ICO Analysis: Block Collider by Midgard Research

ICO Analysis: Block Collider

Disclaimer: Our research is not a financial advice. We just share our opinion on ICOs based on publicly available information. Do your own research before making any investment.
Introduction

The crypto-space is an ever expanding market with new blockchain projects appearing on a daily basis. Each new blockchain technology has its own features that make it unique – some chains have quick block times, some chains have expressive smart contracts, some are purely deflationary and an excellent store of value… In this wide variety of chains it is necessary not just interconnect them in one simple chain, but create an opportunity for them to cooperate.

Block Collider is a minable multichain protocol which allows the interconnection of different blockchains in one ecosystem. Block Collider is truly decentralized. It removes the use of validators, master-nodes or any other signs of centralization.

It looks like multi-chain protocols is going to become the main trend of 2018, so in this terms Block Collider has a great timing.

Key features

It is a multichain, which will, for the first time, connect the 6 main chains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, NEO, Waves, Lisk and “secret chain”.
True decentralization – no validators. Block Collider uses PoED (Proof of Edit Distance). We all remember the decentralization problem with Bitcoin and how miners predominately based in China have a negative centralizing effect on its network.
Block Collider mining is split into two categories, Block and Transaction mining, to reduce the risk of centralization. Transaction mining is open to anyone and does not require ASIC hardware to mine. Block Collider implements game theory for the benefits of mining incentives beyond block/fee rewards. The Emblem bonuses for Mining and sublinear and remove the economic incentive for centralisation.
Block Collider will always be faster than the fastest member chain.
Block Collider can add any new or already existing chain, which does not even require compatibility with Block Collider. No modification to the original chain is required.
The Block Collider uses the FIX protocol (Financial Information eXchange).

Tokens
NRG Token

This is the main currency of local chain transactions, with a fixed supply of 9.8 billion. It is obtained exclusively through mining and serves as the reward for mining of blocks and transactions.

Block Collider supports three types of transactions: cross-case transactions in “marked tokens”, local chain transactions in the NRG currency, the so-called “promises” — cross-channel transactions in any form and any tokens on any of the supported channels.
EMB (Emblems) Token

They do act as a modification of the proof-of-stake (shares), but in fact they increase the threshold of the “sum of distances” for the new block and enable creating blocks with higher computational complexity. Therefore, EMBs are needed for miners who have already invested in the equipment in order to use their computing power better. As a complementary commodity for computing power, EMB will decrease in price as the price of computation increases.
Marked Tokens (M-ETH, M-BTC, M-NEO, etc.)

The Block Collider multichain has marked-token currencies, which are units of value for each bridged chain. Marked Tokens are distributed with Emblems. It is assumed that they will become the main source of liquidity, so their expected value should be somehow subtracted from the value of the Emblem to which they are applied. The price paid for the Emblem during the ICO, will somehow be divided between the six types of tokens.

Team

Arjun Raj Jain – Co-Founder, Core Developer
Patrick McConlogue – Co-Founder, Core Developer
Craig Weisman – Chief Operations Officer, Interim
Tomas Korcak – Chief Technology Officer, Core Developer
Patrick Schilz – Board Member
Adam Kloboucnik – Core Developer
Ian Simpson – Marketing & Communications

The team has four core-developers, two of which do not have Block Collider listed on Linkedin. None of the team members has related blockchain experience. But Tomas Korcak (CTO) has a great deal of experience in programming: 12 years of development experience in low level C/C++ and Assembly. Tomas is a veteran programmer specializing in large scale architecture and algorithmic optimization. He is fluent in six programming languages.

CMO’s (Ian Simpsons) background is strange. He graduated from Middlebury College where he studied history. It is listed that he is currently employed in three other companies besides Block Collider.

No information about advisors: “We will release our investors/advisors only if they explicitly ask us to do so the day before the ICO. Technology should stand on its own, not because the advisors have somehow given it sudden validation as a project :)”
MVP

It is said on their Reddit that the testnet was held in October 2017, and the team has closed access to it. Block Collider will release the code before the launch of softnet and the ICO.

Link to Block Collider GitHub.

Block Collider released a site where people could see how PoED works: Link

But unfortunately the tool works even if “blockchain input” is empty or filled with some random symbols. It does not show the real work of Proof of Distance.

Admin from the Telegram chat: “Please wait for soft launch for miners and test it then. It will happen before ICO, 10-30 days”
Competitors

There are several competitors in this “Interoperability solutions” category:
Name

Market Capitalization / Goal
Block Collider ICO soon, goal $7M ($4M sold on pre-sale)
ICON $ 1373.9 M
WanChain $ 509 M
Ark $ 270.5 M
Fusion $ 60 M
Polkadot $ 145M received on ICO 27-Oct
One Ledger ICO soon, goal – $15M
Quant Network ICO 2-Apr, goal – $50M
Cosmos Network 1090 donations, 4870 BTC raised

The fundraising goal of Block Collider is small ($ 7M) in comparison with similar projects. Block Collider commented on it: “The team has worked out how much they require to locomote the project and achieve all their goals.”

We can see big market caps of already existing projects such as ICON, Ark and Fusion, demonstrating a huge demand for such projects.

Let’s compare Block Collider to WanChain and Fusion, which are also a cross-chain protocols. Wanchain focuses more on the financial sector and Fusion plans to support off-chain data-sets directly. The key difference between Block Collider and its peers in the interoperability space is its use of PoED as consensus methodology. There are several benefits of this approach: it does not require trust in validators and low threshold to achieve interoperability. Block collider consumes blocks from member chains it does not require them to make any changes

Each of the competitors has something unique which makes it indispensable in the blockchain world. The key advantages of Block Collider, which is completely innovative and different from competitors, are lack of validators, Proof of Edit Distance and separation of mining into two parts.

Verdict
We have given this project a score of 7 out of 10.

Block Collider is one more multichain protocol which allows interoperability between different blockchains. It has a lot of technical competitive advantages over similar projects and a lower hard cap – just $7M for such ambitious idea.

Block Collider sold 66% of their tokens (Emblems) on pre-sale which means that only 33% is available for crowdsale. The fact that crowdsale registration was closed in 8 minutes shows the huge demand for this ICO.

The idea behind Block Collider is interesting. However, there are many unknown factors about the project: advisors, ICO dates, roadmap, publicly available MVP. We just have to hope that they will announce all important information between the ICO.
Risks

Scam allegations related with Status RSK (their old project).
As of 22nd March 2018, the company is still not registered in Liechtenstein.
No information about advisors.
There is no publicly available working MVP (only this proof of distance).
No roadmap. It is just said on their Reddit that a visual roadmap is being worked on by the team and will be released “soon”.
The market is competitive. Similar projects: Polkadot, Cosmos, Arc, One Ledger, ICON, Fusion, ICON, Fusion, Wanchain.
Emblems (tokens) are in need just for miners with computing power and investors, which hope that their value will increase in the future.

Growth Potential

Huge market caps of competitors.
Block Collider could bite its competitors because it has more advantages: truly decentralized, faster speed of transaction and no barriers to connect other blockchains.
It gets attention and high ratings  from experts; it’s a hyped project. Social-media statistics show us that a large number of people are interested in the project. The first round of registration closed just in 8 minutes.

Investment Details

Token Distribution: 33% Foundation, 33% Team + Hires, 33% Public Sale
Tokens are distributed immediately after token sale on the native chain. Tokens will be locked until listings on primary exchanges.
Token Sale Date: TBA
Ticker: EMB
Token type: Own wallet
ICO Token Price: 1 EMB = 0.07 USD
Fundraising Goal: 7M USD
Sold on pre-sale: 4M USD (No bonuses)
Total Tokens: 300M (Fixed & not mineable)
Available for Token Sale: 33.33%
Token Distribution: TBA – Presumed Tokens are distributed immediately after token sale on the native chain
Accepts: ETH, BTC

Additional Information

Website: https://www.blockcollider.org
Whitepaper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/blockcollider/blockcollider_wp.pdf
Knowledge Base: https://docs.blockcollider.org

Social stats:

Telegram: 12 400
Twitter: 3 000
Facebook: 2 674
Medium: 217
Reddit: 118
GitHub 

Research was prepared by
Vladyslav Skakun
Senior Analyst at Midgard Ventures