Zebi is a blockchain project that already has a working product that is being used, not just by industrial investors, but governments, Zebi is founded by a group of very smart people from Oxford, MIT, Stanford and IIT and their resumes include previous senior positions in Google, Uber, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.

Zebi is a very new coin, it only launched on the markets about 2 weeks ago and is not listed on any of the big exchanges yet. The token price is still very low and a very attractive entry point, I think this is a coin that undervalued and under-recognised, and has the potential to explode in the near future.

Zebi describes itself as “blockchaining India’s big data”. What does this actually mean?

Many times when we think of the term “big data”, we think of storing large volumes of data. But actually the term “big data” actually means a little bit more than that. I like SAS’s definition of big data and let me read it out to you.

“Big data is a term that describes the large volume of data — both structured and unstructured — that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. But it’s not the amount of data that’s important. It’s what organizations do with the data that matters. Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves.”

So big data is not just the storage of large volume of information, it is also the processing and retrieving of information. Think of it as not just having a library, but having a library and librarian.

India is a country that is growing very fast, both in terms of numbers and technology. Currently they have 1.34 billion people of which 1 billion have digital identities. They have 800 million digital natives and 462 million internet users, which makes them the second biggest internet user base in the world after China.

However, the digital infrastructure of big data is struggling to keep up with the growth. As a result of problems are arising

Data leaks.

Just last year in 2017, there were multi-million dollar leaks of personal information from both mega cooperations as well as the government themselves. Data security is a major issue.

2. The next problem is Data tampering.

60–70% of all Indian court cases are disputes over land titles. Imagine that! In Western world, we find it hard to imagine why there is a dispute in the first place, because there should be a title deed clearly pointing out who owns the land. But in India the data is not secure and people tamper with the data, even government and claim they own the land. That’s crazy right? But it’s happening and 60–70% of all court cases are land disputes, it’s an enormous burden on their judicial system.

3. Data Hacks

Another problem that is happening is Data hacks, this is pure hacking to steal funds and Equifax lost an astronomical $4 billion from hacks.

4. Identity Theft

Identity theft is another problem where hackers are stealing personal details to commit various types of fraud. It is currently estimated that 19 people fall victim to identity theft every minute and it costs consumers more than $16 billion annually.

5. The last problem is Data misuse,

where the people who are trusted Data are using it without the individual’s permission. For example, Bharti Airtel last year was using the electronic KYC of Aadhaar customers to open payment bank accounts without their consent. That’s crazy, but it happened.

So because of all of these problems, someone needs to provide a solution to managing and protecting big data. And that is Zebi.

When Zebi first started in 2015, they actually started as a company purely focused on big data management. They weren’t a Blockchain project. But very quickly they realised they needed a technology that would offer

1) Speed in transactions

2) Reliability and tamperproofness

3) Secure and hackerproof

4) A degree of data democracy

So very naturally then, the only technology that provides all the above is Blockchain with its decentralised nature. So Zebi integrated Blockchain into their system in 2015 and currently they already have a working prototype that is used large scale in partnership with the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and used by over 200 hotels to create an uptodate database of their guests. And this includes prominent hotel chains like Novotel.

Currently Zebi’s main work is with land titles and hospitality, so hotels. The state police has actually made it mandatory for hotels to use Zebi because what was happening was uptil this point, hotels were required to submit a paper list every day of the guests staying at each hotel to cross check with the police department that they weren’t housing any criminals. Because all of this was done on paper, it was taking an enormous amount of time and as you can imagine very inefficient. But now with Zebi, not only is the data collected digitally and automatically, it is also processed, so that only the names that are of concerned are flagged.

Since they started in 2015, Zebi has picked up a lot of momentum. They’ve had a lot of media coverage, and besides Andhra Pradesh, they are also part of the “Smart City Mission” project which is an Indian government multi-billion dollar incentive to develop 100 technology smart cities by 2020. So we’re expecting Zebi to expand to other cities very very quickly and the team has also said that they are currently in discussion with other countries as well. So the potential scope of this project is simply gigantic!

The way Zebi works is as follows. Zebi has 2 parts to its technology:

1) Zebi Chain

2) Zebi Data Gateway

Zebi Chain is the Blockchain structure and its made up of a private chain and a public chain. The private chain is a custom made chain designed by Zebi that is where all the big data from government departments will be processed and stored on.

Each government organisation will have it’s own private Blockchain that is actually under their control. So owners of the data will retain control of their data which is very different from many other Blockchain projects where your data gets put on an open public ledger and you don’t have any control over who has access to your data.

The actual architecture of the private chain is still private and secret, because it is a technology that Zebi wants to patent and later create its own public Blockchain. What I could find out from all the interviews with the CEO is that it is currently using a proof of authority consensus and running at a few hundred transactions/ sec, but it is scalable to much higher in the future and they are also exploring other consensus like POS/ DPOS for the public version.

Now even though all the data is stored on the private blockchains, a hash or very small portion of that data will be stored on a public Blockchain which is Ethereum. The reason for doing this is to make the data tamperproof. Because if it is just a private Blockchain, if something happens to the private Blockchain, the data can be changed. But by having a check on the public Blockchain, the data is made 100% untamperable.

The second feature of their technology is the Zebi Data Gateway.

The Zebi Data Gateway is an API as well as highway for the information that is stored on the private blockchains to be processed and distributed to the relevant requestors or individuals.

How the Zebi system will earn money will be 3 fold.

Storage, extraction and uses. So companies using Zebi will have to pay a license or subscription fee to begin storing their data securely on the private Blockchain. And everytime they or someone else wishes to access that data, they have to pay support fees. But having the data isn’t enough, you also need to process the data e.g. do a transaction. That actual processing of this data will incur another fee. Even though it sounds like a lot, it’s actually cheap, every process uses Zebi tokens on the system and is only a fraction of the cost it would cost if the company was to just store the data on an average cloud server.

Currently Zebi’s main work is with land titles and hospitality, so hotels. The state police has actually made it mandatory for hotels to use Zebi because what was happening was uptil this point, hotels were required to submit a paper list every day of the guests staying at each hotel to cross check with the police department that they weren’t housing any criminals. Because all of this was done on paper, it was taking an enormous amount of time and as you can imagine very inefficient. But now with Zebi, not only is the data collected digitally and automatically, it is also processed, so that only the names that are of concerned are flagged.

Since they started in 2015, Zebi has picked up a lot of momentum. They’ve had a lot of media coverage, and besides Andhra Pradesh, they are also part of the “Smart City Mission” project which is an Indian government multi-billion dollar incentive to develop 100 technology smart cities by 2020. So we’re expecting Zebi to expand to other cities very very quickly and the team has also said that they are currently in discussion with other countries as well. So the potential scope of this project is simply gigantic!

Team

The team consists of 13 members and 12 Advisors, based in India. Zebi has an all-star team and advisors with extremely rich technical, entrepreneur and academic background. Most of the team members have graduated from highly ranked universities and have working experience in global top-tier companies. Highlights: Oracle, Intel, Hitachi, IBM, Standord, MIT and more:

Babu Munagala is their Founder and CEO, who previously worked as Director of Software Development at Oracle for 19 years.

Sudheer Kuppam is their Co-Founder and Board Member, he was the Managing Director and Vice President of Intel Capital and also has rich experience as an Advisor to different technological projects. He is currently also a managing partner at Epsilon Venture Partners.

The rest of the team have equally impressive backgrounds

Kalyan Muppaneni previously worked as an Enterprise Architect with Intel and is currently the CEO at Pi Datacentre.

Phani Arega is thier VP of Engineering and he previously worked at Tata, a Dell subsidiary and also as a manager at Oracle.

Gopal Bang is their in-charge of Business Operations. He was previously the Operations Manager at Hitatchi before founding his own offshore shared services team.

And you can go through the rest of the team yourself, but it is definitely a top-notch team with a lot of success and experience behind them.

Advisors

These are their advisors, it’s a big team of advisors, in fact this is the first time I’ve seen a project have more advisors than team members listed on their website. Some of their advisors include:

Vasu Parameswaran who has held senior positions at companies such as UBER, Microsoft, Nokia and Siemens. Also a P.H.D in computer science from University of Maryland

Rao Surapaneni is the principal engineering manager at Microsoft

And Murali Abburi is the managing director at Graticule Asset management Asia and the ex Vice President of JP Morgan

Prahalad Thota who is the senior Vice President of Wells Fargo, Ex Vice President Charles Schwab, ex regional director PayPal, ex Director Capital One Services

Chandra Mallipedi who is involved in the hardware quality and reliability engineering of Facebook as well as a previous engineering manager of Amazon Labs

Partners

Their partners include:

Torque Capital Partners- This is a familiar name by now. Torque is a Venture Capital company who invests in Blokchain Projects and their previous picks have all been winners. Their portfolio includes projects like Nucleus Vision, ICON, Wanchain, WABI and other top projects.

APCRDA is a urban development authority under the State Government of Andhra Pradesh.

Roadmap

This is their roadmap, it’s a fairly long roadmap that goes into 2020 and focuses on the technical aspects of the project. Some notable milestones include ZebiPay which is their payment gateway to convert Zebi into fiat expected in Q2 of 2019.

Zebi Verify which is an API for Education and Employment verticals. Im guessing this is something like a linkedin profile but on Blockchain.

But this project is going to go way beyond 2020. The real roadmap for this project is not their tech development but their partnerships and real life use case which is going to explode. Big Data is a technology that every country, every government needs, and Zebi very rightly identified that only Blockchain currently offers that immutabilty and security. They are already in discussions with other counties, if it works in India which it’s looking like its working, the chance of other countries adopting Zebi is very high, as opposed to them spending billions of dollars to try a new technology that might not work.

And all of this potential is separate from its future potential as a Blockchain platform. Traditional blockchain platforms currently are public, meaning open ledger for anyone to see. To be honest, I got nothing to hide, even I am getting tired of the fact that when I pay someone, they can view my entire account on etherscan and see what other coins I have and how much. It’s showing your bank account to the whole world. So I would really look forward to a Blockchain which like Zebi has privacy features where all my data is kept private unless I deem otherwise. So I think as a public Blockchain in future, Zebi has a lot of potential as well.

So in conclusion, I don’t like this project. I love it. It’s a project that already has a working product, government partnership, great team and advisors, good capital firm investment, a lot of potential to grow in terms of partnership and technology, super low price and not listed on any major exchange yet. It’s like all the stars are lining up for this coin to be a great buy currently.

That’s it for myZebi review! Thank you so much for joining me.

The above is just my personal opinion. I am not a professional and this is not professional advice guys. So please always do your own research and make your own decisions.

Have a great day wherever you are! And I will catch you guys again soon!