Coin Healthcheck: Newton Project (NEW)

About

The Newton Project has a precise goal in mind: to create a new kind of community economy that involves the interaction of humans and smart technologies. It is aiming to build an infrastructure that could improve the enterprise economy by offering a different method of governance, collaboration, and incentive services. The founders expect the Newton Project to benefit all contributing parties.

Named after the legendary scientist, and founder of the gold standard system, Issac Newton, the Newton Project was launched by the Singapore-registered Newton Foundation in early 2019.

The Newton Project comes with its native token: NEW.

State of the Project

Newton has a full-stack technology architecture: 1. An underlying public chain – NewChain, 2. A distributed storage service – New Net and New IoT, 3. The protocol layer “The Hyper Exchange Protocol” and 4. The application layer.

Newton’s first decentralized app, ‘NewMall’, is the first global blockchain-based e-commerce platform that enables P2P buying and selling transactions.

The Newton Project uses a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism, which requires a limited number of validators, and thus needs a low volume of electricity in order to provide computational power to the network.

The NEW token is used for payment transactions and smart-contract executions.

The token operates on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

The Whitepaper

The whitepaper comes in 19 languages.

The whitepaper comes as pdf file which is automatically downloaded to your computer whenever you click to open it.

2018 was the last time the Newton Project’s whitepaper was updated.

It contains a lack of data on the project’s tokenomics.

Fundraising

Raised almost $23M during a private pre-sale in 2018, selling for $0.0038311 per NEW token.

Around 1.5B NEW tokens were reserved for pre-sale. Not all sold. The pre-sale sold around 6.07% of NEW’s total supply.

The public sale started in 2019, raising nearly $4M at $0.002 per NEW token.

The Development stage

Launched its mainnet in December 2018.

Performs over 5,000 transactions per second. Scalable for various business use cases such as: agriculture, supply chain, payments, public welfare, gaming.

The project says it has established community groups covering 89 countries.

WANQI Mall joined the Newton ecosystem in 2019.

Launched NewChain mainnet ledger node mining and NewSwap NUSDT-NEW liquidity mining in 2021.

NewChain consensus mechanism has been researched and upgraded in 2021.

Most accomplishments are seemingly marketing-related: online market events, hosting seminars, providing tutorials.

Roadmap:

No officially provided roadmap.

Team

Founder Xu JZ (Xu Jizhe) has a bachelor degree in engineering, worked as a system engineer, a senior technology manager, and later as a technology director of various online media and business companies.

Team members have not been revealed on official Newton Project channels. There is no verified data on who they are, what their experience is, or even how many of them are working on the Newton Project.

Partnerships & Investments:

Two investors from China; JLab, the crypto and blockchain arm of JD Capital, which has over $9 billion worth of assets under its management; and the Sailor Capital token fund, which has a focus on blockchain project investments.

Community:

Social media accounts: Twitter (7K), Telegram (3.5K), Weibo (2.4K), Reddit (0).

Has low social media engagement, irregular posts, and a lack of valuable discussions.

Its website blog has year-long periods of inactivity.

Currently 72 Newton human community nodes are operating.

Key Metrics:

Max supply: 100 billion

Circulating supply: 20.5 billion

Market Cap: $5.4 million

All-Time High (ATH): $0.01647294 (April, 2019)

All-Time Low (ATL): $0.00021653 (December, 2021)

Volume: below $1 million

Exchange Listings:

Listed on 11 exchanges (find the full list here), including Huobi Global and Binance DEX.

Main trading pairs are BTC, USDT.

Wallets:

Binance Chain Wallet

Token Allocation:

10% of the token supply is allocated to the founding team. Unlocks 1/24 of the total supply every year to incentivize them.

15% of tokens go to the foundation’s initial operations. A further 15% is dedicated to the foundation’s later operations (with ? of the total supply released immediately, and 1/36 released each month).

60% of NEW tokens are used as incentives for the community.

Provides contradicting data on timeframes and when tokens will be unlocked for the community (data varies from 15 to 50 years after the project’s start).

No data on holder statistics.

Verdict

Not a new project in the cryptocurrency space, but also does not appear very active or lively judging by its metrics.
Lots of important data points are missing; we don’t know who’s in the team. The Newton Project does not provide its future roadmap, and development announcements are rare and irregular.
There are huge gaps between official communications. The project’s communities are small and also do not seem active.
Its low market cap token sits at record lows at the time of writing, but the extremely low volume and trading activity do not seem to be helping to ignite any future spurts. The project is not very popular among traders with its trading volume in the 2021 price peak of NEW only spiking to $7 million.
Although the Newton Project claims to have community groups covering 89 countries, it seems they are mostly focused on the Asian markets.