Callisto Review – A Great Coin to Mine and Hold?

Note: I have been asked by Callisto team to review this project. That being said, I would probably have reviewed it anyway because it does look promising and legit. Anything expressed here is merely my personal point of view and should not be taken as financial advice.

In this article, I will talk about Callisto – a project that is quite an interesting opportunity for miners and investors alike.

After the overview, I will analyze how profitable is to mine and invest into this new project and its respective coin.

There is also a continuation where I guide you step by step on how to set up your GPU(s) to mine CLO.

What is Callisto?

Callisto is a recent Ethereum Classic airdrop. It has been created with a purpose to be a reference implementation of a self-sustaining, self-governed and self-funded blockchain ecosystem and development environment.

In other words, the one of the main raisons d’être of Callisto is to be an innovative network that implements experimental protocols. The final goal of this project is to raise the security bar by successfully defining and standardizing cold staking, governance system and a development funding mechanism protocols based upon smart-contracts.

This reference implementation should show how to do that and encourage others to create their own implementations. Ideally, the protocols, governance system and tools developed by and tested in Callisto might help to prevent smart contract hacking thanks to an ecosystem with official smart-contract auditing department of CLO & ETC.

You have probably heard of the DAO hack where $50 million USD worth of Ether has been lost, the Parity Multi Sig Wallet Hack (~ $300M of losses) and the Parity Freeze (~513,000 ETH). Those incidents show us how vulnerable smart contracts can be when not programmed properly.

Callisto is being developed as a means to help prevent similar cases from happening again – independent security contract auditions should help developers to create fool- and hack-proof smart contracts. Besides that, there is also an option to host the smart contracts directly on the Callisto Network Blockchain.

Who does pay those auditors do to the work? The Callisto Security Department is funded by the Callisto Network, meaning that smart-contract developers and development teams do not have to pay a penny to enjoy the services of the Callisto Security Department.

This looks like an ambitious project, so my question is – is the team behind Callisto qualified enough to do what they have planned?

Callisto Team – Background and Trustworthiness

As usual, before even bothering reading the whitepaper I have checked the legitimacy of the Linked In and Github accounts the Callisto website provides. According to my research, the people behind Callisto are real and their LinkedIn/Github accounts confirm their association with this project.

There are nine people behind Callisto. They belong to the Ethereum Commonwealth team and are quite well-known in the Ethereum Classic community.

Callisto team looks very well-rounded – apparently they have the specialists they need in order to meet their goals and milestones. For example, one of their team members, Yuriy Kharytoshyn, has been assigned to develop the Cold Staking Platform. The platform is being written on Solidity and Yuriy’s Github shows that he has worked with that language before.

The most notable member of this project is Dexaran. Dex is the man who has created the ERC223 token standard. It has been an Ethereum smart-contracts developer since its first days and he is the founder of the Ethereum Commonwealth. Dexaran the CEO and Security Engineer of the Callisto project.

Another name I guess I should mention is Yohan Graterol. Yohan is head of product for Platzi and an active contributor to Mongoengine, Fedora, Viper (Ethereum Language) and ClassicMask (MetaMask port). Since Yohan is from Colombia, his main LinkedIn profile is in Spanish, though there is also an English version available that briefly summarizes his experience and education.

Unlike most other projects, Callisto team includes a dedicated documentation writer, a community manager, a head of community, as well as a head of social media and a marketing manager. Apparently, Callisto is taking social interactions very seriously, which is a good sign if you ask me – There are more than a dozen projects that have failed because of a lack of proper community management and marketing. Hopefully, this will not be the case of Callisto.

Callisto Roadmap

Q1 of this year, the snapshot took place and ETC holders were rewarded with CLO 1:1. The same month, Testnet 2.0 was launched and the team started to research the possibility to implement POS and DPOS protocols.

In April 2018, the mainnet got launched together with the blockchain explorer. That same time period the marketing team got recruited. They have also received a wide array of wallets, mining pools and exchangers to choose from.

Their next step was the formation of the security department. The protocol is written in Solidity, a smart-contracts programming language. Cold staking is the next big step that is planned for Q4 of this year and the actions that are being done now are required to make this happen.

The end of this year should be quite an exciting time for Callisto since Cold Staking should go live and a new department of security is expected to be formed that will work on the EOS blockchain protocol.

The next year, the team expects to start working on interchain operability, decentralized file strorage and Security DAO and Cold Staker’s Codex releases. By the end of the next year there is planned to be another hardfork to implement on-chain governance system.

I know that not everyone is a fan of on-chain governance, which is why I believe it’s a good idea that you look at the roadmap to know what to expect from the evolution of this project. So far, the devs have been meeting the deadlines.

You can find the detailed roadmap here.

CLO Technical Details