Overview
What does the company/project do?
The AERGO project proposes a 4th generation blockchain protocol. The platform is designed to serve particularly enterprise use cases of blockchain technology and will be called AERGO Chain. The AERGO Chain should become a distributed, secure, scalable and public blockchain. AERGO sees itself as a future mainstream IT infrastructure on which thousands of applications will be build.
Blocko Inc., a blockchain and enterprise IT integration-services company, is responsible for much of the AERGO development and supporting the project. The company behind AERGO has four years of experience in the enterprise blockchain sphere and is contributing its core technology, Coinstack, to AERGO. Blockchain based software developed by Blocko is mostly used in Korea. Large credit card companies are using Blocko’s Coinstack software and serving millions of users with it.
How advanced is the project?
The AERGO project launched in April 2018. AERGO already has completed a private token sale. The public AERGO token sale is expected to occur in August 2018. The Alpha version of the AERGO Chain is planned to be released in Q3 2018. The test net is planned to launch in Q4 2018 while the main net should launch in Q1 2019.
Blocko, the company behind AERGO, was founded four years ago and raised a Series B venture capital round.
What are the tokens used for and how can the token value appreciate?
AERGO tokens are the medium of exchange in the AERGO ecosystem. Use cases of the AERGO token include running the smart contract on the AERGO platform. On top, the AERGO token will be used as a payment method for Blocko’s technical support on Coinstack 4.0, payments for the AERGO Hub services and payments for services and assets on the AERGO Marketplace.
Team & Advisors
The AERGO board has three board members:
Phil Zamani is an AERGO board member and the COO of Blocko. He has previous experience with leveraging open source software (Linux) at a leading position for Redhat Inc. Now he wants to apply this knowledge to another open source sphere, which is blockchain technology.
Hun Young Park is an AERGO board member and the CTO of Blocko. He has more than ten years experience in large scale software development with expertise in relational databases and artificial intelligence.
Roderik van der Graaf is an AERGO board member and a managing partner at Lemniscap, a blockchain investment firm. He has several years of experience in private equity and venture capital.
There is already an extensive team in tech and business working on AERGO project, in the form of the numerous employees of Blocko.
Among the advisors of AERGO are Eddie Alleyn, Vincent Zhou, Djamel Souici, Julian Lenz, Joon-Hong Jake Kim, Sinhae Lee, Pierre F. Suhrcke and Riad Hartani. The advisors are mostly entrepreneurs or are working for venture capital companies.
Product
AERGO wants to offer a protocol on which developers can build on and third parties and enterprises can engage with. The focus is on security and scalability of the blockchain cloud architecture. The AERGO blockchain protocol will be open source and will be called AERGO Chain. The AERGO hub will connect dApps (decentralized applications) with the the AERGO Chain and will offer public and private repositories. Software applications, computing resources and other services for the AERGO Chain can be acquired in the AERGO marketplace.
AERGO offers a smart contract engine with the widely used and popular SQL programming language. The platform is designed in a way that it is very easy to use for developers, without requiring them to learn new programming languages. Additionally developers may create side chains, that will run on low operating costs. The objective of AERGO is to become the bridge that connects public and private networks.
AERGO plans to use a deterministic Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus mechanism.
Strength and Opportunities
Development of the AERGO platform doesn’t start from scratch. Instead a lot of the AERGO Chain is based on COINSTACK, that was developed by Blocko and is already tested with enterprise customers.
AERGO wants to allow developers to build upon its platform in widely used programming languages such as SQL, C++, Golang, JavaScript and Python. This is in contrast to Ethereum, the currently biggest smart contract platform, that requires developers to code in Solidity. However, AERGO is not alone with this approach, e.g. it is also possible to build on the smart contract platform Neo with C, Java, JavaScript and Python.
Weaknesses and Threats
AERGO is targeting particularly the enterprise blockchain space. It needs to be noted that the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance has already many big corporations as members, including Microsoft, BP and UBS. The alliance was founded in March 2017 and has today a significant advantage over other projects in terms of enterprise blockchain adoption. Besides the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance many other significant blockchain platforms, such as IOTA or VeChain, have formed meaningful alliances with enterprises.
Verdict
In the short run the solid team, a good concept that is already partially proved by Blocko and a broad net of advisors are indicators for a successful ICO. The experience of Blocko in the enterprise blockchain space will be very valuable at the beginning of the AERGO project. It needs to be seen whether this is enough to compete against established blockchain platforms such as Ethereum in the long run.
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