Cognida - establishing trusted service relationships
So Cognida is the product that has been developed by the Windmill Alliance that has been developing the solution in-house and selling its wares to the enterprise sector for a few years now. The reason the project is getting attention is the fact it has some established names of calibre in the team, a working product ready to go and the board of advisors contains two main players from Wanchain. The project name is popping up across a lot of serious investor discussions.
This is undoubtedly a very prospective sector marking the grey area between private blockchain/enterprise tailored software solutions and the world of decentralized public blockchains. The competition for this sector is fierce, to say the least, but the market potential is massive and there is a lot of room for a lot of leading firms to be successful.
Cognida is a product that sits independent and can interact with public blockchains, solving lots of cross-platform solutions and will evolve from the existing business services into an independent foundation with APIs. And it is at this point that I started to struggle to see the new innovation and the value from the ICO or more accurately the Token Generation Event. Something is strange about it, and it doesn’t stack up for me, don’t get me wrong, it’s legit, but I will explain further.
The information is laid out in a strange fashion that would suggest that they have the trust of private investors and the whole affair of going for the crowdsale is kind of icing on the cake or for publicity reasons. They are in presale now and go to public sale on July 20 but you have to search hard within the offering to find this, and normally it’s the one thing screaming out.
Then, other strange behaviours like not putting LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) profiles for the team members (you can find most of them in separate search) but just why wouldn’t you follow normal practice. Is it because you are a well-established company managing to convince the more conservative investment money that they are morphing into something shiny and decentralized else to get a massive injection of cash with not so many strings.
Then, when you realize the Wanchain link is father to son, co-founder Bing Byington and ex Wanchain president, Dustin Byington, it further loses its appeal. So checking out the tech credentials on the team and it feels like they have just boosted their existing enterprise team with some blockchain expertise, mostly from Argentina in an attempt to get the existing product to look like a great token offering.
Their business is probably very strong, but they just don’t really strike me as a real blockchain contender with the right experienced blockchain people on board, or with an innovative product and they have limited real organic public hype past the first look everyone takes due to the Wanchain connection.
So the outlook for me is short neutral, and long-term neutral as well, the big private investors might do very well, but the crowdsale token holders are a very different matter.
Aergo - blockchain fuel for autonomous business
Same sector as our first player but basically once you get into the real detail, it feels like they are in a different operating league. A cynic might put this down to more professional hands running the ICO campaign, but for me it goes beyond that type of detail.
They too are looking to bridge the crossover between the enterprise sector and the public blockchain world, and underpinning their product is an existing developed tech offering. But that offering comes from project partner Blocko, which even though you may not have heard of is a very established player in Korea, and came through the SparkLabs incubator. In the last three years of developing enterprise private blockchain solutions, it seems to have a strong case history including Samsung (KS:005930), Lottecard and many other case histories using its coinstack technology.
It is providing the technology and team for the venture which seems to be wowing the ICO sector at present. And then on top of that, the offering is well thought out, looking to develop a platform that not only bridges the gap between private enterprise blockchain solutions but offers an easier way for existing developers to work within the framework. They are developing an active dApp environment and also basing their own coding language around SQL (which most enterprise software teams have as a core skill).
The blockchain will have a Deterministic Delegate Proof of Stake, which is similar in concept to the EOS network and means that token holders have voting power but it is not just the amount of token a player holds, but also how the community judges their ongoing involvement. Needless to say, great ideas but as EOS are showing, also with their own particular problems.
No self-respecting offering for speed and capability can even open shop without shouting chain on chain solutions, so of course, this is included, but they probably know what they are talking about rather than copy/pasting it into the white paper. But one note of caution here, they casually drop in the 1 million transactions per second in the middle of everything. Everyone is wary of such large unproved claims and, if anything, the inclusion is debatable here, as well as the reasoning behind claiming it.
The technical side of the project is divided into three sections, the Aergo chain, the Aergo Hub and the Aergo marketplace. The user cases quoted are far ranging and do demonstrate there is a large potential list of possible customers and sectors.
The team:
Aergo board - Phil Zamani, with time at Santander (MC:SAN) among others and Roderic Van Graeffe with time at Deutsche Bank (DE:DBKGn) and HSBC. Janel Lee and Alison Shim, previously from Accenture. And advisors a plenty, with also VC money involved there, with good pedigree.
The tech team as you dig in has an impressive working history in real blockchain solutions which is probably the most attractive feature in the project.
They have not performed airdrops or bounty yet, and their telegram channel appears to be organically growing as the word spreads, it is up to 24k and rising, The technical paper in full has not been released yet, it is supposed to be coming soon with the final token metrics and sale date for August.
The interest and natural hype for the project is immensely interesting, but obviously, the exact structuring of the token sale will have to be looked at carefully.
At this point, my outlook for short term potential is very bullish bearing in mind the above.
In the long term, my assessment would again be very positive, as the foundations are there for existing successful performers in the sector to go on to bigger and better things.
One note of caution is the centralization that may occur with the delegated proof of stake and how it will really run.
Honourable mentions this week go to Ukrainian collective OffLines, after we had the Hodl crew, out of Kyiv comes the Blockchain Hymn, a song dedicated to the Distributed ledger Technology workers.
Here is a link to the full version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPL1X2Xg678
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here should not be considered financial or investment advice, neither treated as an expression of Cryptovest’s view. Neither the author nor the publication takes any responsibility or liability for any investments, profits or losses you may incur as a result of this information.
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