Skycoin (SKY) Review & Analysis – Skycoin Token Review

Skycoin

The New Internet For The New World

About Skycoin
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Network Token

Skycoin was created as an answer to the shortcomings of both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Born out of necessity, no other coin was fulfilling Satoshi’s original vision of a fully decentralized digital currency.

Skycoin’s platform is free from centralization and manipulation through its revolutionary Obelisk consensus algorithm. It features CX, a turing complete programming language built from the ground up to allow hundreds of thousands of devs to easily deploy applications to the blockchain. Skycoin functions as a currency with virtually-free transactions, soon-to-be-implemented absolute privacy, and Visa-like speeds with inherent asset-backed value not based on speculation.

Skywire – In an era where consumers are consistently being taken advantage of by large corporations in the name of profit, Skycoin’s Skywire network is a breath of fresh air. Skywire gives the power back to the people and creates a stronger, faster, and more secure internet in the process.
Obelisk – Obelisk was created out of the shortcomings in the Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithms. Obelisk can never be centralized by mining pools or manipulated by shareholders, meaning it is truly decentralized. Obelisk distributes influence over the network according to a web-of-trust architecture. Instead of miners, the network consists of nodes. Each node gets its own personal blockchain which prevents and quarantines any potential bad actors. These nodes are substantially less expensive to produce, acquire and operate than any traditional miner used for Bitcoin or Ethereum. Obelisk was designed to be a scalable, computationally-inexpensive, zero-waste alternative to PoW.
Fiber – The infinitely-scalable and highly customizable parallel peer-chain architecture of the Skycoin platform. Fiber is a better-than-blockchain solution, which is transformational in the way that it solves existing problems with distributed ledger technology.Fiber is the foundation of “cryptocurrency 3.0”, an infinitely scalable network of blockchains laid side-by-side, like strands. Each project hosted on Fiber gets its own fully customizable, private blockchain capable of Visa-like speeds. Each strand added to Fiber strengthens the whole network and constructs the fabric of the entire ecosystem.

“The Skycoin Platform is the most advanced blockchain platform in the world. Developed by early contributors to both Bitcoin and Ethereum, Skycoin’s platform is completely secure, infinitely scalable, and ISP independent. Backed by bandwidth, storage, and computational power Skycoin is built to fulfill Satoshi’s original vision.”

Positives

Skycoin has all the makings of a solid project: A long history, a working product and a community backing it the whole way up (and down). The whole market has gone through hell over the past 12 months and Skycoin has been one of the hardest hit price-wise, but the fundamentals have gotten stronger. Over the past 12 months Skycoin has done an incredible job fighting off the FUD and battling through the bear market releasing and improving solutions such as Skywire, Fiber and of course the aesthetically pleasing “Skyminer” among other things. For progress, we can’t fault them. In a space where projects drop off the face of the earth after 1-2 years, it’s super impressive to see Skycoin going strong on 7+.
Skycoin is aiming to decentralize the internet. Now, that can be expanded in a Medium article the length of an essay but we’re not here to explain how the Internet has gone downhill over the past few years. Decentralizing the Internet is becoming a more popular idea with ISPs gaining access to customer browsing data, gaining the ability to block sites at will and just doing what corporations do – overcharge & under-perform. Skywire is Skycoins solution to the dated TCP/IP system with it’s own Multi-protocol Label Switching technique (MPLS). That’s a mouthful but it boils down to being a faster, more private TOR-like network. As well as providing users with the freedom they deserve, Skywire also allows Dapps to run on the platform through Fiber, which allows the ecosystem to scale while providing useful apps for users of Skywire. While Ethereum figures out its issues (yawn…), Skycoin (as well as other competitors) have the opportunity to capitalize and provide their own solutions to the scaling issue blockchain tech has been facing for the past few years.
Skycoins “Coin Hours” and the beastly looking piece of hardware called the “Skyminer” are where Skycoin gets really interesting. Seeing as transactions aren’t held back by POW/POS confirmation times and transactions carry no fee, the solution is one that serves both the user and the ecosystem as a whole. In summary, Coin Hours are rewarded to those who are holding SKY and to those who are running hardware such as the Skyminer. We love the Obelisk Consensus Mechanism as it allows more SKY to be locked up resulting in a higher scarcity while providing liquidity for the token users require to use the platform (Coin Hours). The Skyminer is a seriously cool piece of tech and if Skycoin can get in front even further on the hardware side like they are with the upcoming Skywallet, they could be the first ones in their space to garner widespread adoption. Although we do have our concerns about the education barrier “Coin Hours” put up between the user and the decentralized web, the Team has put together the best that they can to ensure everything else is a breeze. Nothing is free and there needs to be an exchange of value at some point, Coin Hours is that value..
Skycoin has easily one of the best Branding/Marketing strategies we’ve seen. The Skyminer is one of the coolest looking “Miners” we’ve seen and the fact that at one point they had a wait-list of over 5,000 people waiting to get their hands on a Skyminer makes a lot of sense. Skycoin does an incredible job of keeping their community up to date and is present a the majority of relevant conferences throughout the year. In a space where projects that held their ICO two years ago haven’t even created their own wallets, explorers, etc it’s pretty obvious Skycoin is ahead of the majority. You could argue it’s been a “long time coming” but the community backing Skycoin will be quick to correct you. Check out this video for a quick brief of how far Skycoin has come.
If we were in the business of doing full overviews on projects, Skycoin would be a 5 part series. There’s a ton of features we haven’t mentioned here such as CX (Skycoins custom programming language), CXO (Cloud Storage), Coin Join (Private Transactions), SDN (SSL Alternative), the list just keeps going. The fact that SKY currently sports a $12m Market Cap should tell you that the market isn’t valuing projects for what they’re worth. The Team has proven themselves as hard working, they’ve consistently developed new solutions and have been more than communicative with a community that has stuck by them on the way down. We’re bullish on a lot of projects and Skycoin is one of them, just be prepared to put this one in the “long term bag”.

Concerns

One thing we pride ourselves on is being able to look past the FUD and bulls**t surrounding a project. Skycoin was hit hard in 2018 for several reasons, some of which are addressed in an article by Charles Bivins which details a “Year in Review for Skycoin”. We commentate/review on what we see as being potential concerns for a project on both a fundamental level and the perspective of token value. SKY has a long history and while that gives it some serious cred, we’ve seen how hard it is for older projects to get past their price “resistance” points on the charts. Skycoin is currently down 97% from its all-time-high of $49 back in December 2017 (time of writing: Jan 8th 2019). While SKY has a long road ahead towards its all-time-high, this also offers investors an incredible opportunity to “get in at the bottom”. Huge upside potential in the long term.
One of the things we look for in a project is the usability of the solution being provided. Skycoins ecosystem revolves around the functionality of Coin Hours which are rewarded to those holding the SKY token (See NEOs “GAS”) or to those running a Skyminer or other certified hardware. This brings us to two concerns we can comfortably summarize into one seeing as they’re closely related and relatively minor. The Internet is currently accessed via users paying an ISP a fiat fee per month/gb in order to use their network, Skycoin will see users pay in Coin Hours instead. This premise is simple on paper but puts a sort of “education” barrier in place where users will need to learn something new (it’s good to assume everyone is an idiot when creating a product). Some users will see the value and some will not, residing to the “tried and true” method of accessing the internet. The second part of this point concerns the need for “certified” hardware. The great thing about Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is that (once upon a time) anybody could get started mining on their personal computer, regardless of their hardware. Skycoin has hardware such as their “Skyminer” available but right now there’s no .exe file that You or I could simply download and run to begin contributing to the network, and Therein lies another barrier regardless of how insignificant. Skycoin plans to release documentation detailing what the hardware “requirements” are in order to build your own “miner” but right now (Jan 2019), we haven’t heard more on this. It’s worth noting that they’re committed to developing more hardware devices.
As for big red flags, there aren’t any that we can see. Skycoin has the fundamentals covered here and has for a long time. The real concern here is more to do with upcoming competition, there are some ICO Projects that entered the game in 2017/2018 that are really catching up and powering forward with their own progress although most are attempting to do (pretty much) the same thing as Skycoin. Skycoin has the “OG” status and that’s hard to achieve seeing as so many projects don’t make it past their first year or two, let alone see development continue over 7+ years. 2019 will be an interesting year for sure and Skycoin may need to prove their dominance over the up-and-comers soon enough.

Price Predictions & Speculation

Please note: This Price Prediction/Speculation section was a section voted on by our community on Twitter. We do not stand by any of the following statements, we are merely speculating. We have been known to be pretty bullish on most projects we review, so take our predictions and DYOR.
As always, we like to take a step back and look at projects from a purely investment based perspective. SKY will no doubt see a ton of FOMO as it starts to climb back up in price when the bull market returns although it does have a long way to go to reach its all time high. At the time of writing (January 2019) SKY is readily available on big exchanges such as Binance although volume is pretty low ($200k daily). Skycoin has seen peak volumes of over $49m according to CoinMarketCap. Any investments now would have a pretty good chance of appreciating seeing as SKY seems to have “bottomed out” in value at the time of writing ($1.10 USD). Now sitting at around a $12m Market Cap after a fall from $320m in little over year, SKY has a ton of upside potential in the long term based on fundamentals. As the need for a more decentralized internet grows as ISPs continue to rip off their customers, it won’t be long until the value of SKY reflects the fundamentals behind the project. It’s also important to note that with any cryptocurrency investment there’s a fair amount of risk involved (especially in a bear market). Always DYOR and pay attention to development in this space.
Short term (< 3 Months) We think SKY could be sitting anywhere from a stable $1.10 to $2.00 taking the current market conditions into consideration, assuming we’re not entering a bull market anytime soon.
Mid Term (6 – 12 Months) we think SKY could be a stable $4 to $8, especially if the market turns around sometime in 2019 as most expect.
Anywhere past 12 months would be impossible to accurately speculate on due to current market conditions but we’d be confident on a $10 to $25+ SKY in 1+ years if we see the crypto markets turn around and make their way back to all-time-highs. Skycoin could easily blow past it’s all-time-high in a 1-2 years from now. Be patient in this space.
The current circulating SKY supply is sitting at 11,000,000 (January 2019), so a $10 SKY would see a $110m+ valuation (not taking into account any increases in circulating supply).
As with any investment, you absolutely must do your own research. We are by no means providing financial advice. Be smart!