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Introduction

True, blockchain promises to be the foundation of a decentralized economy. Leveraging on existing infrastructure, that is web 2.0, blockchain is the next web 3.0, which analysts reckon will change the world. Indeed, in a world where there is increasing awareness and the demand for privacy, transparency and elimination of borders ever rising, blockchain could, in theory, be the panacea for all these shortcomings.

However, there is a problem. To tick all these boxes and meet the needs of users, Blockchain must solve scalability. Of course, from the blockchain trilemma, it’s all about choices and the Internet of Services (IOS/IOST) platform chose to address scalability. Scalability is a bugging and hugely limiting concern. Think about it, Ethereum works with a throughput of 15 TPS, Bitcoin at 7 TPS and Visa, a centralized platform clears transactions at 24,000 TPS.

About IOST

As aforementioned, it’s all about choices and to that end, IOST chose the Proof-of-Believability as their preferred consensus algorithm. In theory, this architecture will present a throughput of 100,000 TPS. At these rates, the network is truly scalable as it can handle demanding operations requiring tremendous on-chain capacities.

IOST, if anything, presents a truly scalable blockchain that is a perfect response to a hurdle that most public chains are doing their best to come up with fitting solutions to. As a result, and to make this possible, IOST is implementing an array of technologies including a different consensus algorithm in Proof-of-Believability, introducing Micro State blocks technology and distributed sharding technology.

Because of Micro State Blocks technology, the IOST platform is leaner, faster and importantly efficient when it comes to demand for storage, processing power and other basic configurations.

Additionally, IOST settled for the Byzantine Shard Atomic Commit (Atomix) protocol for security purposes arresting attempts of double spends while blending this with a truly open source and transparent network that is effectively the true “truth” platform where all and sundry can participate in validating transactions.

Team

Helping harness the true power of the blockchain is Jimmy Zhong, the co-founder and CEO. He is insanely passionate about startups and creating new things. Before IOST, he was the founder and CTO at Studypool (500 startups batch 11), an online academic platform that assists students to get help with their academic questions.

Besides, he is the CEO and Founder of Dora. Dora is a technology-driven company(Series B) that focuses on developing intelligent kiosks/hardware and blockchain technologies.

Meanwhile, Terrence Wang is the CTO and co-founder bringing with him skills from Uber where he was their software engineer. Justin Li is also another co-founder and CIO. Justin is experienced in investment banking with stints at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Deloitte. Other co-founders include Ray Xiao, the COO, Sa Wang, the CMO, and Kevin Tan, the CDO.

Advisors include Yusen Dai who is a partner with ZhenFund and the co-founder of Jumei. Then there is Ryan Bubinski the co-founder of Codecacademy, Robert Neivert who is the COO at Private Me and Jia Tian the investor at BitFinex and a limited partner at BitFund. Others include Bman Lee as well as Michael Karnjanaprakorn.

Roadmap

The idea of IOST was conceived in Q2 2017 but it wasn’t until Q4 2017 that development began. In Q1 2018, the first MVP Test Net in Apollo Version 1 was launched. A few months later in Q2 2018, Janus version 1 where there was implementation and testing of EDS and PoB on Test Net was completed.

By the end of the year, the IOST smart contract draft document had been released and deployment and testing of HUDS and supporting modules completed on Test Net. There was progress in 2019 as the deployment of IOS Virtual Machine on Test Net and auditing the network.

However, the real deal is the release of the next work in Q3 2019 and the launching of dApps with the optimization of machine learning on the network by the close of the year.

Partnerships

Not surprising the IOST ecosystem is diverse, involving heavy weights. With an ecosystem made up of wallet integrating partners as Monarch, Huobi Wallets, COBO, Trust Wallet, Magnum Wallet and others, crypto exchanges for investment or trading purposes as Huobi, Binance, Bittrex, Bithumb, OkEx, Bitfinex and UpBit, an activel dApp gaming protocol, application of the Beam protocol and many others, IOST is rich.

Perhaps making this possible is a IOST Partner voting portal allowing public participation in their governance. With a voice, IOST token holders can elect their preferred Node Partners. Their objective is to on-board more than 500 Node Partners in 2019.

Partners aside, a visible development is the Bluehill incubator and accelerator program under their management. With a $50 million kitty, IOST is seeking to somehow emulate what Ethereum did with ConsenSys. Bluehill backs IOST partnerships and all the projects built in the IOST ecosystem. Then there is Theseus, Research and Development team developed under IOST funded by among others ZhenFund and K2VC.



Tokenomics

The IOST is a utility token based off Ethereum complying with the ERC-20 standard. In total there are 21 billion IOST tokens in circulation and the team set aside 40 percent of all these for public investment. During the crowd sale, the hard cap was set at 35,000 ETH or $31.26 million in USD terms.

The ICO was a success and the team reached the hard cap, raising 100 percent of the amount at $0.01 per IOST. The ICO was split into three phases. In stage one, for every ETH invested, one would receive 200k IOST tokens, in Phase 2, every ETH brought in 150k tokens and in the final section, every ETH brought in 100k IOST tokens for the investor.

35 percent of all IOST are held by the IOS Foundation and will be used for development and ecosystem building. Meanwhile, 12.5 percent will go towards incentivizing the community and 10 percent to the team. The remaining 2.5 percent is set aside for advisors and early investors.

At the time of writing, IOST had a market cap of $158 million from the 12 billion IOST tokens in circulation. By trading at $0.013, IOST daily trading volumes exceed $36 million. Relative to the USD, ROI is 1.36, 3.8 against ETH and 1.67 versus BTC.

Short Term Catalysts

That there has been a high social media activity around IOST is an understatement. IOST has been breaking the inter webs. For a simple reason that in the short term will influence the pricing of the ecosystem in the short to medium term.

The network completed a two-round mainnet token burn even where $55 million worth of IOST were destroyed. Presently, token swap is in progress as leading exchanges as Binance, Huobi, UpBit and other exchange partners supporting the migration.

But that’s not all. There are over 200 node partners and IOST is doing everything they can to make storage, staking or hodling of IOST tokens a safe affair by joining hands with several wallet providers.

By Q1 2019, the platform became the fourth most playable public chain thanks to the scalability enabled by PoS and Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism in place that makes the network scalable.

Active dapps on IOST:

Because of their mission, it is estimated that a game is launched every week in the IOST network making it truly playable helping Jimmy Zhong carve out a niche. Rather than quantity, Zhong is opting for quality.

Therefore, IOST is working with a select number of game developers instead of funding loads of inexperienced teams to boost their dApp ecosystem:

“Real games will come to the blockchain, but we know using a blockchain won’t make a boring game interesting. Tokenized items aren’t interesting on their own. The number of dapps running on IOST doesn’t bother me at all. 100, 300, 500? I’d prefer to have 15–20 of high quality.”

Following the launch of cross chain stable coin, iUSD, that is interoperable and pegged to PAX, GUSD, DAI, TrueUSD and CircleUSD, IOST has launched the IOSTCash, a “free-to-use dApp built on the IOST platform that pays out IOST for completing quick surveys/polls.”

Overly, there are some interesting developments in the pipeline by close of the year and all will one way or another positively influence the price of IOST tokens.



Long Term Catalysts

Leveraging on their scalability guaranteeing Proof-of-Believability, the IOST ecosystem is growing as they strike partnership with heavy weights. In the long run though, some high level partnerships will boost IOST prices. Through their collaboration with Origo, there is better privacy and security for dApps while BitUniverse introduces a new way of trading and managing assets including IOST.

Then again, with Xangle, which provide institutional grade crypto reports for top-tier financial institutions, the path of least resistance for the token will be northwards.

Complementing this is the recent announcement that IOST is indeed a Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) at Amazon Web Service. It is further enhanced by their partnership deal with the Enterprise Singapore and Hashed Venture Labs where the express purpose is to grow and develop the dApp and blockchain arena in Singapore.

Add that to their collaboration with Ok Pool where there are 50 million IOST staked in their voting program. Excitement is visible because staking IOST is a lucrative event since average staking yield is 12.34 percent with average stake ratio of 32.48 percent. On the gaming front, their leaning towards quality means they shall launch a dApp pipeline. Gomoku, the first game of its kind launched by AI Tech, will launch in July.

Enjoy #DeFi with the Best Prices across Exchanges

Peer to Peer, No KYC, Audited and Insured Smart Contracts