There is a video link below for those who prefer an audio version
PChain is a very new coin that only hit the markets a week ago, and because of the recent market crash, it’s actually in a very unusual spot where it’s current price is actually over 25% lower than it’s opening price, which was just a week ago. So potentially it’s at a very big discount.
As I took a lot at this project, I was actually very impressed with the technology behind it and I think it has a lot of potential. So I wanted to introduce it to you guys, if you want to learn more about PChain, keep watching this video.
The guy in this picture is Dr Feng Cao. He’s a very impressive person in the China Blockchain scene and also the co- founder and chief scientist of this project.
Dr Feng Cao was the inventor of the 1st International Blockchain patent from China, he’s also the Co-Founder of ChinaLedger which is the most influential blockchain alliance of China.
He is also the Chief Scientist of Blockchain Application Committee in China Federation of Logistic and Purchasing and he successfully accomplished the 1st blockchain based assets earning rights transfer in the world in September 2016, which is also the 1st Financial Blockchain Transaction in China.
He was an Ex-Chief Scientist of Internet Finance and co-chair of the patent review board in IBM Research China, and he won the IBM Global Technical Achievement Awards three times before. He has written 22 papers in top conferences and has over 30+ international patents to his name.
So before we even look at the project I’m already excited to see what technology they will be offering.
PChain describes itself as “the first multichain system that supports EVM in the world.” EVM stands for Ethereum virtual machine. Let me explain what this project means.
Traditional Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are singular chain models. Which means the Dapps built on it are in the Blockchain and use the computational power of the Blockchain.
So if my computational power of my Blockchain is say 1000trx/ sec for example. It doesn’t matter how many Dapps I have, my total power is still only 1000trx/sec. It just gets divided up between the Dapps using it, and so the more Dapps I have, the slower each Dapp will function. That’s a scalability problem.
A multi-chain model is where the Dapps are built on the Blockchain, but they provide their own computational power and are little burden on the Blockchain.
In this case, the transaction speed of the blockchain is actually the addition of all the transaction speeds of all the Dapps. So in the case of the above diagram, if each Dapp had a transaction speed of 1000 trx/ sec, then the total transaction speed of the Blockchain would be 4000 trx/ sec. Imagine if you have 1000 Dapps built on the Blockchain, that would be (1000x 1000= 1million trx/sec). That’s how EOS and other projects can boast such fast speeds.
This multi-chain model will be a very familiar model for those who have seen our other videos. But if this is your first time seeing it, I do recommend you understand this model, especially if you want to invest in Blockchain protocols, because it’s one of the more popular scaling solutions these days.
Now multi-chain Blockchains usually stop here and that’s the final architecture of the Blockchain.
PChain goes one step further by introducing a cross-link feature to other Blockchains e.g. Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.
Cross-linking/ or interoperability is not actually intuitive to Blockchain. Many Blockchains live in isolation. E.g. if a shop accepts payment in Ethereum, you can’t go in there and pay with Bitcoin. Because they are not compatible. But you can pay with PChain.
The way PChain does it, is it is linked to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The Virtual Machine is the technology that test runs all the smart contracts before releasing it as a finished product. So Ethereum, has a lot of problems, the concensus has issues, the ledger has issues etc… but think of Ethereum in layers. Many of the layers are problematic, but Ethereum does have good technology and some of the layers like the Virtual Machine is actually good technology. One example is the EVM is compatible or designed for the programming language Solidity. Solidity unlike traditional programming language like JAVA, was designed for cryptocurrency, so when you use it to make a smart contract for a transaction, naturally there will be a feature in that smart contract that will require gas. That’s why you need Ether to do transactions. But smart contracts that are coded with JAVA, do not necessarily have this feature.
Furthermore, the EVM also currently hosts the world’s largest number of smart contracts, so if you were a new platform and you wanted to cross-chain to be relevant to other Blockchain projects, the first technology you want to be relevant to is Ethereum, or in this case, not the whole Ethereum, just the most useful part of Ethereum which is the EVM.
By being relevant to the EVM, it means Ethereum smart contracts can be run using PChain tokens as gas. The unspoken thing I think this means is that if Ethereum Dapps wanted to jump ship off Ethereum to a new and better platform, the natural choice would be PChain, because it is the fastest and most compatible platform.
So there are other multi-chain projects out there, but PChain is the only one that supports EVM. Also there are other single chain projects that support EVM, but PChain is the only one who offers the scalability benefits of a multichain model.
The scaling of PChain isn’t just the multi-chain structure, they will also use Sharding as an additional scaling method. Sharding is basically splitting the work up into smaller portions for quicker processing. In PChain, sharding happens at 2 levels:
At the structural level, the concept of side chains itself is sharding, the main chain will provide registration, search storage and deposit services, and the side chain will provide the specific business logic.
The next level is within each side chain, the nodes are further split up into different types of nodes known as execution group and governance group. The work of the transaction is then split into different parts for different groups to work on thus ensuring a much quicker transaction.
The concensus algorithm they use for the system will be Proof of Stake.
The last piece of tech to introduce to you about PChain is their smart contracts. So before smart contracts, there was Bitcoin. Bitcoin is what we call a close system. Meaning that data for any transaction is created and maintained within a closed system. With Ethereum and smart contracts, the system became an open system. Cos a smart contract is a contract, meaning when you finish mowing my lawn, I will automatically deposit $50 into your account. That’s a contract, but the contract needs to receive information from outside the system e.g. When do you actually finish mowing the lawn, in order to be executed. The way that Ethereum receives its data for the smart contract is through what is known as the Oracle—or the link to the outside world. But the problem with the Blockchain world currently is that there is no set standard for Oracles, so different projects get data from different sources, and even within a Blockchain like Ethereum, the quality of data can greatly affect the standard of the smart contract.
But in PChain, they will use an AI system to help generate smart data to input into the smart contract. It is basically a technology that combines AI and Blockchain, but more importantly, the implication of this is that it can be used to manage Big Data because it can process large amounts of information accurately.
Big Data is another key term and concept you should ideally be aware of as a token investor, if you want to learn more, check out the introductiion of our Zebi project review to learn more. But it is going to be a concept that will be huge for the next wave of Blockchain projects.
So this is the tech of the project and it is sounding very exciting. You know how other people like to the say that every new platform that comes out is “The Ethereum Killer?” e.g. Cardano, Neo etc.. I’ve never said that of any project, but I actually think PChain could potentially be the Ethereum killer that everyone is talking about.
The reason I say that is because the other new platforms are better in technology and can attract new business away from Ethereum, but they can’t steal the current business from Ethereum. Ethereum has almost 1000 Dapps built on it, whereas the new platforms only have between 20-50 Dapps on them. So it’s going to take a while to catch up with Ethereum, much less kill it.
But PChain is different. It isn’t just better, it is also compatible with Ethereum, which means, not only can it attract the new business away from Ethereum, it can actually attract the current businesses on Ethereum away as well. Ethereum is currently struggling with scalability, interoperability and sustainability. A lot of ERC20 tokens want to move off Ethereum, but because they are programmed in Solidity and have an Ethereum structure etc.. It’s going to be very hard to change to a different blockchain with different technology. So I think the reason a lot of them stay with Ethereum currently is because they have no choice, not because they want to. Imagine if an option suddenly became available for them to move to a faster platform (1000 times faster) with zero inconvenience or risk risk to their project. Why wouldn’t they? That’s what PChain offers as the first multi-chain system that supports EVM. And if PChain starts pulling Ethereum business, than it will become very big very quick. That’s one of the reasons why I think this project has a lot of potential.
It is important to put things in perspective, and the PChain project is still in conceptual phase, so they don’t have a MVP (minimal viable product) yet, but some parts of the technology like the multi-chain model is already being used and very achievable and furthermore the chief scientist and co-founder of this project is Dr Feng Cao, so if anyone can pull this off, it will be him and his team.
Team and Advisors
This is the team and their advisors. Small team, very tech heavy. But very impressive resumes.
We already covered their Chief scientist, Dr Feng Cao.
Their head of Architecture is Steven Lu, who has previously worked for leading international companies such as SAP Shanghai Lab, with a lot of experience in software design, cluster deployment, big data storage and more.
Frank Ma is their in-charge of Blockchain storage and Optimisation. He has over 10 years of working experience in Global Top 500 companies with focus on database systems and distributed system. He also holds a few US patents in database and has a lot of experience in system development and performance optimisation.
You can go through the rest of the resumes in your own time, but it definitely comes across as a very competent team.
One thing I will quickly address here, is that a youtuber flagged their team’s resume as a red flag because their names in the website were different from the names in the whitepaper, e.g. Steven Lu was Haojin LU, Frank Ma was Zhanfeng Ma, and he also mentioned that the fact that Steven Lu’s profile on Linkedin had no profile pic or friends was very suspicious.
The names on website or whitepaper are actually the same people, if you compare both sources, the last names are exactly the same. It’s just that the whitepaper gives their Chinese names, but the website uses their English names. Understandably so, because the English website is for interaction with English readers and English names are so much easier to read and remember for English speakers. The whitepaper though is a legal document, and needs their legal full name. It’s just like you know me on this channel as Dan, but I have a Chinese name that I use in legal documents, but me introducing myself as Dan on a English blog is a lot more convenient and it doesn’t mean I’m a scam. Does that make sense? Also with the Linkedin profiles, the resume information is accurate, the reason for not having friends is probably because these guys are China Chinese and they don’t use Linkedin that much. I might be wrong, but the team seems quite legit to me. I don’t think this is a scam
Funds and partners:
They have a lot of capital firms invested in them, some of these names like Torque will be familiar to us by now. These are firms that historically have chosen winning Blockchain projects like ICON. As I always say, the best crypto youtuber, is still not a professional, but capital investors are professionals who invests millions of dollars and to see over 10 capital investors in one project is impressive and reassuring to me as a token investor.
Media
Their Media articles are not that impressive. It’s mostly on Dr Feng Cao and his general involvement with Blockchain and China. It gives you the impression he is a prominent person in the China Blockchain scene, but the links are mostly not about PChain directly. It’s a bit misleading and it seems to be a bad habit with many Blockchain projects recently, I’m not a fan of it.
Roadmap
This is their roadmap. Quite sparse, it only lists four major updates for the next one and half years. But they are big milestones to look out for.
The next major update is the Dewdrop stage in Oct 2018 which will see the completion of the PChain core system and the Test net online. This is the main milestone a lot of people will be holding out for, because this will be their MVP and prove that the technology is viable.
The last milestone on this map is Ocean Stage in Sept 2019, and that will introduce the start of the Knowledge Graph Blockchain Alliance. So knowledge graph was like their oracle to collect accurate knowledge with AI, I think this is going to be something similar to how NEO, Ontology, TheKey etc.. are pooling together resources to build a indentification data base. As I mentioned recently in one of our reviews, I think this is the future. Blockchain protocols/ platforms, need to stop thinking of themselves as isolated technology with their own databank, and start seeing themselves as part of an ecosystem or network and how to share their information with other to build a bigger and more accurate data base, which can be used across more applications. So I think PChain definitely has the right vision for the future.
Price:
Finally, ending with where we started, taking a look at the price. The coin is still so young that the websites don’t list their market cap yet. But their ICO hardcap was $20million and that was 30% of their total supply. So we assume their current marketcap is probably sitting somewhere between $20-60 million.
That’s still quite a range to be honest. If it was $20million, I would say that’s criminally low for a project of this potential. If it’s $60million, I would say it’s a bit risky for something that is still quite far off from getting an MVP out. But nonetheless, protocols are a good investment in general, especially the ones that aim to be in the centre of an ecosystem, and the tech behind this project sounds very promising indeed. The market is so low now that almost any project would be a good buy, so we’re spoilt for choice in that sense. I personally like to take advantage of big crashes like currently to load up on the bigger marketcap coins, cos they are more stable and rarely see such big dips, and when the market is greener, I turn my attention to smaller altcoins.
But that’s me and this is definitely not professional advice, just me sharing my thoughts aloud. Always do your own research and make your own decisions.
That’s it for me and my thoughts of PChain, this is a promising project that I’m going to keep my eye on. Let me know what you think of PChain and also how are you approaching the recent market crash.
Have a great day ahead, don’t stare at the red market too much, go out, have a beer and enjoy your life. If you liked this post give us that upvote and follow, take care and Il catch you guys again very soon!