Crowdholding

1 Description
2 History
3 Summary
4 The Platform
5 Social media
6 See also
7 Resources

Description

Crowdholding (YUP) – A Decentralized Open Innovation platform where businesses come for answers and creators come to innovate. Crowdholding allows businesses to get feedback for products & services, validate actions & knowledge and raise awareness. On crowdholding.com creators get early access to products & service, build a portfolio of startups they helped and earn cryptocurrency.

Project website

ICO finish date: 2017-01-11

History

Crowdholding launched on October 17th, 2016, by Ethan Clime, Aleks Bozhinov & Henry Ashley-Cooper. The University of Economics, Prague called Crowdholding “The Best startup of the year” and TYinternet named it one of the “Best ways to use the experience of people to build a business”. Known for giving “power to the crowd” and advancing the use of collective knowledge and crowd promotion for business development. Crowdholding was named by Inventiva “The next biggest thing!” and has been recognised by Political Critique for offering a solution to fight wealth inequality and advancing “Capitalism on Steroids”.

Crowdholding reportedly raised a pre-seed round from hedge-fund Richfox Capital and angel investor Michal Vakoc. The company is registered in the United Kingdom, but operates from Czech Republic. Around the same time, Rosario Colletti joined as CTO after leaving Oracle where he was Principal Engineer. The team reinforced further by inviting Paolo Lacche, former Senior Product Manager at Skype to become CPO.

After launching Beta in March 2017, Crowdholding was featured by TechCo as the place-to-go if you need validation & feedback to improve your business. In his interview with Magazine MN, Ethan Clime said for the first time that Crowdholding is changing the startup ecosystem by “enabling people to invest time rather than money”.

In August 2017, Crowdholding raised a seed-round from angel investor Karel Krcmar and UK Investment Management Group JO Hambro. In the same month, Crowdholding launched and successfully closed the presale of their Initial Coin Offering. The project was acknowledged by ICOindex for providing a much-needed platform for product and community validation. Crowdholding was then recommended by the BitcoinExchangeGuide as the place for startups to get ideas from qualified individuals.

Bankless Times highlighted the advantages of the solution over outdated platforms. By the January 2018, the ICO was officially over and the team advanced with developing the platform. Since then, Crowdholding has launched the ethereum-blockchain API connection for reward-distribution, gained over 30,000 users and helped over 70 companies take advantage of Collective Intelligence and Crowd Marketing. As the platform grew, The Merkle compared it to something “like if Kickstarter and Quora had a child that was raised by a forum-run community like Reddit”. The CEO has summarised the company’s achievements since January 2018 in a video.

Summary

There is a severe disconnection between companies — small or large — and the public. Whether it’s to validate a new product, or iterate on an existing one. There is enormous untapped potential, which with the right tools, can be leveraged to benefit everyone. People around the world are willing to validate products, solve problems, and voice their opinions. This great potential simply needs facilitating, and Crowdholding is designed to do exactly that, encouraging a new wave of co-creation.

Since July 2016, the Crowdholding team has worked hard to build the perfect platform for crowd intelligence and crowd promotion, attracting thousands of dedicated cocreators, and dozens of interesting blockchain startups looking to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd.

Crowdholding enables the public, or ‘the crowd’, to help validate, iterate on, or build awareness for products or services. In return, the product or service owner rewards the crowd for their activity. Thus, building a mutually beneficial scenario where businesses and the public are brought closer together, aligning goals rather than merely exploiting one another.

This reward process is facilitated by the Crowdholding YUP token, and other ERC-20 compatible tokens (including Ethereum itself) — allowing value to be efficiently transferred between parties in a decentralized manner. As Eric Schmidt says, the next hundred-billion-dollar companies will be those who can effectively learn from the crowd. There’s a new dawn in co-creation coming, and Crowdholding is positioned to make it impact society as much as possible.

More information in the project whitepaper: https://ico.crowdholding.com/docs/crowdholding_whitepaper.pdf

The Platform

Crowdholding is designed to facilitate very efficient, and highly productive, communication between businesses and the crowd.

At its core, Crowdholding utilizes a primarily text-based exchange between users, whether the users are multi-million dollar companies, or members of the public with little stake in the platform. This type of exchange has been refined over years by websites which have become important hubs for much of the internet, utilizing commenting and voting methods to sort content. Crowdholding expands on this by adding a reward to the activity, giving people an even greater incentive to participate in a community.

The system revolves around projects, containing tasks for the community to interact with: • A project can be almost anything, from an entrepreneur with an idea, to an established company. The project summarises the venture, providing context for tasks. • A task can be a challenge, discussion, question, or anything else which catalyzes discussion in the community. Content should ideally be fun and shareable, but it can be more technical and challenging.

When a project joins Crowdholding, they buy into the system by exchanging a mainstream cryptocurrency (currently ETH) for the native token — YUP — which functions as a generic fuel for the Crowdholding ecosystem. YUP can be used as the sole reward for completing tasks, or they can be used as a supplement for a reward to the a custom token specified by the project being launched. Currently, Crowdholding facilitates all ERC-20 based tokens, including ETH and all ETH based derivatives.