SUMMARY
- Website: https://wanchain.org/
- Whitepaper: https://wanchain.org/files/Wanchain-Whitepaper-EN-version.pdf
- Hardcap: ~121,704 ETH / 107,100,000 WAN (Contributors own 51%)
- Price: 880 WAN = 1 ETH
- ICO market cap: = ~$35.3 Million (ETH price of $290)
- White-list: Gold (6.8 ETH Cap) guaranteed / Silver (60 ETH Cap) non-guaranteed.
- Sold out on Gold + Silver phase in 6 minutes.
- Tokens release date: Q4 2017 on Wanchain 1.0. (Estimated end of November)
OVERVIEW
Just as traditional banks are the infrastructure of the current financial framework, Wanchain seeks to build a new, distributed infrastructure of digital assets to form an improved, modern framework.
Wanchain connects and exchanges value between different blockchain ledgers in a distributed manner. This means, any blockchain network, whether a public, private or consortium chain, can integrate with Wanchain to establish connections between different ledgers and perform low cost inter-ledger asset transfers.
Using Wanchain, any institution or individual can set up their own virtual teller window and provide services such as loan origination, asset exchanges, credit payments and transaction settlements based on digital assets. To simplify things, Wanchain is a distributed super-financial market based on a blockchain.
TOKEN UTILITY
WAN is the native coin of Wanchain. Both cross- and intra-chain transactions consume a certain amount of Wancoin. Wancoin is also used in security deposits for the cross-chain verification nodes. The network effect is present with WAN tokens.
ARCHITECTURE
- Distributed Ledger and Smart Contract Virtual Machine: Ethereum-based generic ledger that runs applications independently, with account models, smart contracts and privacy protection.
- Proof of Stake (POS) consensus mechanism: Used for ordinary transactions and implements consensus and incentive.
- Intra-Chain Transactions: Transaction methods in Wanchain are the same as in Ethereum, but with added privacy protection mechanism.
- Cross-Chain Connection: Blockchains and assets can integrate with Wanchain completed via chain and asset registration protocols.
- Cross-Chain Transactions: When an unregistered asset is transferred from the original chain to Wanchain, Wanchain will create a new asset using a built-in asset template to deploy a new smart contract based on the cross-chain transaction information.
Read more in the whitepaper (Page 5)
FUNDAMENTALS
WANCHAIN is a very ambitious project and is already ahead in the race for the new "3rd generation" inter-operable blockchains. They have been in development since June 2016 and are a lot more than just a "whitepaper" project. The main-net is expected to be released at the end of November 2017 and will be undergoing the test-net soon.
The project has a large team of more than 20 members and is led by veterans in the blockchain, seasoned developers and advisors. These includes:
Jack Lu - Co-founder of Factom in 2014 and founder of Wanglutech.
Factom was one of the few early successful blockchain startups which had about ~$1million marketcap in 2014 and rose well above $100mil+ marketcap in 2017.
Jack Lu left Factom in July 2016 to start-up Wanglutech.
Registered in Beijing, Wanglutech focuses on the fields of data deposit certificate, digital assets, supply chain finance, anti-fake traceability and providing professional services for the enterprises, financial organizations and governmental departments. Wanglutech was established in August 2016 and have since **raised $10 million from an angel investor. **
Wanglutech has some notable partnerships with well-known corporations and universities in China. These includes:
- Wanxiang Blockchain - The biggest blockchain business consulting service in Shanghai, parent company of:
- Wanxiang Chainbase Accelerator - China's first incubation central for Blockchainn start-ups, have highly notable mentors such as Vitalik Buterin, found of Ethereum, David Johnston, chairman of Factom and Jeff Garzik, Co-founder and CEO of Coin Center.
- DACA Summit- Recently organised the DACA Blockchain Summit 2017 event, where Da Hongfei, founder of NEO was a speaker.
- Zhongguancun Internet Finance Institute (ZIFI).
- Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) - Notable alumni includes the founder of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma and Wu Yajun, fifth richest person and richest women in China as of 2012.
James Shen -Lead engineer at General Motors and HP. Entered into the blockchain space in 2011 as a senior blockchain miner and developer.
Ying Zhang - Senior engineer from Huawei and served as CAO and CTO of several companies.
Ramble Lan -Chairman of North America Blockchain Association(NABA), which have partnerships with prestigious universities in North American including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of California, Berkeley.
View the full list of team members here.
Based on the fundamentals above, we can speculate that Wanchain may be the blockchain that will provide interoperability between the future blockchains incubated by Wanxiang. Because of the strong corporate connections of Wanxiang, Wanchain may very well be ahead of most of their competitors.
We think that the cap of ~$33.3 million is relatively modest for such an ambitious project. Because of this, there will be a lot of growth potential for investors and the project will have a lot of unmet demand.
CONCERNS
- Competitive market - Wanchain has a lot of competitors such as Polkadot, AION, Ripple and ICON. However, we believe that the target market is big enough for them to co-exist.
- China regulations - With the recent ban of ICOs in China, there's a lot of uncertainty for future regulations.
- Expanding outside China - Wanchain is very well rooted into China, but may find trouble expanding outside of China.
- Some team members on the website don't have linked-in profiles and it was impossible to verify them.
VERDICT
We believe that this is a very ambitious project with strong fundamentals. With the rising number of inter-operable blockchains, WANCHAIN will need to proof itself with some real business adoptions and further verifying their connection with Wanxiang before we can expect the project to rise in popularity. We expect Wanchain to float between the 500mil - 1billion marketcap range in 2018.