Bluzelle recently finished up a very successful Initial Coin Offering, raising $19.5 million. This capital will allow them to start making moves in the space, where data storage for dApps (decentralized applications) is becoming all the more important as dApps begin to launch their platforms. With an estimated 20 billion connected devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020, there is going to be a large demand for data storage that currently isn’t there.
Bluzelle comes in by decentralizing data storage, offering anyone with a computer (node) the ability to host data. This allows for redundancy and cheaper storage offered by centralized providers (Oracle is the current market leader in data storage, also known as DBaaS [Database as a Service].) The ability for anyone to host offers better latency, so time to receive data is drastically reduced as a centralized provider are only in certain locations, as building a facility requires a large amount of capital and employees to maintain.
Bluzelle implements swarm technology to enable high throughput in performance, reliability, and scalability. Nodes in these swarms can go down without impacting performance, along with nodes leaving and entering the swarm. Bluzelle is a meta-swarm comprised of multiple swarms. Partial replication means that not every node in the network has a copy of the data — only the nodes within the leaf swarm delegated to that data replicate. This is one of the inherent differences between Bluzelle and traditional “blockchains”, which tend to be slow as everyone (100% of the nodes, so it doesn’t scale well) in the network has to verify a transaction or event. For more in-depth understanding on Bluzelle and how it functions, you can check out my previous article on them.
Bluzelle is headquartered in Singapore and has an office in Vancouver, Canada where they do most of their research and development. Singapore puts the team within a couple hour flight of a lot of key markets like Japan, Korea, and India. Bluzelle has a money service license in Canada, allowing them legally to handle money under Canadian FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Report and Analysis Center). Singapore has become a big spot in the Fin Tech industry and has welcomed many crypto asset and blockchain startups.
Bluzelle recently released it’s token and it has been listed on Binance, the worlds fastest growing and one of the most popular exchanges. This will allow for sufficient liquidity for those willing to purchase or sell the BLZ token. During the token sale, Bluzelle’s Telegram channel reached 27,000 members, despite doing no marketing unlike other ICOs that you just can’t seem to get away from their ads. It is clear, many people saw the value Bluzelle was bringing to the table.
One thing that differs for Bluzelle versus decentralized file storage is that Bluzelle is currently the only project out there in decentralized data storage, versus file storage which has numerous competitors like Storj, Siacoin, Filecoin, Maidsafe, and others looking to come into the space.
Key Partnerships
Ox – is an open (permissionless) protocol allowing for ERC20 tokens to be traded on the Ethereum blockchain, a decentralized exchange. Off-chain relay, on-chain settlement– in 0x protocol, orders are transported off-chain, vastly reducing gas costs and eliminating blockchain bloat. Bluzelle is building on top of Ox to offer relayers a standard consistent database service. Some of the projects building on Ox include District0x, Aragon, Status, Augur, and others.
Zilliqa– is a smart contract platform that looks to solve the current scaling issues faced by the industry (i.e. the number of transactions they are capable of processing per second is limited). Zilliqa looks to solve this by the idea of sharding – dividing the mining network into smaller shards each capable of processing transactions in parallel. This will allow Zilliqa to high throughput or thousands of transactions per second. Bluzelle and Zilliqa are collaborating to provide an integrated solution so users dApps with Zilliqa as the underlying blockchain can use Bluzelle for decentralized data storage.
Bee Token– is the first decentralized home-sharing network built on top of a set of Bee Protocols that connects hosts with guests without taking commissions like current provider AirBnB does. The Beenest dApp and the Bee Protocols are powered by the ERC-20 token. Bluzelle will work with Bee Token to be the underlying database solution for Bee Token customers.
On top of these three, Bluzelle is actively engaged with other great projects, so expect more announcements in the coming months.
Leadership
I’ve now had the pleasure of speaking with both Pavel Bains (co-founder & CEO) and Neeraj Murarka (co-founder & CTO). Both of whom are first generation Canadian Born and of Indian descent. They both bring a tremendous amount of value to space. I’ve never been a huge fan of ICOs (you can check out some of my qualms on them here), due to the fact many don’t really serve a purpose, outside of finding a problem, state a solution, and apply an ERC20 token to it with a white paper. Bluzelle was one of the few ICOs I really wanted to get into since they had a business plan that made sense and has a space that is in dire need of cheaper, more efficient data storage.
Unfortunately, I was unable to make the whitelist on the ICO (author note: I did buy Bluzelle tokens once they hit the exchanges).
This past week while I was on a Skype call with Neeraj, we discussed the post-ICO Bluzelle. When I said, “the ICO was probably chaotic” (as I’ve spoken with other teams that have done ICOs), Neeraj went onto say, “chaotic doesn’t even describe running an ICO.” This should be no shocker as an ICO is similar to an IPO, but you face the unknown of what happens if you get hacked, so stress levels are at all-time high. We discussed how Bluzelle bought as many of the domain names for “Bluzelle.xxx”, yet people still managed to get “Bluzelle.net”, where over $40,000 was sent to an unaffiliated Ethereum address with the token sale. This is why it is vital to always check domain names and make sure you are on the correct website.
The crypto asset markets are still resembling the Wild West. It took stock markets over 300 years to get to a point where regulation protected investors (the first stock exchange was the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, founded in 1602.). An interesting note on Bluzelle that I had previously not known until I talked to Neeraj, was the original founder of Ripple, Ryan Fudder, is an advisor to the project. It’s always good to see creators from other successful projects as an advisor to a team.
While discussing the ICO, Neeraj brought up how prior to the token sale, they hired white hat hackers to try to break into the token sale. They gave them a week and they failed to breach it. This shows a strong commitment by the Bluzelle team to ensure the safety of the participants partaking in the ICO, as we’ve seen many token sales have been hacked in previous months like Coindash, where their page was tampered with and the Ethereum address was changed.
Neeraj left me with a quote in regards to Bluzelle and their mission:
“With the explosion of devices (IoT, mobile apps, etc) that is currently happening in the world, particularly in the developing nations, there is going to be an exponential increase in the amount of data being generated to support these devices. There will be a need for consistently high performance, reliable, and scalable data storage services to manage all this data effectively. Centralized solutions are limited and not designed to handle the magnitude of these demands, and will be displaced with the advent of decentralized solutions such as Bluzelle, a leader in decentralized database storage services.”
Bluzelle is a project to keep your eye on throughout 2018 and the years following, time is their friend. Node by node, their network will become stronger allowing them to compete with the Oracles of the world. This could possibly be the case of the Innovators Dilemma. The more smart devices we add, the more potential Bluzelle will have of being a leader in data storage, as demand soars through the roof.
Disclaimer:
- This author currently owns some Bluzelle (BLZ)
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