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If you want to access the full list of our research watch the video & read the FAQ. Feel free to message me if you have any questions. Telegram: demiculus

Coins are ranked from -1 to 4

  • 4 = Definitely buy this coin.
  • 3 = This is one of the top coins I’ve seen.
  • 2 = You should definitely check this out.
  • 1 = This coin is worth a look.
  • 0 = I’m neutral about this coin.
  • -1 = Shit coin.

Crowdcoin: -1

TLDR: Building an ecosystem to learn/invest/news/exchange/fund cryptos.

  • They are pretty active for a coin their size
  • They have forked a coin and don't seem to have done any innovation
  • They've been updating their github rigorously the past few days.
  • They have published a new whitepaper (a few days ago) which looked really legit at the first glance but as I read more into it, it is a business paper not a technical paper which doesn't include game theories & other formulas solving problems.
  • Sent them email, the email adress doesn't exists.

Conclusion: They are basically giving ICO/investment advice & helping people do ICO's. Thus they are actually a consultancy firm which has created their own coin, where I didn't understand why they needed the coin in the first place.

Since they are updating & publishing more stuff their price can increase in the short term, but I see no long term value for this coin.

atlant: 0

TLDR: Real estate blockchain (make ICOs for real estates & decentralized airbnb)

  • ERC20 token
  • They plan on doing ICOs for shopping malls and other real estates. So people can buy & trade a fraction of the mall.
  • Their white paper looks very legit (work has been put in to it)
  • The coin price is 20% of the ico price where ICO happened in 1 Nov
  • Up until the ICO they tweeted daily after the ICO they tweet once a month
  • They push new code about once a week.
  • They are far behind their road map but have not update their road map.
  • They seem to be more focused on regulatory things than the actual tech.
  • In telegram the admin saidd when they finalize the regulatory problems they will update the site and then do the product release which I think will probably increase the token price by a lot.
  • They go to blockchain events take pics with famous people (like vinny)
  • The method of tokenizing a proprety goes like this: They buy a property, put it in to a special purpose company, then tokenize that company. I'm not sure why ATL is needed here.
  • It might be better if they just tokenize properties without having their own coin. Thus they become a service company.
  • Emailed Maxim(https://github.com/xlab) who implemented their node: https://github.com/AtlantPlatform/atlant-go . He said that he is a freelancer who is working on atlant and another project at the time. And his hourly rate is $40. Hiring freelancers for implementation is a big red flag.

aigang: -1

TLDR: Insurance Protocol

  • Built on top of ethereum
  • White paper looks ameteur, they didn't invent most concepts but no referrals are given
  • Github sucks, no real development can be seen
  • It has been more than 6 months and their docs still have todos everywhere: https://aigang.readthedocs.io/en/latest/platform/predictions.html
  • They don't look like they have anyone in the team capable of building a protocol

Conclusion: They look like they have just did ICO, took money and did nothing else.

nav-coin: 0

TLDR: POS version of Bitcoin

  • Came out in 2014
  • They built a blockchain company in 2015 which builds tools, gives seminars etc to their clients: https://encrypt-s.com/company/
  • They work on Nav-coin but also other stuff as well. So their coin doesn't seem to support their funding.
  • Navcoin is just incrementally better than bitcoin but doesn't look like it is better than ethereum
  • They have a really active github, reddit, telegram, twitter etc.

Overall I don't see anything unique in this coin

Mintcoin: -1

TLDR: One of the first POS projects in 2014

  • Fork of Novacoin which is fork of Bitcoin
  • The developers have long abbandoned the coin
  • Shane Kerr saw this coin and decided to take over in Feb: https://github.com/shane-kerr/MintCoin-Development-Updates/blob/master/2018-02-01.md
  • He has been publishing weekly updates to the wallet ever since and is thinking about teaming up/merging/doing partnerships with other small timer coins.
  • He has just been updating the desktop wallet by himself but nothing new has been added to the coin yet.
  • Has market cap of $10M

Conclusion: If Shane gets more people working on this coin, they can get the coin up 5-10x from where it is in to the top 300, 200. But since the tech is old and doesn't provide a good innovation they will not be able to penaterate the top coins ever. Thus shit coin.

Golos: 1

TLDR: Steemit for russia

  • Code forked from steemit
  • They have been in the market since the beginning of this year with a market cap of $10M (steemit: $870M)
  • Similarweb
    • Visits: Steem - 30M, Golos -1.5M
    • Global Rank: Steem - 1775, Golos - 39000
    • Country Rank: Steem - 2000, Golos - 3960
  • Top posts have: Steem - $600-800, Golos - $30-60
  • Alexa
    • Global rank: Steem: 1400 - Golos: 56000
    • Country rank: Steem: 1500 - Golos: 8000
  • If they are able to increase their russian rank to 2k the token price will probably increase more than 4x.

Questions:

  1. What is the projected growth of the site?
  2. What is the projected growth of the coin?

Chronobank: -1

TLDR: Coin used to hire workers for freelance/labor jobs

  • ERC20 token
  • 90% of their code is javascript
  • They haven't been doing a lot of coding in the past year but in the past month they have updated all of the repos.
  • Finished their ICO in Feb'17(raised $5M) and in the market since Mar'18 (mcap = $10M)
  • They have put the techs they have used for their dapps as partners in their site. (ex: waves, ethereum, 0x..)
  • Founder have put himself as Advisor to SingularityNet, but on singularity net website he isn't listed, I emailed singularity team.
  • Telegram has 55k members (skycoin 8k) has 1/100 of activity that skycoin has
  • 2k subs on reddit, almost 0 activity
  • Means they haven't been able to build a community for 1 year
  • they say that they are building a stable token called Labor hour which is semi-centralized which will be used to pay the freelancers.

Conclusion: Shitcoin, but they've started marketing more agressively the past month thus there can be an increase in the price if they succeed. If they don't it'll be a waste. So it would only be a gamble according to their marketing skills.

Holo: 3

TLDR: Torrent for application hosting

  • Not a blockchain but a DHT like bittorent
  • They have strong connections (CFO of Mozilla & Co-founder of Netflix)
  • Project is in alpha but can still be built on using JS & Lisp
  • Holo fuel will be live in Q3 2018
  • It looks awesome on paper, anyone who looks at it for an hour will not see that token won't work. (we should invest at least 10%)
  • We can hodl until holo fuel becomes live
  • Founder(Arthur Brock) has been a CTO since 1996 and has been working on currencies since 2004
  • They are hiring devs
  • They've written protocol with Go
  • They are agent centric(like git) rather than data centric(like bitcoin). So when an agent create a git repo only he has the power to change it. But doesn't prevent anyone from forking it.
  • I didn't understand the technical part of the white paper, it may take me 5-10hours to think and understand it.
  • They have TODOs in their whitepaper
  • They have green paper & currency paper
  • They use mutual credit, which means the token supply is always zero. When someone creates tokesn someone else goes to negatives.
  • They use double entry ledger system, I'm not sure if it'll work.
  • They have put some normal weaknesses in their Currency paper saying that they don't have good solutions for some attack types.
  • Coins which have this much depth & tech with good marketing has a 99% chance of entering top 30 (which means increasing 4x from where it is right now)

Questions:

  1. How does the distributed validation work? https://youtu.be/hyCtYrHJebs?t=4m30s
  2. There are more misc people on the team than developers, is this good?
  3. They say holo is not a token, not a coin but a mutual credit. I didn't understand the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn7aWuerBB8
    • ""App Providers go through real world identity verification when they sign their agreements for hosting apps on Holo."" how is it decentralized? (they also mention that it will start semi-centralized and gradually holo will stop existing and holochain will become completely decentralized.

Aeternity: -1

  • They aim to make a Global Oracle Machine
  • Each account needs to be payed in order to keep open thus incentivices deleting accounts
  • Their whitepaper is technical in depth
  • They are using almost everything from already created techs.
  • Plagirsm %7 with lightning network, %6 with solidity
  • Their innovations are in
  1. oracles (binding real world data w blockchain data)
  2. They say state channels is innovation but it seems like a copy of lightning network
  3. Cuckoo Cycle Pow, John Tromp has created this and he is their advisor

Questions:

  1. What are the cases that could go wrong with the the oracles they have designed?
  2. Do the remaining members of this team have enough skill to develop a useful coin or would it be a gimmick?
  3. Can this team market the coin well so that it becomes the standard oracle blockchain?
  4. I didn't quite understand the tech and such kan needs to look. (look at Cuckoo Cycle Pow)

If teamCanMarket() && techWork(): invest because they are early else: dontInvest()

I think the team is doing an okay job at marketing. They've pumped the coin to top 30 and have a unique selling point so the coin could go much higher before people realize its tech doesn't work.

Mithril: 0

  • Founder built video streaming company(17 media) in 2015 with $33M in funding.
  • 17 Medias app has 100k stars on google play. (periscope 500k)
  • The white paper sounds amateur, doesn't say how, leaves too many questions unanswered. It feels like they are saying ""we will figure out on the way""
  • There is no protocol tech underneath.
  • Pantera capital has invested & Paul Veradittakit is an advisor
  • Top 100 holders hold more than 97% of the tokens: https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0x3893b9422cd5d70a81edeffe3d5a1c6a978310bb
  • Their app lit is still in its infancy, lots of polishing needed
  • Their price is increasing because they are able to get their coin on many exchanges also only a few % of the coin is changing hands thus price manipulation is easy.
  • The concept has a few errors:
  1. Mithril is mined through social media popularity. This encourages like for like, view for view behavior. How is mithril overcoming this problem?
  2. As far as I've seen Lit is a centralized app. How can other social media developers integrate mithril to their platform? The blockchain needs to be able to process millions of micro transactions in order to validate each like/view, such scalaility does not exist yet on blockchains. From this I see that mith won't be useful until either they build their own scalable blockchain or ethereum ads sharding, where both solutions seem to have 2+ years. So will mith be any use in the next 2 years? If so what?
  3. Mithril will be used by merchants thus giving it value, why would merchants use mithril instead of btc/eth/ltc?
  • Telegram admin answer:
  1. Our team have foreseen that like/view for like/view might happens, so we have our solution to this.
  2. We are building our own Mithril Ecosystem, and Lit is just the first product for it, so currently we are focusing on our to-do projects.
  3. Use BTC/ETH/LTC as a payment method is also good. And we believe MITH will become a great option for everyone to pay for their daily life, too :) *Our fonder once said that “There will only be three crypto coin in the future: BTC, ETH, and MITH” :D
  • This shows that they don't intend on becoming a protocol but creating a new social network. Where if they can migrate their old users it'll be a start.
  • Miths usefulness may grow according to the app.
  • It is an appcoin not protocol
  • Merchants have no incentive to use Mith over any other amazing coin

Skycoin: 4

tl;dr a network of VPNs on top of internet. Earn/spend money based on used bandwidth.

  • Skycoin uses Obelisk, BFT like sync system using game theory to validate transactions. No PoW or anything, just consensus based on time.
  • Skywire share bandwidth but getting paid
  • SkyLedger, platform similiar to Ethereum’s ERC20 with individual chains for each smartcontract
  • It has the potential to Moon Mars. (Market potential is trillions of $)
  • Has tons of Apps
  • Has/Will have hardwares (Skyminer, SkyAnttenna, SkyWallet etc..)
  • They are super technically.
  • The SmartContract languages is Go like but it kinda sucks (like Solidy)
  • They say they have a few secrets which they haven't shared yet so market can't beat them
  • Core is based in China but has offices all around the world.
  • Has more than 80 people working.
  • Has been around for 7 years.
  • They have the core ledger built (blockchain). Almost everything else going to be built.
  • Has scientific papers around
  • Has Lead Dev from Ethereum and Core devs from Bitcoin (this needs validation)
  • Synth (CEO) is exteremely smart and troll

Stellar: 4

TLDLR: Quick reliable cheap payments

  • Protocol between different currencies
  • ICO platform
  • Has decentralized exchange
  • Transactions in 2-5 seconds
  • Can convert all currencies, can integrate with existing banking systems & crypto
  • Wants to distribute/airdrop XLM to nonprofits.
  • Has 1% inflation each year.
  • Their chief scientist who wrote white paper seems like a genius. Has more than 5 papers yearly since 2001.
  • They are opening their governence and numbers, tokens to everyone.
  • Stellar group will serve for lifetime. Jed, Patrick & Professor.
  • Has allstar directors and advisors.
  • Stellar executive director left in 2016 and it seems no one replaced her since.
  • Has a new CTO last 6 months.
  • Most team graduated from shit universities and had no experience before Stellar.
  • I didn't see the team answer anything in the community anytime soon.

Pascalcoin: -1

  • It's an R&D coin
  • It will never have really use case.
  • The only thing they do is trim blockchain data with cost of total 2^32 account limit
  • Written in Pascal...

Holo: 2

  • Targeted 1000x potential ($300B market). Might target more as well.
  • It’s not a cryptocurrency. It’s signature signed bittorent (DHT).
  • They plan to make dApps without cryptocurrencies
  • It’s not ideal to make cryptocurrencies or ICOs in Holo.
  • Holofuel is a digital debit system. Might not work properly?
  • Value of Holofuel will diminish in long term. It only has value in short to medium term.
  • Team looks smart. CEO is definitely smart.
  • The community is smart and healthy (mattermost)
  • They are doing something different than everyone else
  • Their code is actually working
  • They have Holo Box a hardware to host dApps. It’s crowdfunded on Indiegogo rather than venture capital.
  • %1 Holo transaction fees go toward Holochain.
  • Centralization in Holo https://www.reddit.com/r/holochain/comments/8h5hyz/centralization_in_holo/
  • Page 16-18 https://files.holo.host/2018/03/Holo-Green-Paper.pdf. So many roles. Seems complicated for a simple double ledger system.
  • Holo is a dApp platform. CEO says any currency can be built on top of it however his definition of currency is different than Satoshi’s vision. Holo is trying to solve dApps problem. I’m not sure if there is a problem there. Facebook might own my data but it is providing me value and I’m using it. Why should I use dApp Facebook?
  • Holo Fuel value will diminish in long term because it’s backed by compute power. Compute power gets cheaper everyday. In short to medium term the price will probably jump because they started really cheap.

Questions:

  • Holo Organisation owns Holo Fuel and it seems more like bank than a decentralised currency.
  • After ICO tokens are swapped with Holo Fuel, is it possible to cash out Holo Fuel?

Synth:

  • I did not do peer-to-peer apps for coins like holochain is doing, because its pointless; bitorrent works already, any overlay you put on top of it will just be slower. You have to be able to get people to switch what they are doing to use the new thing. Then you have to build on the platform from there.
  • I have already taken all of the core innovations in holochain and put them in the Skycoin development roadmap. They have a few good ideas.
  • I cannot figure out purpose of holochains crypto currency. They do not seem to need it at all
  • There is no solution to the consensus problem at all. Anywhere in the paper. They are trying to justify the fact that they have no automatic way of doing consensus. They have no automatic conflict resolution procedure in the network.
  • Anyone can write any data or any balance they want onto the network and say they have as many holofuel as they want and no one can cap the number of coins that are in existence. There is no method to mediate between conflicts between different users.
  • ""Hosts will be required to register if they want to redeem credits for outside currencies through reserve account"". The coin is completely centralized
  • There is no mechanism in holo to verify that users are not creating coins.
  • There is no way to resolve double spends.
  • There is no conflict or double spending resolution mechanism.
  • ""You can always audit your counterpart’s chain to validate their state and know that they have the credits they’re spending."" The only way to validate the counter party, is to validate his counter parties and the counter parties of the counter parties of the counter parties, etc until you have validated EVERY node in the network (assuming the data is even public or still exists). And the older data drops off the network because its a DHT. So no one will even have a copy. And if there are any errors or discrepencies in the credit system, there is no dispute or resolution mechanism and no method of consensus.
  • The devs are big on ""immune"" systems and claim they can kick out any bad actors from the network if they wanted. At the first sign of trouble it will collapse no doubt.
  • There are several trivial denial of service attacks on the network too, wtf; there is not way to rate limit network activity to a level where validation can actual occur (even in theory).

Nimiq: 1

TLDR: Simple web based transactions

  • Mining and transactions on browser and mobile.
  • Coded in javascript.
  • Targeted for mainstream audience who doesn't understand blockchain and wallets.
  • Has mini wallets that are 1MB size.
  • PoW algorithm.
  • Tech seems like bitcoin in js.
  • 60 second block time is slow.
  • Why should this be better than Stellar?
  • Founder has strong open source projects.
  • One of founder cryptography PhD researcher with publications.
  • Another founder PhD in economics.
  • They are definitely working on the same house and vlogging their experience.
  • Founders old open source projects are now dead.
  • Most team members haven't updated their presence that they are working on nimiq.

Wagerr: 0

tl;dr Betting platform with oracles

  • They are focusing on sport betting as entry to market. However I don't think they'll expand from there
  • The team doesn't look amazing
  • For an oracle coin, entry to market from sport betting makes a lot of sense.
  • They have a huge red flag which is burning fees. They say it'll increase the price of the token but it doesn't actually provide any value to a person who bets. The person should not hold but use the tokens. Active deflationary system is actually really bad unless there is a really good reason to do it. Adding deflantionary system just to increase the prices doesn't make sense. They want to grab store of value too but it's just mehh. They say this is their main differentiator meaning they don't understand business, economy, markets etc.
  • I'm not sure how they are fixing oracles. This may need to be researched.
  • Their competitors are every Oracle coin (Augur, aethernity etc.)
  • They have ""F*ck Yeah"" written in their website banner. Really unprofessional. They sound like a bunch of kids trying to earn money doing ICOs

Aeternity: 1

TLDR: smart contracts interfacing with real world data

  • Yanislav (CEO) is one of the earliest ethereum developers and core eth team member (he calls himself even “godfather of ethereum” https://medium.com/@yanislav/king-of-bitcoin-godfather-of-ethereum-a9af9ecf56d5
  • PoW+PoS hybrid consensus algorithm will use Cuckoo Cycle as PoW which is energy efficient and runs on RAM. They claim even smartphones can mine ae in the future. Delegated voting will be used for PoS governance.
  • This blockchain will use “oracles” as tamper proof data bridges which contracts can act upon. Contracts can pull real world data like the price of real world assets(ie gold), election results, weather conditions etc.
  • State channels are offchain solutions, not a real essential breaktrough though but it’s important for businesses.
  • Erlang has been used in aeternity’s architecture.
  • AE is still ERC20 now which will be swapped to its native infrastracture coins, its ICO had two phases (april and june 2017). First phase price was $0.042 and second was $0.28 per token. (I contributed in both phases)
  • Long wait for token distribution, lots of corporate tragedy (two CTOs have been fired, first one Zack is also one of the creators of aeternity’s whitepaper, and he is one of the earliest characters in cryptosphere but he acted very unprofessional on the process IMHO- childish hack threats on medium posts etc, he’s now making his own project called AMOVEO)
  • It has a high level, OCaml based scripting language called Sophia which can be formally verified. It has also a simpler language called Varna. Both will support contracts and oracles.
  • It will have its own dapps called aepps, not sure how much developer support can it take. Their team is quite competent indeed. (They have few PhD erlang devs)
  • Euro-centered project, no asian hype, at least for now.
  • Despite all of its corporate tragedy ae price has done well since ICO, I believe Yani’s strong ethereum connections are responsible in that.
  • They must be in an independent security audit these days, after that mainnet release and token swap will be expected.

Conclusion:

The only real competitor of AE will be its oldest CTO’s solo project Amoveo which lacks a market existence, for now.

Zilliqa: 2

TLDR: A secure sharding adaptation in blockchain

  • Zilliqa leverages PoW for sybil attacks, establishing identities and performing sharding. However it achieves consensus through practical BFT in each shard.
  • The most unique speciality of Zilliqa is linear scalability which means it processes more tps as more mining nodes join the network. It’s the opposite in almost every blockchain project.
  • Very qualified team with a strong academic background. (one of my highschool friends took a class with their CSA Prateek Saxona at Berkeley in 2009 and he calls him pretty smart guy) Amrit Kumar is also a well known name in crypto-academic circles
  • Zilliqa is developing a non Turing complete, I/O Automata based smart contract language called Scilla, they claim that not all apps require a Turing complete language and it becomes possible to prove interesting safety and liveness properties about a non-Turing complete program such as the funds never get locked, etc. Interesting approach IMHO
  • The biggest critic comes from eth devs and they say that there is no state sharding in Zilliqa (Ethereum is planning to use state sharding in the future) However Zil’s team’s conclusion was that there still isn’t a state sharding scheme that is secure enough, but they are open for future implementations.
  • They have Bluzelle and Genaro partnerships (Distributed storage) NEO also invested in Zilliqa
  • Lately Indonesian bank BNI said that they will use a private blockchain system called Anquan which is powered by Zilliqa for remittances and trade finance.
  • Lack of strong marketing, too much(asian level) nerdy team. Anyways their community is getting stronger everyday.

Conclusion

Zilliqa may be a real permissionless high throughput blockchain solution with its unique linear scalability. I expect an ADA like run from it when its mainnet release approaches (sometime in q3) %5-10 of all portfolio can be invested imho (mine is %11)

Cardano: 4

TLDR: Programmable updatable blockchain

  • Seems like improvement on Ethereum with scientific philosophy and research input. -Uses purely functional Haskell, this makes code harder to write but very bug free, ideal for blockchains.
  • First peer reviewed mathmatically proven PoS on large scale called Ouroboros.
  • System can be upgraded with soft forks.
  • Aimed to use in academy, government, companies.
  • Can add new layers and update the blockchain.
  • Can possibly kill Ethereum and take its place.
  • Minting coins, should need to be checked, is it minted to the company or token holders?
  • Chief scientist has more than 100 papers related to cryptography since 2001. At least 5 papers a year, lately 10+ papers a year.
  • Why part in their website shows a lot of work and incredible openness to the community.
  • Roadmap in their web page shows incredible openness with percentage completeness.
  • Team also works to maintain Ethereum Classic because forking is against blockchain philoshopy.
  • Does weekly reports.
  • Founder ex-CEO of Ethereum & ex-CEO of Bitshares.
  • Has an army of PhDs.
  • Seems to have an investment firm in the holding companies.