iagon (iag) ICO review

"Iagon is a platform for harnessing the storage capacities and processing power of multiple computers over a decentralized blockchain grid. Iagon utilizes enables to store big data files and repositories, as well as smaller scales of files, and to carry out complex computational processes, such as those needed for artificial intelligence and machine learning operations, within a fully secure and encrypted platform that integrates blockchain, cryptographic and AI technologies in a user- friendly way." [2]

Iagon aims to tackle some of the biggest players in the cloud storage industry such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google cloud, Microsoft, and IBM. An ambitious task to say the least, and with the market for A.i and Big data computational tasks only expected to grow for the foreseeable future, their targeted market is huge. The Iagon A.i uses reinforcement learning, this means it learns over time to improve decision making. Reinforcement learning is intended handle learning and improving in a dynamic environment, this is done to optimize the slicing and distributing of data within the decentralized network.

Cloud Storage Market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 29.73% to reach a total market size of $92.488 bln by 2022 [1]. Additionally the market for A.i computational processing power is continuously gonna grow with more than $100 bln invested in A.i companies in the last 5 years, all of whom rely heavily on massive amounts of computational power to run simulations for the A.i engine [3].

In 2016 was the first time a A.i engine was able to beat the world best player in the Ancient Chinese board game Go. It used a total of 1202 CPU's and 176 GPU's to do so which came in at an immense cost of $3000 per game played. These type of simulations is only the beginning for the A.i industry, and is expected to continuously grow the next 10 years. [4][5]

Most companies store vast amounts of data for the potential future use for extracting patterns using A.i engines, this does however require large computational power and is therefore often outsourced to larger actors, this can be very costly for most businesses. These companies often store this data in rented cloud storage, adding additional costs for simply holding this data, while they wait for a day where they can afford to run these pattern simulations using their data to improve their business, and make it more profitable.

The combination of cloud storage for this data, and the running of these a.i pattern simulations is the market that Iagon aims to tackle, adding more security and decreasing costs to the storage of the data. Iagons decentralized network and blockchain is built to be integratable with the current data storage databases like SQL and NoSQL.

Iagon is set to launch their pre-ico at march 15th, and shortly after launch the ICO. Iagon has a team of 12, with 5 developers and a marketing team of 5. Leading the company is Dr. Navjit Dhaliwal as CEO, and Dr. Elad Harison as COO. They are based out of Norway, but with developers residing in India primarily. Apart from that it seems that the entire team is distributed across the world, if they have an office in Norway or not is not disclosed. The background of the leadership comes in the form of a Denitistry degree and entrepreneurial experience as founder and CEO of tech related businesses by Navjit, and in Machine learning and A.i by Elad.

Links to every members LinkedIn page is available, with no sign of dishonesty. One remark can be made that some of the listed members of the team does not list Iagon as their primary work occupation. The entire development team works at Winjit INC or Winjit Technologies, so a fair assumption would be that Iagon does not have a development team of their own, but rather has outsourced the development to this New York based company. However, the case could be made that from researching the LinkedIn pages, the founders of this blockchain and cryptocurrency has been born from the Winjit team in collaboration with the leadership and that they are 100% in line with the project and its success. The whitepaper references list Navjit and Elad as the primary contributors with no apparent copy/pasting which is common for many ICOs.

Here's a link to their LinkedIn and Website :
https://www.linkedin.com/company/winjit-inc/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/winjit-technologies-pvt-ltd/?originalSubdomain=se
https://www.winjit.com/
http://www.iotsense.io/ (Redirected to IOTsense website)

The white paper provides a lot of focus on how they intend to approach the A.i and Data mining, and integrating it into the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies. Also a lot of focus is being placed on how they aim to provide additional security to the storage and recovery abilities of the data storage, which is a really big issue for the biggest providers for cloud storage platforms, and existing blockchain storage platforms. The white paper also tackles current issues with the speed and efficiency at which data can be made available and processed on the blockchain, something current competitors to Iagon struggle with presently. This is something I appreciate about their white paper, presenting the current problems seen in the industry, and how they aim to solve these, and improve the current mainstream adopted systems.

Less focus is being put into the blockchain technology behind the platform, this is left for the reader to assess from their GitHub repository. This does however not give any large insights into the development of the Blockchain itself, but rather has a greater focus on the platform and website, alongside a few commits regarding smart contracts and sharding. All the commits has been done by a total of 4 contributors, most likely the Winjit team. It becomes apparent that this is a fairly new project with the first serious code commit being uploaded to GitHub on the 25th of October of 2017. I think a disclaimer here is necessary: This does not necessarily imply that the A.i engine and cloud storage platform hasn't been in development for a longer period, but rather that the start of the Blockchain approach to launching their engine started in October of last year.

What makes Iagon unique, and separated from other decentralized cloud storage platforms like StorJ, Filecoin, and Siacoin is its machine learning algorithm which will distribute load across the connected nodes to the network for processing. Additionally, they aim to enable a multi distributed ledger technology integration, making it possible to run its cloud storage on both the Ethereum network, aswell as on Tangle.

Tangle is a type of DAG (Directed Acyclic Graphs) technology which is used by IOTA, ByteBall, and Hashgraph. DAG technoloy has grown more and popular during 2017 due to the streamlining abilities it provides for creating faster transaction capacities. Initially, Iagon will launch the cloud storage platform enabling storage on the Ethereum platform but integration of the Tangle is on the roadmap for late 2018/2019.

Here's the current roadmap for Iagon :

[6]

Furthermore, Iagon aims to tackle the growing cybersecurity issue seen with hacks targeting these Big data-databases. With many large companies being hacked, and even the latest US election being in question of potential Russian hacking, the industry for safe cloud storage is growing by the minute.

"Iagon's Secure Lake is based on the blockchain unbreakable encryption technology, on file slicing and storage of small, anonymous and strongly encrypted slices of the original files ensures the complete protection of data files, other types of files (such as scans, photos and videos) and databases of any size and ensures the rapid retrieval and update of any stored file. " [2]

Iagon takes a different approach to data mining, it utilizes a private blockchain with public blockchain network protocols over API networks. This way, a data miner doesn't need to store the data its mining, but rather just process it and send the output back to the Iagon's machine learning algorithm for analysis. This process doesn't rely on solving equations to mine the data, this improves speed and efficiency. It does however still hold incentives for miners to mine the data and blocks based on the number of data points it mines. The motivation behind maintaining the blockchain in a private manner is the better compete with current big data databases when it comes to volume, variety, and velocity.

[6]

Partnerships listed :
https://www.winjit.com/
https://www.wings.ai/#!/home/discover
https://www.unit9.com/
http://www.nuccobrain.com/
http://www.innovasjonnorge.no/
https://www.medianord.no/

Partnership confirmation :
Cloud28+
https://www.cloud28plus.com/emea/partnersearch
https://medium.com/iagon-official/iagon-joins-forces-with-cloud28-4fd13902d40b

Tiesdb
https://tiesdb.com/
https://medium.com/iagon-official/iagon-and-ties-db-partnership-410ffb1a4192
https://coinidol.com/cloud-based-decentralized-storage-partnership-announced/?utm_content=buffer39db0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Looking through the current and previous work occupations of the members of the team could bring additional confidence in the confirmation of the partnership between Winjit since all the developers of IAGON list Winjit as their primary occupation.

Links :
Website - https://www.iagon.com/
White paper - https://iagon.com/pdf/Simple%20Whitepaper%20v2.4.pdf
GitHub - http://www.github.com/iagonorg
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/user/iagon_official/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/iagon/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/IagonOfficial/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/IagonOfficial
Bitcointalk - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2945888.0
Telegram - https://t.me/Iagon_official
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpIUqQSMK5cE4QncanEUpKg

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Sources :
[1] Businesswire (Berkshire Hathaway company), june 2017
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170614005856/en/92.48-Billion-Cloud-Storage-Market---Forecasts
[2] Iagon White paper
https://iagon.com/pdf/Simple%20Whitepaper%20v2.4.pdf
[3] DeepBrain Chain white paper
https://www.deepbrainchain.org/pc/DeepBrainChainWhitepaper.pdf
[4] Business insider - Google deepmind A.i beats world best Go player
https://businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-computing-power-google-deepmind-needed-to-beat-lee-sedol-2016-3?r=US&IR=T&IR=T
[5] Business insider - Google deepmind A.i beats world best Go player
https://businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-ai-alphago-defeats-human-lee-sedol-go-in-south-korea-2016-3?r=UK&IR=T&IR=T
[6] Iagon website
https://www.iagon.com/