In anticipation for the TOP Network launch. 🚀
It’s finally upon us! TOP Network is going live very soon and as an ambassador for TOP Network, I gladly write up my monthly blog about this project. It’s been a very interesting journey past months and I feel like a botanist watching one of his favorite orchids grow.
Lately, TOP’s CEO, Steve Wei, and CMO Noah Wang have been going in overdrive attending all kinds of interesting events and showed they are measuring up fast with other existing great projects in the space. While not even launched yet. The testnet is not accessible to developers, yet, so when TOP Network will launch, a tsunami of information will flood for those interested in the precise working of this ambitious project.
The promise of TOP Network has always been great: a blockchain platform with near-instant state finality and zero fees that will upgrade our communication in terms of privacy. With smart contracts for dApps. With actual daily active users. That’s something we haven’t seen so far in this space and is much needed to lift the entire space to legitimacy, instead of a speculative asset class.
A blockchain is a distributed state machine that replicates the state with Byzantine Fault Tolerance. This means we found a way to tell stories that can’t be altered later on, once it passes an initial security check (a certain threshold withstood against failure). All by means of cryptography.
That being said, a blockchain can certainly exist without a cryptocurrency. Keep this in mind because a lot of projects don’t need a token at all. The irony of this is that these “decentralized” projects have their own single point of failure built-in — the fact that their token is worthless because there will never be a need (and therefore demand) for it. Well-thought-out economics are perhaps just as important as the technology behind it, if not more.
Some people asked in the Telegram channel what the token itself does. We will briefly discuss this. At the moment the TOP token is an ERC-20 (a token standard on the Ethereum Blockchain). This will change into a Token standard when the mainnet goes live. When such a transition occurs, additional functions can be given to the token.
The TOP tokens will be used for all the services provided on the platform, including Messaging, Voice Call, Video Chat, VPN, CDN, Live-Streaming, IoT data sharing and more.
The “more” part is interesting here since Tripio is one of those examples. When more of these partners start accepting TOP, next to its legion userbase, demand is created and liquidity is provided. These are vital for any healthy currency. A need for TOP is a necessity and people need to spend it for less volatility. It’s fun if you bought Bitcoin six months ago and you got a 200% ROI by deflation, but it has proven to work the other way around as well, and inflation is killing if you have to buy groceries at the end of the month. TOP is not designed to be an SoV(Store of Value), like Bitcoin. TOP is designed to be liquid. Why else would you need a superfast system for transaction settlement?
There is no transaction fee for users on the network, however, launching a smart contract will be settled with TOP as well as gaining access to the storage part of the network. Again, demand.
TOP Network has seemingly a very large supply. In total there will be 20 billion TOP in existence (25 years down the road) and it’s good to know that some measurements or taken in place to control the circulating supply. Users can stake their TOP to cast votes and earn rewards for the governance of the ecosystem. Users are more prone to care about the ecosystem with skin in the game. Some spoilers on the staking from Steve’s Twitter gave us around 10% (and up to 16% in the first year!!). Service providers need to deposit TOP as collateral for the same reasons.
TOP Network is primarily a communications network, but this doesn’t mean it doesn’t open doors for a lot of possibilities for developers who want to utilize the aspects of the system. The instant finality and swiftness of the network may attract game developers, for instance. A concept from the top of my head may be a game that can be played while messaging someone and utilizes both the communication platform and the means of deploying a game.
Not many details are released yet on the costs, but this kind of shift from the original targeted market to another market happened before — Ontology didn’t target gaming originally, but developers started to use it for nonetheless and it works better than Ethereum. EOS didn’t target a market for useless tokens that aren’t traded on any exchange, but here they are (ok, bad joke). It has been stated by Steve in the Coin98 AMA that service chains are not charged by TOP Network if the service chain uses TOP, it does not need to pay fees. This is a great incentive for companies to have their dApp run on TOP Network as it can greatly reduce operating costs.
The first dApp on TOP Network will be a VPN, but there will be 3 dApps soon, that will take the users from Dingtone (a messaging app), SkyVPN(the first) and CoverME(a secure messaging app). Furthermore, with the 5G technology on the horizon, a lot more dApps and use cases will surely follow. Banking on this 5G technology, investing in TOP Network has an additional “moon” factor. Other interesting projects and parties seem to agree and are banking on TOP Network as well. You can read more on that in this blog.
That’s it for now, as I am really awaiting the launch. These are the things to look out for:
- the updated Whitepaper when the mainnet is launched
- Technical documentation and open-source code released on Github
- The actual launch and impact
You can find TOP Network on:
Email Contact: contact@topnetwork.org
Official Website: http://www.topnetwork.org
Telegram: https://t.me/topnetwork_top
Twitter: https://twitter.com/topnetwork_top
Medium: https://medium.com/@topnetwork
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@topnetwork-top
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/topnetwork_top
About TOP Network
TOP Network is a decentralized open communication network that provides cloud communication services on the blockchain. TOP offers secure, low-cost services such as messaging, calling, video, VPN, CDN, IoT data sharing and more.
TOP Network is also a high-performance public blockchain platform designed to handle real-world business of any size or volume. Powered by innovations including three-layer network, two-layer sharding, two-layer lattice DAG and PBFT-DPoS*, TOP can process several hundred thousand transactions per second on the blockchain.
The long-term mission of TOP Network is to build a public blockchain infrastructure for all Dapps. Our world-class team of over 100 developers is striving for this goal.
TOP Network originated from the common underlying network layer of Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN, three communication apps built by the TOP team before the blockchain project. These apps, having attracted over 60 million users in total, will be ported to TOP Network upon the launch of TOP and generate huge volumes of transactions in the TOP ecosystem.
TOP Network was founded by serial entrepreneur Steve Wei and his colleagues in late 2017. Steve was one of the earliest employees of WebEx in the 1990s. After WebEx, he founded a successful video conferencing software company which was acquired by Huawei in 2010. In 2012, Steve co-founded Dingtone, a public listed company operating popular communication apps such as Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN.
On March 26th, TOP Network made its debut as the first project launched through Huobi Prime — Huobi’s selective Direct Premium Offering platform. A total of 1.5 billion TOP Tokens were sold out in seconds, after which the price of TOP surged 2770% once it was freely tradable. Upon the listing, TOP’s trading volume hit $100 million in just eight seconds and surpassed the trading volume of Bitcoin at $250 million in less than a week, ranking first in terms of volume on Huobi Global. Before that, TOP Network has closed $15 million early investments from prestigious institutional investors and individual billionaire investors, including DHVC, Fenbushi Capital, NEO Global Capital (NGC), Ontology Global Capital (OGC), LD Capital and more.