1. Project Name

Aergo

2. Link to your asset page on Binance Chain

https://explorer.binance.org/asset/AERGO-46B

3. Your name and position

Hunyoung Park, Board Member & CTO

4. A one-sentence pitch about your Project

Aergo is a fully open-source enterprise-ready blockchain operating platform that leverages and extends both public and private blockchain, and cloud architectures -- empowering enterprise companies with the scalable architecture they need to transform business and create new global networks.

5. What are you planning to achieve with your project?

We are developing the most practical and powerful platform for blockchain businesses.

Aergo aims to advance enterprise blockchain, the upcoming major technological trend in IT, by opening up a new era of mass-market usage of blockchain. An era where businesses can easily benefit from both public and private blockchain innovation, allowing them to focus on building, deploying and managing new services.

By being able to leverage and combine the different characteristics, found in public and private blockchains, enterprises and developers have maximum flexibility and choice, when designing innovative applications and services. Hosting everything on a secure distributed cloud network removes significant cost and other overheads faced by businesses when they typically establish their own physical infrastructure to run blockchain protocols and applications.

6. What is the team size now? Please list each core member of the Project team and outline their role and responsibilities. If any project member is involved in other projects, please clearly state their commitment and how they avoid conflict of interest.

The Aergo Foundation board has a total of 19 members, while our partnering firm Blocko provides 50 full-time personnel towards the buildout of both the platform and ecosystem.

Phil Zamani: Chairman & CEO

Hun-Young Park: CTO

Alison Shim: Committee Head

Kyung Tae Lee: Research and Development

Sung Jae Woo: Research and Development

Yun Woo Park: Research and Development

Pierre-Alain Ouvrard: Research and Development

Bernardino Ramos: Research and Development

Han Kim: Marketing & PR

Camron Miraftab: Business Development

Seona Kim: Business Development

Eddie Alleyn: Advisor

Julian Lenz: Advisor

Joon-Hong Jake Kim: Advisor

Djamel Souici: Advisor

Pierre F. Suhrcke: Advisor

Vincent Zhou: Advisor

Sinhae Lee: Advisor

7. Project Website

https://www.aergo.io/

8. Share a link to your project’s whitepaper

https://paper.aergo.io/AERGO_Whitepaper_v5.2.pdf

9. Share a link or image of your roadmap



10. Where are you right now in your roadmap?

We have already launched our mainnet and are actively developing the codebase further on a fully open-source basis. In terms of technology development, we are currently adding the SQL functionality to our public blockchain (it is currently only available for private deployments), developing our DAO system, developing our Merkle bridge functionality between Aergo and Ethereum as well as Aergo-based blockchains, and finally staking rewards. Blocko is building its advanced commercial product, Aergo Enterprise, based on the Aergo mainnet, and is currently testing it with clients.

On the business and ecosystem side, we are actively adding more clients to the network through our commercial partner Blocko. We are aggressively pursuing more ecosystem partners and are building out our governance participants of 23 block producers. Currently, we are operating with a total of 13 block producers. We see telcos as a prime candidate in this regard and are actively pursuing these kinds of companies.

11. What is the business model of the Project?

As explained in our whitepaper, Aergo is the blockchain software with support for lightning-fast smart contract execution that lets companies track data more securely, exchange assets and information with third-parties trustlessly, and through this, build new revenue streams and business models. The Aergo technology platform itself is completely open-source. It’s a permissionless architecture built for the community. However, integrators and partners will form for-profit venues for accessing Aergo using their own proprietary technology.

One example of this is Blocko, who introduced their Aergo Enterprise product which includes ready made identity, timestamping and document management applications that are easily accessed through orchestration technologies like Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Docker. There will be many more partners like this that appear, however Blocko would be the first and most notable one.

For most companies, they will not be building blockchain solutions all by themselves. They simply do not have the know how and the experience. This is why firms like Blocko will offer supporting consulting services on top of their products like Aergo Enterprise, offering to build projects on a contract-by-contract basis. Some examples of these are the identity management implementation they built for Lotte Card serving over 25 million users, the stock exchange system for Korea Exchange that saved them $78M in settlement costs, etc, all built on the core technology behind Aergo.

Finally, these firms would also provide technical support services - this means that on a 24/7/365 basis, they will be ready to fix any bugs, issues, or assist the customer with their systems.

12. What is the potential user base and market opportunity?

The World Economic Forum recently released a report that predicted that 10% of all of the world’s GDP will be stored on blockchain systems within the next 10 years.

This is the massive opportunity Aergo is going after, by transforming business from the ground up and allowing for the creation of new applications and services based on this revolutionary technology.

One of the existing blockchains deployed under the Aergo technology standard for Lotte Card boasts 25M end users. We expect hundreds of blockchains like this to run in the future, all secured by the Aergo mainnet.

Token Information & Economics

13. Token Name and Symbol

Aergo (AERGO-46B)

14. What is the primary use case of your token?

Transaction and smart contract fees when utilizing the Aergo main network. We expect many many thousands of smart contracts to run on Aergo as it has been built for global enterprise scale.

15. Where else can your token be used?

Staking: In order to secure the network, vote and manage block producers, as well as to support the underlying Aergo mainnet ecosystem, Aergo tokens need to be acquired and staked. For example, although there are a total of 500million Aergo tokens in existence, almost 150 million are reserved (i.e. in effect locked longer term) for ecosystem staking and support. There are currently just over 100 million Aergo tokens in true (not incorrectly coinmarketcap reported) circulation. We expect to have circa 200 million in circulation by end of this year. This would leave a total of 150 million tokens remaining for ALL future token users (forever!). Considering the huge target market potential of Aergo — these are likely to be in very high demand if we deliver on the promise of the Aergo project.

Provisioning nodes from node providers for private chains: Enabling and using extra third party compute resources (like storage and CPU bandwidth from a cloud service provider like Amazon AWS) are unlocked via Aergo tokens. We expect many thousands of businesses to deploy hybrid blockchain solutions in the years to come. Many of these (such as banks or governments) will elect to run part of these hybrid systems on Aergo private side-chains that are hosted by security compliant block producers (such as leading telecommunications or hosting firms that we are targeting with Aergo). These side chains will also need Aergo tokens to operate (and to be “anchored”) with the Aergo mainnet.

Technical support from Blocko: Obtaining integration, consulting or subscription support services from specific firms like Blocko to integrate, deploy and manage/support enterprise grade production deployments of Aergo requires Aergo tokens. As was mentioned in my last article, all of Blocko’s future services will be based on their new Aergo Enterprise product that requires Aergo tokens to work.

Aergo Marketplace: Enterprise clients will likely use the Aergo utility token to acquire extra application services from other third parties. For example, the future Aergo Marketplace may serve as a location and self-contained ecosystem for businesses to acquire and use dApp’s created on Aergo by professional developers. In effect, they may pay developers to use (i.e. licence) these applications in their production systems via Aergo utility tokens.

16. What is the total supply of your token?

500,000,000

17. What is the circulating supply of your token?

125,880,785.50

18. Please provide a breakdown of current token allocation.



19. Please provide a list of team wallets that hold your token.

Main: 0x19939C3463B3B9372607908aB6219D491c74511D

20. Please provide all lockups in place for any holders of the token.





21. Are you compliant in all jurisdictions that you service and operate in?

Yes.

22. Is the token currently running on any network other than Binance Chain? If yes, what is the swap/migration plan?

Currently, the Aergo token is available in ERC-20 format and mainnet coin format. Our innovative Merkle bridge to transfer between Aergo ERC-20 and Aergo mainnet coins will be available near the end of the year, however, until then, we have a swap service available at swap.aergo.io. We will provide a swap service to transfer between Aergo ERC-20 tokens and Aergo BEP2 tokens.

23. Is the token currently listed on any other exchange? What are they?

KuCoin, Upbit, Gopax, Korbit, Bittrex, BitMax, IDEX, Hotbit, Bilaxy.

Funds

24. Did you conduct an ICO or any type of fundraising? When was it?

We conducted a private token sale in August 2018. Our private token sale purchasers included Sequoia Capital China, Arrington XRP Capital, FBG Capital, and more.

25. How much in total did you raise?

$30,000,000

26. How much have you spent in total thus far? What have you spent these funds on?

So far, we’ve spent part of our 2019 budget and our 2018 spend, as per our last financial report. The total amount of funds used would amount to 6,128,464 USD. See the image below for more.



27. How much runway does your project require to ship the final product?

We have already built the core product, which is the Aergo blockchain kernel and we have launched the Aergo main network. The Aergo blockchain network and supporting technology kits are all available on our GitHub. Now, we are working on the UI, serverless cloud platform, and we are working with Blocko to optimize their customer-facing software systems. Our burn rate is relatively low due to our lean operations policy and due to the support from Blocko on many of our technical milestones.

28. What currency/coin/token do you plan to hold your funds in?

We hold most of our funds in USD, KRW, however, we also selectively hold some Bitcoin, Ether, and USDC assets.

29. What’s your coin storage/conversion policy? Do you only convert to fiat when you spend?

We utilize our banking partners to convert our limited USDC, Bitcoin, and Ether funds when needed. We do not only convert to fiat when we spend, in an effort to reduce volatility risk to the project’s financial standing.

30. How do you plan to publish your spending each month?

We regularly publish quarterly project updates with comprehensive and detailed spending information, as provided in the above table. Link to our latest QPU: https://paper.aergo.io/AERGO_QPUQ22019_1.0.0.pdf

31. Where are your funds stored? Please provide the addresses for public community tracking.

As we are already in quite an advanced state of development for our project with almost an entire year having passed since we completed our fundraise, most of our funds are stored in fiat bank accounts. We have a small, insignificant portion of funds in cryptocurrency for immediate crypto-related needs.

Development

32. What are the technological innovations of the project, if there are any?

SQL: Aergo introduces a new and more comprehensive way of accessing data in blockchains for developers and for businesses: the industrial standard relational model. Blockchains like Ethereum currently only support K/V (key-value) tore, but Aergo supports both RDMS (relational database management) as well as K/V store. What this means is that business logic to be defined through a SQL-like scripting language. Data structures can be created, manipulated, and accessed using traditional database programming practices. Business logic using this relational data model can be created and invoked in SQL. The familiar SQL interface supported by Aergo is intended to allow the blockchain protocol to support more developer-friendly methods for building applications and opens up the potential developer base for Aergo to a massive 8.5M+ business engineers — a pool of potential blockchain developers currently completely untapped.

High-performance and scalable architecture: Built from scratch, the Aergo blockchain kernel supports a maximum of 30,000 transactions per second on embedded sidechains, which run on our Leader-based Proof of Authority (LPOA) consensus mechanism. Our mainnet currently supports a maximum of ~13,000 transactions per second, providing the quality of services needed for business to use blockchain via their own dedicated blockchains at scale.

Hybrid system via Merkle Bridge architecture: Our novel Merkle Bridge architecture enables the fastest cross-chain communication yet, enabling hybrid blockchain smart contracts applications to truly shine. It can be considered in certain cases superior to other solutions like Cosmos’ Peggy.sol. Permissioned blockchains on Aergo can by default be embedded into the Aergo mainnet’s data structure as a branch, so bridging and anchoring are relatively simple, cost-effective, and fast. Through this, a programmer is able to write a very simple smart contract that is able to exchange data back and forth between the public and private parts of a hybrid blockchain application without ever leaving the comfort of their development environment.

33. Where are your code repositories located?

https://github.com/aergoio

34. Do you have any products or UI demos can you share publicly? Are any built by your community, as opposed to being in-house demos?

Wallet:





Here is a snippet of the Aergo Enterprise product being offered by Blocko:



You can find our mainnet block explorer here: http://mainnet.aergoscan.io

35. Do you plan to release weekly progress updates in this forum?

We can do that! We are always updating our community through Twitter and Telegram, and summarize our technology releases on GitHub here. We’re always keeping you up-to-date.

36. Do you plan to host monthly or bi-monthly video AMAs?

We host AMAs about every month, though when in advanced execution phases, we may space them out more. We will try our best to host as many AMAs as possible while still achieving the project’s milestones.

Competitors

37. Who do you view as your current competitors/peers?

We have an advantage over most crypto projects: we have been doing this for almost four years now. We have been in the enterprise blockchain sphere for long and through our partner Blocko, the Aergo technology has already been deployed across multiple enterprise-IT environments and is in large-scale production. Some examples: https://www.aergo.io/#featuredsolutions

So, we aren’t necessarily competing with other crypto projects. Our focus is on getting adoption among businesses which will lead to larger network effects. Partners of ours such as Blocko, where a lot of our team originated from, are actively driving adoption of the Aergo technology among businesses, via their own enterprise product based on the Aergo mainnet called Aergo Enterprise.

Our competition is essentially the larger IT vendors - who we really need to be concerned about - big incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, Amazon, and the rest of them.

Our peers would be companies with a similar vision and target to ours - LTO Network, Insolar, etc. These companies would only help grow the market even further for enterprise blockchain, which will only benefit us in the long run.

38. What is your project’s competitive advantage over existing or potential future solutions?

Performance, scalability, hybrid architecture, and our consulting expertise/knowhow. No other company really has as much experience as us in driving adoption of blockchain software on a large scale. We did this in Korea for five years now, and we are doing this globally with one of the most experienced sales teams around blockchain in the world. More than that, our solution has a number of technical advantages over competitive solutions in the same market such as SQL and hybrid architecture integration.