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A. Introduction

WeBloc is a tokenized advertising alliance protocol built on top of ICON.

B. Industry

Advertising has been long existing ever since the beginning of human beings. In the old days, advertisements are mainly presented in physical forms. In the end of the 20th century, with the widespread of Internet, a number of new types of advertisements appeared, for example, interactive banners and push mail. The steep rise in the number of Internet users led to the great interest of offline and online companies in online advertising. The market scale also increased exponentially. According to the 2018 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report published by PwC, in 2017, the global digital advertising market has grown by 21% and reached $88 billion. However, the advertising market has been long plagued by the lack of transparency and the ambiguous pricing system. To solve this problem, WeBloc has proposed the idea of a tokenized advertising alliance protocol. Its main competitors in the advertising industry include Atlas Protocol incubated by Nebulas, javescript and BAT established by the founder of FireFox. WeBloc has no advantage either in terms of its progress or its technologies. (7)

C. Mode

Today’s advertising ecosystem is composed of institutions, advertising network, data management platform, supplier platform, real-time bidding system and etc. On one hand, the structure of the whole ecosystem is extremely complex. On the other hand, the profit distribution lacks transparency due to the heavy reliance on intermediary agencies. In addition, the intermediaries may carry out unnecessary publicity to attract more users and therefore receive more from the advertisers. This will lead to the unnecessary rise in product price. Besides, for non-target users, spams can easily arouse their antipathy toward these advertisements. To solve this pain point, WeBloc has proposed a simplified structure of the ecosystem. In this situation, there are only three roles in WeBloc’s ecosystem: advertisers that execute advertisements, media serving as a channel for matching and users participating in the ads. Participants can be both advertisers and media to make contribution for the spread of the ads. The incentive mechanism based on its tokens will support the formation of the advertising ecosystem. The profits of the media no longer depend on the advertising fees and are well guaranteed on the platform. New reward policy is also applied to encourage users to actively participate in the system. The eventual aim of WeBloc is to provide community-centered scalable advertising products.

The project’s token economy is based on its ecosystem. The total number of tokens is 10 billion. WeBloc has set a token inflation function in advance. Every time the number of users increases by 100,000, the inflation rate decreases by 0.5% in the form of Gaussian function. Tokens are used to incentivize the users in the ecosystem. Advertisers receive tokens for evaluating the activities and contribution of the media and users participating in the ads. Media receive rewards in accordance with its contribution and comments from other participants. Users received some nominal rewards for their participation in the ads and according to their contribution level on the ads. Meanwhile, WeBloc has also designed a Reputation System. Users can score the performance of advertisers and media. Then, there will be a total score with weight value. Part of the tokens will be deducted when the score comes lower than certain percentage. In addition, in the version 0.5 whitepaper, WeBloc designed two types of tokens: WIP pegged to fiat currency and WEB, a universal currency on the platform at floating prices. But in version 1.1, it cancelled the WIP token and only kept the WEB token. (6.5)

D. Technology

As the parent company of WeBloc has many years’ experience in advertising platforms, it has already developed a complete technical architecture. So, the main technical issue to be solved is how to construct the DApp together with ICON. However, this has not been explained in detail in the Version 1.1 whitepaper. It only mentions that it plans to interact with other communities built on ICON through ICON’s network, connect and expand to other public chain platforms through Interchain technologies, thus eventually covering the entire network. But in the version 0.5, it actually elaborated that it would deploy the LFT technology that supports BFT, which can provide fast-consensus without separation. User’s basic information would be encrypted with details stored on IPFS. The inconsistency in technologies and token economy of the two versions reveals that the project may have modified its development direction. Besides, WeBloc has not provided its GitHub link so far and is not open-sourced, which leaves its progress open to question. The roadmap in its whitepaper is focused on the fundraising sector, and neglects the implementation of technologies. (5.5)

E. Team

Ken Hong, CEO of WeBloc, had previously worked in NAVER as the leader of the search engine team for 11 years. Later, he founded Cauly, a mobile advertising service company. After the merger and acquisition of Cauly, Ken also worked as the executive director and advisor of several companies. He has certain influence in Korea’s entrepreneurial circle as well as the country’s Internet industry. Some well-known media also interviewed him, the records of which are available on Yahoo. James Baek, CTO of WeBloc, also worked previously at NAVER. He developed the blog and map services on NAVER. Then he joined Kakao and was responsible for the development of a voice recognition library. Later, he built a website sharing real-estate-related information. According to some online information, the company is at a standstill. There are 30 members listed on WeBloc’s website, most of which have detailed introduction and LinkedIn links. Obviously, the developers’ professional background is limited to ordinary Internet projects and lacks experience in blockchain development. (6.5)

F. Ecosystem

WeBloc is derived from FocusM, an advertising company. The company changed its name to Adforce Insight after the cooperation with ICON Foundation and started this project. WeBloc received a lot of support in Korea and has many domestic partners, including Loop, a blockchain solution provider, and Carry Protocol that bridges the gap between brick-and-mortar retail and consumers. As for its performance on social media, WeBlock joined Twitter in May, 2018. Till now, it has 326 tweets with 9,868 followers and 411 likes. WeBloc also has 2 groups on Telegram. One is for public discussion and has 19,359 members. The other is for news release and has 1,997 members. As a practical matter, currently, there are not many users involved in discussion. This may be due to the gap caused by token iteration. (7)

G. Conclusion

WeBloc itself is a DApp developed on ICON, the most popular blockchain platform across Korea. The nature of the project is to add blockchain-related elements into existing Internet projects and issue tokens in the later phase. This is the typical pattern of Korean projects. In the blockchain industry, there are already numerous outstanding decentralized advertising projects. In contrast, WeBloc has almost no advantage at all. But as a Korea-based project, its founder has certain influence in the country’s entrepreneurial circle. It may have certain achievements locally with ICON Foundation as its partner. From the perspective of mode and technology, WeBloc has broken two taboos for blockchain projects. It modified the token economy and largely cut the technology-related information, which means that although the appearance remains the same, the nature of the project has already changed. Besides, since WeBloc is not open-sourced and has not provided GitHub link, it is impossible to check its real progress. All this leads to a big question on the project’s technology development and mode.

Hype Score: Medium

Risk Score:Medium High

Expectation:Medium

Total Score: 6.5

All information in this article is provided for reference only and does not constitute investment advice.