OYO Smart coin (OSC) Review: Please tell us it is an April Fool Joke

I have seen the most ridiculous projects in the blockchain space, some hilarious altcoins, and honestly some scams where I burnt my own hands too. But never in my wildest dreams I imagined to read a message “Oyo is launching its own coin”. Never.

For those of you who don’t know what Oyo is, let me tell you. OYO Rooms is a hospitality company founded by Ritesh Agarwal. Oyo has revolutionised the hotel industry by tying up with tiniest of hotels to the most luxurious hotels in various cities. Now, you can just book a room from your mobile app as per your budget.

oyo rooms in the street — An Oyo Hotel with the brand displayed

Contents

1 What is the OYO ICO?
2 The WhitePaper
3 The Current Market Value of OYO
4 What is the Need for an ICO?
5 Should we invest in OSC?
6 Is this an April Fool’s Joke?
7 Read more:

What is the OYO ICO?

An hour ago OYO rooms put out a tweet about the OYO Smart Coin (OSC). The pre registrations are open now. Within an hour there are over 80 Retweets and the message is already circulating fast in the Telegram channels.

OYO is launching a new coin to make payments. That’s it. Each OYO smart token is priced at INR 999, which means it is less than 30 tokens for 1 whole ETH. That is a whole lot expensive if you ask me.

#OSC: #OYOSMARTCoin will benefit hotel partners, consumers & the entire ecosystem at large. Using OSC, consumers will be able to transact on the OYO platform with reduced prices and travel partners will be able to directly market & offer benefits to them.https://t.co/R86c4080aB pic.twitter.com/twEOxN2c8T

— OYO (@oyorooms) March 29, 2018

The WhitePaper

No ICO is complete without a white paper. It is the vehicle to drive an ICO. OYO too has a white paper. A 3 page document that has a disclaimer 1.25 page long. Deep dive into it and this is what you will find.

The OYO SMART Coin network will enable a decentralised management of the OYO ecosystem
1. Receive, analyse and dispatch incoming hotel leads
2. Conduct audits through auditors trained by OYO
3. Publish tenders to registered vendors to initiate the transformation of a hotel to an OYO
4. Execute and validate the transformation of a hotel through randomised quality checks.

Some other takeaways from the Whitepaper:

A decentralised exchange setup by OYO to buy and sell or redeem OSC tokens
A smart contract based onboarding platform for hotel partners.
Payments for services can be made using the OSC
Rewards for early adopters.

What is not mentioned in the Whitepaper:

What kind of Blockchain will be developed and how will they handle the customer data.
OSC will be a finite quantity, but how many?
Absolutely no Token distribution

The Current Market Value of OYO

OYO managed to bring down its losses last quarter according to the ET report in January. Oyo Rooms or Oravel travels is has secured a funding round of 260 Million USD last year with help from Softbank. The revenues of the company have jumped since 2016. OYO is doing better than before but still racking up losses.

What is the Need for an ICO?

With an ICO you do not have to distributed your company’s ownership. Oyo is pricing 1 OSC at 999 INR. If they sell a Million OSC, that is 21 times less than the supply of Bitcoin, they will generate 1 Billion INR, which is 100 Crores. If they sell 10 million tokens, they will generate close to 10 Billion INR. This is easy money.

Should we invest in OSC?

According to me, Oyorooms is out there to generate more capital without the liability that surrounds it. The OSC coin has no function other than being able to be used to buy Hotel rooms and services, which you can do using INR right now.

Maybe you will get a 20% or even 50% discount if you use OSC tokens, well you can still buy the tokens from their decentralised exchange they are promising.

The only possible way for an OSC holder to benefit is if the OSC prices go up. If OSC prices go down, you’re in loss. The blog says “With every 100 hotels added to the OYO network, the value of OSC will likely to go up by 4%”.

Personally, I prefer a good white-paper to say the least before I can decide if I want to invest. The OSC whitepaper is like a student project. So I will avoid it then and there.