Disclaimer: These reviews are done as is from what is on display in the master branch of the repo’s made available. This review is not a comment on the overall project, scope, or success thereof. This was done as an educational review by me and any comments in the article are simply my opinion. It should not be used as any comment or advice on the project as a whole.
Review Date: 11/03/0218
I start off mostly with ramblings and ideas, jump to conclusion for the full analysis or feel free to run through the analysis points. Items in quotes are specifically from their sources of information.
“A mineable multi-chain protocol for stable coins, decentralized exchanges, and meta contracts.”
“The mainnet will launch with interoperability between Bitcoin (via a drive chain), Ethereum, NEO, Lisk, and Waves.” - Drive chain here is an interesting choice, it has built in limiters, how do they propose to overcome the built in lockout? The drive chain also means they aren’t just consuming blocks, but they are running Blockcollider as a side chain to Bitcoin. This doesn’t answer how they address two way communication. Consuming the blocks is great for network awareness, but it doesn’t actually allow for value to transfer unless they control the original blockchains. So they will need to function as a side chain to be able to actually function. This means for every chain you have to lock your tokens into their system to have it work as mapped tokens. This is the same design pattern as Aion, Wanchain, or Fusion. I don’t quite see how the block consumption comes into play.
“For instance, buying 1 Emblem in the sale means you can redeem the following amounts.” - This seems incredibly dangerous, their wording also seems ambigous, is 1 Emblem equal to all of the above, or can you redeem 1 emplem for all of the above, or do you need that many emblems to redeem one. Wording on different places all seem to mean different interpretations. I’m not sure which one is right.
Looking at the 1 Emblem is equal to that amount example, 1 emblem = 100 ETH seems insane. Alternatively 100 emblem = 1 ETH, which doesn’t make sense in terms of Lisk or NEO since both are trading below ETH. I don’t understand this mechanic as written. Financially it doesn’t make any sense, but this is only true where 1 M-ETH = 1 ETH, according to their documentation 1 M-ETH = 1 ERC20 M-ETH. So it doesn’t actually map to the underlying ETH at all?
“The sale will be capped at 100M Emblems. There is a fixed of supply of 300M Emblems that will be created which will be placed in the custodianship of the foundation.”
“Miners who have a balance of Emblems can add more transactions per block than the default amount, thereby collecting more fees. This allows blocks to dynamically adjust transaction size, while acting as a more stable store of value for miners than mining hardware.” - Centralization at it’s worst, the miners that control more emblem will continously mine more emblem, thus controlling more emblem.
“Our flagship application is a complete overhaul of the traditional blockchain wallet in the form of a Amazon Alexa chatbot named Collider”*
Focusing on chatbots for wallets. Chatbots seem very impressive but they are insanely easy to make and are annoying to use. Requires a scan, a value, and a button to send value, if everything is chatbots (especially voice driven) they have an issue with adding complex values like private or public keys. This will slow down adoption, unless everything uses ENS, but that is highly unlikely.
“…with no centralized points of failure, oracles, or validators” - this isn’t exactly true, the validators are just changed to the miners. Validation still happens, it’s a novel concept and does avoid the concept of bridges. They just need to add and consume more blockchains. However this design means that they need to store the data from each blockchain, space wise this will become extremely redundant as more blockchains are added. This has an inherent storage flaw.
What is blockcollider bringing to the game that isn’t being developed by Aion? With a validator or bridge design they only have to care about the transaction that created the event into the side chain, with their design they need transparency on every event in every blockchain. Unless they have some new storage mechanism I’m not sure what the value in this is.
Team
Arjun Raj Jain - New York - 500+ - Job hopper - Front End Developer - **
Patrick McConlogue - New York - 500+ - Non Dev - Data Scientist - ***
Tomas Korcak - SF - 500+ - Little info - Engineer - ***
Adam Kloboucnik - Czech - 357 - UI - GoodData - **
Team is mostly from GoodData, very little backend or blockchain experience, also very little previous success execution. The team needs some stronger players to be able to pull this off.
Conclusion: The idea(s) seem disconnected. There is no reason to absorb the blocks other than to know the state of the underlying blockchain. This creates a lot of extra storage in blockcollider while not adding much value.
They don’t explain how they will actually trigger events in the underlying system. It’s great that they know there is 1 LISK in address 0x1, but they can’t actually transfer that 1 LISK, unless I assume it’s locked into their system? But then they say 1 M-ETH is not the same as 1 ETH instead it is 1 M-ETH ERC20, which means 1 BTC can’t exist since Bitcoin doesn’t have any underlying values?
They have an “mvp” which is just consuming ethereum blocks and nothing more, you can’t actually do anything with it.
The idea seems like a combination of thoughts thrown together that don’t exactly make a bunch of sense, the team doesn’t have any experience in this field, and they are going for a chatbot gimmick.
I’m struggling to see how they will compete with Aion, Wanchain, and Fusion.