It was a watershed moment in the wonderful world of cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and blockchain technology projects. Prodeum — which promised to revolutionize the fruit and vegetable industry — replaced its website, post-ICO, with a white screen that contained just one word.
“Penis.”
It is unclear who perpetrated the scam. While the company looked like a legitimate blockchain startup based in Lithuania, there are various threads that suggest it was an individual in Colombia that perpetrated the scam. And while they only got away with a $ 22,000 worth of ETH (more than the $ 11 claimed in other articles on the subject), other scams have been more fruitful.
Confido managed to walk away with over $ 374k in November 2017.
Today, WatermelonBlock — an AI-powered investment and trading platform for cryptocurrency investors and traders — has announced it is integrating with IBM Watson’s AI computing platform to provide investors with real-time insights and detailed analysis to help identify scams like Prodeum and Confido.
WatermelonBlock takes keywords, hashtags, and metadata terms relating to cryptocurrencies and ICOs from a wide variety of social and traditional media APIs. IBM Watson then measures this data for sentiment. It also weighs each message author individually according to their social influence and reach.
WatermelonBlock then uses its algorithms to compute a percentage and index score for each network, known as the MelonScore.
So can this technology help with carefully constructed scams? Prodeum was hard to detect because it looked like a regular ICO, so how does the MelonScore help with those situations?
“WatermelonBlock is designed with retail consumers in mind,” Elliot Rothfield, cofounder and creative director at WatermelonBlock told me. “This scam is a product of a developing market. During an era of ferment, rapid growth and changing standards make discussion making difficult. By combining sentiment analysis — the voice of the people — with weighted influencer sentiment — the voice of the knowledgeable — users can circumvent being entangled in a ‘Penisgate’ controversy.”
In addition to helping investors avoid scams, WatermelonBlock is a useful source of intelligence for the ICO market in general, the majority of which are legitimate projects.
By continually scanning the internet for sentiment data and analyzing both tone and author credibility, the AI-powered market predictions can help investors to spot potential winners too. Whenever sentiment changes in a particular cryptocurrency, the system notifies users in real-time, giving them the opportunity to anticipate market fluctuations and inform appropriate action.
That being said, the MelonScore is not a predictor or future market value.
“The MelonScore is unique in that it will represent the sentiment of the masses with respect to cryptocurrency,” Rothfield said. “AI is used to create a ranking system unique to WatermelonBlock, built on big data sets gathered from social media, blogs, news, microsites and other public forums.”
The use of IBM Watson for AI-powered analysis is just the beginning for WatermelonBlock.
“WatermelonBlock is not just a single application but suite of AI analysis tools,” Rothfield said. “WatermelonAnalytics will be introduced soon as a small business sentiment analyzer. WatermelonAnalytics will allow businesses to search, analyze and compare individual phrases, hashtags or direct URLs to harness industry-specific insights. Users will be able to create their own private index, allowing them to track not only the sentiment of a brand, but the sentiment of certain phrases, products, and releases. WatermelonBlock’s AI and proprietary algorithms are versatile and will be used in many different products and industries. Stay tuned for WatermelonMusic too.”