Hyperion ICO Review

What Hyperion is trying to solve:

The map locational data has been popularised over the past decade helping daily commuters or travelers like me to easily navigate from place A to B, however, over the years people have raised concerns over misuse of their location data, having no privacy of their location information.

Additionally, living in a fast-changing world, things do not stay the same for long and requires the frequent collection of information and update maps.
Inefficient methods of maintaining and acquiring mapping data for every town, village, and building have made data collection very expensive and not always on time or accurate.

At present, there are more than 2 million apps in circulation. Most of these apps are based on major map services from Google maps, Baidu, Tencent etc.

Some popular cases of this centralized control of maps and misleading location data:

– Your Location information is sold to companies : 
Google was fined 4.3 Billion euros for keeping your location history even though the function was switched off. This collected information was sold to companies which targeted custom marketing and promotion to individual customers. Read more here >> Google lawsuit

– Google Maps recently made its map API more difficult and expensive to use, resulting in custom maps less sustainable or even unfeasible for the people who made it.

– This one everyone would have experience. Did you ever complain that the route shown by google maps is not really the best or shortest route? “A Woman Almost Died In The Desert Because Google Made Up A Road”

“Hyperion” is on the path to transforming how maps are made, reviewed or operated by creating their own blockchain called “Mapchain”.

In Hyperion, users will have full control and power of their data. By sharing their location data, they get rewarded in tokens. Also, anyone with a smartphone can create map data and get incentivized in the building and maintenance of the maps.

The team believes that their innovative solutions and community incentive program, they can achieve a sustainable, decentralized and self-governed map economy of the world.

Growth potential in mapping & location services:

By building ‘MapChain’, Hyperion targets to disrupt this centralized control and make it easier for users to access and utilize maps in Hyperion. If successful, Hyperion will generate more than 1 million Dapps or Apps, making it the world’s largest underlying public chain.

As per the report from “ReportsWeb” publication, the Global Mobile Mapping market is estimated to be $10.28 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach $39.8 billion by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 21.3%.

Growing usage of mobile devices, enhanced network connectivity and rising growth for mapping analytics are some of the predominant growth drivers for the market.

According to a report from “Markets and Markets”, the location-based services market is expected to grow to $77.8 Billion by 2021.

• 66% of enterprises rank Location Intelligence as either critical or very important to ongoing revenue growth strategies.
• Enterprises comprised of between 1K and 5K employees say Location Intelligence is critically important to their business success.
• Location-based marketing and location services saw greater adoption in 2016 -2017 and 2018 predictions forecast this to be the year businesses take a “location-first” approach in their marketing, mobile and growth strategy.

Overall grade: B

Pros:

• Given the current market conditions where investors are staying away from ICOs and many projects have failed to even reach soft-cap for project funding, Hyperion has gained good interest from venture capital or institutional investors including Hayak, Dfund, Float Capital, Du Capital, Biaozhun Capital, and Collinstar Capital.
• The co-founders have successfully built and grown their previous startups giving confidence that they have good entrepreneur skillsets.
• Isaac Zhang, the Chief Executive Officer of Hyperion previous startup ‘Mapxus’ has already built one of the largest decentralized indoor mapping platforms. This experience from Mapxus, its innovative technology, and map data could be made available for Hyperion project development.
• A project of this undertaking needs time but Hyperion will be delivering usable elements of their service/product offering throughout 2019. With an incremental delivery focus in mind, the excitement on the project may continue.

Cons:

• The consensus algorithm in MapChain will use BFT + dPOS to produce blocks making it scalable, but will also make it somewhat centralized. This, however, may be needed to enforce a consistent governance structure for ensuring map data accuracy.
• For such level of the undertaking, we believe for startups to bring services to the market, it is imperative that the company become more vocal on their values and objective, and for that startups need to ensure that community is well engaged and informed about developments and what the startup is offering. A well informed and engaged community could contribute/help in the ecosystem development. So far, we have not seen much of this happening.
• Uncertain market conditions.
• Not completely transparent about the token metrics.

Official channels: Website |Telegram