This is a quick review and I will update once the whitepaper becomes available- ETA: June 2018
Brief Summary:
Ankr is targeting the trillion-dollar cloud computing market and aims to disrupt it by providing a solution with the help of blockchain and trusted hardware (Intel SGXs).
Ankr in gist is trying to do the following,
Oracle Service- An API will be exposed to the consumers to port data to smart contracts using the Oracle Services in a secured trusted execution environment (TEE) and in an authenticated way
Multi-chains – There will be a main-chain and side-chains called as plasma chains which can be leveraged to run dApps and any specific smart contracts as needed. Plasma chains will provide high computing power without overloading the main-chain which seems to be the bottleneck now with traditional single chain architecture.
Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) consensus- Ankr aims to make use of the idle computing power and reward the contributor for doing so. Miners need to complete the tasks provided by the consumers in the PoUW algorithm unlike the PoW used by BTC.
Ankr will enable application developers to leverage a blockchain framework and a solid infrastructure to build a robust and highly secured applications.
Product:
No product- prototype – July 2018
Roadmap:
Good roadmap with prototype releasing next month
No info on mainnet though
Investors:
Neo Global Capital, GBIC, OK Blockchain and KOSMOS to name a few
Metrics:
Hard cap: 16 M
Available for Token Sale: 30%
Other details: Unknown
Core Team:
Founding team doesn’t seem to have lot of blockchain experience but they do have some and there are members with good blockchain experience in the team.
Advisors:
Christel Quek is a well-known advisor from Zilliqa
No other big advisors with blockchain experience listed
Positives:
- Strong investors including Neo Global Capital and GBIC
- Multi-chains and distributed cloud computing platform
- Oracle services will help to take blockchain one step closer to real world adoption
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) mining scheme
- Mining projects has given good ROI traditionally
- Hype building up
- Very good hard cap
Negatives:
- Co-founders and top-level team is not strong in my view- they look young
- No whitepaper yet- ETA: June
- Metrics unknown
- No MVP – prototype ETA is JULY so most probably before their public TGE
- No info on mainnet
Verdict: Ankr looks slightly weak now with no whitepaper (time of writing), prototype and young core founding team but I am still bullish on this project.
Ankr will most definitely be one of the hyped ICOs in Q3 2018.
Investing: Yes, I will.
Disclaimer: This is not an investment advice. These are my humble opinions about the project and I request you to do your own due diligence.