Dadi Token (DADI) ICO Fast Facts

• ICO Crowdsale Start Date: 22 January 2018
• Maximum Discount: 20% (presale tokes valued at $0.40USD)
• Platform: ETH
• Amount Raised (Valuation): $29m USD (with a 60% crowdsale, values the company at $48.33m USD)

Dadi Token (DADI) Utility

Dadi, in their own words, “is to the cloud what the cloud was to owned infrastructure. It’s tackling a $250-billion-dollar industry head on”: they are taking on the giants in the web hosting industry and bringing a more agile solution based on the blockchain. It is an extremely boldgoal to make given the already competitive nature of this space. A handful of mega corporations already dominate this sector which is already expected to grow to $154b by 2022.

The Dadi team has been operating for the past 4 years with about $2m USD already invested by the founders to fund the early research. They have surpassed the proof of concept stage: they already are hosting a number of very large websites including Empire Online, Monocole, Virgin Limited Edition, etc. Any doubts I had about the team have been dismissed with these production websites. Four years ago, I would have said the idea would have been too difficult and not efficient enough. I am a little excited to say that I was wrong and I am now intrigued to see what else is possible if this project is given another $29m USD.

Dadi plan to introduce a number of web services over the next 12 months, including:

Dadi Token (DADI) Team

The senior management team has a strong background with: launching technical projects, blockchain startups and investing in a range of technology companies.

Joseph Denne founded Airlock Limited as the Technical Director, where he worked for a decade and enabled the group to bring home a range of awards in the online advertising sector. During this time, he also directed the open source Content Management System (CMS) Symphony. In 2013, he made the decision to found Dadi and take on the industry which provided the platform for his earlier career.

Christopher Mair and Will Lebens both have plenty of management and director experience to draw upon, including that gained by working with Joseph at Airlock Limited. They are big believers in blockchain and open source technologies.

Lastly, Paul Kingsley is a M&A (mergers and acquisitions) adviser who joins Dadi as the Chief Operating Officer.

The senior team have all demonstrated experience in leading startup companies to success, particularly in the marketing and advertising industries. They have all had a technical bent to their business positions and led big companies to great things.

The technical team is led by James Lambie who comes from senior developer roles at Barclay Bank and the BBC, where he worked on a number of modern technologies including docker, nginx and other web services. Francesco Iannuzzelli comes in with a security background, Jo Biddulph as a product manager and Paul Regan as the strategic director.

However, hiding up the back, are the guys I’m interested in: the Engineering team. Viktor Fero (the first employee of Dadi), who worked with the other founders at Airlock Limited as the Technology Manager, leads this team and brings experience in containerisation and blockchain technology. Joining him are: Arthur Mingard, a web developer with an interest in machine learning (and who previously led the web development at Monocle); Eduardo Bouças, another web developer from Monocle who is pioneering the COPE headless CMS platform; and finally, an experienced web designer, Adam Dean.

While it is a massive team, I do have some doubts over the technical depth and web hosting experience of a lot of these people. Most have also spent significant portions of their careers working with each other in the same 2 or 3 organisations. While this does improve the acceleration of a startup, it does bring into question the diversity of experience and I wonder if this nepotistic hiring practice has trumped meritocracy and neglected the best candidate for the role.

Dadi Token (DADI) Roadmap

The fact that the team have 4 years of development under their belt and are already in production is impressive. In Q1 of 2018, the team intend to rollout the CDN, gateway, host and wallet services. Another half a dozen, alpha-staged services are planed to be released in quick succession during Q2 of 2018. By the end of 2018, these should be in a production-ready state and looking for new customers to host.

There are (a lot) more details for the marketing and UI side of the technology, but to be honest, while it is great to see the plans to market the product, this will only add the finishing touches to the core technology utilised by Dadi. The project will be reliant on the core technology being secure and stable.

And on that topic… it is potentially an overly ambitious schedule in my opinion. They have a solid team of marketers and web developers but I’m not seeing the experts in networking, microservices, host services etc etc. While I am tentative about their ability to solve these major core issues in less than 12 months, I am anticipating that a large chunk of this ICO money will be spent on bringing in technological experts to assist in this area.

I am cautious about their ability to deliver a quality product on schedule, but they have already impressed me with what they have delivered to date. As a result, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Dadi Token (DADI) Value

A project valuation of $48.33m USD seems right for where they are at at the moment. It isn’t the incredible value of a new startup, but at the same time, a significant amount of effort has gone into the organisation over the past 4 years to get it to this point. This is a small premium for buying into a mature and proven startup who is about to enter into its next phase of growth. Being able to attain even a fraction of a percent of the $150b - $250b hosting industry gives this project a lot of upside.

Dadi Token (DADI) Transparency

The ICO has been well documented and run to precision by the team. Honestly, the amount of documentation and additional reading available for this project is staggering and actually delayed this report as I was trying to ensure that I have covered all of the relevant items. The team are very upfront about where their product is at and what their intentions are. There are well documented snippets of code available and a detailed high level plan of API calls and messaging buses.

DADI is generating a fair bit of buzz on social media, with many people and groups very eager to get a part of the public distribution of tokens scheduled for this month.

Dadi Token (DADI) Distribution

The distribution of funds is quite well broken down: 30% assigned to the team and partners, 60% assigned to investors and the remaining 10% for the ecosystem, operations and a referral program. While it all falls into the normal range, it would have been nice to see a little less assigned to the team and partners and a little more given to the eco-system of the platform. If the going gets tough, schedules run over or there are other issues with the platform, having that pool of money to immediately assist could be very beneficial.

Dadi Token (DADI) Summary

Dadi is the eternal underdog, their goals constantly dismissed as impossible or un-achievable given the rag-tag team assembled, yet they keep on delivering time and time again. It is a very bold plan that they are trying to deliver in a very competitive market with some of the largest players of any industry already settled in there. Their product has real utility with an already demonstrated ability to host large websites with ease. Their valuation represents fair value and the potential upside is significant. The team in a little incestuous, which brings some doubt as to the breadth of experience.

Crypto Coin Disclosure

The author does not hold DADI in his portfolio.
No payment or private consultation was sought for this article.

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