I was chatting with my friend Josh the other day when I heard him mention the "Internet of Value(s)"(IoV) term. It was my first time to hear that term, I have heard of the Internet of Things and I know it's the big thing right now. But what the heck is IoV, I wondered. Are people just making up random names based on trending terms just for publicity? Out of curiosity, I did a little digging later that evening to find out more about this strange sounding term. I wanted to know how exactly does value get networked, well I assumed that's what it was all about, a network of value. This is when I came across the project that coined this term, Fusion.
What is Fusion?
According to their website's FAQs page, they answer this question like: "Fusion is a Cryptofinance Platform that provides complete financial functions which enable the Era of ‘Internet of Value’." Mmmh, are you confused yet? Well, I was, I still could not understand what exactly this meant, so I did some further reading. Oh wait, maybe I should rephrase that, maybe it will make more sense, Fusion is a Cryptofinance company that introduces the era of the Internet of Values through their blockchain technology. I think that sounds better, doesn't it? Maybe not, what exactly is Cryptofinance?
Qian introduces Fusion at KryptoSeoul
Cryptofinance
Well, I could not find a dictionary definition of the term but one website defines it as: "the term for financial technologies that use encryption algorithms to ensure that financial transactions are private and secure." This is basically blockchain technology.
Internet of Values
Back to the term that made me lose a few hairs. As we all know, the internet allows us to transfer data and information instantly (or not so instantly depending on what kind of internet connection you have). The Internet of Values is a term as I said that was coined by fusion to define the ability to transfer value in the same manner (instantly between parties). Fusion wants to create an exciting new era where blockchain developers can build applications with multi-token smart contracts.
The currency - FSN
I have to mention that the Fusion project has been around for a few months already. The Fusion token (FSN) was listed on exchanges in February and it has performed relatively well. It was trading just under $3 upon listing and reached its ATH of $9.61 on May the 15th and at the time of writing it's trading at $4.75. The ICO price of $2.06 was rather steep but to prove how popular it was, they managed to raise $42M very quickly, hitting the hard-cap in one day! As for the returns for ICO investors, if you sold at the ATH, you could have 4xed your money, that is not as wow, but it' better than losing.
Fusion has a total supply of 57,344,000 FSN and a circulating supply of 29,684,331 FSN at the time of writing meaning it has a market cap of $140,433,899 USD at the current rates and is ranked number 83 on Coinmarketcap.
This is by no means a small feat, I have to say, the token has performed reasonably well given the market conditions that we are currently in.
Problems faced by the Industry
Blockchain technology is truly a gigantic breakthrough. Things that can be achieved through the implementation of this wonderful technology, I cannot even begin to fathom. With blockchain, we can achieve greatness to magnitudes that have never been witnessed in the history of mankind. Great as it may be, there are some few factors that hinder the progress of this technology namely interoperability, scalability, and usability.
In order to see good progress in blockchain technology, we need to address these factors, however, one of these, usability, takes a long, gradual process and Fusion is here to address the current bottlenecks of this technology, scalability and interoperability.
So how does Fusion aim to tackle these challenges? Well, in short, they want to create smart contracts that are smarter! I will explain this later on - if we call all the financial activities on the Internet of Values, crypto-finance, then all current cryptocurrencies are only scraping the surface of the complete crypto-finance ecosystem.
Back to smarter smart contracts, Fusion's smart contracts are smarter because they utilize multiple triggering mechanisms MTM. These are time and event-based triggers combined with the traditional transaction triggers in the smart contracts which are derived from various financial conditions.
Current smart contracts blind to off-chain data and cannot read or interpret that data but Fusion's smarter smart contracts will be able to interact with the outside world.
"FUSION can convert values across various
blockchains and can fulfill almost all the functionality of traditional finance, but in a distributed and more efficient manner, with substantial cost savings. It also can even achieve many unprecedented financial functions that cannot be imagined in scenarios of centralized organizations."
In other words, the Fusion public blockchain can provide complete financial functions by eliminating the bottlenecks of interoperability and scalability.
Interoperability
Current blockchains cannot interact with each other. They are islands and Fusion is here to change that.
"Cross-chain, cross-organization and cross-data source inputs can be mapped onto FUSION, achieving interoperability never seen before on the blockchain."
This is achieved by Fusion building a control and management layer on top of all blockchains by utilizing a distributed network of nodes to controls the various types of tokens private keys.
When I first read this I was like, what, they want to control private keys, that's a no-no. We have always been warned not to provide private keys of our wallets, right. I mean the moment someone has the private keys of your wallet, you are basically at their mercy. They can do what they please with whatever assets you may be holding in that wallet. So Fusion taking control of all tokens' private keys, sounds like a huge security breach.
So how does Fusion aim to do this without compromising security? The following image will break it down for us:
So basically the private keys are broken down to pieces and those pieces are distributed to various nodes such that no one node can have the complete private key. This means no one node can take advantage and take control of the asset in question. Peww, that's a relief!
Use Cases
- Use Case 1: Risk-free Token Loan
- Use Case 2: Risk-free contracts market
- Use Case 3: Mortgage smart contract
You can check out the use case videos made by Fusion (links above) to see examples of how fusion can be used, but if I may bring it closer to home...
In this image that I made, I was trying to visualize a scenario where Fusion acts as a platform where collateral loans can be made on the Fusion blockchain. The recipient could receive his loan from multiple lenders from different platforms and all are mapped to the fusion blockchain and the fusion smart contract takes care of the conversion of all these tokens to the one the borrower needs and the smart contract takes care of the repayment of the loan, giving the lenders a peace of mind.
Summary and Conclusion
I made a short video to summarise this article, please watch it:
The Team
The project has an impressive team led by the principal Dejun Qian who is the Founder and CEO of BitSE and he created Qtum and Vechain. Vechain currently has a market cap of $1.7Billion. That is an impressive CV if you may ask me. Another Key member is David Perez who is in charge of the foundation strategy, he is the managing director of Goldman Sachs.
Click on the image to see the entire team.
Watch D.J. Qian talking about the project:
More info
If you want to find out more about the project check out their website and if you are technically intelligent, you can read their whitepaper which has a whole lot of details about their project and how they want it to work.
Alternatively, you can read the summary to get a gist of what Fusion is all about. They are present in the social media through their Facebook page, telegram and Twitter. They also have a videos page where you can watch videos explaining the whole concept.