In this article I’ll try to esteem the Aergo project and publish my marks for each of the following parts of the project: Team, Technology, MVP, Community, Partners, Investors, level of popularity (hype). Everything written below is my personal opinion and have nothing to do with YOUR personal analyze.
Technology
To start with, Aergo isn’t the next “sharding-blockchain”. it’s a platform developed with several pillars and blockchain is only one of them. Aergo Chain is a hybrid-structure blockchain consisted of private side chains and the main public chain. Every development team, building dApps on top of Aergo, has the choice between the higher level of trust within the public chain and higher level of speed and privacy within the private chains, so-called sidechains.
Talking about a consensus, it’s worth to mention that Aergo utilized Deterministic Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) with a total of 23 stakeholders responsible for network integrity and building new blocks.
The next pillar of Aergo is Hub, Aergo Hub. This is a public interface to underlying Aergo Chain with some useful features. Firstly, it provides the opportunity for developers to build dApps in private and public repositories (similar to GitHub). Secondary, it allows developers to use Microservices, Smart Oracles, Serverless databases.
To orchestrate decentralized applications developing on top of Aergo chain, the project uses Aergo Horde.
The last puzzle of the platform is Aergo Marketplace - place where software and computing resources provided by IT-providers can be sold directly to dApps developers.
Additionally, one of the main developments of Aergo is SQL-programmable smart-contracts.
Yes, developers will not have to learn Solidity to write smart-contracts, they can use well-known SQL instead.
My appraisal: 5 of 5.
Team
CEO of the project is Phil Zamani. It’s fair to add 4 points to the total score for this block for his presence only. He has about 20 years in managing cloud-computing and Linux-based open-source projects. Moreover, judging by his interviews to bloggers, his understanding of the project and the current blockchain issues is incredible.
My advice is to watch a few interviews with Phil to understand what I’m talking about.
Additionally, Aergo Board includes 2 people: Hun Young Park (CTO), having 12-years experience in developing distributed systems and Relational DBMS, and Roderik van der Graaf - investor and trader with 20+years of experience in spheres.
I will not write about every single team-member here, but they are all high-level specialists. In the last interview, Phil said that the team has grown significantly over the last few months, which is a good sign.
My appraisal: 5 of 5.
MVP
At the current period of time, project has already developed SQL-programmable smart-contracts. Test Net will be developed by the end of the year, Main Net - on the first quarter of 2019. Personally, I like the fact that Aergo was conducting sales with a working prototype Coinstack. Also, I appreciate very clear Roadmap without any non-related to development events, like: “Opened whitelist”, “Conducting the first AMA”, etc.
My appraisal: 5 of 5.
Partners / Investors
The main partner of Aergo is a Korean company Blocko. This is not a usual blockchain cooperation between blockchain projects to reach a mutual hype, this is another case. The base of Aergo is built from Coinstack - Blocko’s enterprise blockchain solution.
On the website, we can see nine institutional investors (blockchain funds) which have successfully invested in Aergo. These funds are BA Capital, FBG Capital, Rockaway blockchain, Lemniscap, and others.
From the one side, the funds mentioned above is not the best funds investing money in crypto. From the other side, funds like Kolon group, FBG Capital, GBIC are officially advising the projects. This means they have insisted not only money but their reputation and time.
In total: 5+ for Blocko, 4 for funds, +0.5 for Advising.
My appraisal: 4.75 of 5.
Community
Aergo has the community in Telegram, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, WeChat, Kakao, and Weibo. The most users are located in Telegram channel (31,500), Twitter has a little more than 4,500 followers. In my opinion, such amount of telegram users is a sign of strong interest to the project from average users.
My appraisal: 5 of 5.
Level of popularity (hype)
Oversubscribed private sale
Despite the worst market conditions over the last few years, the private sale event was oversubscribed twentyfold. For me, this is the main index of popularity of the project. The project has successfully attracted the attention of money even without any marketing and advertisement.
Large community
As I’ve said before, Aergo’s Telegram group has more than 31,500 users and it was more than 30,000 people in it before distribution event was announced. The project didn’t have any bounty or airdrop programs, people just wanted to participate in the crowd sale.
The attention of bloggers
This is another index I’m using to determine the popularity of the project. On the mid of summer popular web resource, ICO Drops added Aergo to the website with the rating “HIGH”.
Additionally, they interviewed Phil Zamani and translated this interview to the Russian-speaking audience. Some days ago Phil was interviewed by the group of bloggers called “Token Tank”.
My appraisal: 5 of 5.
Conclusion
My total subjective appraisal is 4.95 of 5 and this is an excellent result.