Drep (DREP) ICO Review & Analysis – Drep ICO Review

DREP

A Decentralized Reputation Ecosystem

ERC20 Token

Drep is a decentralized reputation ecosystem comprising of a public chain, a reputation-based protocol and the tools for Internet platforms to leverage its power

DREP enables Internet platforms to quantify, monetize, and share reputation value. Drep aims to push forward a more engaging, high-quality and interconnected Internet community.

Use-Cases:

E-commerce Platforms – Platforms trading physical/virtual products or services where transaction is dependent on the reputation of sellers and buyers.
Social Platforms – Platforms having more user-specific features where reputation is reflected by user behavior.
Content Platforms – Platforms providing PGC/ UGC content where reputation is focused on content quality and popularity.

“The ultimate goal is to unleash the value of untapped internet reputation and push forward a more engaging, high-quality, interconnected internet community, benefiting both platforms and users.”

Positives

DREP is creating more than just a reputation platform. The team are looking to create a system that enables websites, services, users, etc, to receive a rating. Assuming DREP garners adoption, everything on the internet will have a “rating”. While it’s obviously up to Websites and Users to adopt the system and not everybody will, it’s a model that is very refreshing. If everything on the internet had a reputation attached to it, exploring and using different websites/services would be a lot easier and safer for the average user. Due to the nature of blockchain technology, reputations would not be able to be tampered with or “hacked” to mislead other users. It’s an ambitious project but it’s a model worth exploring.
Documentation looks great and offers investors a good look into how the platform will work on a technical and practical level. Extensive Documentation is available including a Full Whitepaper and a One-pager for Investors who are time poor. Great website presentation even if a bit repetitive at times. Well structured and presented.
DREP has strategic partnerships with projects such as QTUM and Quarkchain, not to mention organizations such as the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Partnerships are extremely important to this type of business model and the Team needs to get this solution in front of the right people to start gaining traction. If they can take advantage of these partnerships the platform will benefit greatly.
The Team behind DREP is very impressive. Stephen Xu is the former lead developer of QTUM and Rich experience in Blockchain and software programming, used to work for Tencent and Microsoft. Matt Bennice was an Expert Engineer at Google X with More than 10 years of programming experience with Google+, YouTube and Accenture. DREPs development is in safe hands here.
If DREP is able to garner adoption and prove itself to be the leading reputation platform, competitors are going to find it very hard to compete. We’ve seen centralized solutions such as TrustPilot get a huge amount of traction and run with it, leaving competitors with really nothing to work with. If DREP can be aggressive enough with its marketing and networking, they should see success.

Concerns

Our main concern with reputation based platforms is the power that it gives to users with a high rating. Voting can be influenced by a user who has a high enough reputation to do so. No matter the hurdles that DREP puts into place to stop malicious activity on the platform, people will always find a way to get around it or make it work for their own benefit and unfortunately this is just how things go sometimes. It’s not really DREPs fault if users figure out how to game the system, some people are just dodgy.
Reputation platforms are really at the mercy of the end user. Centralized reputation models have given this type of model a bad wrap and Websites/services are still getting away with writing their own reviews or paying users for good reviews. We’ve seen centralized platforms try this model over and over again but if websites/services aren’t interested in integrating a reputation based platform, users aren’t really going to notice. It’s not like users are going to refuse to visit a website or use a service if they can’t find good reviews/ratings on it, clever marketing is usually enough to persuade a user. This isn’t a concern for DREP specifically but it’s worth thinking about.
No other real concerns here. If we were being picky we could point out DREPs roadmap as being a bit vague with its milestones. There are milestones that indicate prior planning and development but as for future milestones there are only vague points made for Q4 2018 and Q1 2019. No doubt the roadmap will be updated once funds have been secured and development really kicks off. The website seems to repeat itself a lot, especially in the FAQ section. If you are after an in-depth look into how the platform really works, go straight for the Whitepaper.