0Chain (ZCN)
Token contract address: 0xb9EF770B6A5e12E45983C5D80545258aA38F3B78
Project website: https://0chain.net/
TL;DR
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0Chain is a decentralized data storage network, and introduces an out-of-the-box, data regulation-compliant product set to disrupt a $1T industry.
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The ZCN token is locked in exchange for cloud storage access.
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The initial seed investors and team’s token vesting, representing 20% of the fully diluted token supply, has been linearly vested over 4 years (2018-2021). The single greatest private holder of ZCN has approx. 1% of the total ZCN supply.
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There are no obvious exploits that could affect the Bancor Network, vis-a-vis developer rug pulls, or whale price manipulation games.
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There is an existing, active liquidity provider community lying in wait, ready to move liquidity to Bancor at the first opportunity. The proposed co-investment limit allows ample space for Bancor to absorb the lion’s share of the total DEX liquidity, while maintaining a substantive incentive for ZCN LPs to buy and stake BNT to increase the pool depth thereafter.
Discussion
0Chain is a layer-1 enterprise grade Decentralized Storage Network (DSN) with built-in proxy re-encryption allowing for public / private sharing of data. It adopts erasure coding (data fragmentation) technology instead of file replication to achieve security, availability and geo diversity of data. This in turn allows for companies to comply with GDPR/CCPA regulations, as data access is only possible by the data owner or entities that he or she delegates access to all the while whilst maintaining control on data fragment geography should such a business or regulatory need arise without data bloat.
Furthermore, 0chain’s fast block finality allows for recording of data CRUD operations in real time on the blockchain; which in turn provides for real-time auditability of data usage and way forward for dispensing archaic compliance processes [1].
With data regulations poised to reshape data access and storage over the next decade, enterprises have indeed started looking for scalable compliant by design data storage solutions. 0Chain storage solution is already being tested by Oracle, via a private implementation of 0stor [2]. Moreover, a Fortune100 company has committed to leveraging the 0chain tech stack for their data lake, aiming to change a 1T industry [3]. Whilst these efforts remain in their infancy, they are reminiscent of the shift enterprises went through over the last decade when they transitioned from private networks to hybrid to cloud-first infrastructure; albeit this time around with a precedence to take note from.
Aside from data regulations, 0chain protocol design allows for data streaming and data sharing. Data fragment streaming is a feat. that has eluded decentralized storage solutions thus far as full file download has been necessary to play media files such as video or music. Combine this with proxy re-encryption and data owners can now share streamable data without relenting data ownership or custody.
0Chain mainnet is planned for the end of this quarter (Q1), and has notable partners within the crypto sphere that have too committed to the use of 0chain’s tech stack, including but not limited to Ocean protocol, Fetch.ai, Polygon (previously Matic).
Tokenomics
Storage Consumers, aka Clients, can lock tokens and obtain cloud storage in return. Storage Providers, aka Blobbers, can stake ZCN and earn yield on their stake plus a service fee on data written / read by the Clients. ZCN holders can also delegate their ZCN to Blobbers, and earn a yield on their stake plus a percentage of the Blobber’s revenue. Such delegation enables further scalability of the 0Chain storage network by allowing Blobbers who can provide the adequate storage hardware but do not have the required ZCN tokens to join the storage network.
Ultimately, the ZCN token value is directly correlated to the amount of data stored on, and read from, the Blobber’s storage network; and thus in turn to the amount of tokens staked by Blobbers (and delegators) for availing such storage capacity. [4]
0Chain decouples this storage network from consensus, which is handled by a different set of service providers. The active consensus set is made up of 100 Miners and 25 Sharders, and is shuffled every 7 days. Miners are responsible for producing blocks and Sharders are responsible for storing blocks. This active set behaves as a control layer for the storage network, facilitating handshakes between Clients and Blobbers amongst other things.
0Chain decouples consensus and storage at the infrastructure layer and couples them at the economics layer albeit via different reward mechanisms; however are all ultimately token centric. This allows for a fast, scalable and lean network that is not resource intensive nor one that constrains or favors any one aspect or group over another.
Github | 17 Pub. Repos , 200+ Branches
0Chain is a project which has been in development for the last three (3) years. This development went through a two-pronged process of research, third party review, and eventually code implementation.
Cutting edge research was done in collaboration with researchers from San Jose State University, University of Maryland, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and Imperial College of London. Whitepapers are available 0Chain’s website [1].
Code implementation over 3 years and ongoing, 17 active public repositories, 200+ branches, and more than 3000+ commits, is available on Github [9]. The code is production ready and available for download.
Enterprise Awareness & Collaboration
0Chain collaborates with different entities in the Info Tech field.
On the infrastructure side, data centers are collaborating and offering one-click buy configurations for 0Chain miner and blobber rigs in the US and EU [10]. This collaboration is currently being expanded to other regions as well. These click and buy is expected to accelerate adoption beyond crypto enthusiasts.
On the tech stack, companies such as Oracle and others have been working with 0chain to address new data compliance regulations. GDPR and CCPA regulations have created a necessity for big tech to innovate the way they handle and store data whilst mitigating liability of such custody.
0chain has been featured on Oracle Blog several times [6].
Storage Network Capacity
More than 140 blobbers have thus far committed close to 3PB of storage capacity towards 0Chain mainnet at an average of 20TB per blobber. At this rate, network capacity is estimated to exceed 10PB within a year. As more data centers and companies provide one-click server hosting (colo) solutions this rate should increase.
Most blobbers are collocated in Tier 3 data centers worldwide, and thus most if not all, have 1gbps connections. This provided for an enterprise grade decentralized storage network with low latency and high availability.
Developers can build applications to make use of this capacity. 0Chain has itself developed 0Box, a Dropbox-like dApp that makes use of this decentralized storage network. Other developers have developed video streaming dApps. Others are integrating into data marketplaces such as Kylin and Ocean. The possibilities are endless and 0Chain is just getting started.
Interestingly, this network capacity lives on the edge of the internet, in data centers within cities. This makes cheap IoT storage a reality. IoT providers can now unload data with low latency to a decentralized storage network within source proximity and simultaneously sell this data on decentralized marketplaces such as Ocean via 0Chain’s Proxy Re-encryption technology without forfeiting data ownership. Cross network marketplaces are inevitable, and IoT data streams sold on such marketplaces is now becoming possible. The road ahead is exciting.
Community and Communication
The 0Chain community is a large proponent of DeFI, so much that the community independently crowdsourced its liquidity through a smart contract: a “Geyser” [5] that functions in a very similar manner to Bancor’s Liquidity Mining reward protocol.
The Geyser issues a reward multiplier that increases over time as the liquidity position remains staked. Today, the Geyser currently holds over $700,000 in dual sided liquidity from community members. Since the liquidity on 0Chain’s Geyser is dual sided, it exposes the 0Chain community to IL and is a risk they happily take. However, a whitelisted ZCN on the Bancor Network would see the Geyser liquidity replicated on its Bancor pool, since it enables IL protections that Uniswap cannot, removing the risk and thus increasing staking incentives.
0Chain has an active Telegram, Twitter, Newsletter and Facebook. There are two official chats: the main chat (general and tech related questions), and a “Service Provider” chat (questions related to Mining / Sharding / Blobbing).
There are several articles on Medium regarding updates, partnerships, and tech. You can also find us on Youtube, Facebook and Reddit.
The founders, Saswata Basu and Tom Austin, have 15+ years experience operating in Silicon Valley. Saswata has founded several successful startups, with previous experience at Nortel, Harris, and Intel. Tom currently teaches Computer Science at SJSU, with previous experience at Cloudflare and Mozilla [7]. The core team has more than 20 developers.
Market Data
Max total supply: 400,000,000 (50% is mineable - block & interest rewards)
FDV: USD $244,372,607 [8]
Circulating supply: 135,178,082* (67.5% of minted tokens) [8]
24h trading volume: circa USD 1M+ [9]
Exchanges: Uniswap, Gate.io, Bitfinex, Bilaxy, Bancor
Distribution: 25,000 ERC20 addresses.
Token Distribution
Max Cap is 400 Million. 50% mineable and 50% pre-mint. Overall, the token distribution on a fully diluted basis is as follows:
50% Asymp. declining emission over >50 years for BLOCK and Interest rewards. Block Emissions is 10.5 mil tokens in the first year of Mainnet and declines 10% yoy. Interest rewards emission is dependent on how many tokens are staked and locked by blobbers and clients respectively.
10% Reserve for partnerships and development. Reserves unlock on a trigger of 90 days sustained token price of $10 per token or more. Once unlocked, reserves vest thereafter at a rate of 1% over 10 years.
10% Network Security and incentives for data acquisition.
15% Team [Vests linearly over 4 years 2018-2021]
10% Community Sale [2018]
5% Seed investors and advisors [Vests linearly over 4 years 2018-2021]
Co-Investment
We seek a co-investment of 250,000 BNT and whitelisting of ZCN for IL protection at this stage. We believe Uniswap has limited the interest from LPs due to IL as is apparent from our liquidity profile below.
- At the hype of Uniswap our total liquidity increased to $4 million. Unfortunately this growth was interrupted, as LPs soon realized that IL is a serious issue and have proceeded to downsize their positions or leave completely.
[UniSwap Liquidity Profile History]
- Moreover, our volume has room to increase with our liquidity as is evident from our UniSwap volume profile history.
[UniSwap Volume Profile History]
- The number of transactions on ZCN today is clearly dominated by Uniswap as shown by data from etherscan below. We believe there is ample share for our nascent and recent Bancor pool to grab here.
Conclusion
Bancor’s impermanent loss insurance will provide great incentives for 0Chain users to provide liquidity. Additionally, a co-investment of 250,000 BNT will drive single sided liquidity from ZCN holders onto Bancor’s network and ultimately liquidity away from UniSwap when presented with a choice.
Furthermore, since Bancor aims to provide support for multiple block chains in the near future, there exists a synergy for both parties to provide a marketplace through Bancor as 0chain’s data storage partners across various block chains can seamlessly shift liquidity between blockchains through the storage layer network and vice versa as 0chain itself is agnostic to who utilizes it’s APIs for cloud storage.
References
[1] Whitepapers
[2] Oracle Listing | Marketplace
[3] CEO Saswata Basu regarding Fortune100 client Link 1 | Link 2
[4] Token Economics
[5] ZCN Geyser
[6] Oracle blog posts
“How Oracle Cloud Customers can turn GDPR and CCPA into a business advantage”
“A simple joint controller and Schrems II solution for Oracle Cloud customers”
“Immutable data privacy protection and private sharing with 0chain on Oracle Cloud”
[7]: Team: Team | 0Chain
[8] Current Circulation Supply: https://0chain.net/circulatingCoins
[9] Github : https://GitHub.com/0chain
[10] TerraSwitch : Shopping Cart - TeraSwitch Inc
Social Venues
Telegram Main Chat: https://t.me/Ochain
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/ZCN_announcements
Telegram Service Providers: https://t.me/MiningBlobbingSharding
Twitter: https://twitter.com/0Chain
Facebook: 0chain - Home | Facebook
