CommerceBlock ICO: Using the BIP Protocol to Make the Decentralized Business Suite of the Future

The “bank-killer” of Initial Coin Offerings is almost upon us, as the CommerceBlock ICO is set to go live on November 28th, 2017.

If you read the CB whitepaper, you’ll know it’s no stretch to say the CommerceBlock platform could power business—all business, literally—in the not so distant future.

This is one of the most tech-sexy, under-the-radar ICOs on the horizon. For that reason, today CryptoAnalyst will be bringing you an overview of this platform and an exclusive interview with the project’s CEO, Nicholas Gregory.

What is CommerceBlock?

In the simplest terms, CommerceBlock is a decentralized business suite backed by Bitcoin Improvement Protocol (BIP) 175.

The CB team drafted up BIP175 just this year by combining elements of BIP-0032 and BIP-0043. Accordingly, the team’s ICO will be the first to be implemented on BIP175.

Thanks to this unique innovation, the CommerceBlock platform will be able to associate smart contracts with escrowed cryptocurrency addresses (e.g. Bitcoin) while allowing only client-side visibility into the specs of these contracts.

This dynamic is significant, as it obliterates a previous impediment that Big Business faced in using blockchains, namely putting private data on a public chain. Now, courtesy of CommerceBlock’s cutting-edge design, businesses can have data validated one-way on a public chain both safely and easily.

What can the CommerceBlock business suite do?

The suite is an all-in-one, whatever-you-need kind of deal, allowing for all kind of general perks:

facilitate trust-minimized trades

decentralized and streamlined contract executions

placing derivatives on-chain

issue asset-backed tokens on public chains

But this is just where the possibilities begin. CB’s products look extremely interesting, too:

chain-agnostic SDKs and APIs for unparalleled customization

pre-packaged trade flow templates for trade management

Enterprise-grade toolkit integrations for Big Business customers

And the integration capabilities are attractive:

the team’s integrated a slew of popular third-party standards in security, identity, and storage into the platform

https://twitter.com/commerceblock/status/923448650000404480

Truly, a network for financial applications

When it comes down to it, CommerceBlock is the ultimate network for financial applications.

The possibilities of these applications are endless, as the CommerceBlock blog points out:

“Networks of federated sidechains will also emerge, allowing assets of all types to be traded and collateralized against one another. For example, hedge fund shares on one federated sidechain could be atomically swapped for equity or debt in commercial real estate on another while using a modified version of BIP 175.”

What are the specs of the CommerceBlock ICO?

First off, the CommerceBlock platform and its underlying products are already completed, so the CB ICO has that going for it.

The technical specs of the ICO are as follows:

Dates: 2017-11-28 – 2017-12-19

Token: CBT (used for fees on the platform)

Price: 1 CBT = 0.0624 USD

Platform: Ethereum

Accepting: BTC, ETH

Soft cap: 2,000,000 USD

Hard cap: 25,000,000 USD

Supply: 1,000,000,000 CBT

Implications

Ideally, the CB team hopes that their network will eventually replace banks, or at least help to replace them.

For now, their use of BIP175 will help for verifying transactions in banking.

And their platform, again, is cross-compatible with any cryptocurrency so doesn’t require any new infrastructure for banks.

As such, we here at CryptoAnalyst think CommerceBlock could have explosive investment potential in the mid- and long-term.

Indeed, as the CB white paper puts it, a bona fide ecosystem could be on the verge of sprouting:

Companies that download our SDKs will be fully integrated with CBTs out of the box. By building a self sustaining ecosystem of companies that accept CBTs, an emergent network of developers will be incentivized to improve upon and help maintain the open source libraries that CommerceBlock releases.”

TLDR: The CommerceBlock ICO is almost here, so the CB platform’s ability to disrupt all business as we know it shouldn’t be lost on you. This “big picture” business suite will change the world.

And now it’s time for our exclusive interview with CommerceBlock CEO Nicholas Gregory. Nicholas, who’s talking with us from London, was happy to answer our questions.

Thanks so much for being with us today Nicholas. Let’s get to it!

1) In a recent CommerceBlock blog post, your team talked about one potential use-case for CB’s federated side-chain dynamic being a fund management protocol. You envision this utility revolutionizing hedge and private equity funds, or something a little more modest—at least in the short-term?

(NG): Most of our network is built around the concept of federated side chains. These are chains pegged to any currency, “most likely” on bitcoin. We believe this is an appropriate place to run smart contracts as they are “off-chain” and don’t incur expensive and unsustainable gas costs. They are essentially controlled using multiple signatures. This would create an environment to easily create any fund of sorts. 3 keys would be used to manage the side chain. Key 1 for fund, Key 2 for client, key 3 for custodian (back-up). The key thing is a fund would have control over how the tokens of the fund are traded as they have 1 key to ensure KYC/AML, etc. The goal here is that transparency is provided. We truly believe this will revolutionize the fund industry and create other industries in this space.

2) In CommerceBlock’s whitepaper, your team states, “We have submitted a draft BIP for approval.” Any word on the status of this draft?

(NG): Our BIP has since been released. If you google BIP 175, you can find the BIP and see that the authors are CommerceBlock. We have a 2 year period that that BIP 175 is in industry.

3) For entities that don’t want to run their own infrastructure, your whitepaper states clients can interact with CB using “paid-access APIs.” Could you speak a little bit on what your payment process will look like for business customers?

(NG): We are raising the finance for this token sale to run the hardware for this network. The code will be open-source. However, dedicated servers run by CommerceBlock will provide the services for clients. It’s important to remember that this is a network and and other service providers can join the CommerceBlock network. Clients will use CBTs to execute services. Other infrastructure companies can join the network and earn CBTs. Others can compete with CommerceBlock. CommerceBlock is essentially software – it will provide all the tools to be part of and join the network.

4) CommerceBlock will have chain-agnostic APIs and SDKs. Do you think this kind of “agnosticism” is the future of the crypto industry?

(NG): Short-term,yes. This is because the ecosystem is new and many different coins / networks exist. Long-term, no. I believe the natural flow of systems is layered. Where are we today with the internet? It’s essentially layerings of network protocols. Over time this will happen in the crypto currency ecosystem. This is why at CommerceBlock we believe in federated side chains and BIP175.

5) What proprietary element of CommerceBlock are you most excited about personally?





Like this: Like Loading...

William Peaster William M. Peaster is a cryptocurrency journalist and copy-editor based out of El Paso, Texas. He's an avid fan of Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens, and smart contracts in general.

The combination of BIP 175 and layer-2 solutions like federated side chains. Crypto is brilliant. However, when it comes to B2B and mainstream adoption there has been no coherent strategy. Big companies have focused on initiatives like R3 and Hyperledger, and this is like building intranets in the 90s. In the open-source world, we have seen things like EOS or Tezos, interesting ideas, but it’s overkill to created new protocols when we have working crypto like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and others. The CommerceBlock solution brings crypto to the mainstream immediately. BIP175 bridges private data to crypto contracts. Federated idechains bring a logical solution to executing business in tandem with a cryptocurrency transaction.