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N.B: In the spirit of full transparency, the following Coin Report on Mochimo is a Sponsored Post.
Welcome to the 35th Coin Report. In today’s report, I will be assessing the fundamental and technical strengths and weaknesses of Mochimo. 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
Now, this has been a report I’ve been wanting to write for quite a while, given the unique nature of the project in question. Mochimo has been a community favourite for some time and given that my friend @bitcoin_dad is on the team, we were able to get this booked in and I am eager to share my findings with you. Despite this fact, I hope it goes without saying that I will be brutal in my evaluation of Mochimo if I find significant flaws and weaknesses, but ultimately I expect that this report will provide some insight into just how novel smaller projects in this space can be.
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 Mochimo prior to reading this report, here are some primary links:
Fundamental
General:
Name: Mochimo
Ticker: MCM
Algorithm: Peach (Proof-of-Work)
Sector: Quantum-Proof Currency
Exchanges: Citex, QBTC & QTrade.io
Launch Overview
Mochimo was launched on June 25th, 2018, utilising Trigg’s Algorithm (now Peach) for its Proof-of-Work consensus. The genesis block contained a 6.34% premine of the maximum supply of 76,533,882 MCM, amounting to 4.76mn MCM, with two-third of this allocated to the team and one-third allocated to the Mochimo Foundation. There was no ICO.
The block reward increases incrementally for the first four years of mining, with 337.5-second block times, though this shall be covered in detail in a later section. The current block reward is 18.2 MCM.
Price-History Overview
Despite the project being in existence, there is only around five months of price-history available for Mochimo, with two distinct market cycles having played out in that time. This is likely due to the difficulties found in getting listed on exchanges since inception, as we shall discuss later. For now, it shall suffice to say that Mochimo formed its all-time high at 26,600 satoshis in May 2019. It has since made successive lower peaks, within a longer-term downtrend, but is currently trading around 2,800 satoshis. Its all-time low was printed at 1,900 satoshis in August 2019.
Project Overview
Unlike most projects in this space, seeking to be everything to everyone, it is apparent that Mochimo knows its (albeit broad) purpose; to provide a future-proof financial protocol, facilitated by a quantum-resistant codebase.
As stated in their whitepaper:
“Mochimo [$MCM] is a third-generation cryptocurrency and transaction network architected from the ground up to avoid known issues and deficiencies in existing blockchain systems. Mochimo was coded from a blank page to combine best-in class features into one crypto ecosystem that is also future proofed through post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. As part of this protocol, the currency employs a randomized peer-to-peer network, a new consensus algorithm, and a unique proof-of-work mining technology. These pieces work together to produce a trustless, distributed ledger.”
Let’s begin with some Metric Analysis:
Metric Analysis:
Below are listed a number of important metrics, all of which are accurate as of 27th September 2019. 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: $0.22 (2,785 satoshis)
Circulating Supply: 3,326,645 MCM
Total Supply: 5,814,576 MCM
Exchange Volume: $23,295
Network Value: $743,122 (82.65 BTC)
Maximum Supply: 76,533,882 MCM
% of Max. Supply Minted: 7.59%
Network Value at Max. Supply: $17.096mn
Exchange Volume-to-Network Value: 3.13%
Category: Microcap
Average Price (30-Day): $0.37
Average Exchange Volume (30-Day): $59,511
Average Network Value (30-Day): $1.217mn
Average Exchange Volume (30-Day)-to-Network Value: 4.89%
Volatility* (30-Day): –0.1151
Average Daily On-Chain Transactions (1-Day): 826
Average Daily Transactional Value** (1-Day): $6,193 (source)
NVT*** (1-Day): 119.99
% Price Change USD (30-Day): -48.8%
% Price Change USD (1-Year): N/A
USD All-Time High: $1.95
% From USD All-Time High: -88.5%
Premine % of Max. Supply: 6.34% (4,76mn MCM)
Premine Location: Source
Liquidity (calculated as the sum of BTC in the buy-side with 10% of current price across all exchanges): 0.111 BTC
Liquidity-to-Network Value %: 0.12%
Supply Available on Exchanges: 63,901 MCM
% of Circulating Supply Available on Exchanges: 1.92%
*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.
**Transactional Value in $ is calculated by taking the daily transactional value in MCM and multiplying it by price.
***NVT is calculated by dividing the Network Value by the Average Daily Transactional Value. See here for more on NVT.
Supply Emission & Inflation:
Block Reward Schedule: Current block reward is 18.2, with the reward increasing incrementally with each block.
Average Block Time: 5.63 minutes
Current Block Height: 101,132
Annual Supply Emission: 1,700,608 MCM (Minimum) = 47.36 BTC at current prices
Annual Inflation Rate: 51.12%
Circulating Supply in 365 Days: 5,027,253 MCM
Distribution:
Address Count: 12,253
Supply Held By Top 10 Addresses: 52.51%
Supply Held By Top 20 Addresses: 58.31%
Supply Held By Top 100 Addresses: 71.23%
Inactive Address Count in Top 20 (30 Days of No Activity): 15
Analysis:
Unlike for the vast majority of projects featured in these reports, there is a somewhat lessened mountain of metrics for Mochimo, due to its lack of staking and masternodes. That said, many of my more recent reports have featured ICO projects, which naturally also lack any supply emission metrics, unlike Mochimo.
Enough preamble; let’s crack on.
To begin with, I’d like to take a look at the transaction-related metrics, as these are clearly the most significant for a project aiming to be used as a currency. Following this, I’ll be covering the remaining General metrics, Supply Emission & Inflation and I’ll conclude by taking a look at Distribution:
The first thing to note is that the transactions for the past 24 hours are tracked live on the block explorer, and, whilst data is available for the past 30 days, the design of the explorer makes it unfeasible to collate it manually, as I do. As such, the data provided here is from the past 24 hours.
I found that there were 826 On-Chain Transactions over the past 24 hours, amounting to $6,193 of Daily Transactional Value. This means that the average on-chain transaction over the past day was worth $7.50. Using this data, we can work out that the 24-hour NVT of Mochimo is 119.99; this is around 55% greater than that of Bitcoin, at present.
Moving on, I’d like to take a look at Volatility, which I calculated to be -0.1151 for the past 30 days; this places Mochimo 9th-highest amongst prior reports for 30-day volatility, indicating that MCM remains in price discovery mode, unable to find an area within which it can consolidate and be accumulated.
Next up, we have the metrics relating to Liquidity:
Firstly, I found that there was 0.111 BTC of buy-side liquidity within 10% of current prices to be found across all exchanges, equating to 0.12% of its Network Value. This places Mochimo joint 8th-lowest from prior reports, indicating little demand at current prices.
As for sell-side liquidity, I found that 63,901 MCM was available for purchase in the orderbooks, equating to 1.92% of the circulating supply. This places Mochimo somewhere in the middle of the pack, and is overall indicative of a moderate desire to sell MCM at any price, as opposed to hold the coins off-exchange. When taken in conjunction with the buy-side liquidity measure, this paints a somewhat disappointing picture, with no real demand present in the market. This is undoubtedly in large part due to the lack of exchange listings.
Moving onto volume, Mochimo is reported to have traded $23,295 over the past 24 hours, equating to 3.13% of its Network Value. Further, over the past 30 days, Mochimo traded an average of $59,511 daily, equating to 4.89% of its Average Network Value for the same period. These, in contrast to those relating to liquidity, are promising figures, particularly considering the lack of exchange listings. In fact, the latter figure places Mochimo in the middle of the pack, relative to prior reports; this despite the fact that most projects featured in these reports are listed on at least one of the larger exchanges.
Now, let’s take a look at Supply Emission:
Given that Mochimo has 5.625-minute block times and a current block reward of 18.2 MCM, we can determine that minimum annual supply emission is 1,700,608 MCM. Why minimum? Because Mochimo’s block rewards are incrementally increasing for the first four years, thus block rewards a year from now will be greater than today. This degree of emission equates to 47.36 BTC at current prices, giving MCM an annual inflation rate of 51.12%; the 8th-highest figure of all prior reports.
More significant than these figures alone, however, is their relationship to volume:
If Mochimo has minimum annual supply emission of 1.7mn MCM, its Average Daily Supply Emission is 4,659.2 MCM, equating to 0.129 BTC, or $1,041 worth at current prices.
Mochimo’s 24H traded volume covers this daily emission by 22.3x. Further, its Average Daily Exchange Volume covers this by 57.2x. As such, there is no reason why current prices should be unsustainable, thus declining prices are likely a symptom of price manipulation or weak hands selling, rather than supply emission being dumped. But we will have a clearer picture of this after covering the rich-list. Finally, Mochimo’s buy-side liquidity of 0.111 BTC paints a bleaker picture in relation to its supply emission, as it suggests that the market would not be able to soak up even one day’s-worth of emission without wiping out all buy-side liquidity within 10% of current prices.
Using the rich-list, I found that there are currently 12,253 holders of MCM.
Further, I found that the top 10 richest addresses control 52.51% of the total supply; the top 20 control 58.31%; and the top 100 control 71.23%.
Regarding the activity of the top 20 addresses, I found that 15 were inactive over the past 30 days. Of the remaining 5 addresses, 1 added 10k; 1 added 20k; 1 added 28k; 1 added 34k; 1 added 88k; and 1 added 242k MCM. Overall, zero distribution amongst the large holders and a large degree of accumulation. Promising stuff.
And that concludes this section. Onto the Mochimo 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.
Mochimo is present on two of the four platforms: Twitter and Discord. To begin, let’s look at the various social metrics that I calculated from the Mochimo Twitter account:
Twitter Followers: 1,061
Tweets: 330
Average Twitter Engagement: 1.31%
Facebook Likes: N/A
Facebook Posts (30-Day): N/A
Average Facebook Engagement: N/A
As usual, I will be using RivalIQ‘s social benchmark report for evaluation purposes.
Twitter:
Mochimo has a small audience on Twitter of 1,061 followers, which is the 4th-lowest of prior reports Its engagement, however, is somewhat impressive, at 1.31% on average; 11th-highest amongst the same reports. This, of course, is likely a symptom of the small audience size as much as it is the engaged nature of the community.
Relative to global benchmarks, this is 145.5x greater than the Media industry and 27.3x greater than the average across all industries. I would suggest focusing on growing this audience, as Twitter can be a powerful tool for the growth of a project. Perhaps incentivise the current community to spread the word.
Facebook:
There is no Facebook page for Mochimo.
Discord:
The Mochimo Discord has 1,770 members. 40 new members have joined over the past week.
The Discord group is very well organised and laid out, with numerous relevant channels and sub-channels to ensure accessibility. Upon joining the group, the Start Here channel provides relevant links for new users and a list of user IDs for the core team. Within this menu, the What Is Mochimo channel provides a history of the project and its inception. Most significant, however, is the Announcements channel, which is updated regularly: over the past month, there has been an addition to the Mochimo team; community fundraising for a new exchange listing on QBTC; a Q&A livestream; and, as of today, confirmed listing on QBTC.
The channel we’re most concerned with, however, is General, which is commonly the most active channel in a Discord. Here, I found there to be daily discussion at varying degrees of constancy; some days were very active and some less so. Regarding important information within recent discussion, I found that the team are very much committed to the core principles they started with, with the recent questioning of Binance US’s CEO on their exchange listing policy proving this. However, one community member raised the most salient point, which is that cryptocurrencies, like everything else, are competitive and the vast majority of fundamentally sound projects that disappear or diminish into nothingness do so because they did not capture sufficient speculative interest to carry the project through the toughest times; such is the cruel nature of this and all other competitive domains. Moving on through the discussion, I found that the team are looking for a Social Media manager to become part of the core contributors, which is very promising to see; this is clearly a weakness at present and it is good to see steps being made to resolve this.
Overall, the community seem engaged and committed, although the size of the community is not particularly large yet. They also appear to take an active role in the development of the project, which is very healthy.
Telegram:
There is no Telegram group for Mochimo.
BitcoinTalk:
The Mochimo BitcoinTalk thread was created on 5th February, 2018, and has since generated 181 posts spanning 9 pages in 592 days. This equates to 0.27 posts per day, on average. However, in the past 90 days, the thread has had 15 posts via 10 individual posters, giving an average of 0.03 posts per day; effectively, the thread is dead.
Regarding the announcement itself, it is well-designed, with the tagline reading “Post-Quantum Currency“. This is clear and direct in its purpose and reflects the rest of the announcement, which is informative and concise. It begins by describing the purpose of the project, which is “a complete reimplementation of blockchain”, with primary features including being quantum-proof, scalable, fast, decentralised and fair. The Mochimo mainnet is live, which is good to find as a potential new user or investor.
Below this, the coin specification is outlined, which I will briefly summarise: there is a 76.5mn MCM maximum supply, with the project having launched on June 25th, 2018. It is a Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency with a 22-year mining period and incrementally increasing block rewards for the first four years. 6.34% of the maximum supply, equating to 4.76mn MCM, was premined in the genesis block, with 3.2mn allocated to the team and the remainder to the Mochimo Foundation. Beyond this, further reading material is provided, including the Wiki and Whitepaper, and social platforms, exchanges and wallets are all linked prominently. The announcement concludes with a brief overview of the team behind the project.
Regarding the recent content on the thread, I found that there was mention of a recent wallet update and a miner update, as well as an AMA that took place in July. Further, I discovered that most MCM trading occurs OTC and that the community are keen on decentralised exchange listings becoming a priority. There is nothing much beyond this.
And that concludes this section on the Mochimo community.
Development:
For the following Development analysis, I will be evaluating project leadership, the website, the roadmap, the whitepaper, the wallets and finally providing a general overview:
Project Leadership:
The website lists 7 core team members and there are 7 Github contributors. Full transparency is provided on these members, and naturally the expertise is development-heavy, with 6 of the 7 having backgrounds in a field related to programming and computing. There are no marketing specialists, and, as we have discovered in some of the earlier sections, it shows.
This is a common thread with more novel projects, as the unique nature of the project itself requires significant development focus, often leading to a disregard for the other aspects necessary to give the project longevity. I have seen it occur time and time again; these are simple fixes that can make a big impact on the prominence of any given project in this space.
Update: in a recent interview, it was mentioned that the team has now grown to 16 individuals, although none of the additions have been marketing-related.
Website:
The website is relatively well-designed, but lacks much branding. There is a banner in green highlighting the most recent wallet update, which sits beneath the navigation menu and the logo. The background image appear to be a screenshot from YouTube, as the Play button is invalid; I expect this to open up an introductory video or something similar. The navigation menu itself is relevant, though sub-menus with further details would be useful.
Moving down the homepage, the tagline printed is Currency For The Post-Quantum Era, with links provided to mining resources and the whitepaper. Further down, there is a What Is Mochimo? section, which reiterates the quantum-proof nature of the project, as well as highlighting its scalability due to its proprietary ChainCrunch algorithm that increases transaction speeds whilst maintaining small block sizes. Further, its ASIC-resistance and decentralised nature is emphasised, but the most important point here is that Mochimo believes that within 5 years Quantum Computing will break ECDSA encryption, leaving almost all cryptocurrencies vulnerable. Mochimo uses WOTS+ to bypass this, making it future-proof.
Moving further down, we are given an introduction to the Peach hashing algorithm that enables consensus on the network, as well as ChainCrunch, which compresses the Mochimo blockchain. Beneath this, we find the roadmap, though this is covered in the next section. We also find a link to further information on the team.
Now, interestingly, we find a detailed FAQ native to the homepage, which ensures user accessibility. Here, there is more than enough relevant material to satisfy a potential new user or investor, covering mining, the launch, block rewards and the premine.
Finally, the homepage concludes with social links, though these should really be more prominent, and more detailed website navigation.
Roadmap:
The roadmap is native to the homepage of the website and is presented in a visually-appealing format, beginning in Q3 2017 and running through to Q4 2018. This means that the roadmap is now 9 months outdated with no direction given on future developments. Now, in the interview linked in the Project Leadership section, the team mentioned that they do not intend to release information on the future of the project, but rather prefer to only discuss tested and released developments.
Whilst I can understand the intent, which I assume is to dampen speculative movements, I believe this is counter-productive for a number of reasons. Firstly, providing no information on the future of a project can make a potential new user or investor feel as though there is no future and that the project is unambitious, at the very least. Secondly, having no public goals removes accountability from the team; how am I expected to put capital at risk when I am unable to determine the efficacy and commitment of the team behind the project? Lastly, having public goals that are known to be being worked towards, even if they are not time-stamped as they are in traditional roadmaps, gives the community something to continue looking forward to; to get excited about and interested in; and to ultimately share with others those very things.
Whitepaper:
https://mochimo.org/download/1094/
The Mochimo whitepaper is 28 pages in length, with around half of this focusing on the technological aspects of the project in a more technical manner. As such, I will not be covering these here, but will instead focus on the other sections that give us a clear picture of what purpose Mochimo is intending to serve. If you’d like to read up on the more technical components, you can find the whitepaper linked above.
The document begins with an executive summary that outlines the five key innovations of Mochimo and its purpose, which is to future-proof the crypto ecosystem. The innovations outlined are: the ChainCrunch algorithm, which ensures scalability of the blockchain via compression; Trigg’s Algorithm, which processes transactions with a fixed fee and a first-in-first-out system; the Mochimo Consensus Mechanism, which “allows for high-speed convergence, orphaned chain pruning and a mathematically provable consensus that is superior to the consensus-by-rumor model of many cryptocurrencies”; Quantum Resistant Security, ensured by the WOTS+ algorithm, future-proofing the protocol; and a fair distribution model with no ICO, minimal premine and a block reward schedule that does not favor the earliest adopters.
The document goes on to discuss design principles for the Mochimo protocol, with the emphasis being placed on true decentralisation. The codebase was written from scratch rather than forked from another cryptocurrency, with autonomous decentralisation the first point-of-interest; on this, Mochimo rejected the concept of governance systems and of consolidated mining power. The second primary principle of design is termed The Self-Healing Ledger that relies on mathematics to prune the chain. The document states “If the ledger is mutable in any way, the currency is worthless.” As such, Mochimo also reject the concept of masternodes and other centralised authority systems. The third principle of design is termed Egalitarian Mining Inclusion and focuses on keeping the currency accessible to all across time; facilitated by a fair distribution model.
Moving on, the document discusses the issues solved by Mochimo, with the primary of these being the so-called future-proofing, achieved with quantum resistance. The thesis here is that ECDSA encryption is likely to be broken within 5 years and so the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are vulnerable; by utilising WOTS+, Mochimo will be quantum resistant.
The following section deals with network scalability, which is solved by Mochimo’s ChainCrunch proprietary algorithm. This compresses the blockchain to ensure accessibility for all and not just those with the hardware capacity to run nodes on excessively large blockchains.
This is followed by the aforementioned technical sections, which I shall not be covering here.
Concluding the document are the currency’s specifications and key references.
Overall, the whitepaper is concise and informative.
Wallets:
There is a Mojo GUI wallet for Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as a command-line wallet for Linux. There is a bounty available for Trezor or Ledger integration.
And that concludes this section on development. Onto the technicals:
Technical
MCM/BTC
*NOTE: This chart is a little out-dated, as the data feed on Cointrader.pro seems to lag price by a few days; as we know, MCM is currently trading around 2,800 satoshis rather than above 4,000 satoshis, but the chart has not yet updated to reflect this. Nonetheless, I will endeavour to analyse the price-action we can see, whilst being mindful of the fact that price has now broken below the range support at 3,400 satoshis.
So, looking at the MCM/BTC chart, we can see roughly four months of price-history, beginning in May 2019. It was here that Mochimo printed its all-time high of 26,679 satoshis, before falling considerably, making new all-time lows in late June at 4,700 satoshis. This became the intermediate bottom, with price beginning a short-term cycle here, climbing to a cyclical high of 15,544 satoshis, well short of its all-time high, forming a first long-term lower peak. From here, price continued to bleed, making a new all-time low in a flash crash in early August to 1,900 satoshis. Price did not remain here for very long, however, with the candle close back above 5,700 satoshis that day. Nonetheless, the bleeding did not abate, and price began to close below 4,700 satoshis, turning it into what can now be viewed as range resistance. Range support was found at 3,386 satoshis and price remained range-bound for 40 days; however, recently, with the turbulence in BTC/USD, price has broken below range support and remains firmly in price discovery mode, with current prices of 2,800 satoshis. This is lingering far too close to the all-time low for comfort, and I would not seek to be a buyer here even if liquidity was available, which is a separate issue altogether. Instead, I believe it would be wise to wait for price to reclaim 3,400 satoshis as support before entering, even with the fundamental soundness Mochimo possesses.
Now, the primary issue I briefly mentioned earlier is indeed liquidity. Given the liquidity metrics I evaluated earlier, there is simply not enough demand at current prices to deem an entry worthy here. I believe that exchange listings are the key here to bring the desired awareness to Mochimo; greater liquidity is paramount to draw more eyes to the project. Of course, the difficulty here, relative to a run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency, is that Mochimo’s unique codebase makes it all the more expensive and arduous to be listed. Unlike an ERC-20 token that can be added to an exchange effectively without cost, adding MCM is considered to be more of a task. Thus, exchanges charge more for listing. Now, given that the project does have a premine, there is the possibility that funds could be made available; however, the catch here is that MCM, at present, is largely illiquid, so are exchanges going to take the risk in accepting MCM as payment? I don’t know. Clearly, something must be done to resolve this, as Mochimo cannot thrive without liquidity and liquidity will not appear without greater exchange exposure, which itself will not happen without either stable funding or fixing the liquidity issue.
Conclusion
This report is now approaching 5,000 words, and it is time to draw it to a close.
My final grading for Mochimo is 6 out of 10.*
*Improvements to liquidity would see me alter this grading to a 7.
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.
AD: This blog is sponsored by Proof of Review.
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