Hey Steemit!

I got wind of IOST through the airdrop they were doing which is now over as of yesterday. I managed to scrape up some free tokens so I thought the least I could do was research it a bit to figure out what the hell I now own.

Below is my analysis and research - let me know your thoughts!

Standard Dislcaimer: DYOR, the below is not financial advice.

My analysis is broken out into:

• IOST Quick and Dirty Overview
• Fundraising
• Trading Technicals
• Slightly Deeper Dive into IOST Technology
• Team
• Social Media
• Key Links
• To But or not to Buy

The Quick and Dirty Overview

I would bucket the IOST use case as a Network Backbone / Virtual Machine (a comparable is Ethereum).
They plan to build a platform with Smart Contracts, dApps, Data Storage, and voting & feedback systems. All of which can be coded using mainstream languages. This is not the case with Ethereum which has its own coding language - Solidity.

The Problem: They are trying to tackle the issue of scalability, which is faced by many Cryptos. A great example is Ethereum, where we saw the CryptoKitties game wreak havoc on the Ethereum network sending transaction fees through the roof and clogging up the network.

Competition: However it must be said that they are not the first one's to try tackle the scalability issues faced by other Crypto's. EOS has adopted a new consensus mechanism DPoS in order to enhance the transaction processing speed, while Zilliqa is using sharding to enable parallel transaction processing.

Solution: IOST's proposed solution to the scalability issue are the below innovative technologies:

• Efficient Distributed Sharding (EDS)
• TransEpoch
• Atomix
• Proof-of-Believability (PoB)
• Micro State Bloc (MSB)

They claim that through the above technologies they will be able to achieve their goal of providing a network infrastructure to support a service-oriented ecosystem with a high enough throughput to handle 100,000 transactions per second whilst still maintain network security i.e. make an Ethereum which doesn't crash on a stupid CryptoKitties game (sorry CryptoKitty lovers).

Fundraising

IOST did not host a public pre-sale or a ICO, it was all privately funded. They raised money via a hard-caped 35,000 ETH private sale which closed on 3rd January 2018.

Analysis

I view this positively as private investors who have funded a substantial amount of the project will likely demand a proof of product and perform careful due diligence before investing so the team has an increased likelihood of delivering on their promises. It's not a guarantee but still reassuring.

Trading Technicals

Price: $0.074 (-8.81%) // 0.0000066 BTC (-4.57%)
Market Cap: $500m
24H trading volume: $170m
Exchanges: Binance, Huobi, OKEx & BigONE - most volume is on Binance (50%)

Analysis

• It seems that the price has recently sunk 8% - however considering the whole market is bearish this shouldn't be a surprise
• The market cap puts IOST at number 60 on CoinMarketCap
• Liquidity is pretty good as the 24H trading volume makes up 34% of the market cap ($170m/$500m)
• Half of trading occurs on Binance which is the largest exchange by volume traded - another good sign

Slightly Deeper Dive Into IOST Technology

In their whitepaper they state that through their "Proof of Believability" (PoB) consensus approach along with "Efficient Distributed Sharding" (EDS) technology IOST can increase the system's throughput enormously (100,000 transactions per second) however still guarantee security.

• EDS makes the sharding creation process faster (by replaced the PoW process with cryptographic sortition). This will result in shards which are sufficiently large and bias-resistant.
• PoB is used to guarantee that Nodes have a negligible probability to misbehave. If you are interested in how it actually works you can read their Whitepaper but in short it assigns a believabiliity score to each node based on several criteria e.g. tokens in wallet, contribution to community etc... The more trusted nodes (the ones with highest scores) perform more important tasks and get a higher reward.

In a nutshell EDS will allow for efficient and fast transactions at low costs whilst PoB helps guarantee the security of the network through solving the pitfalls which a Proof-of-Stake consensus may face (e.g. risk of centralisation or the nothing-at-stake problem).

Team

All team members have first-class experience, education, and academic awards. There are multiple PhD's from top schools like Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Berkeley.
Their team also have come from reputable companies e.g. Facebook, Airbnb, Linkedin, Goldman, Morgan Stanley.

Analysis

• The team has an abundance of diversity, which is their strongest characteristic.
• I specifically like the fact that they have a good mix of business professionals from tech and non-tech companies as well as academics from high ranking universities.
• This mix can only be positive for the IOST team.

Social Media

Twitter: 155k followers
Telegram: 52k members

Key Links

Website: http://iost.io
Whitepaper: https://docsend.com/view/ihwqcdg

To Buy or not to Buy?

Overall, I think this is a buy. IOST are trying to solve a big issue plaguing the Crypto community, which if they are successful will make them a household name. They have the qualified team to tackle this as well as the funds to do so. The major concern to keep in mind is that EOS or Ziquilla may solve the scalability before them as they both have a heard start, however IOST claims their technology is superior and so maybe this shouldn't be a concern to us anyway?