Emotiq is a PoS blockchain built on the OmniLedger and MimbleWimble protocol for scalability and privacy, via sharding and ZK proofs featuring easy to code smart contracts. The team aims at facing three challenges: scalability, privacy, and accessibility. Bold claims that we need to check in detail by taking a deeper look to their product and their vision.

Product Description

“Emotiq is a next-generation blockchain with powerful scalability and privacy, combining the latest research in distributed ledger technology with an innovative natural-language approach to smart contracts. The Emotiq blockchain is designed to be scalable, private, and natural.”

Usability. Scalability. Privacy. Let’s take a look at how they intend to address these different goals.

1- Usability

Emotiq intends to make their blockchain “natural”. It is a core feature of their blockchain. Since smart contracts are inaccessible to the majority of its non tech savvy users, Emotiq wants to deliver a blockchain with easy-to-create applications. According the team, “Emotiq aims to be the most accessible and friendly blockchain of them all — the Apple to other blockchains’ Android and Windows. Emotiq smart contracts are written in Ring, a plain English programming language that’s as easy to read as a newspaper.” Ring, the Emotiq natural smart contract language, will enable non-programmers to write smart contracts. The smart contract language will be either Ring (for non programmers) or Lisp (for programmers), offering the same result.

Ring/LISP architecture

Although this is not the most exciting tech feature of the project, this vision actually makes a lot of sense, as this is an unchallenged problem in the industry so far. Everyone can read, understand and even write legal contracts. Building a blockchain that will make smart contracts easy to use can make blockchain go mainstream. And if it goes mainstream, the tech has to be scalable. So, we think the different issues Emotiq wants to address are actually connected, and not only buzz words to generate the hype. If you figure out a way of making blockchain accessible to the mainstream user, you have to make it scalable so that it can support a high throughput.

So let’s take a look at how they intend to provide scalability.

2- Scalability

Emotiq is built on OmniLedger, and that’s why the project caught our attention first. Right now, only 3 projects are building on Omniledger: Zilliqa, Harmony and Emotiq. This gives credibility to their claims. OmniLedger technology features high transaction throughput and horizontal scaling via sharding. What’s interesting is that their third main focus, privacy, integrates tech features that will boost and increase this scalability achieved through OmniLedger.

Thus, their privacy focus is also connected to their usability and scalability ambitions.

3- Privacy

I don’t think I need to explain why privacy can be a killer feature for a blockchain. Especially in Emotiq’s case, where mainstream users are targeted to use and build smart contracts: there’s a common desire of anonymity (especially regarding finance) with people that needs to be respected for a wider adoption of blockchain. What’s interesting is that the tech used to provide privacy will leverage the scalability of Emotiq. In our opinion, this is killer code that will make of Emotiq one of the best privacy coins: they basically want to implement Non-Interactive Zero Knowledge Proofs with bulletproofs and MimbleWimble.

We need to dig into the tech here. Using multiple outputs, Bulletproofs offer big improvements because it allows a chain to scale logarithmically instead of the usual linear scale of transactions. At the same time, MimbleWimble will allow to keep the block size small, and thus minimize the blockchain size, which is something you don’t have with Zilliqa and Harmony for instance. There is a lot to say about MimbleWimble. We could write an entire article about this, so I encourage you to watch this video about it:

Like Satoshi, nobody knows who wrote the MimbleWimble whitepaper, which was signed by a so-called “Voldemort”..

Ask any blockchain developer about MimbleWimble…

Short overview of Emotiq tech

Overall, these privacy features will highly leverage the scalability of Emotiq by reducing drastically the size of the blockchain.

I took a lot of time describing the details of the tech behind this blockchain, but we believe it is necessary to understand why this project is not just another high TPS claimed whitepaper. GitHub activity is good, Andre Cronje was enthusiastic about it and you can check it here: https://github.com/emotiq/emotiq .

To conclude about the project description, we can say we’re really excited about Emotiq’s vision and that we’re really bullish on the tech and the features they want to implement. If they succeed to do so, this will be a gamechanger project. So let’s check the team behind it !

Team:

Joel Reymont, CEO at Emotiq: “Joel is a seasoned hacker and blockchain pioneer. He started his career on Wall Street and brings twenty-five years of diverse software engineering and management experience to Emotiq. Before Emotiq, he has been the CTO at Aeternity for 6 months (top 27 on CoinMarketCap, $773M total capitalization on June 6) where he earned a reputation with the community for his fearsome execution power.”

Vladimir Lebedev, VP of Engineering at Emotiq: “Vladimir’s extensive management experience spans three decades and more than a few pioneering projects. These include the first FidoNet node in the Soviet Union, the first remote banking application using symmetric keys cryptography in Russia, and the first ISP in Western Siberia.”

Emma Cooper, COO at Emotiq: “Emma worked for many years in counterterrorism for the US Department of Homeland Security, before which she was a lawyer in the US, specializing in private placements and corporate law. She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BS in Mathematical Sciences, and holds a JD from the University of Richmond School of Law.”

David McClain, Chief Rocket Scientist at Emotiq: “David is trained in theoretical and observational astrophysics and served as a Principal Scientist in the aerospace industry, where he built airborne LIDAR systems for underwater mine detection. He was also a Senior Scientist on the Raytheon ExoAtmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) program.”

In my opinion, Emotiq team is an all-star team, and in particular, because Joel Reymont has been the CTO of Aeternity. Aeternity is a highly challenging project as it’s a new blockchain technology, designed to deliver unmatched efficiency, transparent governance and global scalability. After raising $25M, Aeternity has been able to be ranked among the top 30 by market capitalization, it proves the seriousness of the team.

Since ICOs are mostly recent, there are very few ICO teams having a track-record in previous successful ICOs. Emotiq team reminds us of Wanchain team, as Wanchain co-founder had founded Factom in 2014. Wanchain’s market capitalization is currently over $450M (top 40 on coinmarketcap).

Since we’re early on this, our only concern is that we will need to make sure of the full team dedication to the project over time.

Roadmap

Emotiq will launch its testnet with dPOS and real-time trust-but-verify transaction validation within 2 or 3 weeks, which is very promising. It will be crucial to follow their technological advances to find out if Emotiq team is able to fulfill this challenging roadmap.

Token metrics

The website and whitepaper of Emotiq are not updated with the good token metrics. We hope the team will sort out things soon to make it clear.

Hardcap is $39M for 51% of the tokens being sold. This is quite a high hardcap. We just want to underline two things:

on a fully diluted basis, the hardcap is $76.5M while Zilliqa’s was $75M. So, when you look into the details, it’s not at as high as what you think first, it’s comparable to Zilliqa .

. Fantom raised $39M for 40% of the tokens being sold and we think Emotiq is a much more promising project.

There are also concerns about the seed prices on which we don’t have much details. What we know it term of lockup is:

12-month lockup for seed contributors

6-month lockup for 50% of private sale round 1 contributors.

6-month lockup for 40% of private sale round 2 contributors.

Overall, these are pretty average token metrics. It could be better for sure, but it is comparable to Zilliqa capitalisation when you look at the fully diluted basis. The main concern is the seed price, but this contribution appears to be locked for a year.

Conclusion

Emotiq doesn’t just aim at being more scalable and private than existing solutions. They also aim to allow non-developers to unlock the blockchain’s potential to create smart contracts. The three issues they want to tackle (usability, scalability and privacy) are actually connected, and the technical solutions Emotiq is offering are combining each other to provide a unique product that could be a game changer for the industry.

We’re particulary excited about the tech features the team wants to implement: Ring language, MimbleWimble, Omniledger, ZK proofs with bulletproofs… Moreover, the activity of the project on GitHub and the previous success of the CEO as CTO of Aeternity gives us confidence in the ability of the team to execute.

Our only concerns are the token metrics, which are quite average, and the challenging roadmap ahead that we will have to follow closely.

In conclusion, we’re extremly enthusiastic about Emotiq. Like Harmony, we believe it’s a Zilliqa level project that is much more promising than the long list of whitepaper projects claiming fancy performance without any material. Thus, we give Emotiq a “Very High” rating on our spreadsheet.

Useful links:

Website: https://emotiq.ch

Telegram: https://telegram.me/emotiq

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Emotiq_AG

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