Blocktrak

In 2018 there has been a lot of discussion in the media regarding Facebook and the privacy of it’s users. There has also been a movement towards Blockchain technology and Cryptocurrencies being adopted by the masses. Most of the participants are early adopters jumping on the bandwagon so to speak. Billions of dollars have been pumped into the space and similar to the great .com boom of the late 1990’s, we are seeing similarities with the Blockchain ecosystem. Some of these companies are pioneers and innovators, others are chasing the large returns trading speculative Tokens. Phantasma, which is one of these privacy pioneers, is looking to create a privacy oriented ecosystem for mixed media content creators.

“For the artists that make amazing videos, games, music and other copyrighted content, giving up a large percentage of your revenue can be very discouraging. Plus content creators usually become locked-in to those centralized platforms with the overhanging danger of arbitrary rule changes cutting their revenues.” – Phantasma Protocol 

Use Cases

Built on the NEO Blockchain, Phantasma is a privacy oriented ecosystem focusing on:

• Decentralized E-Mail – giving control to inbox owners with a single account with a wide array of features like autoresponders and newsletters. Not only this, it will be able to bridge existing, centralized e-mail providers using SMTP/IMAP. They will also apply PGP.
• Oracles – Onchain for low data, on the NEO Blockchain. Onchain with backend storage, Endpoint with Phantasma Relays, for high data flows.
• Digital Commerce – products, videos, videogames and other types of files.
• Video Streaming – giving full control to the content creators with various toggles.
• Incentivized Data Economy – for producers, consumers and operators.

The “Soul” Token and Uses

Phantasma Protocol’s Soul Token will be used to fuel the economy of this decentralized ecosystem. Data will not be necessarily free, and the Token will be used as a sort of network toll for participating. They will also be used for storage and network fees. Node operators will receive them as rewards for supporting the network. As of now, the Tokens will be issued as NEP-5’s which is the NEO standard. Similar to other storage protocols, sharing of the network is a major incentive for participating and gaining adoption.

Team

The team consist of multiple talented developers like Sergio Flores, City of Zion developer since October 2017. He’s also the founder of a startups called Lunar Labs in Portugal, and was a Blockchain developer in early 2016. He’s fluent in C++, C, C#, Objective-C, Java programming languages. Miguel Ferreira, who has been proclaimed a “Blockchain Expert” and an experienced developer, Bruno Freitas who has been a software developer and Crypto enthusiast since early 2017.

While it’s hard to predict the future of Phantasma Protocol, I think it’s an interesting idea and once these decentralized ecosystems really kick off in the next few years, we will see quite a few of these Blockchain startups becoming a presence around the globe.

 

QuarkChain is one of the most talked about Initial Coin Offerings of May. Attempting to solve one of the biggest problems in Blockchain, Transactions Per Second. Currently Bitcoin has 4 TPS, Ethereum 10 TPS, and QuarkChain is claiming 99999 TPS which is clearly astounding in comparison. The project is being spearheaded by Qi Zhou, a software engineer with a rather impressive resume working for publicly traded companies like Google, Dell, and Facebook. Not only is his career impressive, he’s also earned a PhD in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2013. The rest of the team forms a collective of “all stars” so to speak, from the same companies with equally matching educational backgrounds.

2017 Launch

Astoundingly, QuarkChain already has a Testnet and wallet even though the White Paper was drafted in Q4 2017. It says to potential Token buyers that this team is hard at work and not wasting any time. It’s not hard to conceive they will also deliver the second phase of the Testnet and Smart Contracts rollout scheduled for Q2 2018. We have reached a point in the Blockchain community where Token buyers are demanding progress on these projects unlike the speculative White Paper projects of 2016 and 2017, which often failed to deliver anything at all except empty promises of great achievements. The Mainnet is scheduled for Q4 2018.

 Main Features of QuarkChain

“QuarkChain is an innovative permissionless blockchain architecture that aims to meet the global-wise commercial standard. It provides a secure, decentralized, and scalable blockchain solution to deliver 100,000+ on-chain TPS.” -QuarkChain 

Some of these features include:

• Reshardable two-layered Blockchain, a root Blockchain and an “Elastic Sharding” Blockchain.
• “Guaranteed Security” by market driven collaborative mining to prevent double spending attacks on transactions.
• Anti-centralized horizontal scalability, excluding a centralized “Supernode” and forming multiple cheap nodes as a cluster.
• Cross-shard transactions.
• One account and one smart wallet.
• Turing-complete Smart Contracts using the Ethereum Virtual Machine for easy migration.

Solving Problems with Current Blockchains

Blockchain has been rapidly evolving month by month and faces more and more hurdles regarding security, scalability and decentralization concerns. Some of the solutions to improve the current networks are in question that they may lead full circle back to centralization. QuarkChain is placing a strong emphasis on this controversial, but inevitable topic. To increase the security of the network, they are focusing on advanced sharding techniques to improve system capacity. Miners will not need to join pools for higher rewards, discouraging centralization, and security increasing because transactions in the QuarkChain network are protected by 50% of the overall hash power.

Token Functionality

Questions often pop up regarding the use of Tokens in the Blockchain space. Quarkchain’s “QKC” Token will be used as a unit of exchange across the QuarkChain network, and for a payment or settlement. They are making the statement that the Token does not promise fees, dividends, participation, rights, titles or interest in the foundation and be used as a medium of exchange on the network. It will also be used as a sort of fuel for future functions on the network. Transaction fees will take place but they will be extremely low and this also serves a purpose for the QKC Token. The QKC Token will also be used to incentivize further development on the network for the community.

It is my belief that QuarkChain, while still in it’s infancy and facing hurdles in the future could be a strong candidate for the solutions presented above. The space we are in is still quite early, with lots of potential pitfalls. Given that the team, has already launched successful Testnet Code in a short period of time gives me confidence they can go even further in the future and accomplish all that they say they will.

 

 

 

Sweetbridge wants to build a new economy, a Decentralized one. While this has been a strong ambition of many in the Blockchain space, Sweetbridge has been building a rather large team of experts from their respective fields since late 2016. The company was launched by Scott Nelson who spent 24 years building Trax, a global logistics, analytics and freight audit & payment firm. He is also joined by his co-founder David Henderson who has had a multitude of roles at companies like Coca Cola, PwC, and finally Nelson’s company Trax. Given the diversity of experience in related fields, the team’s roster is impressive, with advisors such as Vinay Gupta and Don Tapscott who have been influential in the awareness and development of Blockchain projects for several years.

“We are an open-source non-profit project building toward a new economy of fairer, faster trade that values all participants. Contributors to the project are a diverse group of global citizens from 10 different countries with experience in blockchain, supply chain, economics, trade finance and software development.” -Sweetbridge

Make The World a Better Place?

One of the recurring themes for Sweetbridge is fairness, allowing equal opportunities for all demographic backgrounds, through this proposed Decentralized economy. Sweetbridge appears to want to additionally nurture the growth of newly proposed projects through select partnerships in the Blockchain space and they call this the “Sweetbridge Alliance”. It consist of funding, acceleration, shared resources, and enterprise engagement. Some of their partners include projects like Mattereum, who aims to create legally enforceable smart contracts, Brooklyn New York based CoinFund, a Cryptocurrency fund, Copper Hill Strategies which focuses on governmental relations and public policy, Aperio, focusing on building Blockchain applications for the global supply chain and several others. These partnerships will nurture the growth of companies focusing on 6 stages:

• Liquidity – through digital assets
• Settlement – transactions
• Accounting – financial transparency
• Resource Sharing – sharing of data
• Optimization & Liquid Talent – further data aggregation

Interconnected Systems, Ecosystems

Given the founding team members backgrounds with supply chain logistics, it makes sense they will launch with a focus on supply chain & logistics. They are also focusing on an expert legal ecosystem with partner Mattereum. Currently, Smart Contracts are not legally enforceable still being in the very early stages of development. They also plan on launching in future niches such as retail, tax, finance, tech and manufacturing. It’s a highly ambitious project with some realistic starting goals. As real estate on the Blockchain proliferates, Smart Contracts will absolutely need some sort of legal structure behind them. They are also launching a loaning platform called “Sweetbridge Assets” which will allow people to lend themselves money against digital assets they currently own using their own Stable Coin called Bridge Coin, which is pegged to the currency of each region. They will also offer another Coin to use with this system called Sweetcoin, which will reduce liquidity fees. It is very possible that Sweetbridge could one day reach a $1B+ market cap if they manage to execute their goals.

 

 

As we enter a new digital age the signs all point to Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and digitized assets. Supply chains optimize operations with speed and efficiency while additionally reducing costs. Most importantly, the design of these systems are essential for the companies success. Currently, a small percentage of companies globally place a strong emphasis on supply chain management. Another aspect of a successful supply chain is customer service management, which tends to be a massive problem for most companies. Some of the other problems include long delivery lead times, delays in response to customer service requests, inventory shortages, poor product quality, tracking missing items, verifying what is authentic vs non authentic, tracking costs and all of the related categories such as wasted products, procurement cost, inventory management, transportation, etc. If you really consider Blockchain to be in the image of a chain, it could only take one weak link to destroy it which is why it significantly helps to have every detail tracked properly to improve efficiency of the company leading to better results.

Enter VeChain

Already a top performing company in the speculative Blockchain investing space, VeChain has held onto it’s position through tough times. It’s a key player in the supply chain category and it plans to release it’s Mainnet in June 2018. Furthermore, VeChain has partners with some major firms for it’s potential use.

“From now until the release of mainnet, Xiamen Innov and Smart Corelink will be working to onboard their existing customers onto this service providing robust supply chain management, smart appliance solutions, and product lifespan analytic modules that provide immense value as defined by their pilot members” -VeChain

In addition, Vechain has reportedly aligned on a partnership level with BMW, Michigan State University, Chinese consulting firm NRCC, Oxford University, PwC Asia, and they have also formed investor alliances with VC heavy hitter Tim Draper of Silicon Valley, who seems to have gone full force into Blockchain investing and is a key figurehead at many Blockchain conferences taking place globally. Also backing VeChain’s development are powerful investment groups like Fenbushi Capital and Breyer Capital. The team is predominately Chinese and headed by Sunny Lu who started working on the VeChain concept in 2015. Many of the core team members have backgrounds working for large publicly traded companies.

VeChain to Solve Supply Chain Problems

VeChain wants to solve the problems that exist in:

• IoT (Internet of Things) for cold chain logistics (temperature controlled supply chains often used in the trucking industry for meats, dairy and other products that require specifics temperatures)
• Automotive, which will track all aspects of the vehicle history including repair history, insurance, registration and driver behavior. This ultimately could lead to more partnerships with major automakers.
• Medical & Health Care such as sharing biometric data of patients, hardware devices & medical devices, which is a very needed use case in my opinion, medical records are often mismanaged.
• Luxury & Fashion. Large brands such as LV & Gucci has faced immense problems with this over the years due to lack of supply chain and authenticity information.
• Liquor. VeChain created a system to track the wine supply chain including the use of QR/NFC codes.
• Agriculture. Through the use of IoT VeChain can track conditions for organic materials. This sort of data can be used to improve the quality of products.
• Logistics.

VeChain Growth

VeChain has been in production since 2015 and lead by a strong team with backgrounds working for publicly traded companies for several years. They have strong backers such as VC Tim Draper and Fenbushi Capital who has been backing a lot of Blockchain related projects. I also see huge potential for partnerships not just in Asian but globally. We should be paying attention to the Chinese markets. Although the Market Capitalization for VeChain is nearly $2B, I still believe the potential for more partnerships will allow much more growth in Market Cap. The space is highly competitive right now, with dozens of other Blockchain companies aiming for the same goals. I will definitely be keeping my eye on VeChain for long term growth.

I recently watched a video from Andreas Antonopoulos about the most important projects under development right now in the Cryptocurrency ecosystem. He highlighted exchanges and wallets as being the most important for wider adoption of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies. You can see more of his videos here. He has been the voice of Bitcoin for several years, speaking globally about how it works and why it’s an important invention and evolution in money. You often hear of ICO’s (Initial Coin Offerings) building a fancy project for machine learning and AI, big buzzwords with idealistic visions. I don’t discredit these projects, they may one day be vitally important. However, people have yet to even adopt Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency on a basic level yet. Right now the main doorway is Coinbase, a licensed Crypto bank that started several years ago and is the go to place for purchasing Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. Ethos was an ICO during the summer of 2017 and the name was “Bitquence” at the time. I personally thought this was a pretty bad name. However they have since rebranded and want to introduce a universal wallet for the masses. I found this appealing because it captures the most basic audience, and that is the wide adoption audience or as they call it “Noobs”.

“Bitquence’s vision is to create a people-powered new economy services company that makes the cryptocurrency market accessible and trustworthy to the average user, accelerating adoption of blockchain technology and democratizing ownership of cryptocurrencies.” – Bitquence Whitepaper (2017) 

The Visionary Team Behind Ethos

The founder of Ethos is Shingo Lavine, currently a student of the prestigious Brown University, he is scheduled to graduate in 2020 under their Computer Science and Economics program. He is young (20) and has been working on entrepreneurial pursuits for several years, in high school he was the founder of the innovation club. He’s worked for the following companies: Fun Mobility, Motzie & High Performance Computing, he then founded “Jobs University.” The team is equally impressive with experience from former Blackrock, Merrill Lynch, Citrix, Freddie Mac, UBS, executives and graduates from other prestigious schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What Ethos Will Do

One of the key features Ethos will bring is universal access to all Cryptocurrencies and Tokens under one private key. Currently, you have to use various wallets to access your holdings. Usually this is done via “Hardware Wallet” such as the Ledger or Trezor. These have been very popular because they add a layer of security which is the most important feature of any Crypto wallet. You can also create a “Paper Wallet” which is simply a printed out version of your Public and Private Key. For those who don’t understand what that means, your Public Key is how you receive Crypto payments, and your Private Key is how you will store and access them. Anyone can see your Public Key, if your Private Key is known, it can be accessed.

Aside from Hardware Wallet and Paper Wallet, there are also “Hot Wallets” which are stored on a computers desktop, such as “Exodus”. These have good security, but they do interact with your computer, which interacts with the internet and can also be vulnerable to hacking. Many of the popular Tokens require the users to download a “Mainnet Wallet” to their desktop because they are not able to interact with Ethereum based wallets requiring ERC20 Token Standards. The ERC20 Token Standard simply means that it has to be a Token that was developed for Ethereum. So if you are holding a Token built on it’s own Blockchain, it won’t interact with the Ethereum Blockchains wallet such as “My Ethereum Wallet”, “MetaMask” etc. As you may have noticed understanding these basics can be a headache, and this is why Ethos is being developed. With all of these complications there can’t possibly be faster adoption until this is solved. They want to solve this.

Additional Features

Ethos wants to also be a beacon of understanding for new Cryptocurrencies and Token projects. As of now, you are required to do hours and hours of research on new projects, or rely on ratings sites to make investment decisions on new ICO’s. People often “Shill” their own Tokens because they want them to be more popular. The ratings system that Ethos is planning to build will be P2P (Peer to Peer) and help determine which projects have good potential for future development and adoption. I like systems that are P2P because the trust factor goes up. If we rely on a centralized source for information, we don’t always know what goes on behind the scenes. We don’t know why one project is rated higher than the other. Ethos community creates a layer of transparency that will allow a meritocratic environment causing the project to have to prove its worth as opposed to being proven without a reason other than blind reviews. Ethos is a project that I believe will happen. They will be hosting a summit in Rhode Island on April 14th and you can RSVP to attend by clicking here.