Ankr Network Review: Distributed Cloud Computing on Trusted Hardware

EVALUAPE
EVALUAPE
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

Original article by EVALUAPE

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A. Introduction

A decentralized computing platform based on the Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) consensus mechanism on an Intel SGX-enabled trusted execution environment.

B. Industry

In 2018, the market value of global cloud services market will reach $186.4 billion. Edge computing is a new concept proposed in the recent two years. Its market size in 2017 is $185.8 million and is expected to jump to $838.6 million in 2022. Distributed computing is a computing science that takes use of the idle computer resources on the internet to solve computing problems at scale. Distributed computing power requires a market where sellers and buyers can match and deal with each other. The meaning of the deployment of blockchain lies more in a better incentive mechanism, transaction recording system and privacy protection to perform married deals of computing power, which better saves the cost and provides the foundation of the computing power for the underlying network. For the moment, the industry’s bottleneck lies in the fact that the application scenarios of distributed computing are concentrated in the field of grid computing, that is, problems can be solved via enumeration algorithm. The application scenarios are limited to a certain extent. After combining with the blockchain, there are still problems such as limits on the performance of blockchain and miners’ cheating behaviors.

C. Competitions

There are many competing products of distributed computing power, the famous ones established lone before are IEX. EC, SOMN and Golen, all of which have been developed for more than one year. They have already completed DEMO or MVP, and their products are relatively mature. In terms of the latest projects, there are hardon, hypernet, perlin, etc. Each has its own characteristics. Hardon has a deluxe team, while hypernet focuses on how to realize parallel computing by using DAC. At present, the early projects still lack promotion, while the most recent ones with large capital support are not yet mature. Although so many kinds of projects have led to fierce competition in the market, the whole cake is rather small up to now, which means there is still a rather large chance to predominate in market shares.

D. Mode

The project has 4 main features: 1) It has adopted the Intel SGX to ensure a trusted execution environment for remote hardware. SGX was first launched in 2013 and mainly aimed to provide a trusted execution environment (TEE) on the computing platform. It protects the confidentiality and integrity of users’ core codes by permitting their execution inside a hardware enclave, working like a sandbox in hardware. It is also the technology that Intel strongly recommended in the industry; 2) Proof of Useful Work (PoUW). The trusted hardware environment makes it possible to quantify users’ useful computation and provide proofs for users’ ownership of rewards, thus evading the waste of resources; 3) Native Autenticated Oracle Services (NOS). It is also attributed to the trusted environment that the problem of off-chain data feed is solved; 4) Multi-chain structure. By using Ethereum’s future technologies like PLASMA and sharding, Ankr can solve problems regarding scalability, micropayment and the deployment of DApp.

The primary features of the project are concentrated on the hardware and consensus layer, but it lacks sufficient attention on the issue of application scenarios of the distributed computing projects. In terms of the user community, although Intel is still promoting SGX, it will still be subject to the chip installation capacity for a period of time. In addition, more detail is to be added regarding the specific issues during the core process, such as task announcement, supply and demand match, partition, computation, data transfer, results confirmation, payment system, etc.

E. Economic model:

The economic model is roughly divided into four types: requesting nodes, dispatching nodes, processing nodes and verification nodes. The tokens’ primary function in the system is to incentivize computing power or the data providers. Besides, one can also win tokens by packing blocks. The company also plans to establish a reputation system according to the task execution performance via the tokens.

F. Technology

The project adopts a three-layer architecture, which is composed of the blockchain layer, the layer of PoUW miners and the distributed computing engine. SGX of hardware, NOS, sharding to solve the issue of scalability and PLASMA are all third-party technologies. Besides, although the official website announced that the prototype would be released in July, it has not been published yet.

G. Team

Chandler Song, CEO at Ankr, receives a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley. He was an intern in Berkeley’s blockchain development and AI Research Lab. He also worked as a practice software engineering in Amazon. (It was exposed that he had exaggerated his work experience.)

Stanley Wu, CTO at Ankr, receives a MS in Computer Science from Rochester University and has over-10-year experience in the development of cloud services.

Ryan Fang, COO at Ankr, receives an MBA from UC Berkeley and worked as intern in firms such as Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley.

Song Liu, chief security engineer, receives a MS in Science from Boston University and was the chief software engineer of Gigamon.

Most of the founders graduate from UC Berkeley, but both the CEO and COO only hold a BS and most of their work experience is internship. Moreover, there were scandals of exaggerating the work experience before. All this leads to great uncertainty about whether the members are capable of managing their team well.

H. Investors

Well-known institutional investors such as NGC, Pantera, DHVC, OK, GBIC, Node Capital, etc.

I. Community

Telegram:54,544;Twitter:2364. Because of the white list, users ask more about the price and fundraising issues in the group rather than technology.

J. Conclusion

Advantage:1) Its concept of distributed computing, which is a hot issue in the market. 2) The ideas of trusted execution environment and PoUW also differentiate it from other projects.3) The team members are well allocated, with support of many famous institutions. 4) The community operation is also good, keeping the project on the hot lists of various KOLs.

Disadvantages:1) SGX has limited its available user groups. 2) The PoUW mechanism lacks details for judging and starts rather late compared with many other projects with technical accumulation in the market. 3) The whole team has little experience in blockchain.

Hype Score:Medium High

Risk Score:Medium High

Investment Score:Medium

Total Score:6.8

All information in this article is provided for reference only and does not constitute investment advice.


For more reviews and information,please visit https://evaluape.io/share to download EVALUAPE APP.

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