to rise as the platform continues to grow with its audience. In both cases, Steemit and Golos want to bring revolutionary changes to the media industry, and competition from traditional segment players is very strong. If we look at the Russian-speaking segment of the crypto-community (Golos main audience from the beginning) there are essentially no alternatives to Golos, or that come with its features. In that regard, we consider that this offers some stability to the project in the short or possibly medium term. Afterwards, everything will depend on the activity of the Russian-speaking community. The project has a good chance to show, if not explosive growth, at least a steady, positive dynamic for the long term.

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3. THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF THE PLATFORM

Golos is a blockchain database that supports community-building and social interaction with cryptocurrency rewards. The platform is based on a blockchain called Graphene II, which is used in BitShares. Technically, Golos is an offshoot of Steemit. All specifications, with the exception of some details, such as in Steemit, Steemit Inc., will provide technical support to this project, as well as provide access to codes under the license agreement.

Tokens Golos like Steemit will use several tokens to the platform:

● GOLOS (ГОЛОС), in the Steemit it is STEEM ● Golos Power/GP (Сила Голоса), in the Steemit it is Steem Power/SP ● Gold-backed by Golos (Золотой), in the Steemit it is Steem Dollar /SMD

GOLOS GOLOS is the fundamental unit of account on the Golos blockchain. All other tokens derive their value from the value of GOLOS. Generally speaking GOLOS should be held for short periods of time when liquidity is needed. Someone looking to enter or exit the Golos platform will have to buy or sell GOLOS. Once GOLOS has been purchased it should be converted into Golos Power or Gold backed by Golos to mitigate the impact of dilution over the long-term. GOLOS is constantly increasing in supply by 100% per year due to non-GBG incentives. Someone who holds GOLOS without converting it to GP is diluted by approximately 0.19% per day.

GOLOS POWER Because Golos wants to encourage long-term growth, it is hardwired to allocate 9 GOLOS to Golos Power (GP) stakeholders for every 1 GOLOS it creates to fund growth through contribution incentives. Over time this drives the ratio of the total GOLOS value of Golos Power balances to the total of GOLOS balances toward 9:1. (It seems likely that the ratio will be somewhat greater than 9:1 due to continued net Powering Up of newly printed GOLOS.) It also means that long-term holders are almost completely protected from the ‘dilution’ (inflation) that was incurred during the start-up to fund growth. GP can only be converted back to GOLOS over 2 years via 104 equal weekly payments. ‘1 GP’ can be viewed as a share in a pool of GOLOS . The network automatically adds GOLOS

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to the pool every block. At any time users can convert their GOLOS into GP at the same ratio as GOLOS in the vesting pool to total GP. Converting GOLOS to GP does not ‘dilute’ the value of existing holders of SP. Likewise, every time GP is converted back to GOLOS it will be done at the current ratio. Individuals are guaranteed to have more GOLOS in the future than they have when they first convert from GOLOS to GP. GP balances are non-transferrable and non-divisible except via the automatically recurring conversion requests. This means that GP cannot be easily traded on cryptocurrency exchanges. GP is a requirement for voting ‘for’ or ‘against’ content. This means that GP is an access token that grants its holders exclusive powers within the Golos platform. Transferring from GOLOS to GP is referred to as “Powering Up” while transferring from GP to Golos is referred to as “Powering Down.” For example, one can “power down” their GOLOS over a period of two years, but one can “power up” their GOLOS instantly.

Gold backed by Golos (GBG) Gold backed by GOLOS were designed as an attempt to bring stability to the world of cryptocurrency and to the individuals who use the Golos network. One GBG is at a cost of 1 milligrams of gold. Initially this role was offered the Russian ruble, but this idea has been refused, as the Ruble is undergoing high inflation. Russian-speaking users not only from Russia will use Golos. Steemit can also use the Steemit Dollar, the US dollar equivalent. GBG are created by a mechanism similar to convertible notes, which are often used to fund startups. In the startup world, convertible notes are short-term debt instruments that can be converted to ownership at a rate determined in the future, typically during a future funding round. A blockchain based token can be viewed as ownership in the community whereas a convertible note can be viewed as a debt denominated in any other commodity or currency. The terms of the convertible note allow the holder to convert to the backing token with a minimum notice at the fair market price of the token. Creating token-convertible-gold enables blockchains to grow their network effect while maximizing the return for token holders. Creating GBG requires a combination of a reliable price feed, rules to prevent abuse, and liquidity. Providing a reliable price feed involves three factors: a) minimizing the impact of an incorrect feed, b) maximizing the cost of producing an incorrect feed, and c) minimizing the importance of timing. More about this can be read in the Whitepaper. GBG pays holders interest. All debt imparts risk to the lender. Someone who holds GBG without redeeming it is effectively lending the community the value of 1 milligrams of gold. They are trusting that, at some point in the future, someone will be willing to buy the GBG from them for a 1 milligrams of gold or that there will be speculators and investors willing to buy the GOLOS they convert it into. GBG can be converted into GOLOS, and conversion lasts a week. Also GBG can be exchanged on GOLOS and back again within its internal stock exchange (built into GOLOS’s

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blockchain) by other users of this network. As planned by the developers, GBG will be traded on the stock exchanges at market value of one milligram of gold +/- 1%.

Voting system Golos encourages authors and those who vote for the content.

Authors rewards Payments to the author depends on the number votes for his post, as well as how much Golos Power is on the voters accounts. By giving their votes, the voters did not spend their tokens. This makes it possible to vote more easily without experiencing any kind of ‘psychological pressure’, in such cases as when a user has paid for their vote. Awards for authors formed from the pool payments for a day are divided according to the number of votes. For those that have been given a voice, the more GP a voter has, then all the more significant contribution they will make. When calculating the "weight" of the voice a quadratic function used. The weight of a vote is measured in VEST. In other words, the reward is proportional to votes squared rather than the votes. In Golos, unlike Steemit, a quadratic function may not be introduced, but a smoother version, which will mitigate the difference in strength between the holders of a large number of GP and ordinary users. When a post receives a payout, it takes the form of 50% GBG and 50% GP. Golos Power gives the user increased voting and transaction power, while the GBG gives the user an immediate benefit in a stable currency.

Curation rewards The system also encourages those who vote for articles and comments. Members who voted for an article are called curators. Curators receive up to 25% of the award for the article. Сurator award are dependent on the number of voters, their place in the queue and the amount of Golos Power curators. A major component to minimize abuse is in the form of rate-limiting voting. Individual users can only read and evaluate so many work items per day. Any attempt to vote more frequently than this is a sign of automation and potential abuse. Through rate limiting, stakeholders who vote more frequently have each vote count less than stakeholders who vote less frequently.

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The charts above shows how a user’s voting power decreases every time they vote and then regenerates as time passes without voting. These charts use nominal time unit and could be made to scale to any targeted voting rate. Note that voting power rapidly drops off during periods of continuous voting, and then slowly recovers.

Flags As a means to combat spam, plagiarism and bots in Golos is a function that marks such content. Members point out such content by pressing the flag button. If an article or comment collect more flags than the votes (in VESTs), it disappears, and the user that receives the flags suffers a drop in ranking.

Delayed Payouts To further prevent abuse, all payouts are delayed a stake-weighted average of 24 hours from the time each vote was cast. This ensures that large stakeholders cannot snipe payouts by voting at the last second before other voters have a chance to negate the potential abuse. Once a payout is made to the user all votes are reset to 0. After the first payment of the next payment comes only after a month. After that vote for this post anymore.

Payout Distribution One of the primary goals of Golos’s reward system is to produce the best discussions on the internet. Each and every year 10% of the market capitalization of Golos is distributed to users submitting, voting on, and discussing content. In Bitcoin value, this could be as much as $1.75 million dollars per day given to top contributors. Actual distribution will depend upon the voting patterns of users.

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Consensus Algorithm Golos is working on a combined algorithm PoS and PoW. For PoS mining, delegates who are chosen by users respond. Each user can vote for the selected delegate. When an account votes, the amount of VEST it has is considered, with more VEST carrying more weight, compared to an account with less. With Golos, block production is done in rounds. Each round 21 witnesses are selected to create and sign blocks of transactions. Nineteen (19) of these witnesses are selected by approval voting, one is selected by a computational proof-of-work, and one is timeshared by every witness that didn’t make it into the top 19 proportional to their total votes. The 21 active witnesses are shuffled every round to prevent any one witness from constantly ignoring blocks produced by the same witness placed before. This process is designed to provide the best reliability while ensuring that everyone has the potential to participate in block production regardless of whether they are popular enough to get voted to the top. People have three options to overcome censorship by the top 19 elected witnesses: patiently wait in line with everyone else not in the top 19, purchase enough computational power to provide proof of working faster than others, or purchase more GP to improve voting power. Generally speaking, applying censorship is a good way for elected witnesses to lose their job and therefore, it is unlikely to be a real problem on the Golos network. Because the active witnesses are known in advance, Golos is able to schedule witnesses to produce blocks every 3 seconds. Witnesses synchronize their block production via the NTP protocol. A variation of this algorithm has been in use by the BitShares network for over a year, where it has been proven to be reliable.

Mining in Golos Traditional proof of work blockchains combine block production with of proof of solving work. Because the process of solving proof of work takes an unpredictable amount of time, the result is unpredictable block production times. Golos aims to have consistent and reliable block production every 3 seconds with almost no potential for forks. To achieve this, Golos separates block production from solving of proof of work. When a miner solves a proof of work for Golos, they broadcast a transaction containing the work. The next scheduled witness includes the transaction into the blockchain. When the transaction is included the miner is added to the queue of miners scheduled to produce blocks. Each round one miner is popped from the queue and included in the active set of witnesses. The miner gets paid when they produce a block at the time they are scheduled.

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The difficulty of the proof of work doubles every time the queue length grows by 4. Because one miner is popped from the queue every round, and each round takes 21 * 3 = 63 seconds, the difficulty automatically halves if no proof of work is found in no more than 21 * 3 * 4 = 252 seconds. Golos miners are paid in Golos Power (GP). GP is liquidated through a two-year process of “Powering Down.” This means that miners must wait for a long time, many months, before sufficient mining rewards have been powered down to allow them to recover the cost of electricity and computational resources. The powering down process discourages creation of mining pools because the pool operator would have to spread payouts over years.

Transaction Fees At Golos there is no commission for transferring tokens between accounts. This is accomplished by a bandwidth-based, rate-limiting algorithm system. A Golos account-based system with publicly known balances simplifies the implementation of the bandwidth-based rate limiting algorithm. Any account with a balance below the minimum required to transact once per week would be unable to transact. This implies that all new accounts should be funded with at least this minimum balance. So that when users sign up in the system, they receive a certain amount of GP from the registrar. In order to prevent the registration of a many of accounts by one user registration introduced through existing social networks, one Golos account for a single user VK.com or Facebook user.

Performance and Scalability The Golos network is built upon Graphene, the same technology that powers BitShares. Graphene has been publicly demonstrated sustaining over 1000 transactions per second on a distributed test network. Graphene can easily scale to 10,000 or more transactions per second with relatively straightforward improvements to server capacity and communication protocols.

Censorship Golos is a decentralized network that is operated by miners in jurisdictions around the world. All user actions are publicly recorded on the blockchain, and can be publicly verified. This means that there is no single entity that can censor content that is valued by GOLOS holders. Individual websites such as golos.io may censor content on their particular site, but content published on the blockchain is inherently broadcast traffic and mirrors all around the world may continue to make it available.

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New Golos features not mentioned in the documentation As in the last update on Steemit, Golos added new features:

● Introduced system accounts rankings on the number of votes and flags ● Added Promotion of the articles with GBG ● Added the ability to assign any account as the account for password recovery ● Added the ability to repost any article on your page ● Added the ability to refuse a reward for the article or get reward completely in GP

Proposed Changes to the Steemit Economy November 5, 2016 Steemit introduced a new economic model, which is going to start using hardfork in the second half of November. Updated Whitepaper to be released in December. Here is part of Steemit’s developers appeal to the community: “We would like feedback on upgrading the network to support a new token production model that we believe is more attractive to more people.” Summary of Proposed Changes:

● Set a fixed instantaneous annual creation rate of 9.5% from all sources (except Steem Dollars conversion)

● Allocate 75% of the created Steem to the Reward Fund. ● Allocate 15% of the created Steem to the Vesting Fund as interest on Steem Power. ● Allocate 10% of the created Steem to the Witnesses. ● Witness rewards would be rebalanced such that the top 19 would earn 1/29th of the

witness rewards, the runner up witnesses -would share 5/29th, and the miners would share 5/29th.

● Witnesses and miners would be paid in STEEM rather than Steem Power. All votes for witnesses would expire after 3 months, this would remove the incumbent advantage and require people to continuously evaluate and vote for witnesses.

● To support more equal opportunity mining the mining algorithm would be updated to use Equihash (similar to zcash).

● Reducing the Steem Power holding period to a minimum of three months.

Pro & Cons All changes to the protocol impact how individuals perceive the value of Steem. Under the proposed changes Steem Power holders may gain significant liquidity and reduce their

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long-term risk exposure, both of these things could add value to Steem Power. The STEEM token may become much more appealing to hold when the inflation rate is imperceptible impact on the daily volatility. Those who wish to exit the platform would be able to leave faster through powering down than they could by abusing their voting power. Greater liquidity means faster price discovery and greater market confidence in the price and market cap. Steem can now transfer from weak hands to strong hands. In the short term these changes could cause the market to reprice Steemit based upon the relative value of the short term increase in supply relative to the benefits of reduced inflation. Author/curation rewards in terms of STEEM would be reduced by this change in the short term, but would be much higher in the long term. Witness pay would be reduced in the short-term, but would be the same as the long-term plan. More witnesses would be able to be involved even if they are not in the Top 19, this could increase diversity and competition in the witness pool. Currently Steem Power holders are earning a slight negative inflation adjusted return on investment. Under the new model the market could discover a new equilibrium between holding VESTS vs STEEM which may result in Steem Power having a positive inflation adjusted return on investment. Changes will not be made without a buy-in from the majority of witnesses and steem holders. Ned & Dan, Founders of Steemit These changes are planned to enter into Golos after the results in Steemit are evaluated. Technically, it will be carried out through hardfork, which will take place if the majority of delegates support it. At the moment, the delegates agreed to this change.

Original innovations presented by Golos that were absent on Steemit:

● Users can add avatars that will be displayed next to their posts and comments.

● Multi-language support, currently available in English, Russian and Ukrainian

● Choice of currency which will be displayed below the articles. GBG will be automatically converted into the selected currency. At present users can choose from eight different currencies

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Code The full source code opened on github for public access Technical documentation:

● Wiki ● White Paper

Starting the Golos Network The Golos was launched on the 18th of October. Running has been successful on the first day was more than 50 active nodes. Accounts from Steemit, which had more than 7 (SP + STEEM) and made at least one action in a network or just had a 100 (STEEM + SP) have been transferred to Golos. These accounts can log in to Golos, using a username and password from a Steamit account. At the same time, on their balance sheets Golos will be credited a reward proportional to the balance, which has been with Steemit at the time of copying (29 September 2016). Charging will take place after the ICO, currently on those accounts credited with 5 tokens. Users do not receive a reward for their articles and posts, but after the completion of ICO awards for posts will be credited to their accounts in accordance with how much money will be collected as a result of ICO and the market value of GOLOS. Distribution has not yet occurred. Therefore, until December 4th, the primary benefits are distributed by a vote of the Delegates and Founders.

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ICO Because of legal risks, the initial STEEM distribution was carried out through mining. The Golos team decided to use a crowdsale in Bitcoins as a major way for initial distribution of tokens. Bitcoins obtained by the crowdsale will be directed to the development of the protocol and its protection. ICO will begin on November 1 and will last until 4 December.

In the Genesis block on the account cyberfounder will be created 43,306,176 GOLOS.

In the first hours after the start of Golos, the means will be transferred from the cyberfounder account to the target accounts in accordance with a certain structure of distribution:

● 60% on crowdsale (27 072 000 GOLOS) ● 10% to the participants of the original Steamit (4 512 000 GOLOS) ● 10% to Cyber • Fund for the financing of Golos start (4 512 000 GOLOS) ● 8.98% reserve for the development (4 051 776 GOLOS) ● 7% founding team reward (3 158 400 GOLOS)

Also during the 47 days after the start of the system and prior to the start VESTing (during preparation and holding the crowdsale) system will be issued 1,813,824 GOLOS, namely:

● 3% to delegates for the bootstrap of a network, formation of a backup node system ● 1.02% bounty to the authors and curators for the preparation and promotional

crowdsale

Thus, in the first 47 days of existence of the system will be issued 45,120,000 GOLOS.

All distribution implemented in the Golos Power (GP), with the exception of exchanges accounts.

27072000 GOLOS will be distributed to all crowdsale participants in proportion invested by Bitcoin. During the crowdsale the following bonus system will apply:

● 25% in the first 15 days ● 20% from 16 days to 18 days ● 15% from 19 days to 21 days ● 10% from 22 days to 24 days ● 5% from 25 days to 27 days ● 0% from 28 days to 30 days

On the first day of crowdsale is unlimited. If within 24 hours after the start of crowdsale will not exceed the sum of 5000 BTC, crowdsale will continue for 29 days or until the volume of the collected funds will not reach 5,000 BTC. While crowdsale of the limit on the sale of tokens per account - 100 BTC.

Bitcoins obtained by crowdsale will be used as follows:

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● 70% development protocol and application ● 10% license fee Steemit Inc. in accordance with the license agreement ● 10% founding team reward ● 10% Cyber • Fund for the financing of Golos start

Bounty

There is 3 types of bounty:

● for the elimination of critical errors in the Golos blockchain ● for the removal of the web client vulnerabilities ● for the identification of critical vulnerabilities in golos.io site infrastructure

Each of these bounty has its own criteria and incentives.

The network went through two public testnet, then launch of a public network followed. The Bounty program is already producing its first results.

● User @penguin was paid 22,500 GOLOS in the form of Golos Power, who fixed a bug in the miners’ code (Golos and Steemit), because of which the PoW mining on multi-core processors was not effective.

● User @abit was paid 22,500 GOLOS in the form of Golos Power, who offered a solution to a problem in the economy with the number of VESTs (this was discovered in the first public testnet.)

● User @steemitmarket will soon receive a reward for finding a critical vulnerability.

Out of interest he began to test the network’s stability against spam attacks. He made 16 accounts and wrote 16kB comments. In one night alone he increased the blockchain by 134mB while at that moment the current blockchain was less than 3 GB. To find out how serious the potential problem was, he decided to see how much harm one new user’s account could cause. In this latest test, he was able to overload about 20% of the network within the course of an hour. He was able to work around the time limit for editing posts by changing the file size of his content by 60kB, 4-8 times a minute. In other words if a block is 64kB spread over 3 seconds, then, from 5 accounts each, one can completely overload the network. Even after an hour @steemitmarket didn’t come across any limitations or system blocks. Delegates from Golos and Steemit quickly reacted to the problem: the bug was discovered in the code, documented, and a new solution requiring a hardfork was implemented.

Once again this shows that Golos’ development, in close partnership with Steemit, will be advantageous to both networks.

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Escrow

In order to ensure the transparency and demonstrability of the crowdsale, the following Genesis address will be used: 3CWicRKHQqcj1N6fT1pC9J3hUzHw1KyPv3. This address will not be used for direct transfer of money during the crowdsale. Instead, it will be used to redirect the Bitcoins are allocated to a unique address, which will be generated for each participant of the crowdsale. All Bitcoins sent to this address will be considered as direct sponsorship of the project. Thus, the funds collected during the crowdsale will be collected demonstrably and transparently. The Genesis address is a multi-signed account 4 of 6, which is controlled by 5 of the 8 founders + 1 independent signatory. Almost the entire team works in the cyber•Fund; transferring money from the escrow address without an escrow signature is not possible. According to available data, an escrow is one of the investors, which differs from the habitual practices of ICO to attract independent escrow. As it turns out, this escrow is used more for show (aka that it exists), rather than to save and prevent non-targeted use of funds collected during the crowdsale. On the whole, the cyber•Fund is a powerful organization. Their project, Satoshi•Pie, has a little less than $1 million; it’s possible they considered attracting an independent signatory as unnecessary.

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4. TEAM

Proof of developer The team is not anonymous and active on many social media channels.

Experience All the information is given according to the description of the official website, public sources and team members’ LinkedIn profiles. Most of the team members also work at the crypto-investment platform cyber•Fund. Some of them also share a previous workplace: Department of Science, Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship of Moscow.

Management

Dmitry Starodubcev (LinkedIn) - Economics

● He has an audit background, working as an Analyst, Auditor and Head of Audit in few companies. He also worked at Department of Science, Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship of Moscow as Head of Strategic Planning and Analytics and Head of Investments support & Special projects.

● Dmitry co-founded Kidlabs.ru, an online store for educational toys which is now defunct.

● Currently he’s an Architect at cyber•Fund. Github

Joined on 22 Sep 2010 Active since the end of 2014. Mostly works with cyber•Fund projects, but has commits in other projects. Rating: 761 star; 536 contributions during the last year.

He has a analytical and audit experience. His only recorded blockchain experience is with the cyber•Fund.

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Marina Guryeva (LinkedIn) - Partnerships

● She’s currently a CEO at cyber•Fund, where she’s in charge of Business Development, Marketing, and Investment Relations Blockchain Assets Analysis.

● She’s also an Acting Director of Innovations Office at National Research University — Higher School of Economics in Russia.

● She previously worked as a Head of Strategic Planning and Investments at the Office Department of Science, Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship of Moscow

● She also has experience in Public Relations, working at several PR-related jobs for several years.

Github

Joined on 19 May 2014

Active since the September of 2016, writes Golos FAQ (just wiki, no code).

Rating: 0 star; 43 contributions during the last year She has a Public Relations experience. Her only recorded blockchain experience is with the cyber•Fund.

Konstantin Lomashuk (LinkedIn) - Business Development

● He’s a Co-founder at cyber•Fund. ● He’s also a Co-founder, Advisera and Architect at Dao.Casino, a blockhain-based

gamnbling platform that is preparing to a crowdsale. ● Previously he was a Co-founder at Loveberry, an apparently a frozen yogurt cafe and

a broker at Re&Solution, a real estate consultancy company. Github

Joined on 18 Sep 2014 Active since the September 2016, when he started working with cyber•Fund. Mostly writes bag reports and project documentation.

Rating: 13 star; 38 contributions during the last year. He has a business and blockchain experience.

Vitaly Lvov (LinkedIn) - Finance and Audit

● He’s a Co-founder at cyber•Fund.

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● He’s also a Co-founder, Advisera and Architect at Dao.Casino, a blockhain-based gamnbling platform that is preparing a crowdsale.

● Previously he co-founded Kidlabs.ru and worked as a Consultant of Strategic Planning and Analytics and Head of Strategic Planning and Analytics at the Department of Science, Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship of Moscow

Github

Joined on 19 Jul 2011 Active since the June 2015, when he started working with cyber•Fund. Mostly writes bag reports and project documentation.

Rating: 32 star; 683 contributions during the last year. He has an audit experience. His only recorded blockchain experience is with the cyber•Fund.

Tech

Valery Litvin (LinkedIn) - Blockchain development

● He’s a Full-stack developer at cyber•Fund. ● Previously he worked as a Ruby on Rails developer at datarockets, an applications

development company and as a Network engineer at Revival Technology LLC, a data recovery company.

● He also worked as an auditor for 2 years and 9 months. Github

Joined on 29 Apr 2012 Active since November 2014. Mostly works with cyber•Fund projects

Rating: 108 star; 226 contributions during the last year. According to his LinkedIn account his expertise includes Ethereum, Bitcoin and Blockchain technology. His only recorded blockchain experience is with the cyber•Fund. The team also includes Mihail Paley, a Front-end developer and Alexey Frumin, a Back-end developer. Unfortunately there’s no information about their experience on the official website and they have almost empty LinkedIn accounts, so there’s no information about their background. Here are their Githubs: Alexey Frumin

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Joined on 14 Mar 2012 Active since 2014, writes Golos FAQ (usually writed his own code or forks), since 2015 actively works with cyber•Fund

Rating: 21 star; 1,664 contributions during the last year

Mihail Paley Joined on 11 Apr 2013 Active since the end of 2015. Since mid-2016 works with cyber•Fund.

Rating: 64 star; 90 contributions during the last year.

Advisors

Valentine Zavgorodnev (LinkedIn)

● He has an extensive tech background, working as Software Engineer in various companies, including two blockchain-related: Bitshares is a crypto-tokens platform and Cryptonomex which is a company that works with the custom blockchain development, blockchain application development and blockchain technology consulting.

● Currently he works as a Software/UX Engineer at Steemit, a company that works on a platform similar to Golos.

Github

Joined on 12 Oct 2008 Active since 2013, more active every year. participates in various blockchain projects.

Rating: 167 star; 484 contributions during the last year. He has a software and blockchain experience, that is closely related to the Golos development.

Conclusion The team already has an experience in developing and managing a blockchain platform called, cyber•Fund. They also have a support from members of Steemit team. It’s more difficult to evaluate the experience of Front-end and Back-end developers, since there’s very little information about their background Activity

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Activity The team is active on Telegram, Chat and Bitcointalk, answering most users’ questions. We were able to talk to the founders over chat and email and they gave answers to our questions. The team didn’t give any text interviews about the Golos project, but they are very active on their YouTube channel, streaming daily Q&As that last from 1 to 4 hours. They also have a blog on their own platform. The team has participated in few events and conferences, including: Bitcoin & Blockchain Meetup Minsk, Russian FinTech Meetup and Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Kiev.

5. LEGAL

The company is registered in Belize as Graciola Systems Inc. - IBC (International Business Company). An IBC is a legal entity incorporated under specific legislation which is free from all local taxes (except small fixed annual fees). No reorganizations are planned after the end of the ICO.

Guarantees to investors

Sale of the tokens is regulated by the sale and purchase agreement, under which Graciola Systems Inc. is obliged to transfer tokens to investors.

According to the team, they plan to create a set of rules for budget planning and allocation of funds. The Board of Directors of the company will keep a multisig account and the decisions about the allocation of collected Bitcoins will be taken by delegates.

Also, according to the team, even if they don’t collect any funds, they still will be committed to “bring the network up to the first payments”, however the only guarantee for this is their reputation.

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6. SOCIAL MEDIA

Feedback

The Crypto-community Golos has only one thread on Bitcointalk in Russian. The project has considerable attention, getting 944 replies throughout one month and 17 days (Nov, 9 2016). The project has received mostly polarizing feedback from users, many expressing concerns about the business-model and exclusive focus on a Russian audience. Marketing Golos doesn’t have a dedicated marketing team however they have a community manager. There is a bounty program, but the reward are given only for the elimination of critical errors. Media The company has a presence on a few social media platforms

● Facebook ● Twitter ● VK

Community. It is difficult to say at the moment as though the project is already hase active users, there’s a lot of polarizing comments on Bitcointalk. Media attention. Wings has received moderate attention from various crypto media outlets including Econo Times, CryptoCoinsNews, Coinews, Coinfox and Forklog.

Announcement

Bitcointalk

● Account - Full Member ● No Self-Moderated Announcement Thread

Website

● There is a detailed and professionally designed website.

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● There is a project wiki. ● There is a brief and general roadmap and financial plan. According to the team,

decision about the usage of funds will be made by the delegates and will need an approval from the community. However, at the moment that’s just an idea that might be changed.

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7. SUMMARIES

Advantages:

● The whole business model is a licensed copy of the English-language platform Steemit, which has already proved its viability and stability;

● Promising blockchain and strong team that works in close collaboration with Steemit Inc.

Disadvantages: ● The lack of clearly defined innovation in the business model of the platform; ● A lot of competitors (mostly indirect though) in the traditional segment of the Internet

(websites for the placement and distribution of digital content); ● The lack of significant growth of the token’s value for the parent project (Steemit).

This is likely to be projected on Golos tokens and can inhibit their growth in the future;

● The entire content monetization model relies solely on the voluntary desire of the users to donate money to the creators;

Rating assessment Our evaluation for Golos is “Stable”. If the company will do the following, we may assign a higher rating for the project:

● The team should add to the platform additional functionality with a strong innovative character;

● Also the medium-term growth of Golos tokens value should happen, which will show growth platform popularity;

Rationale The founders of the project chose the conservative way of creating their own service. They took the infrastructure and the idea of international platform Steemit, which has already proven its stability and viability.

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Advantages:

● proven and reliable technical background, which has already been tested in real conditions;

● automated marketing component of Steemit, which easily made Golos known among Russian-speaking audience;

● a ready to use and fully developed financial model which is already well-known to most of the original audience;

Disadvantages:

● the project doesn’t have a revolutionary feature (venture capital component), which would give it the future potential to create an entirely new kind of business;

● rather conservative market segment that is filled with a large number of competitors from the traditional industry;

● narrow audience; ● Russian users will look at the dynamics of the parent project Steemit and project

these results onto Golos, which creates additional pressure; As a result, this is a reliable and tested project according to all major assessments. Market law states that the higher the risk, the higher the profitability. In this case, the risk is very low (relative to the rest of the blockchain projects), and in this regard, the potential profitability of the project is rather conservative than a high-risk venture. However, the focus on just a Russian audience creates additional pressure.

The project may be generally interesting for investors who want to participate in the development of blockchain technology, but who are not willing to take massive risks. Therefore, the potential level of return on investment in the project will be lower than more innovative start-ups demonstrate.

The information contained in the document is for informational purposes only. The views expressed in this document are solely personal stance of the ICOrating team, based on data from open access and information that developers provided to the team through Skype, email or other means of communication.

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Our goal is to increase the transparency and reliability of the young ICO market and to minimize the risk of fraud. We appreciate feedback with constructive comments, suggestions and ideas on how to make the analysis more comprehensive and informative.

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