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A. Introduction

Inter-chain service infrastructure and protocol.

B. Industry

With the rapid development of blockchain industry, a variety of public chains, sidechains and DApps on top of the public chains have shown up on the market. However, currently, the existing inter-chain technologies are mainly designed to provide interoperability among existing blockchains and focus on token value transfer. It is still difficult to exchange information or tokens directly between different chains. The first consortium chains, such as Hyperledger Fabric and R3 Corda, have tried to make blockchain technologies more suitable for enterprises by building a private chain for each company in the consortium and linking all the private chains with a public chain. However, due to the lack of incentive mechanism and highly efficient consensus mechanism, in this situation, it usually takes a very long time to reach consensus off the chain. The off-chain management mode is also of low efficiency. As a Blockchain 3.0 project, Cosmos expects to build an ecosystem that separates tokens from chains via multi-chain and multi-token integration. Technically, Cosmos has proposed an inter-blockchain messaging protocol to carry out inter-chain token transfer. The network of Cosmos has shown a number of advantages such as diversity, security and autonomy, especially security during integration.

Today, the major projects focusing on inter-chain technologies include Aion, Polkadot and Cosmos. Aion aims to build a multi-tier blockchain network based on inter-chain protocol. The network is supposed to be of interoperability, scalability and be able to perform inter-chain data transmission and value transfer. The project is very innovative in terms of its design of multi-tier network, high-performance virtual machine and consensus mechanism. Aion has already implemented the basic functions of its mainnet. Polkadot is dedicated to the development of parachains. It enables developers and enterprises to build blockchains with other protocols. As long as the parachains are built on Polkadot, they will share the same Proof of Authority consensus. Since this type of consensus is embedded in Polkadot, developers can concentrate on the development of their distinctive features. All parachains are seamlessly connected to a universal blockchain called Relay Chain. The latter acts as a bridge between all parachains. There are quite a lot of inter-chain projects on the market now. As a derivation of Cosmos, IRIS Network does not have much advantage in either progress or technology. (8)

C. Mode

The project plans to connect the IRIS Hub to the Cosmos Hub as one of its regional hubs. In this way, all nodes connected to the IRIS Hub can interact with other zones in the Cosmos Network via an inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol. At the same time, IRIS network will help Cosmos to build its blockchain infrastructure and provides IRIS Services (iServices). iServices intend to bridge the gap between the blockchain world and the conventional business application world, by mediating a complete lifecycle of off-chain services — from definition, provider registration, to governance. There are three roles in the network: consumers, profilers and providers who act as adapters for public chains, consortium chains and the business logic in enterprises’ current systems. The advantage of IRIS is that only very little data is executed on the chain, which improves the transaction confirmation speed and better protects data privacy. In the future, this technology can be applied to distributed AI-based private data protection, medical data protection and etc. As for token economy, the project has designed two types of fee token: network fee token and transaction fee token. Network fee token is for spam-prevention and payment to validators in maintaining the ledger; transaction fee token is used for payment to service providers who deploy iServices. (7)

D. Technology

Since IRIS Network is designed on top of Cosmos/Tendermint, it would be better to first take a look at Cosmos and Tendermint to be able to make a summarize over them. The vision of Cosmos is to build an Internet of blockchain formed by many independent blockchains. In this network, every zone is backed by classical BFT consensus protocols like Tendermint. Tendermint aims to provide a high-performance, consistent and secure consensus engine. Communication between different zones is achieved via virtual UDP or TCP messaging protocol for blockchains. Tokens can be transferred from one zone to another through the Cosmos system. In contrast, the main aims of IRIS network are to address the integration and collaboration of off-chain computing and resources on a distributed ledger and the interoperability of the services across heterogeneous chains. With the flexible Tendermint protocol, IRIS has defined a set of service infrastructure transaction types including service supply, consumption and governance. As most business logic is not suitable for smart contracts on blockchains, we are using this service to move the unsuitable logics and transaction processing off the main blockchain and leveraging smart contracts on blockchains to confirm the results generated on the sidechain. As for inter-chain communication, IRIS has designed its own semantics based on Cosmos’ IBC protocol, enabling inter-chain computation by using IBC protocol. In a nutshell, the aim of Cosmos is inter-chain token transfer, while IRIS has evolved on this basis and enables transmission of more things between different blockchains. As of the report, the project has already uploaded its main codes on GitHub since last December. At present, it is still at the first stage and focuses on building and operating the IRIS Hub. It plans to release an initial version for the mobile client of the IRIS network and collaborate with 1–2 ecosystem partners to release iServices on IRIS Hub. (7.5)

E. Ecosystem

At present, IRIS Network has only 740 members in its Telegram group and almost no discussion. It has 2,087 followers on Twitter and has published 105 tweets so far, with few comments or forwards. As for China-based communities, although it has opened accounts on Microblog and WeChat, both have few followers. Generally speaking, the project is of low popularity. But the development cycle is rather long. It will not be connected to the Cosmos Hub or Ethereum before the middle of 2019, and the whole project is expected to be implemented after 2020. Therefore, its poor ecosystem at the current stage is also understandable. However, long development cycle can also lead to huge instability in the long term. (7)

F. Team

The core development team of IRIS comes from BIANJIE.AI, a startup founded in 2016. This company is dedicated to build smart services for blockchain by leveraging distributed AI technology. The team has 4 co-founders, all with experience of 10+ years in the top companies in the industry. In addition, IRIS network also has a powerful advisory team, including senior executives from Cosmos, experts in IoT and mobile software. Generally speaking, the information of its team members and advisors in the whitepaper is consistent with the profiles on LinkedIn. However, although the team shows a solid technical background, no marketing or management staff has been mentioned in its whitepaper so far. (8)

G. Conclusion

Technically speaking, IRIS network is a derivation of the Cosmos Network, so it relies heavily on the development progress of Cosmos. At present, there are many competing projects that mainly focus on inter-chain technologies. Since Cosmos does not have any overwhelming advantage, IRIS Network also faces some risks regarding its market share as a derivation of Cosmos. The advantage of the project is that it is based on a reliable consortium chain, with founders of solid background. It is backed by Wancloud blockchain and has some good interpersonal connections in the industry. It has received investment from some well-known institutions and has a clear business model. However, the problem is that currently, the ecosystem of the project is quite poor. Neither its beta version nor the official version generated much influence on the market. Although the project is a long-term one, if Cosmos cannot be successfully implemented, the R&D and implementation of IRIS will also be affected. Overall, the project is not very promising.

Hype Score: Medium High

Risk Score:Medium

Expectation:High

Total Score: 7.5

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