Virtue Poker ICO Review by Midgard Research

Published 23 Apr by Oleksandr Liubashevskyi

Virtue Poker aims to create a decentralized online poker network with trust, transparency, and accountability built-in, enabling an improved playing experience at a lower cost to players.

Prototype:

Private alpha planned to be released for all token-buyers in May.

Competitors:

Real world competitors are very strong. Pokerstars has the biggest community and market revenue. Mass-market players will trust PokerStars instead of a more technologically secure, blockchain project. Their security features are useless for this market.

We are probably not the only ones to have noticed that a similar type of blockchain project, Blitzpredict (aggregator of bets on different type of events such as eSports, and politics), which has an admirable team and an already working project, has an ROI of only 0.15x. This is mainly because of their failure to beat real world competitors. We worry that Virtue Poker could have a similar market-experience.

Tokenomics:

Tokenomics are good.

Utility as in game currency.

Stake: nodes are used to validate poker hands on the network.

The nodes in the platform are called “Justices.” “Justices are non playing peers, assigned to poker tables, who provide security and protection to players on the virtue poker network and in exchange receive fees from players platform fees.”

The token distribution is fair:

Crowdsale 20%.
Second token offering after main net: 20%.
Marketing and development: 20%.
Founders: 17.2%.
Strategic Partners: 18.8%.
Advisers: 4%.

In terms of price, everyone pays the same amount per token.

Verdict:

Our grade is 2 out of 10, we don't see any hype around Virtue, and this is bad for the short term; additionally, we don't believe in the project’s long-term prospects because of real-world competitors. The company can't propose any really useful applications for mass-market poker players; they are unlikely to use any product this company proposes.We expect that they will meet a fate similar to that which has met Blitzpredict.