Since the creation of bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto’s introduction of a truly decentralized, peer to peer monetary transactional blockchain system; Many people have leveraged such technology to use it for far more things than monetary transactions. Ethereum introduced smart contracts, NEO the smart economy, and EOS a Delegated Proof Of Stake consensus.

Big projects have been focusing on blockchain protocols so that other smaller projects can build upon their infrastructure within their platform. For example, Binance (BNB), Tron (TRX), and OmiseGo (OMG) take advantage of Ethereums smart contracts and leverage the ERC20 token standard in their favor for their token respective functionalities.

NEO has a similar standard called the NEP5. Projects such as Red Pulse (RPX), Deep Brain Chain (DBC) and Ontology (ONT) use it to build their solutions and vision. If some blockchain projects are trying to cut out the middleman, how can they build a truly decentralized and trustless network?

Introducing Ontology

Ontology is a public platform founded by the Onchain team in China. They used the NEO blockchain platform for their ICO and was launched back in 2017. Their token has increased in valuation by >3000% since ICO, making it one of the top cryptocurrency performers of 2018. ONT is their native token and can be traded on Huobi pro, Okex, and Upbit exchanges. Ontology is focusing on the trust issue, as well as building a platform that works on distributed identity verification, data exchange, data collaboration, procedure protocols, communities, attestation, and various industry-specific modules. Their revolutionary Verifiable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (VBFT) has tackled a lot of scalable problems inside the blockchain world.

Case study

For a team of developers without previous experience in the blockchain, it is really hard to implement their platform to a trustless network. The big issue with nowadays centralized networks is privacy issues, monopolization of data, and identity authentication. Ontology is solving all those issues within a decentralized and trustless platform. Since the Ontology network can be customizable, giant tech companies can leverage this blockchain to authenticate users identity and ownership. For example, Linkedin will be able to use Ontology to use it to verify identities of users and trust the verification within a decentralized network.

In Ontologys terms:

“Ontology is a blockchain/distributed ledger network which combines a distributed identity system, distributed data exchange, distributed data collaboration, distributed procedure protocols, distributed communities, distributed attestation, and various industry-specific modules. Together this builds the infrastructure for a peer-to-peer trust network which is cross-chain, cross-system, cross-industry, cross-application, and cross-device.”

The Ontology trust network works as follows

The first chain verifies identities of people, their wealth, organization, and ownership.

The second chain verifies everything and links the information together

The third chain Verifies and link modules, protocols, SDK’s and API’s.

The last chain links all the previous chains together.

Ontology Native Token (ONT)

ONT was launched to the public late 2017. Their ICO selling price was $0.2 and now is traded at $9 with a market cap of $1 Billion. Their stellar performance and promising project has seen the stock increase by a whopping >3000% in just a few months! Huobi Pro, Okex, and Upbit exchanges let user trade BTC/ ONT, USDT/ONT, and ETH/ONT. There will be a supply limit of 1 billion ONT and as an ONT token holder, you will receive ONT Gas as dividends. The token functionality is similar to NEOs for governance and utility within the platform.

Consensus

ONT uses the Verifiable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (VBFT) which is a new consensus algorithm that combines Proof of Stake (PoS), VRF (Verifiable Random Function), and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT).

“With VBFT, Ontology nodes first apply for participation in network consensus by placing a stake. Then, by using a verifiable random number, several nodes are selected from among all the consensus nodes. The selected nodes take the responsibility to propose, verify, and vote for a new block(s). “ (ONT Team).

Ontology seems to be working on an ambitious project that has the backing of NEO and a global community. Really interesting project to keep an eye on in 2018.

*Disclaimer, this is in no way a trading advice. The information provided above should be used for research purposes before investing. Cryptocurrencies can be volatile, please learn about the projects you are looking to invest in and do due diligence just like any other investment.