1: Summary
Project name: Ankr
Token symbol: ANK
Website: https://www.ankr.network/
White paper: TBA
Hard cap: $15.95 million
Conversion rate: TBA
Maximum market cap at ICO on a fully diluted basis: TBA
Bonus structure: 20% discount during presale
Private sale / white list: TBA
ERC20 token: Yes
Countries excluded: Residents of U.S / Canada / China / South Korean /Barbados & other FATF countries like Ethiopia, Iraq, Serbia, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Vanuatu, Yemen, Iran, North Korea are not able to participate
Timeline: Crowdsale is scheduled to start on August
Token distribution date: TBA
2: What does the company/project do?
Ankr strives to build a resource efficient blockchain framework that truly enables Distributed Cloud Computing (DCC) and provides user-friendly infrastucture for business applications.
There are indeed existing cloud solutions, but Ankr is the first one to leverage both blockchain and trusted hardware.
Below are the main features of Ankr:
a. Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) Consensus Protocol
The Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) consensus enables a self-sustainable blockchain framework. Instead of wasting electricity and computing power on hashes like Bitcoin does, PoUW uses these resources towards useful work tasks provided by enterprises and consumers.
The protocol runs on SGX-enabled CPUs with remote attestation to ensure security and confidentiality.
The novel PoUW approach unlocks the massive potential of idle computing power around the world by providing enough incentives: in this scheme, every computation contributor gets compensated, and some will get the extra reward for generating the blocks.
In the future, this mining scheme can promote Universal Basic Income (UBI).
b. Distributed Cloud Computing (DCC) Platform
DCC platform allows transacting for computing power between users in a peer-to-peer fashion.
With the PoUW consensus mechanism, miners will use their idle computing resources to secure the network while performing useful computation, for example, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and so on.
The miners create the supply for the DCC platform. Individuals/companies that need extra computing resources would form the demand side of the DCC. DCC lowers the barrier of entry to cloud computing comparing to the existing cloud computing services.
c. Oracle Service
Ankr introduces an authenticated data feed system using trusted hardware. The system is comprised of 3 components – smart contact, enclave, and the relay.
d: Multi-Chain Structure
Ankr aims to scale the blockchain by implementing Plasma and sharding. The network consists of a tree structure of blockchains where various application chains (Child Chains) are connected to a single root chain (Main Chain).
The Main Chain is used for child chain indexing, useful work mining and smart contract executions. Each child chain is tailored to the needs of a specific application. For example, real estate transactions are of high value but low volume, whereas e-commerce transactions are the other way around.
3: Roadmap
The project was incepted in Q4 2017 with a research study conducted by the team on the feasibility of their works. The team provided a simple development roadmap on their website and here are some major developments in the near future:
Jun 2018 : Release white paper
Jul 2018 : Prototype Release
4: Team
Ankr Network is based in California, USA and currently has a team of at least 12 people. The biographies of the key team members are summarized below:
Here are some of the notable team members.
Chandler Song (Co-Founder & CEO) — Overall, Chandler has 2 years of experience in software engineering. He has short term stints with CitySpade, Amazon and SAP.
Stanley Wu (Co-Founder & CTO) — Formerly a tech lead in Amazon, Stanley has over 10 years of experience in large scale cloud services. He holds a MS in Electrical and Computer engineering from Rochester University.
Ryan Fang (Co-Founder & COO) — Graduated recently with B.S. Business and had numerous internship experience with top tier banks that includes Credit Suisse, State Street and Morgan Stanley.
Song Liu (Chief Security Engineer) — Song Liu had over 7 years of experience and was formerly with Gigamon, Palo Alto Networks, General Electric (GE) and Electronic Arts. He holds a MS in computer Science from Boston University.
Yan Ji (Scientist) — Currently a PhD student at Cornell University with a focus on applied cryptography.
Quanlai Li (Blockchain Engineer) — A computer science serial entrepreneur with over 3 years of experience. Formerly worked at Uber, Club Factory and Insigma and is a committee member of a symposium of Application of Blockchain. He holds a Master of Engineering in computer science from UC Berkeley.
Akash Khosla (Blockchain Engineer) — Akash is a third year Electrical Engineering and Computer Science student at UC Berkeley. He has short stint work experience at SAP and Earn.com and is a co-founder @ Blockchain at Berkeley. He also teaches a blockchain course at UC Berkeley.
The project has 3 advisors – Ramsey Hanna at Reed Smith, Jiangang Zhang, Founder of PDX, and Christel Quek, Founder of BOLT.
Investors of the project include JLab, NEO Global Capital, DHVC, OK Blockchain Capital, LinkVC, GBIC, BlockVC, and Kosmos.
Research partners include Blockchain at Berkeley, Dorahacks, and CPC.
5: Strengths
The project is very ambitious that is trying to tackle multiple big problems facing blockchain including consensus protocol (PoUW), trusted hardware, data feed (Oracle), distributed computing, and sidechain structure. If successful, the
upside can be substantial.
Utilizing verifiable computing technology as PoUW reward workers based on functional work done rather than the first worker who solves it in PoW. Hence, hardworking workers will be highly incentivised to use their blockchain.
A strong panel of strategic investors, which had a track record of making successful past investments.
Low hardcap of $16m, which is attractive for similar projects in this space.
6: Weaknesses
Currently, the project is a whitepaper proof of concept with no mentions on the timeframe for launching their MVP
The team is relatively young with a couple still pursuing their degrees
PoUW consensus algorithm is a relatively new concept with many unknowns and has little commits in GitHub. However, some codes are not public and will be released on a later date
Use of trusted hardware has received many skepticisms in the past, as critic sites potential backdoor opportunities to those content.
7: Conclusion
The project has a high market awareness with a low hard cap (for a blockchain project). Most of the hard cap is contributed by funds and no syndicates are allowed. I believe there should be plenty of unmet demand following trading of the tokens.