ProCurrency (PROC) — In Depth Review

For our In Depth Reviews, we’re going to focus mainly on small market cap altcoins. These coins not only have massive potential for speculation, information is typically scattered and somewhat unreliable. This is our first in-depth review and we welcome feedback & requests for other altcoins you’d like to see analysis on.

Overview:

ProCurrency was launched in January of 2017.

Website: https://www.procommerce.io/

Algo: SHA256 + POS

Max Supply: 75 Billion

Pre-mine: 15 Billion

POS Reward: 15 Coins/ Block 1st Year

10 Coins/ Block 2nd Year

5 Coins/ Block until max supply is reached

Block Time: 60 Seconds, Min Age: 6 Hours

Wallets: Desktop (Mac/PC/Ubuntu) & Paper

App: PRO Rewards, working — Apple & Android

Exchanges: Cryptopia & Stocks.Exchange

Whitepaper: link here

Market Cap (on 3/5/18): ~$2.8M/242 BTC

PROC price (on 3/5/18): $0.028637/ 0.00000249 BTC

Reading the Whitepaper, ProCurrency promises to do quite a lot — let’s look into these things:

Coin Back Program — via their app, they’ve set up structure to reward users for purchases with partners. This is similar to other “cash back” type sites on the web — most notably Ebates.

We downloaded the app (easy to find under “PRO Rewards” in the app store) to check it out:

It’s got a flashy little loading screen:

But from there, it looks much more standard/low budget:

If you scroll through the list of stores, there are only 13 retailers in the “featured” list — but they are popular names like Wal-Mart, Target and Macy’s.

The Coin Back Program is the real draw to bring users to the platform, so let’s compare a couple of the rewards versus Ebates:

Nothing too exciting here, looking into the Bed Bath & Beyond discounts — there are many exclusions and the vast majority of purchases would fall under a 2.52%-0.63% rebate. Not sure where the 6.3% number is really even coming from. The full list is more exhaustive, they tout 4,000 retailers…so there might be some gems out there. That would beg the question of why not put your best deals under the “featured” section?

There just doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason, at this point, for the mainstream to move to this app. Will some fanboys use it? Probably…

It also would be interesting to know if the ProCurrency team passes along all of the revenue they receive from retailers to the users — or is this a profit center for them? We asked the Bitcointalk community regarding this & there has been no response at this point.

The whitepaper states: “PRO’s vision will catapult this particular coin to become a mainstream currency by incentivizing consumers to use the coin and merchants to accept the coin.” So far, there is nothing that makes us believe that mission is achievable with the current app.

Business/Merchant Solutions Reward Application — free solution offered to businesses to guide them on how they can benefit from accepting cryptocurrency. This educational program has the goal of then encouraging businesses to offer PRO Rewards to customers or accept PROC as a form of payment.

There is no indication that any of the retailers that are currently listed through the app have completed this training. This appears to just be a list of retailers that are open to affinity/referral type arrangements.

Also, there appears to be a disconnect with how large corporations work. Why would a large corporation view or trust ProCurrency as a source of education? Do they really expect an executive to sit through this training? Do they anticipate the folks in charge of internet marketing are the same folks that determine payment policies? Feels like a stretch.

It feels like there might be more of a market here for local businesses. Work with them to show the benefits, while offering a Groupon/LivingSocial type discount via the Coin Back Rewards. These businesses are likely more interested in learning about ways to drive business & reduce surcharges from credit cards.

Merchant Payment Application: Having a Merchant Payment Application via Cryptocurrency would be a good thing — integrating it via an already established app would be good as well. The problem here is ease of use and the ability to integrate with existing systems. If you look at Square, they were able to disrupt payments by offering a POS (Point of Sale not Proof of Stake) for their clients to use that was easy to implement. The PRO Currency Merchant Payment Application would have to do just this — it would have to be easier to use or offer other advantages versus a retailer’s current system. We’re not saying this can’t happen…but there are hurdles.

Social Exchange Application: Gives customers an in app way of converting fiat into PROC or BTC, or vice versa. Another great goal — it would be good to have an exchange type app that you can also buy things with.

Financials:

There was a premine of 15 Billion coins and a max supply of 75 Billion coins. Here is the current distribution according to their website:

Unsold Coins and their purpose:

Main points:

• 75% of unsold coins will be kept in esrow via a multisig wallet.
• To unlock the wallet, the signature of both Carlos Contreras (PRO Founder) & Irving Gerardo (PRO Marketing/Community Manager) along with either Lauda or Minerjones from Bitcointalk.
• Release Schedule of: 30% after PRO Solutions App is developed and viable, 25% after PRO Merchant App is developed and viable, and 20% after PRO Exchange App is developed and viable.

What about the other 60 BILLION Coins?

If all 75 Billion coins were in circulation @ current price levels, PROC would have a Top 20 Market Cap. If it raised modestly to $0.10/PROC, it would rival LTC in terms of marketcap.

Roadmap:

Here is the roadmap that was posted in the summer of 2017:

Here is the roadmap posted in February of 2018:

Couple things to note:

• Mobile wallets were supposed to be done in Aug/Sept of 2017, still a couple steps in on the 2018 Phase 1 roadmap.
• ProSolutions was to be launched in October 2017, now the last part of Phase 1 of 2018 roadmap.
• ProExchange was scheduled to be launched in July 2018, not even on the new 2018 roadmap.
• The new roadmap has no dates or projections as to when projects will be released. When called out (albeit in a snarky way) on Twitter, Contreras had the following response:

Tough to say that you “do things differently here at ProCommerce” when your original roadmap had dates…seems like a total cop-out to us.

What we like about this coin:

Not everyone who is into crypto is aware of sites like Ebates. Therefore this is a good way to earn some cryptocurrency without it costing you anything. If PROC goes to 0 and you weren’t going to get cashback elsewhere anyway, no loss to you.

If PROC increases in value, you may very well see a multiple on your rebates, which might effectively make whatever it was you purchased — free.

What we don’t like about this coin:

This article does a great job at covering the MLM (multi-level marketing) aspects of PROC and the background of it’s founder — Armando Contreras. We’re not going to do into the details of this, but it’s quite detailed and raises some concerns about the goals of PROC.

These issues aside, there are other significant issues with this coin that should raise eyebrows. The distribution of rewards is still questionable to us. There is no indication that any of the 4500+ retailers on the app have any relationship with ProCurrency beyond viewing them as an affiliate. None of these organizations have publicly embraced the goals of PROC and/or announced their support of the mission. This being said, PROC is receiving fiat from these retailers and then paying out some percentage of that fiat (could be 100% but likely to be a fraction) in PROC. They get to pocket the cash and you get PROC coins, yay for you!

Without touching the escrow, there are 3.5 billion PROC that are reserved to the rewards app. At this time, there is no underlying utility to the PROC coin and we’ve not see the Dev team make a commitment as to how the fiat payments from retailers will be utilized.

Last but not least is the roadmap. Some of these issues could be less of a concern if the team had a roadmap with firm dates and had a history of meeting it’s commitments, however this is not the case.

Finally, if you look on Github, there has been little meaningful activity as of the last month or so. Check the changes, most are extremely minor tweaks and not indicative of a team that is actively working on an aggressive roadmap.

Verdict: Do not buy, on Shitcoin watch

If all 75 Billion coins were in circulation @ current price levels, PROC would have a Top 20 Market Cap. If it raised modestly to $0.10/PROC, it would rival LTC in terms of marketcap.

Is there any indication that The MLM aspects of the coin & the founder, leave us very uncomfortable about the legitimacy of the coin’s future. Even as an investment, the likelihood of this coin sustaining a significant price increase feels unlikely. There are many more coins with significantly better upside potential.

The questions about the mission of this coin are too significant to warrant that we recommend for anyone to buy this coin. This may end up being a total scam and we will continue to watch it in the weeks/months ahead.

Disclosure:

We currently have no holdings of PROC and do not plan to initiate a position in the next 48 hours. This is not investment advice, continue to do your own research before buying/selling any coin. We hope that these insights and the associated links included will aid you in making an educated decision.