Should You Invest in Stratis? (Opinion)

Brief History of Stratis and Its ICO

Stratis has roots that go back to July 2016 when it released its ICO.  An ICO (initial coin offering) is a way of raising funds for a cryptocurrency project by distributing “tokens” to its early participating investors.  With the completion of the Stratis ICO, they were able to raise 948.15 BTC while distributing 84,000,000 STRAT tokens to its investors.  The ICO price of each token ended up being 0.00001129 BTC (equivalent to ~$0.007) for a total funding of $600,000. This is a huge difference compared to today’s ICO numbers which hit in the millions and tens of millions with ease.  The money raised in the Stratis ICO allowed the project to sustain itself and grow as time passed.  The ATH (all-time-high) reached $11.67 USD, which yielded immense gains for investors that bought from the ICO date.  With today’s price, which can be seen in Figure 1, the Stratis ICO can be seen as a very successful investment.

Figure 1: Stratis ROI since the ICO (initial coin offering) date.

More About Stratis

Initially, Stratis came into existence by forking from NBitcoin, with a large difference being that Stratis is coded primarily in C#.  Another interesting notion is that the Microsoft has already integrated Stratis as a blockchain platform into their Azure developer platform.  This enables companies to easily deploy blockchain nodes to support decentralized applications that they build on top of the Stratis platform.  The blockchain-as-a-service platform that Stratis provides allows companies and developers to build, test, debug, and deploy their blockchain applications built on C# (and for the Microsoft .NET framework).  This is beneficial for financial technology services and other real-world industries that lack the ability, time, and money to build their own blockchain from scratch.  Instead, they can easily use Stratis as a platform to build any decentralized blockchain-based applications they like in a language that has become so common around the world – C#.

Aside from the amazing technology that Stratis has produced and is continuing to develop, the team boasts several feats.  The Stratis slack channel  has over 10k members (which is a huge milestone) and the team has been able to effectively communicate to its investors and holders through this medium, as well as others (such as Twitter, Stratis blog, etc).  Not only this, but Stratis is serious about accounting, compliance, and fulfilling the legal framework to ensure that the business is running smoothly and effectively.  This in turn shows that the team is compliant with the law and that investors’ money is accountable for.

Also, Stratis has Nicolas Dorier working hard to develop a full node that is more reliable, and of higher performance than Bitcoin Core!

Should You Invest in Stratis?

Since Stratis focuses on becoming the #1 blockchain-as-a-service product in the world, it can be compared and contrasted against similar projects such as Ethereum, Lisk, and Waves.  The long term projection of Stratis acting as a blockchain platform service and token ultimately depends on the partnerships that are made.  Since the Stratis platform is targeted towards blockchain developers and companies that aim to develop C#/.NET applications on the Stratis blockchain, these are the entities that need to be on board with the project.  Although Ethereum is currently in the lead for platforms that allow decentralized applications to be built on, Stratis is continuing its scope on further partnerships.

Figure 2: Announcing the partnership between Earth Twine and Stratis.

On August 16, 2017, Stratis secured a partnership with Earth Twine.  This partnership created the first blockchain dedicated to origin data and tracking that targets the international seafood industry.  The Earth Twine group will work closely with Stratis blockchain technology to provide a seamlessly efficient way of tracking mandatory data required for IUU fishing compliance.

The global seafood industry produces a large market netting over $100B+ and Stratis will be able to create a dedicated blockchain to compile seafood tracking data on the blockchain.  The process of tracking data in this industry will be a big push for both parties, Stratis and Earth Twine, with the central point focusing on the power of blockchain technology.

The Earth Twine partnership is just the beginning for Stratis and its goals on becoming more accepted on a mainstream level.  Future industries that Stratis will aim to be involved in include financial technology and medical research.  The Stratis blockchain will benefit the medical sector as it will resolve issues centering around publication of works by offering an immutable store of records. Since this data cannot be maliciously altered, researchers and publishers working on medical research can verify the integrity and legitimacy of a record.  Financial technology, on the other hand, will be affected by Stratis as the team looks to resolve several key issues that exist.  These include eliminating trust of 3rd party escrows, identity management (through Stratis Identity), and KYC (know your customer) compliances.

By following Stratis (through its various social media outlets), it is apparent that the project and its team emanate quality and a high degree of professionalism.  Considering the success of other cryptocurrency projects that focus on developing a BaaS (blockchain-as-a-service) product, you may consider investing a small portion of your portfolio (5%-10%) into Stratis.  Stratis has an incredible team developing and releasing many milestones (such as Stratis Identity, Breeze Wallet Alpha, etc).  The newly updated roadmap also shows that the team is continuing to aspire to be the #1 blockchain-as-a-service company.  It it safe to say that Stratis has a bright future ahead of itself and their revolutionary technology that will be released by their team is what will dictate the markets.  Ultimately, this will show the true worth of Stratis and its digital token in the upcoming future.