Detailed review of Aergo (translated)

"It’s not about performance or tps, it’s about making a system work end to end and meet the performance and security needs of enterprise customers", Phil Zamani

Technological review

Aergo is a 4th generational blockchain designed to implement blockchain-based solutions into enterprises and businesses. Aergo is based on Coinstack, blockchain product developed by Blocko. More information about Blocko and Coinstack is available on the paragraph below.

Aergo Project is not only about blockchain, but also a platform consisting of Aergo Chain, Aergo Marketplace and Aergo Hub. Let me start with the blockchain.

Aergochain is a hybrid blockchain, which combines public and private chains (side-chains).

The main (public) chain is reaching consensus through the Deterministic Delegated Proof of Stake method with a maximum of 23 stakeholders, elected by all nodes of the network. The Main chain is public and permissionless.

All side-chains are the private blockchains, developed for companies or dApps wishing to operate own main chains. In side-chains, the consensus method isn’t pre-determined and developers can implement their own. Transaction throughput can reach up to 1,000,000 tps.

It’s hard to talk about blockchain and not emphasize the fact that Aergo implemented their own smart-contract language called AERGOSQL. This SQL-based language will substitute Solidity.

Also, Aergo chain has it’s own approach in dealing with forks with Branching and Merging technologies, when the fork occurs (branching), it will be connected to the main network soon with the process of merging.

AergoHub is a public interface to the underlying Aergo chain. It was developed to connect secure dApps with the blockchain. AergoHub is similar to GitHub, this means all the applications developed on top of Aergo are placed in two types of repositories: private and public. Besides repositories, AergoHub is allowing to use:

• support for software Microservices
• a content delivery network CDN
• a serverless database
• interfaces for smart oracles
• a smart gateway to intelligently route data traffic/messages into a blockchain

Aergo Horde used to orchestrate, provision, deploy and manage Aergo dApps.

In some cases, it’s necessary to have large computing resources to run own blockchain network (side-chain). Computing resources, different software and machine-learning algorithms are purchasable through Aergo Marketplace.

Roadmap

Aergo’s roadmap includes the plan of project development from the second quarter of 2018 to the third quarter of 2019. Now, Aergo developers are finishing the development of AergoChain Beta. The next phase of development is TestNet, which will be presented to the community in Q4 2018. After the TestNet, the project will be developing in two phases:

• Q1 2019 - MainNet presentation, enhanced the privacy of transactions through Branching and Merging the chain with the strong concurrency control.
  *Q3 2019 - Finalizing the development of AergoHub and AergoMarketplace for business and developers.

It was announced that the first dApp developed on top of Aergo is called “Capitan Aergo”.

Team review

Phil Zamani is the CEO of the project. He is Aergo’s media person, presenting the project in different interviews with the well-known ICODrops and “Token Tank” group.

Moreover, there’re a lot of old videos of Phil explaining cloud technology on conferences and interviews. Phil has 20 years of experience in open source projects and cloud computing.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philzamani

Roderik van der Graaf, member of Aergo Board, is a trader and investor. He spent his trading career operating with derivatives in Deutsche Bank and Rabobank International, was the Managing Director in Bear Stearns, The head of the Trading department in All Options (Asia) and Managing Director in KCP Capital, Caldera Pacific. He’s an advisor to Blocko.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roder1k

Hunyoung Park - CTO at Blocko and Board member of Aergo. There’s not a lot of data in his LinkedIn, but according to the information available on the official website he has 12 years of experience in developing distributed systems and Relational DBMS.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunyoung-park-58731a70

Jane Lee - Chief Operating Officer at Blocko. She is also COO at Aergo with 6+ years of experience of Strategic Managing in Accenture.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-lee-52b86115

Developer’s LinkedIn profiles don’t contain the necessary information about their past activities or experience, but the official website has some info. According to it, Korean development team consists of Bernardino Ramos, Kyung Tae Lee, Sung Jae Woo, Yun Woo Park, Pierre-Alain Ouvrard. All of them are great developers with a huge experience in developing Relational DBMS (Kyung Tae Lee - 12 years, Sung Jae Woo - 9 years, Run Woo Park - 10 years).

Generally, the team looks great.

Partnerships

The main partner of Aergo is Blocko. According to the website, Blocko has successfully implemented its product, called Coinstack, to Hyundai, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, LG, Cisco, SK Telecom and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Blocko provides such services, as:

• technical consulting and advisory services on blockchain implementation
• technical support for the middleware and application development
• support and maintenance for ready-made solutions
• infrastructure for public and permission blockchain networks.

Coinstack is used by more than 20 companies around the world with 25 million+ user base.

Aergo is open-sourced Coinstack with some modifications.

Besides help Aergo with the prototype, Blocko is one of the stakeholders of Aergo and will be providing support services to dApps, developed in Aergo Ecosystem.

Investors

Key investors and backers are: Rockaway Blockchain, FGB Capital, GBIC, Dekrypt Capital, BA Capital, JRR Crypto, Capital, Chainfund Capital, FGB Capital, GBIC, Block Crafters.

It’s 9 funds in total. Obviously, this is not all the funds invested in Aergo. And I expect Aergo to announce more investors in the future.

Token

A native utility token will circulate within the Aergo Ecosystem. Broadly speaking, the token will serve as a medium of exchange and will be used in staking, paying for deploying smart-contracts, payment for Hub services, payment for Blocko’s support, etc.

There will be 500 millions of tokens circulating within the platform, 30% of them will be sold during sale, 30% is intended to be used for partnerships and community, 25% are reserved by Aergo, 10% will be distributed to key backers and advisors, and 5% - for Aergo’s employees.

The money from the token sales will be used for R&D (40%), Ecosystem growth (30%), Marketing (15%), Creating strategic alliances and business developments (10%), and Miscellaneous (5%)

Token sale results

The project has met a huge interest from the investors during the private sale. Hardcap was oversubscribed twentyfold. That's why the team decided to raise all funds via the private sale and then distribute some tokens to the active part of the community.

Private sale info:

• funds collected via private sale: 28,832,654$ (144,151,452 tokens sold),
• token price: 0.2$

About Token Distribution Event

As I’ve said before, the team decided to distribute unsold tokens to the community. To participate in the Token Distribution Event, users have to show their understanding of the basics of Aergo and make a contribution to the project.

There’re some examples of things given to users to be able to participate in Event. They could facilitate discussions on the official social media channels about Aergo, share and comment the articles of Aergo, create a thread on coding forum discussing Aergo’s SQL smart contract engine or produce high-quality content that expands and educates the broader community.

Users will be given scores depending on their contribution. Top 275 scores will be rewarded with 2,000$ in Aergo tokens, places from 276 to 1275 will be rewarded with 500$ in Aergo Tokens and the last tier for people with places from 1276 to 3275 will be rewarded with 250$.

The submission form will be available on the Aergo website from 1st to 7th of October. And in a period from the 7th to the 14th of October the team will be reviewing submissions. If the user wins any reward, he’ll be asked to go through the KYC/AML process.

Community

At the moment, about 31,800 users have joined the official Telegram community of Aergo. There was no “bots invasion” in the telegram group after the announcement of Token Distribution Event, which is a very good sign. Aergo hasn’t conducted any bounty or 1-dollar airdrops to have 100,000 users in its channels.

The links to official community channels are below:

• Website: https://aergo.io
• LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/2JLmPmB
• Medium: https://medium.com/aergo
• Telegram: https://t.me/aergoofficial
• Telegram Announcement: https://t.me/aergoannouncements
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AERGO_IO
• Kakao: https://bit.ly/2NPxvWJ
• WeChat (CN only): https://bit.ly/2MAGl5X
• Weibo: https://bit.ly/2NLY3rY

Website analytics

Official website of the Aergo project is www.aergo.io. The website is developed in a classical style, it’s simple and understandable for the average user. Information is divided into pages and not situated on the single landing page.

According to the Similarweb, the website was launched in May 2018 and the record of traffic was fixed on June - 101,000 visits per month. By the end of the summer, the number of visits was declined to 22,000 per month in August but this is an excellent result for blockchain project running no bounty or airdrops. I expect the total visits in September to increase significantly with the start of TDE campaign.

Things become more interested in the statistics per countries. Despite being a Korean project, South Korea isn’t in “Top Countries”. Website is attended mostly from USA - 13% of visitors, China - 12.5%, Russia - 9.8%, Germany - 6.8%, Ukraine - 5%. Incredible to see China generating 12% of all the website traffic.

It’s not a surprise to see ICO Drops as the largest generator of traffic to the website. Quite interesting to see GitHub as the second source and Ycombinator as third.

Obviously, the popularity of the project is higher than the average.

Crypto-Influencers and Aergo

At the moment, Aergo is the top-project in all crypto-bloggers lists. According to the cryptodiffer.com, the website with ICO-ratings, Aergo mentioned by 10 influencers as “Top-project”.

ICO Drops gave Aergo the “high-interest” appraisal which is the highest level of rating at the moment.

Also, it’s worth to mention Ian Balina’s 80-points appraisal. CrushCrypto, OhHeyMarty, Mandy, Shin Chan, Crypto Calibur, PicoloResearch put Aergo on top of their lists, Crypto Briefing and Coin Bloq believe Aergo is the best project on the market now.

Useful resources

In this paragraph I’ll try to share the most informative Aergo resources with the links. Besides the whitepaper, people can get a lot of useful information from the presentation of Aergo in Seul, South Korea:

Look at the level of organization and compare it to any other blockchain project pre-sale stage. And make a conclusion.

A lot of details about the project was shared by Phil Zamani interviewed by ICO Drops team.

The newest informational source is the interview of Phil Zamani to CryptoZombie, CryptoLark, Shil Nye, and Crypto Candor.