In this post, I want to briefly outline the differences between Ambrosus and Waltonchain, while also pointing out key things to look for in the future to determine the quality of both companies. Like many of my previous posts, I hope to do this in a fair and reasonable way, without misrepresenting either company and their potential to continue growing and evolving into the future.

As a disclaimer, none of this should be considered as investment or financial advice. Please consult a professional before deciding upon investing in anything.

Setting things straight: The wildly different technological capabilities of Ambrosus and Waltonchain

To start, let’s take a very close look at Ambrosus and Waltonchain to really see what each company aspires to do, as well as what technologies the companies employ to do so:

Ambrosus:

As many are aware, Ambrosus is building a decentralised blockchain and IoT eco-system for the future of supply chain (and eventually data) management. What this means is that Ambrosus wishes to establish itself — first and foremost — as a leader in cutting edge smart supply chain management for all sorts of products: food, medicine, commodities, electronics, etc. What should be remembered is that supply chain management does not only involve basic track and trace capabilities: it also involves anti-counterfeiting measures as well as the quality assurance of products.

Ambrosus’ technological solutions center upon creating secure IoT devices, which can communicate with a blockchain in a precise and efficient manner. These devices are fit for a specific purpose depending on the client companies supply chain and their most pressing needs (track and trace, anti-counterfeiting, quality assurance — data optimization, etc). So from the outset, Ambrosus’ technological solution is not limited to one specific type of technology: it is in smart containers (as the recent interview with Stefan Meyer demonstrated), in smart devices, and in smart gateways. From previous articles also discussed, the solution additionally lies in sensors that monitor the composition — DNA, enzymes, pH levels, etc. — of certain products; in short biosensors as well. It should also be mentioned that the aforementioned anti-counterfeiting measures were discussed as a key priority of Stefan and the Innovation Laboratory, and as such they are looking into more cost-effective, and secure ways of printing labels (as well as 3D printing them).

The goal of Ambrosus (as apparent from their blog), is to leverage such expertise in IoT and blockchain to create an open system for companies, entrepreneurs, and app developers to make use of their tech and to ultimately expand upon it into further domains of the global economy. The desired result it seems is to first and foremost transform global supply chains and the movement of such goods around the globe, but in general the Ambrosus solution applies to broader data management practices as well.

Waltonchain:

Waltonchain explains that their own name is derived from the founder of RFID technology: Charlie Walton. This in itself should be a clear indicator of what the technological focus of Waltonchain is: RFID. Radio-Frequency-Identification technology is something that has existed for a long time, but has become much more cost and size effective in recent years. The main advantage that Waltonchain possesses is that they are capable of creating high tech RFID tags, which are cost-effective and cannot be found elsewhere.

More specifically, as the DistributedPost explains:

“Their [Waltonchains] RFID chips add all the data directly to the blockchain without any centralized party intervention. This technology is patented, which may not be looked highly upon by the open-source blockchain community, but it positions WaltonChain as the leader in this new VIoT space by creating reliable data, free from censorship and counterfeiting.”

In short, Waltonchain utilizes RFID tags to better allow communication between aspects of an object and a decentralised blockchain. The value of their system is that their RFID tags are cheap (as low as $0.05 cents) and also capable of interacting directly with a blockchain instead of needing to go through a centralized API of sorts.

The goal of the Waltonchain ecosystem is to leverage other projects (i.e. side chains) to use the same technology Waltonchain is offering, but in different industries. This will expand the use case of Waltonchain’s tags and ecosystem. The specific industrial focus of Waltonchain going into the future is in Clothing, Society, Public Utilities, Retail, and Manufacturing (Whitepaper page 48). Due to their geographical positioning within China, Waltonchain is mainly focused on working within China and the Chinese government, and has particularly emphasized their ability to help contribute towards the creation of future smart cities, specifically using a high tech air quality monitor which is currently under development.

The Main Difference: Technology

What distinguishes Ambrosus from Waltonchain is in the scope of their technology solutions. While Waltonchain has strictly limited itself to RFID technology, Ambrosus has expanded beyond RFID devices to more sophisticated and composition-focused IoT devices, such as Biosensors and smart containers. Both teams boast patents in their inventions, however to date, only Ambrosus possesses its own Innovation Laboratory whereby it can customarily build future IoT devices for specific supply chain problems.

This is not to detract from the useful solution Waltonchain has designed — rather it is to emphasize the fact that Ambrosus has a much wider scope of what kinds of smart devices they are capable of building. If one were to ‘zoom out’ and look at the bigger picture it is clear that the larger scope of Ambrosus is justified by a more ambitious and larger applicability: global food and pharmaceutical supply chain possess an indefinite number of minute variables that may be in need of quality assurance, anti-tampering design, or smart transportation — all such needs beyond the scopes of RFID tech.

Part 2: Tokeneconomics

Importantly, there is a clear difference between the different tokeneconomic systems that each company has created: for Ambrosus the AMB token is used as the blood of the ecosystem to upload and store all data in need of being put onto the blockchain. Through the innovative use of bundles (which can each store up around 16,000 Assets and Events), Ambrosus is capable of storing thousands of sensor readings on a blockchain every second.

Due to the fact that companies who use AMB-NET must pay $12 USD in Amber for each bundle of data that is stored on the network, a clear supply and demand model is created between the various masternodes brought onto the network. In such a scenario, assuming large scale network adoption, the various Masternodes stand to benefit greatly from this token consumption model (I should also add there are a number of community calculators out there as well that provide much more detailed analyses of these things to the best of my knowledge the best one is here).

For Waltonchain, the tokeneconomics is much less sophisticated: similar to other coins like NEO, Waltonchain holders benefit from network transactions as well as the use of child chains or the trading of child chain tokens. However no clear mention is provided for how much it will cost companies to use the Waltonchain ecosystem, nor where the data will be stored, nor who is allowed to upload data onto the network. Since it is also unclear how Waltonchain plans to address long-term scalability issues, (especially if there is no limit to who can store what on the network) a number of missing variables do not bode well for the long term viability of the Waltonchain tokeneconomic model. Without more clear information, it is difficult to evaluate the viability of the model.

Part 3: Different Types of Solution

Waltonchain has been around since November, 2016 whereas Ambrosus has only existed since around November 2017. Regardless of head start, there is little to suggest that Waltonchain is more developed at this stage of development than Ambrosus.

Below a clear graph aligns the two projects together as a comparison of their developments and accomplishments:

Altogether both projects have serious potential, however it would be unfair to say that they are currently equal in value: even though Ambrosus is barely a year old, it has developed a much more sophisticated ecosystem both in scope and depth of potential solution, when compared to the Waltonchain counterpart. Of course, this is open to change in the future depending on future developments, however as of now it should only be emphasized that Ambrosus is the most complete solution for industrial data management (blockchain and IoT) based on their clear prices, complete technological solutions, and large scope of applicability.