NuCypher ICO Review

Summary

Project name: NuCypher
Ticker: NKMS
Website: https://www.nucypher.com
Telegram: https://t.me/nucypher
White paper: https://www.nucypher.com/whitepapers/english.pdf
Hard cap: TBA
Total supply: TBA
Token price: TBA
Token type: ERC20
Bonus: N/A
Countries excluded: N/A

Dates

Whitelist: TBA (join telegram or subscribe on mailing list)
KYC: TBA
Presale: Closed in 2017
Public sale: TBA
Token distribution: TBA

Introduction

NuCypher KMS is a decentralized key management system (KMS), encryption, and access control service. It enables private data sharing between arbitrary numbers of participants in public consensus networks, using proxy re-encryption (PRE) to delegate decryption rights in a way that cannot be achieved by traditional symmetric or public-key encryption schemes. Native tokens are used to incentivize network participants to perform key management and access delegation/revocation operations.

How it works

Alice, the data owner, encrypts data with her public key and uploads it to IPFS, Swarm, S3, or any supported storage layer. To delegate access to valid recipients, she creates and uploads re-encryption keys to the NuCypher KMS network.
Ursula, a miner, receives the re-encryption keys and stands ready to re-key data. She provides this service in exchange for payment in fees and block rewards. The NuCypher KMS network and the storage layer never have access to Alice's plaintext data.
Bob, a valid recipient, sends an access request to the NuCypher KMS network. If a valid re-encryption key exists and specified conditions are met, the data is re-keyed to his public key and he is able to decrypt with his private key.

Team

MacLane Wilkison (Co-Founder and CEO)
MacLane is a software engineer and former TMT investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He holds CISSP, CFA, and FRM designations.
Dr. Michael Egorov (Co-Founder and CTO)
Michael is a physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a bronze medalist in the 2003 International Physics Olympiad.
Dr. David Núñez (Cryptographer)
David is a postdoctoral Researcher at NICS Lab (Universidad de Málaga, Spain).

Advisors

John Bantleman
John is a serial entrepreneur with three decades of experience managing high-growth software companies.
Prof. Giuseppe Ateniese
Giuseppe is one of the fathers of proxy re-encryption and the department chair in Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Prof. David Evans
Dave is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia and Faculty Director of the Secure Computation research group.
Tony Bishop
Tony is a VP at Equinix, the author of Next Generation Data Centers, and former Global Head of Data Centers at Morgan Stanley.

Partners

Coval Emblem Vault
Bluzelle
Datum
Origin protocol
IoT
...

Competition

NuCypher is the first mover in the decentralized world, but faces competition with several big players in the centralized world. A number of enterprise-oriented KMS services exist and are already heavily utilized at the moment, including Amazon CloudHSM, Google Cloud KMS and Azure Key Vault.

Opportunities

Very active on GitHub
Infrastructure project with high use utility
Working product which will be launched on main net at the time of the token sale
Partnerships with other blockchain companies
Solving a real problem in the blockchain ecosystem
First-mover advantage
Significant community support (>33k users in telegram)

Concerns

No marketing team members
Token metrics not available yet
No exact roadmap dates are announced

Verdict

NuCypher appears to be a very interesting project which can be interesting for every person that is serious about keeping their information safe. The blockchain technology can revolutionize and solve the issues that centralize couldn't. But before we want to participate in the ICO, we'd like to get more info about the token metrics and the roadmap.

Sources

None of this is investment advice. Please do your own research!

Sources

https://www.nucypher.com/company/

https://cryptobriefing.com/nucypher-ico-review-nkms-token/