Morpheus Network ICO review

Review

Who is Morpheus.Network?

The Morpheus Network was established by industry veterans to address global supply chain inefficiencies, resulting in full-service, global, automated, supplychain platform for the global trade industry, utilizing blockchain technology. They recognize blockchain as a technology to be leveraged across supply chains to see breakthroughs in automation, optimization, security, visibility and forecasting. 

What problems does Morpheus Network try to solve?

Shareholders lost over $2 trillion in potential revenue last year due to the lack of transparency, connectivity, and agility in the global supply chain.

• Supply chain management creates a lot of paperwork, a shipment can generate many hundreds of documents that must be stamped and signed by multiple agencies because customs agents require original documents to help prevent fraud. One small error can result in delays that can spoil a shipment or hold up payment. The Morpheus Network aims to remove the compexity from this process, any time a document needs to be shared with multiple institutions, putting that record on the blockchain enables real-time updates that can be seen, but not tampered with or altered. This can create significant savings in time and cost while at the same time, ensuring a strong level of trust.
• Supply chain finance is expensive and complex, it takes tremendous efforts to integrate all parties with their existing operational flows. Morpheus wants to lower these barriers by offering automation in shipping and customs documents as well as automated international payments by using smart contracts. They aim to integrate with other blockchains as well, like the Walton Blockchain, to signify the arrival of a shipment with an RFID scan or the SIA blockchain to verify the transfer of data.
• It is difficult to align incentives among different participants. Suppliers, buyers and financiers are independent decision makers attempting to maximize their own profits. Such independent profit maximizations often lead to poor performance of the entire supply chain.  A fundamental advantage of blockchain technology is that no single company has control, it resolves problems of disclosure and accountability between individuals and institutions whose interests aren’t aligned.
• There is currently no immutable record shared amongst all parties to track the origins of an asset to determine authenticity and quality. Supply chains can span over hundreds of stages and dozens of geographical locations, which makes it very hard to trace events or investigate incidents. The blockchain solves this problem by maintaining a tamper-proof, timely record of product movements and related transactions.
• International payments are often slow and expensive due to unfavourable exchange rates and high banking fees. Morpheus aims to lower these costs by offering swift integration through their platform which allows for the direct transfer of funds to over 1600 banks.

How does the Morpheus platform work?

Morpheus is building their own permissioned version of the Ethereum blockchain to provide open transparancy while keeping sensitive data confidential. While part of a public blockchain’s appeal lies in the transparency it provides, this isn’t always desirable, especially when users want to transact privately or enterprises need some level of confidentiality between partners.

You can interact with the Morpheus Network through a simplified dashboard interface which is designed to be intuitive and easy to navigate.

It is possible to revise or add Smart Contract objectives in your supply chain, view the flow of funds and documentation within any transaction and utilize features such as escrow payment services and document digitization. There are also permission settings available which establish which documents or Smart Contract objectives are kept private, and which ones are visible and shareable with your shipping agents, customs brokers and freight forwarders

They offer direct integration with SWIFT through MS dynamics 365 ERP system.

The Morpheus Network automates the supply chain structure, an example below:

• Generating new contracts for a supplier when inventory is running low
• Automated payments to supplier directly into their bank account in their native currency
• Creation, digitization and sharing all original shipping documents to be seamlessly handled by customs brokers and freight forwarders with permissible access.

Product Roadmap:

We will now take a look at their product Roadmap and will only mention current and future milestones:

Team:

The team of Morpheus currently consist of 12 people with years long experience in the supply chain industry, the development of their permissioned blockchain will be done in partnership with Winjit inc. who has extensive knowledge about the blockchain industry, has offices in 5 countries and serves customers in over 50 countries.

Danny Weinberger, Co-Founder & CEO, Morpheus.Network
McMaster University – BSc Psychology
15+ Years Experience in Global Trade

Danny is one of founding team members, and his passion and drive for business has led to his success as a serial entrepreneur. His forte is international relations and logistics, and he has personally orchestrated and facilitated tens of millions of dollars in global transactions with many Fortune 500 companies such as Magna, Aecon, General Electric, General Motors, Linamar, Commercial Spring and more.

Noam Eppel, Co-Founder & COO, Morpheus.Network

York University
15+ Years Experience In Web Development & Information Security

Noam Eppel is a highly experienced senior developer with over 15+ years of experience. He has worked for large web agencies in Toronto, New York, Texas and California, and founded a busy web agency with clients around the world. Noam has worked with and consulted for IBM, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, National Bank Financial, Bank of Montreal, Mount Sinai Hospital and many more financial corporations, e-commerce companies, law firms, hotels, startups, hospitals, independent artists and non-profit organizations

One of the projects that has been developed by Winjit is the iotsense.io project who has won the Businessworld Leadership and CIO award for the best IoT implementation.

The team that was involved in this project will also be working on the permissioned blockchain of Morpheus. These engineers are:

Priyanka Pareek, Blockchain Developer, Morpheus.Network

Priyank Sharma, Blockchain Developer, Morpheus.Network

Pravin Tambe, Blockchain Developer, Morpheus.Network

Vijayta Bhatt, Blockchain Developer, Morpheus.Network

The team has sought out advisors with extensive experience in their field such as Roger Cook, Former CEO of DHL and others. Click here for a full list of their team members and advisors.

Token distribution:

Category                                Total MORPH

Bounty                                       650,000
Bonus Token sale              9,000,000
Founders                              12,000,000                   – Vesting 18 Months
Strategic Partners:              3,350,000
Advisors                               3,000,000                   – Vesting 6 Months
Crowdsale                            72,000,000

How are the MORPH tokens used?

The MORPH tokens give users access to the Morpheus Network and services on the Network. The Morpheus Tokens can be attained converting from virtually any fiat currency, or over 74 different cryptocurrencies directly through the platform and Shapeshift integration. The Morpheus Token’s value is based on the real time financial derivative of the currency needed to complete a payment as a Smart Contract’s objective. The integration with SWIFT allows to send payments directly into the bank account of over 1600 banks globally in the specific currency required (fiat or cryptocurrency) by the Smart Contract.

Opportunities:

• Team: They have a dedicated and experienced team that has vast knowledge about Supply Chains and are backed by Winjit who have vast experience with blockchain technologies.
• Member of BiTA: They are a member of the ‘Blockchain in transport Alliance’ together with companies like FedEx, UPS, Salesforce etc. The members are in direct contact to come up with solutions for Supply Chain efficiencies.
• Efficiency improvement: Efficiency improvements in the supply chain can save the industry billions of dollars. The advances in chip and sensor technology greatly enhance blockchain based supply chain management systems. It is especially powerful when combined with ‘Smart Contracts’, in which contractual rights and obligations, including the terms for payment and delivery of goods and services, can be automatically executed by an autonomous system that’s trusted by all signatories.
• Integration with SWIFT: They provide a easy to use interface with SWIFT integration through the MS dynamics 365 ERP system which should encourage easy adoption of their product.
• Smart Contracts: They provide an easy way to create Smart Contracts, within their system,for all steps necessary to complete the whole cycle from Inventory management to document generation and escrow payment services.
• Escrow Payment services: Their product integrates ESCROW payment services, based on predefined settings in the SMART contract, funds will only become available to the exporter when all objectives in the smart contract are met.
• Low entry barrier: The Morpheus Network is designed to directly connect into existing systems such as MS dynamics and SWIFT with easy to use templates to automate common tasks.

Concerns:

There are some key technology risks that are basicly the same for all blockchain related projects, here are the most important ones:

• No Product or MVP: They do not have an Product or MVP yet, they aim to provide the MVP by the end of April but there is no prototype available to date, this essentially means that this is a whitepaper ICO. This does not mean that it is a bad ICO but there is a substantial risk involved when investing in this ICO.
• Technology Risks: They want to build a permissioned blockchain based on the Ethereum Blockchain but do not provide enough specifics on how they want to solve the privacy and security issues. The technology they want to use to challenge these issue are immature and unproven. If any of those core technologies do not perform according to Morpheus.Network needs or expectations, they may be required to change the specifications and to reduce or eliminate features on the platform
• Token ecosystem: They rely on their MORPH token to be able to offer cheap peer-to-peer transactions after which they can be exchanged for local currency. We forsee problems because cryptocurrencies are currently plagued by volatility. It is not unusual for cryptocurrencies to have value fluctuations of more than 50%. These fluctuations mean that their token is unsuitable for international import and export payments at the moment.
• Lack of Market Penetration: This project depends on attracting users and/or third parties to become (or remain) useful or viable. Any such lack of use or interest could negatively affect the development of Morpheus.Network.
• Competition: They face heavy competition, IBM has recently announced a joint venture with MEARSK to digitize the worlds supply chains and Eximchain is ready to launch their solution within a few months as well.
• Regulatory Risks: Their regulatory status is unclear or unsettled in many jurisdictions. It is not known if, when, or to what degree different jurisdictions will interpret existing laws and regulations or adopt new laws and regulations that could adversely affect them.

Conclusion:

ICOs suffer from their own success nowadays. If you do not participate in the pre-sale, you have a chance that you can not participate in the sale at all.

Presales offer the opportunity to step in early, with a higher risk, because there is often no product or prototype available, it offers you the chance to purchase at a discount because of this risk, but the question is whether this discount outweighs the risks.

In general, we are currently neutral about this presale. There are many questions that need to be answered before we decide to invest.

Although we like their idea and vision, we would like to see the Minimum Viable Product and an awnser on how they will address the volatility issues of their MORPH token. This token is one of their biggest selling points of the platform.

We will assess them as soon as they have an MVP available.

You can still sign up for their whitelist here, so you can be sure that you will be able to participate in their ICO.

This is not investment advice, we only show you in which ICO we invest. As always do your own research!