Cypherium ICO review

"Cypherium is a highly scalable & permission-less hybrid blockchain platform based on proof-of-work and Byzantine fault tolerance consensus. The design goal of Cypherium focuses on achieving the apex of scalability, decentralization, and commercialization viability.

Cypherium’s unique consensus mechanism provides unprecedented transaction throughput and contract execution time through PBFT, while leveraging an ASIC-resistant PoW system for decentralized node election. By providing fundamental building blocks for developers to create groundbreaking applications, and an intuitive interface for users to access these functionalities, Cypherium aims to provide a comprehensive foundation for the future of Blockchain technology" [1].

Cypherium is built from the ground up, and their goal is simply put: to achieve a secure, private and instant transaction framework. Meaning their Blockchain is like Ethereum or Neo, it allows you to build your own Blockchain on top of the Cypherium Blockchain. You can also create and send Smart contracts over their Blockchain.

One of their Unique Selling Points (USP) is also their no minimum fee protocol for Smart Contracts, being able to execute Smart Contracts at low cost will be key to earning market share of the growing market for IoT, large scale governmental implementation of Smart Contracts for Medic Aid, and benefit payouts. The ultimate goal here is to provide scalability, which is why they have the design with No fixed Blocksize.

When the main net goes live, they will issue their own cryptocurrency token named "Cypher" and will have the denomination "CPH". After the ICO is complete, the token distribution will be delivered straight into a Cypherium Wallet. Their Blockchain uses a hybrid consensus mechanism which uses concepts seen in the Bitcoin-ng protocol and Byzcoin. It aims to improve the Blockchain scalability and solve governance problems within decentralized networks [6][7].

"From Bitcoin-NG, we adopt the idea of decoupling key block mining from micro blocks for faster transaction processing. From ByzCoin, we adopt the method of using windows of recent key block miners to elect a group of validators for Byzantine consensus and allow those groups to commit transactions collectively" [1] [7].

The key features of their platform includes double-chain consensus, federated architecture and separate sandboxes for test and production smart contracts. Their Blockchain is optimized for on-chain scalability, and mine-ability through their hybrid consensus mechanism which uses Proof-of-work (PoW), and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) [7].

[1]

Cypherium has a very well produced white paper. Their highly technical and descriptive white paper of how they are going to achieve their marketed high-speed Blockchain inspires confidence in the project and the team. The team behind Cypherium have first-class experience, with former employers such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. It seems as if they know where they want to go, and their plan for going there seems clear. It also seems the highly active community, and general interest in the ICO is growing by the day. With a shy Hardcap of $25M for both their Pre-sale and ICO, this should be contender for the next Bull-run [4] [5] [7].

Their team is lead by the experienced Sky Guo, a student of Computer Science who got into Blockchain in 2015 [9]. They have a comprehensive team of highly experienced cryptographers and software engineers, and on their advisory board we find the well known Associate Professor at Cornell University and bloXroute Labs Chief Scientist, Emin Gün Sirer [2]. Jeremy Gardner, Co-founder of Augur Distributed Magazine, is also an advisor to Cypherium [3] [8].

Cypherium has also secured a strategic partnership with above mentioned bloXroute Labs. [1]

Their Pre-sale is undergoing, and a date for the ICO is yet to be determined. There is certainly a lot of hype around this projected, which by many ICO tracking websites and Cryptocurrency news outlets is being ranked No. 1 ICO for 2018 [10][11][12][15][16]. Among these financial news outlets are also more recognized mainstream sources; Forbes, and Yahoo Finance [13][14].

Covering some community measurements, as of date (2018-01-08)
Twitter @CypheriumChain - 2998 followers
Facebook @CypheriumChain - 1419 followers
Telegram - 4449 members
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Cypherium/ - 676 readers

Sources
[1] Cypherium Website
https://www.cypherium.io/landing/index.html

[2] Advisor Emin Gün Sirer
https://twitter.com/el33th4xor

[3] Advisor Jeremy Gardner
https://twitter.com/Disruptepreneur

[4] Coinspeaker.com
https://www.coinspeaker.com/2017/12/01/former-amazon-google-developers-building-fast-highly-scalable-blockchain/

[5] Bloomberg.com
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-13/bitcoin-competitors-are-being-built-in-ex-google-coders-laptops?cmpid=socialflow-facebook-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

[6] CryptoCoinNews.com
https://www.ccn.com/cypherium-taps-hybrid-consensus-mechanism-permissionless-scalable-blockchain/

[7] Cypherium White paper
https://www.cypherium.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/cypherium_whitepaper.pdf

[8] Forbes.com
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2017/12/08/debugging-public-blockchains-to-secure-ico-markets-and-prevent-a-crypto-crash/#5eba1b7b6b93

[9] Interview with CEO Sky Guo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=HTMfPNvPnVk

[10] INC
https://www.inc.com/bill-carmody/top-10-initial-coin-offerings-icos-to-watch-heading-into-2018.html

[11] The Tokener
https://thetokener.com/news/top-10-icos-for-investment-in-2018.html

[12] investinblockchain.com
https://www.investinblockchain.com/top-icos-2018/

[13] Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/haroldstark/2017/12/12/keep-an-eye-on-these-blockchain-startups-throughout-2018/2/#3fe683e5ae5d

[14] Yahoo Finance
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2017-ico-highlights-best-icos-142644068.html

[15] Blockdiscover.com
http://www.blockdiscover.com/ico-news/top-icos-to-watch-out-for-in-2018/

[16] Coinfunda.com
https://coinfunda.com/top-6-ico-concepts-to-invest-in-2018/