History
Syscoin 1.0 was announced on April 16th, 2014 and the pre sale (ICO) started on July 19th, 2014. The official launch commenced on August 16th, 2014. Its initial aim was to provide a decentralised marketplace, smart contracts, certificate issuance and data storage and retrieval.
The initial presale raised 1500 bitcoin. 250 bitcoin was to be used as buy support. However 750 bitcoin was allegedly ‘stolen’ by the organisation (Moolah.io) that hosted the presale for the syscoin team. Moolah.io acted as the escrow agent for the presale.
Syscoin 2.0 was implemented on May 1st, 2016. A new graphical interface was added for additional features relating to the decentralised marketplace. Work relating to the decentralised market place has been on going and a refined core and graphical interface is very near completion.
Blockchain Foundry Inc was announced to the Syscoin community on August 22nd, 2016. Based in Toronto, Canada. This enabled the beginning of complex, successful and ongoing business partnerships with established software giants.
Blockchain Foundry announced on March 10th, 2017, their first certified Microsoft Azure marketplace offering.
Road Map
The Blockmarket decentralised market place is not the only thing on the road map for Syscoin and Blockchain Foundry. They have many interesting and varied projects going forward.
- the roadmap is currently a little outdated, but still indicates the projects they are currently working on and intend to work on.
Blockmarket Desktop and Blockmarket Web
Essentially Desktop and Web will be the same service accessible via different interfaces. One via a desktop application and the other via your web browser.
What is Blockmarket?
What is a decentralised marketplace? It allows buyers to browse with anonymity and sellers do do the same. Without hosting and monitoring from a central authority.
Technical: In essence the Blockmarket, Desktop and Web, is a redesign of the existing syscoin marketplace, which is available via the syscoin QT wallet. The user experience has been redesigned and enhanced to create a fresh new product that aims to rival the likes of traditional and established marketplaces like Ebay and Amazon and more recent crypto markets such as OpenBazaar. Incorporation of new ‘cutting edge’ web based technologies will allow for user experiences that will occur in 1/100th of the time, compared to existing syscoin marketplace experiences. The existing marketplace in the syscoin QT wallet will eventually be removed.
Syscoin blockchain technical details
Current supply of Syscoin: 525,872,540
Maximum supply of Syscoin: 888,000,000
Algorithm: SHA-256 (Proof Of Work - POW), merge-mineable with bitcoin.
Annual inflation of coin supply: 1.65% (approximately)
BlockMarket Security
Syscoin BlockMarket contains both TOR and ZCash (ZEC) based anonymity. TOR is one of the older technologies that allow anonymous communication via its network. However, this alone does not guarantee complete anonymity. This is because TOR was initially developed in the early 2000s by the US navy and DARPA, with funding from the Federal government of the United States. While you may have privacy (different to anonymity) using the TOR network, there are potential back doors that may have been build in. The Zcash protocol was built into the Syscoin core to enable trustless anonymity as a second layer which is a massive improvement to privacy and is cutting edge technology. The only big competitor to Syscoin BlockMarket, OpenBazaar, only uses TOR as of end of june 2017. No other layer of encryption has been built into OpenBazaar. It is debatable whether you can ever have true anonymity in the crypto world, however Syscoin BlockMarket beats all of its competitors in terms of privacy, thus far.
BlockMarket Functionality and Services
The following images, are sufficient to summarize what BlockMarket will offer:
Syscoin has more than just Multisig support. Control money, data, documents or departments with the built in BlockMarket account controls.
Consensus 2017 and BlockChain Foundry.
The Syscoin/Blockchain Foundry team attended Consensus 2017. After which, new offices were set up in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, where they could focus and communicate more effectively in a shared environment. Some members of the team even gave up their day jobs to fully focus on the new projects ahead of them. New team members were hired in order to support the continued and growing development requirements of current and future Blockchain Foundry / Syscoin software products.
Decentralized Identity Foundation. (DIF)
Syscoin has already developed and incorporated its own proprietary identification technology and was one the first to do so. As of Consensus 2017, Syscoin/Blockchain Foundry, entered into partnership with a number of organisations (including MicroSoft) to create a generic way forward for this technology. A few companies, such as Facebook, have allegedly wanted to control such technology for themselves but the Syscoin/Blockchain Foundry team feel as though their technology is one to be shared. Hence the partnership with a number of large established software giants and smaller companies, in order to forge a shared and common way forward.
Release Dates.
Syscoin and Blockchain Foundry do not like to give set dates as to when products will be released. They are very careful in this respect, so as not to give crypto investors (players) too much information so that they can manipulate, pump and then dump the syscoin market. They informed me that they prefer the “ninja” styles of announcements and releases (humour). In doing this, it gives little time for those that wish to manipulate the market the opportunity to organise strategies. That said, as a developer myself, I know that schedules can slip and it is unwise to give people false expectations. So personally, I think it is a wise strategy i.e. to get down, develop, test, QA and only then publicize the final product.
BlockMarket Desktop is “anticipated” to be released early August 2017, after an independent security audit of the code has been completed (something that not many crypto organisations do. Remember The DAO?). BlockMarket Web is “anticipated” to be released late August 2017 or early September 2017 and will also include a web wallet. These are my own estimates based upon my research.
The future is bright for Syscoin and BlockChain Foundry.
Syscoin as an Investment.
I have left the best bit until last. Much like the Syscoin team does :P If you have got this far in the article, then I can only assume you are genuinely interested in the BlockMarket and Syscoin. Congratulations!
From a personal point of view, I can see the price reaching $1 per Syscoin in the near future. This is a conservative estimate. This is based upon current development milestones being reached (very soon) and the now growing demand for anonymous marketplaces, which Syscoin/Blockmarket provides. Not only that, it is not centralised. It is decentralised. A decentralised marketplace running on 100s/1000s of nodes globally. That my friends, is hard to take down. Very hard.
Now... where are you going to put your money today? Some of mine goes on Syscoin 😊
Apart from Steem, Stratis , Antshares (NEO), EOS 😉