Review by ICODrops: Veriblock (Eng)
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Veriblock is a blockchain ecosystem that can be used for transferring mining processing power from Bitcoin to other cryptocurrencies via its POP (Proof Of Proof) consensus. In simple terms, tokens with low hashrates will be able to increase their security by connecting to Bitcoin miners.
Timeframe:
Initial Exchange Offering on Bittrex will be conducted at 19:00 (UTC+3) on April 2, 2019.
Metrics:
The token is native.
Token Supply is 2 100 000 000 VBK.
All of the testnet tokens will be transferred to the mainnet in ratio 1:2 (1000 testnet tokens = 2000 mainnet tokens). The total of tokens to transfer to the mainnet is 111,105,440.
The amount of tokens offered on Bittrex is 70,000,000 VBK. The price is ~0.10 USD (the exact peg will be announced 24 hours before the start of the IEO).
The hard cap is 7 000 000 USD.
The initial circulation of tokens is 283,000,000 VBK = 28 300 000 USD.
Total valuation is 210 000 000 USD.
Social metrics:
The website was created on May 8, 2014.
There are 403 views and 101 unique users daily.
According to Alexa, 49% of the website's traffic comes from the U.S.
The official Twitter page is being hosted since June 2015. There are 1000 followers, the posting frequency is moderate, and there is a reasonable number of likes and reposts. However, the first tweet was published on March 20, 2017, and then there was an idle period until March 2018, when the active posting resumed until September 2018. Among the famous followers, we found Nic Carter.
The official Telegram group has 7,5 thousand users joined. It was incepted on March 2, 2018, the communication started on March 15, 2018. There is no airdrop. The communication is mostly about launching nodes (on the testnet). There are some rewards for certain actions like performing transactions on the testnet, etc.
Additionally, there is a website with structured information about the project: https://wiki.veriblock.org/.
Key players
The team comes from the USA.
According to their profiles in LinkedIn, the majority of team members started working on Veriblock in January 2015.
Justin Fisher, CEO has been a co-founder and CEO of Brevo LLC (which was focused on IP-telecom in the early '90s in New York, Google search returns no results about this company);
Maxwell Sanzhez, CTO has been working as software developer at Cure Coin for roughly five years (ranked 726 CMC, processing power donation for research in healthcare);
Flip Filipowski, Chairman is also a co-founder and СЕО Fluree (a blockchain-based database for enterprises). He has also been a chairman at Fuel50 (a working software company in HR sphere, 170 visitors monthly) for almost 6 years. Between the '80s and '90s he founded and managed large software companies. Flip is also a co-founder of Tally capital (along with his teammate in Veriblock, Matthew Roszak).
Jeff Roschman is a Financial Advisor with an empty LinkedIn profile. He is a president of not so well-known CT Capital fund (the website certificate is outdated and the stats isn't available).
Josh Rack, Blockchain Engineer with 15 years of experience with development (including managerial experience). The companies he worked at have low influence. According to his status in LinkedIn, Josh got in Veriblock via an online headhunter and looks more like a freelancer.
Tim Stall, CDO with more than 15 years of experience in IT at various engineering positions.
Jeff Garzik, Technical Advisor is famous as one of Bitcoin core's developer, a co-founder of Bloq (blockchain development), СЕО of Metronome and one of the top Bitcoin holders.
Matthew Roszak, Strategy advisor is a co-founder of Bloq, Tally capital, and Metronome.
Only one person has joined the team since June 2018.
We could find information about 2 out of 3 developers:
Сasey Kettler has no education mentioned in his profile. He worked as a barista and a freelance Web developer for about 3 years. He designs interfaces in Veriblock.
Garry Paxinos has been CTO of netTALK (telecom) from 2011. He has 31 years of experience of design & development of products with a various level of complexity.
The team has only 1 person left since June 2018. Nobody from the team is experienced in open-source & blockchain development.
Advisors:
Bo Shen is a managing partner at Fenbushi Capital (a crypto fund founded in the latter 2015). Bo also acts as an advisor in multiple projects (many of which currently have negative ROI).
Bill Shihara is CEO of Bittrex, his former experience includes working in Amazon, Blackberry, and Microsoft.
Anthony Di Lorio was a founder of Ethereum in 2013-2015. He has also been a founder and CEO of Jaxx (a blockchain wallet that supports multiple tokens) from 2016. Anthony is CEO and founder of Decentral (a blockchain hub in Toronto), a genesis member of Bitcoin alliance in Canada, CEO, and founder of CryptoKit (a Bitcoin wallet). In addition, he advises for Skrumble Network, AION, and Polymath.
Partners / investors:
On the website, there is a section called 'From our partners' with quotes from:
- the co-founder and CEO of Bittrex (who also acts as an advisor), where he speaks about collaboration with Veriblock in terms of providing security for the exchange.
- CEO of TruePic, where he talks about collaborating with Veriblock as well for certification of their product (verification of photo and video content, 18 employees mentioned in LinkedIn, founded in 2014).
Technology and idea
Whitepaper:
The main value proposition of Veriblock is to provide other blockchains with low hashrate to use Bitcoin's PoW to prove that their networks work correctly.
The whitepaper discusses the issues of blockchains, particularly their ability to reach and maintain consensus.
As a solution, VeriBlock provides Proof of Proof protocol that uses hash power of a blockchain with PoW to produce an unlimited number of additional blockchains.
Blockchains with low hashrate will be able to use Bitcoin's PoW to prove that their chains function correctly. Proof of Proof is focused on 'security inheritance' for other blockchains. PoP introduces a mining algorithm that periodically publishes the current state of a blockchain on another blockchain (anchoring). PoP requires that a blockchain has certain means of block production like local PoW or PoS with a low hashrate.
In addition, Veriblock is supposed to solve existing issues of the blockchains' infrastructure, improve Bitcoin's scalability and other blockchains' security. Veriblock's technology resembles that of Plasma in the way that it realizes functionality and scalability of the second layer and uses a core blockchain to ensure security. The difference between the projects is that while popular layer 2 solutions use blockchains like Ethereum as their core blockchain and develop their second layers on top of them, Veriblock chooses Bitcoin as its core Blockchain to create an alternative blockchain on top of it.
Currently, there are two types of Veriblock's competitors: those who introduce merged mining and those who use multi-layer technologies. Namecoin is a typical representative of the first category with merged mining and AuxPoW protocol. This allows Bitcoin miners to mine Bitcoin with one or several other tokens on secondary networks. Omni & Counterparty represent the second category. Omni proposed a protocol that works on top of Bitcoin blockchain and included data in it. Counterparty built a transportation layer on top of the Bitcoin protocol to create and use a set of decentralized financial instruments within the protocol.
VeriBlock is a dedicated attempt of PoP realization, which extends Bitcoin's security for other blockchains in the safest, cost-effective and straightforward manner, further developing DTTP (Decentralized, Trustless, Transparent, and Permissionless) PoP. It acts as a fully protective adapter of DTTP / an aggregation layer between other blockchains & Bitcoin.
Every time a new blockchain connects to Veriblock, or an existing one grows in value, all the other blockchains in Veriblock's ecosystem benefit from it by getting additional security and decentralization that ensure the effective functioning of Veriblock network.
The process of mining
Veriblock acts as a safe adapter / an aggregation level between other blockchains & Bitcoin. Currently, Veriblock blockchain has two types of mining: PoW & PoP. PoW miners generate blocks and provide intermediate consensus. The PoP protocol helps in expanding Bitcoin's security for other blockchains. In particular, PoP miners are responsible for checking the most recent states of other blockchains and publishing this data onto Bitcoin blockchain. They also act as communicational / transactional bridges between SI and SP blockchains. On their request, PoP miners will get the most recent data about the blockchain state from SI blockchain and publish it to SP blockchain along with certain identifications, which will make them eligible for receiving compensations later. Later on, PoP miners will wait for transactions to be included in blocks of the SP blockchain, generate certain forms of confirming publications, add other identification information necessary to receive publication credits, and send these confirmations back to the SI blockchain in form of a dedicated PoP mining transaction.
In order for PoP mining transactions to be used later in reaching consensus, they should be stored in the SI blockchain. Moreover, block headers in the SP chain should be stored in a way that allows the SP chain's consensus without requiring p2p nodes to interact with the SP blockchain's network. As a result, blocks in the blockchain that realizes PoP have special segments for storing new headers of the SP blockchain's blocks, as the SP blockchain's headers of the last block include the SI blockchain.
To prevent double-spending, Veriblock offers block weighting function. Blocks will be weighted in regards to the network's transactional behavior caused by their timing. At the end of the process, only the blocks with the highest scores will be saved.
Tokenomics:
The whitepaper describes issues of the current blockchains, particularly their ability of reaching and maintaining consensus.
The project has was in the testnet phase from Spring 2018 to March 3, 2019.
The Mainnet launch is scheduled to March 25, 2o19.
The product has been in development from 2015. Tim Stall is the major contributor from March 2018. There is a total of 4 repos.
The primary repo is used for launching nodes.
Here are its stats:
The rest repos are mostly idle. As per the team, an update is planned before the Mainnet launch.
Competitors:
Komodo (valuation is 112 million USD);
Plasma;
Cosmos Network.
Addendum / summary / opinions
This is the first project on the 'launchpad' from Bittrex. The initial circulation is 4 times higher than the number of tokens offered for sale. The potential positive ROI can be expected only if Bittrex will strive to make its platform attractive to users and motivate them to participate in the exchange's next IEO.
At first glance, the project looks like another play of Garzik and Roszak. This is not the first time when then build a project with a dedicated token.
The rest of the team looks bleak, many of the members don't have relevant experience.
The project's technological focus resembles that of Plasma & Cosmos Network (similar goals). The competitors seem stronger than Veriblock and have huge support.