Coin Report #77: COTI

Welcome to the 77th Coin Report. In today’s report, I will be assessing the fundamental and technical strengths and weaknesses of COTI. This will be comprised of an analysis of a number of significant metrics, an evaluation of the project’s community and development and an overview of its price-history. The report will conclude with a grading out of 10. I hope you enjoy the read!

Introduction

This is the tenth of my subscriber-exclusive Coin Reports, with COTI winning the March poll. Each month, I will run a poll and publish a Coin Report on the winner either that month or the following month, available only to those of you that are subscribed to my premium content.

Keep your eyes out for the April poll, which will be hitting your inboxes soon.

I hope this report will prove objective where it must be and fair on more subjective matters. For those who’d like to learn a little more about COTI prior to reading this report, here are some primary links:

Fundamental Analysis

General:

Name: COTI

Ticker: COTI

Algorithm: ERC-20, BEP-2 and DAG Mainnet (Proof-of-Trust consensus)

Sector: Payments

Exchanges: Binance, VCC Exchange, Uniswap, Indodax, Binance DEX, Sushiswap, HitBTC, BitMax, WazirX, Gate.io, Kucoin and Bithumb Global

Launch Overview

COTI (Currency of the Internet) was conceptualised in 2017, utilising DAG technology as opposed to a traditional blockchain and implementing their own novel Proof-of-Trust consensus mechanism via Trustchain. The team raised funds via three token sales, beginning with a seed round that raised $3.5mn, a private sale that raised $16mn and a public IEO that raised $3mn. In exchange, investors were issued with mainnet COTI tokens upon its launch in June 2019, with the funding facilitating the development of said mainnet. Seed investors paid $0.06 per COTI, private sale investors paid $0.08 and public investors paid $0.065 per COTI. Overall, 2bn COTI were created, with seed investors receiving 2.89% of these; private investors receiving 10.04%; and public investors receiving 2.3%, equating to 304,753,846 COTI issued to investors. COTI later became interoperable as the mainnet was launched on June 4th, 2019, and now users can swap between ERC-20, BEP-2 and Mainnet COTI tokens.

Price-History Overview

As COTI has now been traded for around two years, there is plenty of price-history available. Whilst I will cover this at length in a later section, for now it will suffice to say that COTI formed its all-time low against Bitcoin at 67 satoshis in November 2019, having formed its all-time high shortly after initial trading began at 1300 satoshis in June 2019. Against the Dollar, its all-time low came at $0.0062 in November 2019, whilst it recently made an all-time high at $0.48 in March 2021.

Project Overview

Though, at first glance, COTI may seem somewhat complex, with its DAG-based platform and terms like interoperability, arbitrator decentralised governance, multiDAG and Proof-of-Trust, at its core it is a rather straightforward project. In short, COTI is seeking to bring payments systems into the modern era, as they believe such systems have fallen behind in recent times. The core aim of the project is to facilitate payments in the most cost-effective, scalable and convenient manner for both buyers and sellers, allowing global commerce to continue to flourish.

As stated in their whitepaper:

“It has been long anticipated for cryptocurrencies to significantly alter the online payment landscape. To accomplish this, it is necessary for cryptocurrencies to be user friendly, convenient and highly scalable. Several blockchain based technologies have been created to tackle the challenges posed by attempting to provide high transaction throughput while remaining inexpensive, but these have been met with little success. Another challenge faced is the lack of trust between unknown parties, which leads to countless chargebacks and transaction cancellations. Moreover, merchants are often classified as ’high-risk’ or ’low-risk’ based on their association with a particular industry, rather than on their actual behaviour.

COTI, Currency Of The Internet, solves these challenges by using an innovative base-layer protocol in the form of a directed acyclic graph-based ledger, built from transactions connected through time, by harnessing trust-based algorithms. Trust should be based on a combination of the network participant‘s historical behaviour data and objective information about them. COTI takes this into consideration, calculating trust using a unique machine-learning algorithm. Trust is used in the Trustchain Algorithm to validate and confirm transactions faster. Trust chains grow as new transactions attach to two prior transactions which have similar degrees of trust as themselves. This results in an innovative consensus-based confirmation mechanism, where every user is incentivised to have a high level of trust while engaging in trust-building behaviour due to the benefits associated with having a high level of trust (i.e. faster confirmation times). COTI has built mechanisms to monitor, detect and defend against possible attacks, ensuring network security. An example of such a mechanism is COTI’s Double Spend Prevention (DSP) Nodes. COTI also introduces novel protocols to address disputes that may arise when sending transactions, a much required feature which is not possible with other cryptocurrencies. Dispute resolution is achieved by the use of an Arbitration Service. This service takes advantage of the principles of game theory to ensure a fair outcome in the case of a dispute and votes to determine which of the two disputing parties is right.

Our vision of COTI is to empower users to freely exchange value as simply as information is exchanged on the Internet. To achieve this, we are developing the Trustchain Protocol based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) distributed ledger, which creates a scalable blockless protocol that can be utilised by any industry that needs high throughput and trust to operate.“

I look forward to evaluating their progress in this respect.

Let’s begin with some Metric Analysis:

Metric Analysis:

Below are listed a number of important metrics, all of which are accurate as of 18th March 2021. For anyone reading this who has yet to read a Coin Report, it might be worth reading this section of the first report, where any potentially unfamiliar terms are explained. For any terms or metrics specific to this post, I will provide explanations besides the figures.

Metrics:

General:

Price: $0.42 (711 satoshis)

Circulating Supply: 669,740,238 COTI

Total Supply: 2,000,000,000 COTI

Maximum Supply: 2,000,000,000 COTI

% of Max. Supply Minted: 100%

Network Value: $279,625,537 (4761.95 BTC)

Network Value at Max. Supply: $835,026,840

Exchange Volume: $93,154,646 excluding wash

Exchange Volume-to-Network Value: 33.31% excluding wash

Category: Midcap

Average Price (30-Day): $0.245

Average Exchange Volume (30-Day): $116,826,186

Average Network Value (30-Day): $159,286,370

Average Exchange Volume (30-Day)-to-Network Value: 73.34%

Volatility* (30-Day): -0.3825

Average Daily On-Chain Transactions (30-Day): ~11,233 (source)

Average Daily Transactional Value (30-Day): $620,000 (source)

NVT (30-Day): 451

% Price Change USD (30-Day): 241.7%

% Price Change USD (1-Year): 3423.3%

USD All-Time High: $0.48

% From USD All-Time High: -11%

Premine % of Max. Supply: N/A

Premine Location: N/A

Liquidity (calculated as the sum of BTC in the buy-side with 10% of current price across all exchanges): 50.43 BTC

Liquidity-to-Network Value %: 1.06%

Supply Available on Exchanges: 97,783,513 COTI

% of Circulating Supply Available on Exchanges: 14.6%

*Volatility is calculated by taking the average price over the given time-period, calculating the difference between it and the highest price and it and the lowest price over that same time-period, and multiplying those figures together. The closer to 0, the less volatility during that period, and vice-versa. Read this for more on volatility.

Supply Emission & Inflation:

Block Reward Schedule: See release schedule below

Average Block Time: N/A

Current Block Height: N/A

Annual Supply Emission: 110,259,762 COTI (783.95 BTC at current prices)

Annual Inflation Rate: 16.46%

Circulating Supply in 365 Days: ~780,000,000 COTI

IEO:

The following details were taken from this source and this.

IEO Period: June 4th 2019

Total Tokens: 2,000,000,000 COTI

Total Tokens Available for Sale: 46,153,846 COTI

Total Raised: $3mn

Average IEO Price Per Token: $0.065

Total Tokens Sold: 46,153,846 COTI

Further Details: There were three rounds of fundraising, beginning with a seed round in Q1 2018 that raised $3.5mn for 2.89% of total supply, at an average price of $0.06 per COTI; a private round that raised $16mn for 10.04% of the supply in June-December 2018 at an average price of $0.08 per COTI; and a public IEO on Kucoin that raised $3mn on June 4th 2019 at an average price of $0.065 per COTI.

Distribution:

Address Count: 7507 (ERC-20) + 3,834 (BEP-2)

Supply Held By Top 10 Addresses: 6.04%*

Supply Held By Top 20 Addresses: 7.99%*

Supply Held By Top 100 Addresses: 12.52%*

Inactive Address Count in Top 20 (30 Days of No Activity): 15**

*Excluding team and exchange addresses and calculated as percentage of ERC-20 supply (~1.329bn COTI)

**Excluding team and exchange addresses

Analysis:

There is quite a lot to work through here, so I will refrain from any preamble.

To begin with, I’d like to take a look at the data we have for on-chain transactions, as, given COTI’s primary aims of being a Universal Payments System, this is most relevant. Unfortunately, I was unable to collate any significant amount of clear data myself, but I do have a source that illuminates this matter a little.

In the Medium articles linked in the section above, COTI state that they are currently processing $18.6mn of transactions per month (as of February 2021). This would give us Average Daily On-Chain Transactional Value of ~$620,000, giving COTI an NVT ratio of 451. This is potentially indicative of a degree of overvaluation at present. If COTI were to have an NVT equivalent to that of Bitcoin, for example, which is 120 currently, it would need to be processing around $2.3mn of transaction on-chain daily at its current network value.

Moving onto some more of the General metrics, let’s take a look at Volatility:

I calculated this to be -0.3825 for the past 30 days; this places COTI 5th-highest amongst prior reports for 30-day volatility, indicating that we are very much in the midst of a market cycle underway; something we will look at in depth a little later in this report.

Next up, we have the metrics relating to Liquidity:

Firstly, I found that there was 50.43 BTC of buy-side liquidity within 10% of current prices (up from ~5 BTC in the first report) equating to 1.6% of its Network Value (up from 0.73%). This places COTI 6th-highest among prior reports, indicating strong demand at current prices. More impressive still is the fact that its liquidity-to-network value ratio has grown over the past year despite the project appreciating significantly over that time.

As for sell-side liquidity, I found that 97,783,513 COTI was available for purchase (up from ~67mn) in the orderbooks, equating to 14.6% (down from ~22%) of the circulating supply. This is the 2nd-highest figure recorded in these reports, suggesting that a large proportion of supply ownership is speculative, as a relatively high amount of circulating supply is being held in orderbooks as opposed to off-exchange. That said, this may also be a symptom of liquidity provision by the team, allowing for greater overall liquidity for buyers.

Moving onto volume, COTI traded $93.154mn of Exchange Volume (accounting for wash) over the past 24 hours, equating to 33.31% of its Network Value. Further, Average Exchange Volume was $116.826mn or the past 30 days, equating to 73.34% of COTI’s Average Network Value (up from 26%) for the same period. This is the 2nd-highest figure recorded in these reports and highly indicative of speculative interest.

Now, let’s take a look at Supply Emission:

Using COTI’s emission schedule, I calculated that it is expected to have annual supply emission of 110,295,762 COTI (783.95 BTC-worth at current prices). This gives COTI a low annual inflation rate of 16.46% and places its circulating supply at ~780,000,000 COTI in 365 days.

However, more significant than the supply emission itself is its relationship to traded volume. Given the above figures, we can work out that COTI’s average daily supply emission for the next 12 months is 302,081 COTI, equating to 2.15BTC, or $126,230-worth. COTI’s Exchange Volume covers this supply emission by 738x and its Average Exchange Volume by almost 926x. indicating that emission should not really cause any downwards pressure on price. Moreover, its Liquidity of 50.43 BTC is almost 25 times as great as the average daily supply emission. As such, there should not be any real headwinds to price growth moving forward.

Finally, let us take a look at some Distribution:

Using the rich-list, I found that there are currently 7507 holders of COTI (up from 503 in the first report) on the ERC-20 standard. There are also 3834 BEP-2 addresses.

Looking at the ERC-20 supply, I found that the top 10 richest addresses control 6.04% of the total ERC-20 supply of ~1.329bn; the top 20 control 7.99%; and the top 100 control 12.52%. This is excluding team and exchange addresses but including subsequent private addresses. 961mn COTI is held in team or exchange addresses in the top 10 on the ERC-20 chain. Finally, regarding the activity of the richest private addresses, of the top 20, 4 addresses are in accumulation, with 1 in distribution and 15 inactive over the past 30 days. There have been net inflows of 15,624,874 COTI to the top 20 over the past 30 days.

And that concludes this section. Onto the COTI Community:

Community:

There are two primary aspects of community analysis: social media presence and Bitcointalk threads. I’ll begin with the former before moving on to the latter.

Social Media:

Concerning social media presence, there are four main platforms to examine: Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and Discord.

COTI is present on all four platforms. To begin, let’s look at the various social metrics that I calculated from the COTI Twitter and Facebook accounts:

Twitter Followers: 58,736

Tweets: 1,289

Average Twitter Engagement: 1.85%

Facebook Likes: 23,302

Facebook Posts (30-Day): 8

Average Facebook Engagement: 0.17%

As usual, I will be using RivalIQ‘s social benchmark report for evaluation purposes.

Twitter:

COTI has a large Twitter audience of 58,736 followers, which places it 6th-highest among coins previously reported on. Its engagement is very impressive at 1.85%, particularly given its audience size, placing it in the top 5. This is also 41x greater than average across all industries of 0.045% and 68.5x greater than the average in the Tech and Software industry of 0.027%. More impressive still is the fact that the engagement rate has grown from 1.25% last year, when the audience was only ~17k.

Facebook:

COTI also has a relatively large Facebook audience of 23,302, although this is roughly equivalent to the size of the audience this time last year, thus there has been no real growth here. The engagement rate is much weaker at 0.17%, but I am glad to see that, unlike in the first report, COTI has begun posting here more regularly, with 8 posts published in the past 30 days. Regarding engagement, its rate is twice that of the median across all industries of 0.08% and 8.5x that of the Tech & Software Industry of 0.02%.

Discord:

There are 1,686 members of the COTI Discord group. This represents growth of ~1,250 members in one year.

Whilst there is significant growth of the group recently, it is clear that Telegram remains the primary community hub, as much of the discussion that occurs here is price-related as opposed to project-related. We do find useful channels here for new users with resources linked clearly and support available, but Telegram is certainly the more active community channel.

Telegram:

There are 18,491 members of the COTI Telegram group. This represents growth of ~6,800 members in one year.

I would usually include a summary of my findings regarding the project from the activity of the group, but the majority of this is covered in the Developmental Progress section, so I will refrain from repeating myself. That said, regarding the community itself, discussion is constant on a daily basis, at a level which I rarely find – in fact, it is almost infeasible to keep up with the amount of activity in the group occurring every day. Moreover, the excitement around COTI is significant and palpable and the team are actively in discussion with the community, which is great to see. Finally, the discussion focuses on the project itself and the growth of the ecosystem, as opposed to solely price-related discussions.

BitcoinTalk:

The COTI BitcoinTalk thread was created on February 12th, 2018, and has since generated 1013 posts spanning 51 pages in 1133 days. This equates to 0.89 posts per day, on average. However, in the past 90 days, the thread has had 16 posts via 5 individual posters, giving an average of 0.18 posts per day; a significant decline in engagement.

The bulk of recent posts have been published by the team. providing development updates that I will discuss at length a little later in the report.

And that concludes my evaluation of the COTI community.

Let’s now look more closely at development:

Development:

For the following Development analysis, I will be evaluating project leadership, the whitepaper, the roadmap, available wallets and finally providing a general overview of developmental progress:

Project Leadership:

The COTI team comprises 20 employees as per the website.

More specifically, the core team consists of:

Whitepaper:

This section has been copied in from the first report to allow for this updated report to function as a stand-alone.

There are two concise documents here that I would like to cover: the Token Economy paper and the COTI Pay paper.

Beginning with the former, this is a 9-page document focused on the COTI token itself, beginning with an overview of token supply. More specifically, COTI has a maximum supply of 2,000,000,000 COTI that were all created upon network genesis, distributed between the team, advisors, token sale and ecosystem reserve as specified in earlier sections (the figures here are a little out of date).

Beyond this, we find a page on the protocol economy, with COTI comprising a multi-layered system consisting of: applications such as COTI Pay and COTI-X; tokens such as COTI, COTI-USD, COTI-BTC and other DAG-based tokens; services such as transactions, balances, KYC and arbitration; implementations such as Full Nodes, DSP Nodes, Trust Score Nodes and the KYC server; and abstractions such as DAG, Trust Score and TrustChain.

Transaction fees are stated to be the primary income source for the network. Full Nodes function as fee collectors, redistributing fees to the network pool who in turn redistribute to DSP Nodes, Trust Score Nodes and the KYC Server, though keeping a portion of fees for their services. The value of the token itself is derived from its utility as a means-of-payment and medium-of-exchange, with COTI being used for staking by node operators, payment fees, transactions, service fees, merchant services and other applications.

Regarding incentives for consumers, these are as follows:

100 COTI free for opening a wallet and 100 COTI per referral
Cashback in COTI for transactions made when 1,000 COTI or more is staked
Discounts and loyalty plans
Yearly bonuses for maintaining a high Trust Score

Regarding incentives for merchants, these are as follows:

10,000 COTI free for opening a wallet and 5,000 per merchant referral
1,000 COTI per user referral
Bonuses for high processing volume
Fee discounts for staking 1mn COTI or more in a merchant wallet

We are also provided with a model that assumes a 1% share of online retail sales attributed to the COTI network, which would give the network an annual turnover of $40bn and 10 million customers; this is COTI’s goal for three years post-mainnet launch.

Turning the latter document, here we find a thorough overview of COTI Pay, updated June 2019:

This begins with an executive summary that details COTI’s vision of becoming a prominent, decentralised, scalable payments network for global commerce. Within this, COTI Pay assists merchants and consumers by improving payment experience, utilising COTI Dime (a stablecoin on the network). Moreover, COTI Pay is partnered with Processing.com, who serve tens of thousands of merchants and handle tens of billions of dollars in payments annually. COTI being integrated will allow it to be used seamlessly by their clients.

Moving through the document, we find a comprehensive series of pages on COTI Pay itself, comprised of the Trustchain protocol, Trust Score, Arbitration System, COTI Dime and COTI-X.

Trustchain, as previously mentioned, is their novel consensus mechanism that utilises machine-learning algorithms to assign trust scores to consumers and merchants, as well as to transactions, which are clustered to increase processing speed. When coupled with low energy consumption, the network is able to operate with near-zero transaction fees. Trustchain itself is comprised of Full Nodes, Double Spend Prevention Nodes, Trust Score Nodes and History Nodes, creating a trust layer on top of the DAG, ranking users by their trust and decreasing or increasing fees based on this, as well as processing speed of transactions. Further, this same node network is able to operate for a multitude of DAGs.

Trust Score is determined using the following parameters: account balance (the aggregate value of transactions over a specified period); dispute occurrence; disputes won; disputes lost; and user ratings. Trust Scores are updated with each new transaction in a user’s history, with the spectrum of scores available ranging from 0 to 100. Those with scores of 100 would receive maximally discounted fees and most primary processing.

The Arbitration System has been developed to provide buyer-seller protections against fraud, errors and counterparty abuse. Arbitrators are required to resolve disputes when issues such as billing errors, unauthorized charges or faulty/undelivered goods arise. Merchants have rolling reserve requirements based on turnover and Trust Score, where a fee is incurred and reserved for a number of days on each transaction; once the reserve term ends, this particular fee is refunded. When a merchant loses a dispute, this is taken from his rolling reserve. Moreover, this reserve is significantly lower than traditional payment systems with lower term-periods.

COTI Dime is COTI Pay’s native stablecoin, bearing a consistent value of $0.10 and facilitating price stability within the ecosystem. This stablecoin will be utilised for value transfer within the network, whilst the native COTI token will be used for fee payment, node operator incentives and arbitration.

Finally, COTI-X is the native currency exchange for COTI Pay, providing network participants with liquidity in an assortment of digital and traditional currencies. It has three primary functions: cross-currency payments; direct transfers and conversions; and liquidity. Further, COTI-X operates in the background for all of COTI Pay’s services and applications, making sure that exchange requests from merchants and consumers are fulfilled automatically.

There is also a 65-page highly-technical whitepaper that can be found here with further detail on all of this.

Roadmap:

The 2021 roadmap can be found in this Medium article.

It is presented both as a visual graphic and a detailed blog post, with the timeline published below:

As you can see, it is jam-packed with goals and only relates to the first half of 2021; I assume we can expect a similar article and timeline published in June for Q3 and Q4.

The roadmap itself is divided into five core development aspects: COTI Pay, COTI Pay Business, Infrastructure, Licenses and Regulation and DeFi.

Within these, we find more specific goals related to each aspect of the COTI ecosystem.

Beginning with COTI Pay, the team will be focused on the release of debit cards and bank accounts powered by VISA and Simplex, where users will be able to store fiat within COTI Pay and pay anywhere that accepts VISA internationally, facilitating more seamless interaction between crypto and fiat (where they are already able to purchase and store crypto). The aim is for COTI Pay to become the all-encompassing finance hub for the end-user. Further, the iOS version of the COTI Pay app is expected to be submitted to the Apple app store in Q2.

Moving onto COTI Pay Business, the team will be release v2.0 of the Ultra eWallet, allowing merchants to process USDT through a gateway; at present, this is limited to credit card payments and bank transfers, but following this release USDT will be acceptable by any merchant who wishes to do so. This was specifically request by one of COTI’s largest clients – Dafabet. Further, in Q2, COTI will be releasing a new version of Blockchain Dollars that integrates the ORO system, which will optimise the experience for fiat-to-crypto. Over 20 fiat currencies are expected to be supported. The team will also be releasing an updated version of AdaPay in collaboration with Cardano for the Shelley Mainnet. Moreover, COTI’s credit card processing solution – PayWize – will become a payment institution in order to facilitate money remittance, FX services and more, thus growing the amount of revenue processed on COTI. Finally, the team will be releasing one-click payment requests for merchants in Q2 to improve the experience.

Turning to COTI’s infrastructure, the team will be rolling out Staking 3.0 (now live), which will lock a significant amount of COTI out of circulation. The team will also look to finalise integration of v1 of the mainnet to exchanges in order to facilitate more listings of the mainnet token. This is expected to allow for the team to continue development on v2.0 of Trustchain and their DAG for release in Q2. Finally, the native COTI token is expected to be integrated to Ledger to allow for hardware wallet storage.

Moving onto licenses and regulation, the team will be looking to obtain licenses in Singapore, legally allowing fiat to crypto conversions (the team is already licensed in Europe). The team are also still in the process of obtaining an EMI (Electronic Money License) which will allow them to function like a digital bank, excluding loans. They are hopeful that this process will be completed in Q2.

Finally, regarding DeFi, COTI have recently launched their decentralised Crypto Volatility Index and this will continue to be developed through the year. There will be a mainnet release of the CVI allowing for on-chain staking of its governance token, as well as liquidity mining. In Q2, the team will be releasing margin trading functionality.

Wallets:

COTI can be stored on hardware wallets like those of Ledger and Trezor as an ERC-20 token, as well as on mobile wallets, web wallets and local clients. It can also be stored on the COTI Pay Viper wallet in its mainnet form.

Developmental Progress:

No doubt, the most important aspect of fundamental evaluation of a project is to look at the progress being made. As such, I have provided my key takeaways from various sources (all linked at the bottom of this section) regarding the development of COTI:

October 2020 saw COTI process 75,000+ transactions on-chain and COTI’s processing solution, PayWize, signs deals with Soft Gamings and Kindred Group. Merchants including BetWarrior, Entertainment Art and 10bet were signed also.
COTI released their MultiDAG, extending the capacity of their Trustchain to allow for multi-currency and additional token issuance on the network. COTI are in discussions to be involved in the issuance of Central Bank Digital Currencies this year.
COTI Pay Viper was launched, with integration of the COTI Bridge and COTI-X, as well as staking support. This release was also published to Android, with the iOS version expected later this year.
COTI-X was launched to function as an internal exchange and a fiat on-ramp.
TrustChain 2.0 began being developed, as well as further work completed on the integration of the mainnet token to more exchanges.
The team released Blockchain Dollars and Ultra eWallet as whitelabel solutions for Market Junction and Dafabet, respectively.
COTI partnered with Cardano, Chainlink, Recruit, Celsius, Simplex and Moonpay.
Over 100 merchants now use PayWize for payment processing, primarily in the gaming industry, including Market Junction, Dafabet, 10bet, Kindred Group and Jet Bingo.
Around $100mn of transactions were processed in 2020.
18 mainnet nodes were run in COTI’s staking 2.0 program, with 750+ staking participants.
COTI was listed on Binance in 2020, as well as on Gate.io, IndoDax, WazirX, Bidesk and Coinbet, with COTI also creating a pool on Uniswap for the ERC-20 token.
COTI released the crypto volatility index (CVI), with its mainnet expected in early 2021.
In December 2020 alone, COTI processed $15mn+ of transactions, and in February 2021 this grew to $18.6mn, continuing the trend of month-on-month growth.
In December 2020, over 339,000 transactions were processed, with PayWize acquiring William Hill for payment processing and Bet365.
In March 2021, COTI launched Staking 3.0, with 1129 staking participants, 109mn COTI staked and 17 active nodes.
COTI announced a partnership with Orion Protocol for liquidity provision via COTI-X.
Apple Pay purchases of COTI are now available via Simplex.

And that concludes my fundamental evaluation of COTI.

Technical Analysis

COTI/BTC

Weekly:

Daily:

COTI/USD

Weekly:

Daily:

*The analysis provided below is accurate as of 18th March 2021.

If we begin by looking at COTI/BTC, from the weekly, we can see that price formed a high at 834 satoshis in August 2020, before retracing its 2020 gains all the way back into the original accumulation area below 190 satoshis in late December; subsequently, the pair found a base, re-accumulated and broke back above that prior range resistance at 190, beginning a cyclical reversal. We are quite clearly in the midst of this cyclical reversal, with the pair having rallied into the August 2020 high, wicked above but failed to close higher. Whilst it is possible that this could mark the end of the bull cycle for COTI, looking at the lack of selling from large holders – alongside the performance of similar midcaps (rallying into the 1.618 extension of the August high at the very least), I believe COTI is simply in a period of consolidation below resistance here, with the next target the 1.618 extension, which has confluence with the all-time high around 1300 satoshis. If we drop into the daily, we can see just how much volume is being traded up here, and the pull-back from resistance has now sufficiently reset RSI for another push higher, although we may yet see another week or so of consolidation before another test at a higher-high above 925 satoshis. The bear case would be if the pair puts in a lower-high on a test of 836 satoshis, then breaks down below the most recent swing-low into 530 satoshis, thus turning market structure bearish. Until then, onwards and upwards.

Turning to COTI/USD, we can see from the weekly that the pair been pushing new all-time highs every week since late February, continuing its multi-year uptrend and finding resistance last week at the 3.618 extension of the bear market around $0.46. Last week traded significantly higher volume than ever before, so I would now be looking for a rally higher into the 500% extension at $0.64 on lower volume to mark a potential slowing down of the rally – this is an area I will be looking to take some profits. Naturally, this is not an area for new entries but rather for those in positions to pay more attention; if I begin to see larger holders start offloading COTI whilst price pushes higher, I will do the same. This does not detract from what is quite clearly strong fundamental quality in the project, but all projects are at the mercy of market cycles, so whether we get another 2x from here or even a 5x, we are undoubtedly closer to euphoria than depression.

And that concludes my evaluation of COTI.

Conclusion

This report is now approaching 6,000 words, and it is time to draw it to a close.

My final grading for COTI is 7 out of 10.*

*Despite growing significantly across social metrics, financial metrics and most importantly, the business itself, the token is now approaching the latter stages of its market cycle and thus I have had to downgrade it based on perceived downside risks for new buyers at current prices. I would like to reiterate that were these reports graded purely on fundamental qualities, COTI would now score a 10, as it is one of the most impressive projects I have come across over recent years. I am sure if it continues to grow its ecosystem as it is currently doing, its token will be one of the best investments for new speculators in the next bear market, at which point this report will be updated to grade it as such.

Here, you can find my grading framework, for reference.

Lastly, here is a link to a Google Sheets file with any significant data from previous reports compiled for cross-comparative purposes. I will keep this updated as I continue to write these reports.

I hope this report has proved insightful and that you’ve enjoyed the read! Please do feel free to leave any questions in the Comments, and I’ll answer them as best I can.

Cryptocurrency Trading | Research | Analysis