Overview
What does the company/project do?
Hypernet aims to create a marketplace where users can buy and sell computational power. Prices on the marketplace are derived from supply and demand. Blockchain technology is used for matching sellers with buyers and for securing the subsequent payment via smart contracts.
Hypernet takes advantage of parallel computing, which is essentially dividing larger computational problems into smaller ones and solving the smaller problems at the same time. Users can execute code across a distributed network of devices via an API that is provided by Hypernet.
How advanced is the project?
Version 1 of the Hypernet white paper was released in March 2018. As of June 2018 the Hypernet Telegram Group has more than 23,000 users. According to the timeline presented by Hypernet the scheduler and the consensus API should be finalized by August 2018, while the runtime environment is planned to be completed by December 2018.
What are the tokens used for and how can the token value appreciate?
Hypertokens are the tokens used to pay for services provided on the Hypernet platform. Apart from being a means of payment the Hyptertoken has further use cases such as signalling the reputation of market actors or voting for changes to the Hypernet protocol. After the release of the platform, the value of the Hypertoken will correlate with the adoption of the Hypernet platform as a marketplace for computational power.
Team & Advisors
The Hypernet team consists of three co-founders and a team of six employees, mostly engineering and marketing staff. The co-founders are dedicated to the project since August 2017.
Ivan Ravlich is the founder and CEO of Hypernet. He has a strong academic background and holds a PhD from Stanford university. However, he had no significant professional experience before starting Hypernet.
Todd Chapman is a co-founder and CTO of Hypernet. Just as Ivan Ravlich he holds a PhD from Stanford university without significant professional experience.
Daniel Maren is a co-founder at Hypernet. He studied computer science at Stanford. Before joining Hypernet he worked at Sunpower, a solar energy company, and founded a non-profit organization.
Hypernet has received an angel investment of 500,000 USD, but the investors were not publicly announced.
In May 2018 Hypernet announced Randall Kaplan, Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies, Joseph Urgo, Co-Founder of District0x, and Tony Reeves, CFO of Global Technology at Experian Plc, as advisors.
Product
Hypernet is developed by a team of researchers who did not have the computational resources to solve their problems, such as advanced Machine Learning tasks.
A blockchain resource scheduler is at the core of Hypernet. It should be developed as a graphical user interface but will also be available via the command line. Buyers of computational power will be able to input the details of their contract such as the runtime and the purchase rate into the scheduler. Computational jobs are prioritized by the value of Hypertokens offered by the buyer.
It is necessary for both, buyers and sellers of computational resources, to stake a collateral in order to engage in the contract. This is a mechanism to prevent bad actors from participating in the marketplace.
The Hypernet protocol will be built around a Distributed Average Consensus Mechanism.
Strength and Opportunities
The cloud computation market is growing at a massive scale and expected to be worth more than 400 billion USD by 2020.
Hypernet distinguishes itself from other distributed computing projects by applying general parallel computing which according to them can solve a broader range of problems than grid computing, the system used by their competitors.
Weaknesses and Threats
Delivering distributed computational power via the blockchain is a highly competitive market segment. Several projects are already active in this field, such as Golem, Somn, GirdCoin, iExec and Sparc. Golem has already a market capitalization of more than 275 million USD as of June 2018. Cultivating their niche and differentiating themselves substantially from the other market players may not be easy.
The fact that no credible strategic investors have been announced so far raises doubts how well Hypernet’s ICO will perform.
Verdict
If the technology of the Hypernet platform and in particular parallel computing is more efficient compared to the technology used by the Hypernet competitors there is no reason why the Hypernet competitors should not implement the same technology. Other platforms in this field may have a first mover advantage since they were already active significantly before Hypernet.
We can assume that just as for every marketplace economics of scale will be one of the decisive factors for determining the winner in this market niche. Uber and AirBnB have shown that once a dominant player successfully penetrated a niche, it becomes very hard for competitors to catch up. Therefore the long term success of the project will depend on how quickly the team can execute and implement their idea compared to competitive projects. The timeline of Hypernet is ambitious and in Q3 2018 we will be able to see if important technical milestones were met.
Hypernet counts with an engaged community but lacks big strategic investors. It remains to be seen if the community can compensate for this during the ICO.
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