ICO Sparkster

Website: https://sparkster.me
Token type: ERC-20
Ticker: SPARK
Token Supply: 290,000,000 SPARK
Hard Cap 30,000,000 USD
Whitepaper: 57 pages

Distribution of Funds:

Project Summary:

• Decentralized cloud

• Platform to interact with multiple chains

• High tps network, touted to reach over 10,000,000 tps

  • Nodes that service a network do not see other networks

  • i.e nodes for network A do not see nodes for network B

  • TPS of the individual networks is then added up

• No main chain

• Compute and storage nodes

  • Required to stake tokens to ensure good behaviour

  • Nodes are rewarded in SPARK tokens for good behaviours

  • Reward is determined by resource requestor

• Verification nodes

  • Performs PoW

  • Stellar consensus model

• Token

  • Marketplace will be created to buy and sell the "functions" as
    well as smart contracts

  • Used as reward for node runners

• Utilizes stellar consensus protocol

• Functional "no-code" programming in "plain English"

Pros/Cons:

• Pros:

  • More than 50% (67% to be exact) of the tokens are being sold

  • Core team members look to have a strong background (i.e
    ex-employees of top companies)

  • Team looks to have a large number of developers which is
    comforting

  • Partner with ARM is a big plus if true

  • Token economics seem sound with SPARK tokens as an incentive

• Cons:

  • The way 10mil tps is computed is not correct to me

  • This seems more like a dApp interacting with multiple platforms

  • Their version of sharding is not true sharding

  • Somewhat high hard cap

General Thoughts:

High tps projects seem to be the trend now, but Sparkster seems to be
one of the more ambitious ones. Touting 10mil tps (which I will
elaborate on later) with PoW & PoS with the inclusion of Zero Knowledge
Proofs (ZKP) is jaw dropping should one not dig deeper into the
whitepaper.

I have my doubts on the way their implementation of "daily English"
programming will work. However, I do appreciate their planned
implementation of functional programming as well as bootstrapping api
access to each function.

The common limitation of many high tps chains is usually the propagation
time, to the rest of the nodes. Chains that implement sharding usually
advert this by having the shards commit to the main chain at a
determined epoch and order the commits such that they form a chain that
is able to flow. However, the way Sparkster arrives at their high tps
number is somewhat sketchy. As the project has no main chain, individual
clusters run their own network and Sparkster simply adds up the tps of
all the networks to get a high tps project.

The implementation of this project also seems fuzzy to me. The
whitepaper first mentions nodes for different networks which are air
gapped and moves on to mention about achieving consensus via Stellar
Consensus Protocol with ZKP.

The partners of this project seem strong and I do like the fact that
they are selling more than half of the tokens, something that few other
icos do. However, this also means that if you're in for the flip then
majority will do the same.

Ultimately this project seems to have a decent amount of unjustified
fluff with statements such as "Our tools enable software to be built
100x faster than traditional software" and I would exercise extreme
caution when investing in such projects.

Rating: 5/10

Disclaimer: This is not investing advice and simply my personal
thoughts and opinions. I am not liable for any decisions made from this
post. I am also not affiliated with any investment or advisory firms and
do not engage in activity with such entities.

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