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“Scalable Blockchain…”

The Ardor project has been designed as a scalable “blockchain as a service” solution for businesses, designed by the same team that brought NXT to the world (Jelurida).

The NXT platform (on top of which Ardor has been built) was launched as an ICO in 2013, only raising around $6,000. Nonetheless, the system was completed and made live later that year.

Unfortunately, the support wasn’t great for NXT from the outset, with only several large names beginning to adopt it – most notably European bank BNP Paribas and Accenture Spain. This lead the team to consider reconfiguring their offer as a new product entirely.

The Ardor system was announced and presented through an ICO in late November 2017.

The system boasts a number of features, including the ability to create “child” chains, which essentially allows developers to obscure the entire Ardor system entirely (making it appear that they own the underlying technology)

Since the system has been designed by a central company, the technology is proprietary.

In an increasingly common move in the blockchain space, this not only means that the system is going to be reliant, but that the central company actually needs to be able to pay the various developers, representatives and advisers it may have. This puts a certain question to the system, in that in order for the company to actually create a profit – what is it going to do in terms of providing a paid-for service.

What is Ardor?

The most important feature of Ardor appears to be its child blockchain functionality.

Whilst the idea is nothing new, its implementation is. To date, no other company has been able to provide child blockchains to the system, although “side” chains have been created and are in operation.

Perhaps one of the more telling points of this is that Vitalik Buterin – Ethereum’s founder – recently announced a partnership with the creator of the Bitcoin Lightning Network to create a system called “Plasma” – providing “child chain” functionality to a core/root blockchain system (Ethereum). Many see Plasma’s announcement as being a direct response to Ardor.

The first child chain that Ardor is looking to provide is one called Ignis. What this does doesn’t really matter… what’s important is that it highlights the business model for the company behind Ardor – the development and deployment of various child blockchains onto a central chain.

They receive development fees and consultancy charges for their services in helping firms / businesses implement the likes of their own ICO etc.

Who created it?

Like the majority of other success crypto / blockchain systems, Jelurida is a real company backed by several legal entities in the likes of the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Jelurida consists of three full-time and two part-time developers as well as a managing director with background as a legal advisor.

It appears to have some of the most experienced people in the crypto scene – with Ardor being based on the solid, long-running NXT platform, it could be a dark horse in this space…

Kristina Kalcheva (Managing Director)

Legal specialist with 7 years’ experience working as a legal adviser.

Lior Yaffe (Managing Director)

Programming expert with experience dating back to when he was 13

Petko Petkov (Core Developer)

Software developer with experience with financial applications and games.

It must be stated that one of the most important things to remember about this company is they are completely transparent and do not hide behind pseudonyms etc.

Why does it exist?

As explained above, the main reason for Ardor’s existence is apparently to provide “service-level” functionality for companies who wish to harness blockchain technology for their own offerings. Perfect for the likes of ICO’s, it’s able to provide users with a range of features that basically allow them to run their apps as if they owned Ardor…

Ardor is a blockchain-as-a-service-platform that evolved from the time-tested Nxt blockchain. It is currently successfully running on a testnet and will be launched in Q4 2017. The unique parent-child chain architecture of Ardor, with a single security chain and multiple transactional chains, enables three fundamental advantages – reducing blockchain bloat, providing multiple transactional tokens, and hosting ready-to-use interconnected blockchains. To kickstart the Ardor project and allow it to compete with the rapidly-growing blockchain market, the development team behind Nxt and Ardor decided to conduct a crowdsale for 50 % of IGNIS – the token of Ignis, the first Ardor child chain. Jelurida will be the corporate entity that will be responsible for the development of Ardor and Nxt platform.

You can see the Whitepaper here.

Trajectory

The most important consideration with this is that it’s designed to be a cross between a platform and service. This is important, as it’s rarely been done before in the blockchain world.

A platform is basically a way for other developers to utilize the technology of the system directly. They can typically do this through the creation & deployment of decentralized applications (dApps) – as is the case with such systems as Ethereum.

The difference with a service is that whilst a similar principle to a platform, ALL of the infrastructure layer for the system is covered up – people are essentially able to launch their own crypto tokens without even mentioning the Ardor system on which they have been built.

The reason why this works well is because when you’re looking at designing a new system which needs to run entirely on top of the Ardor platform, you’re able to do so without having to surrender any of the potential branding and merchandising opportunities present with running your own system entirely.

As mentioned, not many service based systems actually exist in the blockchain world – with one of the few being offered by Microsoft. The reality is that if you’re going to do something like Ardor, you need to be sure that A) the system works as intended and B) it actually delivers a result far greater than anything that exists presently. If you can do that, the thing has a chance of becoming adopted.

To this end, the way to measure the adoption of the Ardor platform is to consider how many people are actually developing solutions on top of it. This should be displayed with large market cap, and relatively low coin price (remember – platforms need volume more than a large individual transaction price).

For this, there are several things Ardor have done well, and one they have done incorrectly.

Here’s how it looks:

The Team Behind The System Seems Legitimate

Designed by a registered company, the team behind the system are both legitimate and professional – having already delivered a scalable solution (NXT).

Consequently, if you’re interested in putting money into the coins of this system, you need to consider the people who’ve actually built and continue to support it.

The Product Seems Stable & Effective

The most important aspect of this system is that it appears stable and effective. The reason for this is that if you’re looking to utilize the service to run your own blockchain application / system, you need to be sure in what you’re actually going to get.

Indeed, one of the virtues of running the likes of Ethereum is that its system is robust and able to provide the most effective way to help developers produce their own decentralized applications.

There’s No “Killer Feature”

The underpin of this is that whenever you design a new technology system, what determines its success is the creation of a “killer feature”.

A killer feature is basically something you can do with this system but not with others. Bitcoin is a “currency”; Ethereum offers “smart contracts“… what does Ardor actually deliver? If you can’t state it in 5 or fewer words, it doesn’t have one yet.

If you’re considering buying into this coin with the hope of seeing a profit, the reality is that the honeymoon period is starting to wear off, and thus its price will likely start to experience volatility.

One of the major patterns you see in the crypto market is exactly what’s seen in every other market in the world – people getting hyped about a new idea or product and then losing interest after two weeks. But let’s see how Ardor will do in the future.