Blockcloud ICO review
1: General Information
Ticker: BLOC
Website: http://www.block-cloud.io
Telegram: https://t.me/BlockcloudTeam
Whitepaper: https://www.block-cloud.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlockcloudTeam
Hardcap: 15 million USD (12 million USD for private sale)
Private sale: 12 million USD (~1,500,000,000 BLOC= 15% total tokens)
Lockup Time: 20% (released before listing), 10% per month after 2 months,
Other sale: 5% (of total tokens)
Token Price: 0.008 USD
Whitelist : TBA
2: Token Distribution
Private Sale: 15%
Other Sale: 5%
Early Contributor Incentive: 10%
Foundation: 30%
Team: 10%
Mining Rewards: 30%
According to the Blockcloud platform, it will release its mining rewards at a rate of 5% per year, for up to 6 years.
The token will be useful in the incentivization aspect of the network, it will help to bring in service providers (who will be rewarded for their contributions to the network), the BLOC token will be instrumental in rewards to contributors and miners and verifiers alike.
3: Ideas
The Internet of Things is an industry that matters. According to the whitepaper offered by the Blockcloud team, there will be an estimated 20 Billion devices by the year 2022, the Internet of Things will become an important part of the key aspect of accessibility. As more technologies come about (smart healthcare, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles and, others) the world becomes an increasingly device oriented place.
Blockcloud is a new approach that combines the advantages of SCN and blockchain to empower IoT. In Blockcloud, SCN forms the underlying physical network that provides connectivity, mobility and scalability. The blockchain logically operates on top of SCN to provide decentralized trust, security, fairness and economic incentive.
4: Here are some of Blockcloud’s outstanding features:
Consensus mechanism: Proof of service. Each service provider who enters the network must prove that they actually provide the services and they are effective as promised. This consensus is for evaluating the total contributing resources of participants in the network, which are storage, computation, relay and bandwidth. To provide the service correctly, 3 parties are involved which are subscriber- needs and subscribes a service, Provider- provides a service, and Verifier- verifies the service.
CoDAG (Compacted Directed Acyclic Graph) for fast recording of IoT transactions. As to solve problems of the existing blockchain protocols, Blockcloud provides a totally new framework, besides miners and devices, there will be an additional role which is gateway- a device with enough resources to run the protocol- like a cellphone or a smart car… In this new ledger structure, transactions are enveloped in blocks- a gossip-like structure, fits well in asynchronous operations.
TCDA (Truthful Continuous Double Auction): it is used for fair pricing and matching of services. It will act as a smart contract which defends against price cheating, guarantees fairness and minimizes trading maintenance cost.
5: Architecture
Transactionchain Layer: Lowest tier. This chain (CoDAG) stores the transactions of the network as a global ledger, and to fulfill all the characteristics of IoT, this layer must be elastic, efficient, secure, scalable and cost-effective, guaranteeing the fast confirmation time and liveness property.
Servicechain Layer: This layer is above the Transactionchain Layer, fo defining new operations and rules for accepting or rejecting Blockcloud operations. Service chain can be used to build a variety of state machines, currently a global service management system and a service matching and pricing system.
Routing Layer: Blockcloud uses service files for storing routing information, which are similar to DNS zone files in their format.
Service Layer: this layer serves the actual services for the network. Applications can use names to directly express their intent to publish or access specific services.
SCN (Service-centric Networking) is a future internet technology that provides a service-aware network stack, where applications communicate directly on service names instead of addresses. It helps enhance the mobility, scalability, and connectivity.
6: Team Members
The team behind Blockcloud is largely comprised of academics from Tsinghua University, Shenzhen University, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Zhongxing Ming (CEO)- has worked as a CTO of Oudman, the company behind Blockcloud ICO. He also is the visiting Scholar to Priceton University, Ph.D at Tsinghua University. He is a member of BLockchain Special Committee of China Computer Federation. He has more than 13 publications published on Top Conferences and Journals.
Shu Yang (Chairman/SCN Lab Principle): CEO of Oudman. He is the visiting scholar at Case Western Reserve University, Ph.D from Tsinghua and studied his postdoctoral degree at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Dai Pan (Co-founder/COO): He holds his Maser at Peking University, an Urban Intelligence Expert of Shenzhen, China. He has co-founded a Startup with 6.5 million dollars raised.
Fred Baker (Advisor): He is an Internet pioneer and former IETF chair from 1996 to 2001. He co-chaired the IPv6 Operations Working Group in the IETF (until 2013). We co-authored and edited more than 50 Internet standards such as Open Shortest Path First, Routing Information Protocol (RIPv2) and so on.
Hoan Soo Lee (Advisor): He is the Economist of Council of Economic Adviser (CEA) during the 1st term of Obama government, the partner of CMB International. He is also the cofounder and COO of Give2gether in Boston, Massachusetts, US.
7: Strong points
Blockcloud is one of the most recent solutions that claim to resolve the scalability issues and other issues that are suppressing the substantial growth of the IoT sector, if they can pull it off they will be able to unlock a lot of value.
They will be able to utilize their relationships and credibility in both academia and business fields to bring on board clientele who can serve as providers and consumers in their network.
The hardcap is attractive comparing with the existing ICO projects (~15 million USD).
8: Weak points
Blockcloud has its own emerging competitors in IoT field.
The project has a whitepaper but it seems that we don’t have great details on their roadmap, in addition to this, it seems that we will only see progress in regard to their minimum viable product in the in middle of next year. Many investors may not have the patience to wait that long to see if the team show proof of product.
9: Conclusion
From what is seen of the team’s work through the proposed solutions, it seems that Blockcloud has the potential to revolutionize the IoT industry and progress further.
The team seems to have looked every angle and considered the many possibilities in this sector and have addressed to them the best of their ability.
Based on its solid idea, experienced team and community’s interest, Blockcloud will be a promising project in the third quarter of 2018.