Overview:

BlockCloud is a blockchain-based advanced TCP/IP architecture which aims to solve the challenges associated with the IOT sector, such as frail connectivity for scalability, absent trust, cracked security and broken business models. BlockCloud aims to solve these issues through implementing Service Centric Networking and blockchain to empower the IOT. SCN provides a clean-slate solution for interface failover, device mobility and global scalability, however lacks trust, security and economic incentive at the service level in which the use of blockchain solves this. The combined approach with the blockchain logically operating on top of SCN allows for a smooth, scalable, secure and fair system. The parent company of BlockCloud: Oudmon, is a successful Chinese company in which provides Intelligent health, household, software design, cloud service products and more. They have links with major Chinese organisations and have a community of over 8 million users. 12 employees including the CEO of BlockCloud have played significant roles in Oudmon proving that they can be successful in applying technical and business knowledge to real life business use cases.

Team:

Founders/Management:

  • Zhongxing MingCEO – Experience as CTO for Oudmon Technology, Assistant Professor at Tsinghua University and visiting research collaborator at Princeton university. Team lead at Intel along with Software Engineering experience. PHD in Computer Systems Networking and Telecommunications. Blockchain Special Committee of China Computer Federation member.
  • Shu Yang – Chairman/SCN Lab Principal – Associate professor at Shenzhen University with a PHD in Computer Architecture.
  • Dai Pan Co-founder/COO – COO of Oudmon Technology, Masters degree in Computer Science from Peking University. Blockchain Special Committee of China Computer Federation member.

 

Business/Marketing Team:

  • Claire Xiong – Director of Business and Communications – Experience as Director of Innovation at Plug and Play China, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Zhuiyi Technology, Marketing Lead for Global Health Pass. UK Berkely Graduate in Mass Communication/Media and Economics.
  • Peter Ran – Director of Business Development in North America – Experience a Chief Medical Offer for Oudman Technology, Manager at Olympus,
  • Lucy Liu – Director of Marketing in North America – Experience as Senior PWC Auditor, Degree in Information Management from George Washington University.
  • Kun Liu – Head of Marketing – Experience working as Head of Marketing for Oudman Technology, Senior Customer Manager for Alibaba, Customer Manager for Baidu. Degree in Marketing from Renmin University of China.

 

Tech Team:

  • Dong Huo – Strategic Scientist – Assistant Professor at Harbin Institute of Technology – PHD in Technology Management for Innovation from University of Tokyo. Masters of Engineering in Computer Networking from Tsinghua Uni.
  • Qi Li – Expert of Network Security and Cryptography – Associate professor at Tsinghua Uni, Scientific Specialist at ETH Zurich. PHD Network and Protocol Design, computer and network security. Bachelor of Computer Science.
  • Wei Xiao – Data Scientist
  • Kun Hu – Head of Development – Experience as Head of Development Department for Oudmon Technology, Mobile Developer Director, Senior Software Engineer. Graduate of Huazhong Uni Of Science and Technology.
  • Zhenzhou Wu – Cloud Platform Director – Experience as Cloud Platform Director at Oudmon Technology, Worked at Digu.com,

 

Advisors:

Technical Advisory Board Includes:

  • Jiangchuan Liu, F.Richard Yu, Ke Xu, Dan Wang, Quian Wang, Linghe Kong, Sheng Zhongm Qianhong Wu, Kun Yang, Liehuang Zhu, Mingwei Xu, Guang ChengHaibin Kan.
  • Fred Baker – Co-Author of 50+ Internet standards including Routing information protocol, QoS and more.
  • Shai Mohaban – Expert in Networking, cloud computing and security with experience in blockchain.
  • Ahmed Alsayadi–  Co-Founder of blockchain Project – Prochain.

 

Business Advisory Board Includes:

  • Alex Likhetenstein, Andre Kim, Sandra Wu.
  • Roger Lim – Founding partner of NEO Global Capital, advisory links in Bluzelle, Qlink, Tomocoin and more. Founder of Web visions a successful cloud hosting company.
  • Hoan Soo Lee – Economist of Council of Economic Advisor. Co-founder and COO of give2gether.

 

Rating:

The founders have great experience in a successful start up business raising over $6.5m. They have a good mix of technical and management experience particularly seen through their efforts in Oudmon. The CEO and Chairman are a part of the Blockchain Special Committee of China Computer Federation which is good to see their links however lack any experience in previous ICOs.

The Technology Team is very intelligent and has accreditation from all over the world at reputable institutions. With this project being quite tech based we believe there could be more blockchain experience in the team with the only experience being an Advisor (Co-founder of Prochain). The business team is very talented, and majority have worked together in a team of the parent company showing chemistry and motivation.

The team and advisory board is very impressive with lots of PHDs, IEEE fellow, IETF chairman etc. Roger Lm is also a great addition to the advisory board and because of his position in NGC, using the connections he has to really help the project.

In addition, between the team they have posted more than 50 papers in top academic journals and hold over 80 patents. They have proven track record of business success and have run real-life businesses in a relevant IOT industry. With 12 employees of the Oudman Company – there is broad knowledge and experience in intelligent products and the IOT. With all said the team is great with the only potential issue the slight lack of Blockchain experience.

Business:

Idea:

The idea is to combine Server Centric Networking (SCN) and Blockchain. SCN forms the underlying physical network that provides connectivity, mobility and scalability whilst blockchain operates on top of SCN to provide decentralized trust, security, fairness and economic incentive. This is relatively original with them trying to target the protocol level in which can support upper-level and other blockchains such as IOTA etc. Meaning they are first to market and have no direct competitors, rather complimentary potential partners.

Market and Competition:

With a predicted 20 billion devices by 2022 the internet of things is increasingly a platform that is a part of everyday life. There is large market share potential with IOT projects such as WTC and IOTA reaching market capitalization of over $14b. Although BlockCloud sits on the lower layer and supports these upper blockchains thus not directly correlated, it should have a large reach and market share potential. These projects show the great demand in the markets for IOT based projects.

In the cryptocurrency space there are no direct competitors yet although a few projects potentially developing simultaneously but nothing of real merit yet. As this project is at the TCP/IP layer – there is the real-world competition of many company’s providing Services. However, these companies using TCP/IP and normal SCN lack the security and trust that BlockCloud is creating through the 4-layer approach with Blockchain on top of SCN. BlockCloud aims to use Service Centric Networks where applications communicate directly on service names instead of addresses and then implement Blockchain to make up for the security and trust flaws. Along with this the Parent Company Oudman is a very successful player in intelligent products with the aim to help traditional enterprises enhance

They are First to implement SCN and blockchain together on the TCP/IP level. As mentioned above the competitors are in the real world of providing TCP/IP and SCN however the lack of security, trust and economic incentive drives the need and comparative advantage of using blockchain.

Business Challenges:

The main business challenges stand regarding the adoption of the product in such a competitive cryptocurrency market. Help from Oudmon and where this application positions itself in the blockchain space should solve that particularly in the China market. Concerning Regulations for privacy and security of devices – if anything the blockchain should prove to be more secure than current methods although strong precautions must be taken. The innovators dilemma in the sense that as this blockchain technology takes away any middle-man in the situation it impacts current solutions who will try act as a force to prevent this.

Whitepaper:

Whitepaper is written relatively well, being a technical whitepaper it misses business information and economics aspect along with the mentioning of partnerships and research. The business whitepaper is expected to be released soon exploring more of the BlockCloud Ecosystem and future plans.

Partnerships:

Parents Company Oudmon is a large scale Chinese platform with relationships in many sectors of Home, Health, Vehicles and devices. Partners with China Automotive Industry Association and long-term relationship with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation and Guangzhou Automobile Group. Signed data sharing agreement with many Chinese hospitals including the Chinese Armed place General Hospital, and signed cooperation and promotion agreement with cities such as Guangzhou, Foshan and more along with Research and development of more than 20 intelligent health product with sales of over 1 million devices and development of over 30 smart home devices and modules with annual sales of over 2 million units. Platform has over 50 clients in related industries including business system, data communication, mobile app, algorithm, module and cloud storage. The parents company already has over 8m users, 7m devices, 1m+ Daily Active Users.  BlockCloud have also secured investments from funds including Genesis Capital, NEO Global Capital, OK Capital and more.

Rating:

SCN is not a new idea or first to the market however currently there seems to be littleo to none IOT infrastructure blockchain solutions in the market that work. Most of them are either theoretical or have many critical problems in the network.  With such a huge market on offer and a lack of working solutions, the adoption success can play out very positively for BlockCloud. The implementation of blockchain technology in-hand with SCN is original and seems like a great fit. With the project being a Protocol level solution supporting the upper-level blockchains/dApps we like the idea and its first mover advantage.

The market size and demand for IOT platforms and blockchain projects is significant. The market is growing rapidly external of blockchain with the huge number of devices and there is plenty of room for growth especially with the close ties in the large Chinese community. With the application being on the TCP/IP layer the competition is more businesses outside of blockchain which in our opinion will fail to compete against the BlockClouds approach of combining SCN and Blockchain.

The company is claiming to already have connected 8M+ users. The biggest challenge for this business is adoption but with such a large base of users using it already, it might not be the biggest challenge for BlockCloud. In real world, DNS is already the easiest solution but more prone to attack and intrusive surveillance which BlockCloud is trying to solve by designating a new service centric blockchain architecture, proof of service consensus, CoDAG(Compacted Directed Acyclic Graph) for recording the transactions, TCDA(truthful continuous double auction) for fair pricing and matching of services.

Technology:

Use of Blockchain Technology:

The use of Blockchain results in a few different characteristics for Blockcloud:

Gaining Trust: Devices form a blockchain network where the system runs in a fully decentralized manner. Use of a novel Proof of Service aiming to offer truthful service, allow for no single point of failure/centralization.

Protecting Security: Blockchain system and P2P network called ‘Coral’ form the secure backbone of the BlockCloud Network. Communications between devices are membered in the blockchain and service information is stored in Coral, routed by Peer nodes and guaranteed by the POS consensus. No central point exposed to attackers.

Achieving Fairness: Services are published/subscribed to/from the network. Matching system is controlled by smart contracts with no centralized party in control. Running Truthful Continuous Double Auction for venting cheating and maximising social welfare. Gives no incentive to lie or hide information from others.

Strengthening Incentive: Matching supply and demand of services in real time this creates new marketplaces. Enabling new P2P economic models and foster sharing economies. It uses a four layer infrastructure to reduce transaction times. Transaction layer – stores the transactions of the network as a global ledger, service chain layer – which defines new operations without requiring changes to the underlying blockchain , routing layer – Separates task of routing requests from the providing of service allowing for multiple service providers to coexist along with storing service files and service layer – serves the actual services for the network. With SCN not being useful on its own due to the security and trust flaws – the use of blockchain technology for this project is very warranted and like a great fit using many core value propositions of the blockchain including immutability, auditability, new digital relationships and more.

Blockcloud is creating it’s Own Blockchain Platform on the Protocol Level solution to better support upper-layer applications, including other blockchains, DAPPS and not-blockchain applications. It is a ‘physical network’ underneath upper-layer applications meaning anything can run on top of BlockCloud.

MVP/Prototype:

There is no MVP released and the CoDAG and PoS minimum and Bilateral auction mechanism test networks to be complete in 2018 Q4.

This section should be updated upon MVP Release and more activity in GitHub.

Token Utility:

Due to the small and high frequency of Internet of things payments, there is no charge for token transfer in BlockCloud network. Therefore, BLOC tokens takes a mortgage economy model. By depositing a certain amount of BLOC in the account, we can use the services provided by BlockCloud network. Service providers and DApp publishers that provide services in the BlockCloud network need to mortgage a certain amount of BlockCloud tokens. The service provider has this payment collection right. If the service provider provides a dishonest service, the BLOC tokens that are credited in the account and are equal to the service price will be forfeited to the system and rewarded to the service miner who discovered the behavior.

Technological Challenges:

BlockCloud seems to have a solid theory behind their technology and use cases.  There may be issues concerning the data reduction in which the team needs to overcome which will in no way be easy. Other factors regarding the technology involve which block layer holds Unspent transaction output and what the expected growth rate is along with how the transaction chain is connected to the UTXO. Also, Which layers are permissionless and permissied or semi permissioned.

RATING:

With the current flaws in IOT and the technology external to Blockchain not being capable of solving them – the idea BlockCloud is implementing is very much a worthy use case of blockchain. With the usual Server Centric Networks lacking security, trust and economic incentive, blockchain allows for an excellent solution to these downfalls.

The technical whitepaper shows the use of blockchain and how the blockchain will work however the utility of the token is scarce. As mentioned there is the mortgage utility token and free transactions but it will be better to see when the future whitepaper comes out.

Regarding the technological challenges it is hard to analyse and understand if the promises of the technical whitepaper have been fulfilled and challenges overcome without an MVP and this will have to be updated upon release. In a speculative approach the tech team seems capable along with a great theory supporting its project and we are quite confident to see progress in solving these issues soon.


Marketing/Hype:

Social Media/Website:

Facebook Account active, Twitter : 4000+  followers – post content often. The Website is Well made and easy to use. Linked In: Active offering another business orientated avenue with verification of team members and activity.

Medium Account created Early July. Active posting of announcements and updates to community.  Lots of ICO reviews being positive about BlockClouds idea, technology and team. Slight lack of Press releases. They have started making more public appearances speaking at Connect Conference along with the Silicon Valley Conference and speaking with PR firms in China and other areas.

Telegram : 43k+  members in which is growing very steadily with no Airdrop. Active and organic followers. Admins receptive and helpful along with community optimistic with Answering questions and updating the community on progress. Chat is mostly about people finding out about the ICO sale and information On the projects tech. Community managers are very receptive and helpful.

Market Hype and Sentiment:

There is a great level of hype built about the project, it has definitely picked up traction. With 43k Telegram members due to good reason we believe as the team is experienced and intelligent along with the partnerships and research executed. As the public sale is only 20% their will be high demand and hype for wanting to invest in the small portion available. The Hype is propelled with a high demand in the VC space with large capital firms such as NEO Global Capital investing in the project. Positive ICO reviews throughout rating sites and YouTube has boosted the confidence and positive sentiment shown in the market for BlockCloud.

Rating:

The website is well made with a easy to use interface and professional presentation. The Medium Account has been very active since its inception in early July. It is good to see there is a large array of ICO reviews shedding positive light on the project both website and YouTube based.

Telegram community is impressive with that many organic members and the communication in the telegram being informative, prompt and helpful. There is a great hype for the project with over 43K members in telegram and floating around in the top ICO ratings of multiple reviews. It seems well deserved and healthy for the project. The search trends are not high currently – however the mentions in reviews and avenues in the community is promising.

With the private sale already being  oversubscribed the future is looking bright for BlockCloud for the Crowd sale.


Token Metrics:
 

 

Fund Breakdown:

The split up of funds are expected to be : Mining Award: 30%, Foundation: 30% Team: 10% Early Contributor Incentive: 10% Crowd sale 5% Private Sale: 15%. 50% R & D , 15% partnerships and establishment of business alliance. 5% international standard setting, 5% research Cooperation and Intellectual property, 15% marketing and community Building, 5% HR and Team Incentive. , 5% daily operation management.

Private Sale/Bonus:

No bonus for Private Sale. $0.008 and total of 1.5B selling.  Private Sale in Q3 2018 is only for institutions. 10% Early Contributor incentive in fund breakdown for partnerships and institutions that help in incubation process. First release 20% before exchange listen, then release 10% for every month after exchange listed, finish releasing in 8 months.

Roadmap/Timeline:

Roadmap is very detailed with in depth goal and targets that seem attainable based on promises proved up to date. Easy view and understandable roadmap. Presented well and very detailed however the test net is not expected to come out until 2019 Q2 – All goals seem attainable however the raising of funds is almost a year prior to the main net use which  may allow time for competitors to enter the market.

The private sale is happening in Q3 2018 with the Crowdsale White list expected to be in August. 20% of private sale tokens will be released before exchange listing. Two months after the exchange listing, 10% of the otkens will be released every month. Release of tokens to be completed in 8 months. This helps to reduce the risk of a post ICO dump, as the 80% private sale seems very high. There is a long time lag between the ICO and the mainnet system. With the Roadmap expecting to be released n 2019 Q2 which questions the need of raising funds so early.

Rating:

The Hardcap is not very high compared to what the other projects are raising at this time. Releasing the pricing information about different tranches brings a lot of transparency and creates a high level of trust with the investors. The lockups are long for private sale investors which would prevent any dumping during the listing. With private sale highly oversubscribed, the project could have easily raised all the funds in private sale but kept a reserve for Crowdsale which is an intelligent way.

The roadmap is detailed and promising with which we like to see. The mainnet seems a little stretched in terms the ICO date however with what they have in plan It is for good reason they just have to be cautious of potential competitors entering the market.


X – Factor Bonus:

The research and partnerships particularly the link with Oudmon have paved the way for BlockCloud. Adoption in the IOT market, particularly China will be made far more feasible and it proves that the team and business know what they are doing in a similar space. The funding from NEO Global, Genesis Capital and more show strong demand in the VC space. Definitely worth extra points in our books!



Final Rating:

Overall the team is very intelligent and has experience in running a business in the IOT space with support and partnerships for the Blockcloud platform, we believe enhancing its future adoption and success rate, specifically in China. There is a very large market and demand for IOT projects and it is a rapidly growing industry. With the project at the TCP/IP layer as a protocol level solution it has positioned itself well in regard to competitors in the IOT space – supporting upper-layer blockchains and DApps. The community is very active, particularly in the Telegram with very helpful and receptive admins and community members. The main current let downs at the moment for the project is the lack of any MVP/Prototype and the test net Roadmap being stretched and planned for 2019 Q2. Also the potential lack of blockchain experience in the team may prove to be an issue which we will find out in the coming months.

There is expected to be a whitepaper released soon with more information regarding the token utility and economics surrounding the sale which should boost this project. The time lag between the ICO and the MVP/Mainnet would be a problem however with such strong partnerships and links in the Chinese community along with the experienced team from Oudmon, this longer term road-map will be worth the wait in our opinion.  Keep an Eye out on this project!

ALTCOIN BUZZ ICO REVIEW RATING:

This analysis was produced by The Altcoin Buzz ICO Research and Analysis Team. Members: Shashwat Gupta, Andrew Grapsas, Mohak Agarwal with the help of other members of the Altcoin Buzz Team and Community.

Disclaimer:

The information discussed in the Altcoin Buzz ICO review is not financial advice. The reviewers are crypto enthusiasts and not Financial Advisers. This information is for educational, informational and entertainment purposes only. Any information or strategies are thoughts and opinions relevant to accepted levels of risk tolerance of the writer/reviewers and their risk tolerance may be different than yours. We are not responsible for any losses that you may incur as a result of any investments directly or indirectly related to information provided. The system and numbers indicated are our own ICO rating metric and may be updated and changed according to what we believe the current ICO market trend to be. It is not to be taken as investment advice, do your own due diligence and rating before making any investments and consult your financial advisor. The reviewer may have or wish to invest and have an interest in the project reviewed. The rating is only indicative of the rating during a certain time and may have changed over time without being updated. The researched information presented we believe to be correct and accurate however there is no guarantee or warranty as to the accuracy, timeliness, completeness. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are high-risk investments so please do your due diligence. Copyright Altcoin Buzz Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.

 

For more information visit: https://www.block-cloud.io/

Sources Used:

https://www.block-cloud.io/

https://www.block-cloud.io/blockcloudtechnicalwhitepaper.pdf

https://www.block-cloud.io/achievement.shtml

https://t.me/BlockcloudTeam

 

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