Bluzelle — ICO Review

Token: BLZ

ICO Date: TBD

Hardcap: TBD

Project website: https://bluzelle.com/ and https://blog.bluzelle.com/

White Paper: https://bluzelle.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Bluzelle-White-Paper.pdf

“A Decentralized, Scalable, On-Demand Database Service”

TOTAL 14 / 20 (no details on ICO yet)

1 Business opportunity: 4.5/5

Description: Bluzelle presents itself as the “Oracle” of the new ecosystem that is built on the blockchain.

It provides software developers with a way to handle large amounts of data in a way that is, thanks to the blockchain:

• scalable,
• high performance (speed),
• low-cost,
• immutable
• decentralized

In a nutshell, they actually use idle computer space and incentivize people (that are called farmers or producers) to share their resources (CPU and memory) by rewarding them with BLZ tokens.

Trackrecord:

They have already delivered some projects like an Ethereum-based KYC shared ledger for a consortium of banks. They have already worked for banks, insurers and have also approached Microsoft, KPMG, British Telecom to make their customers use Bluzelle.

Market/competitors:

Many traditional actors in this sector already:

• Companies running their own database servers (costly and not that performing)
• Traditional companies like Oracle (providing servers + database management system) with issues in terms of hardware costs, risk relying mostly on one point of failure (hard disk, operating system), privacy issues etc.
• Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) or Cloud Database market, growing extremely fast and in which Bluzelle is. 15Bn$ market by 2019! It is extremely useful for IoT and mobile apps (and now the Dapps on the blockchain).

Bluzelle wants to decentralize that market that is still relying on centralized network to store data.

Current players for file storage are Storj and Filecoin. These two projects have generated lot of enthusiasm from the crypto-community (Filecoin raised $200m in 1 min). And I think there will be space for many competitors. For the moment, the more competitors, the more confident we can be that there is a business opportunity.

Current competitor for database management is Oracle ($40B+ Revenue…) which a traditional player.

What is worth mentioning is that Bluzelle does not really compete with the file storage competitors (Storj, Filecoin, Sia). Indeed, file storage is about storing entire files (>10KB) without any flexibility when it comes to manipulate that file. The only thing you can do is add or delete the file. Bluzelle is competing in the data field storage. Data fields are small and organized in structure that is searchable. You have room to manipulate that data: create, read, update, and delete (CRUD).

2 Technology: 4/5

Release expected in April 2018.

Seems that technology is at the center of the project.

From my understanding, to put it simply, Bluzelle will create distributed networks of nodes (called swarms of nodes) acting collectively to dynamically store data with partial replication to maximize performance (since you would send data only to the nodes that are the closest to you).

There will be two tokens: one (BLZ) for the lambda guy that will be traded, transferred, bought with ETH etc and one (BNT) that will be actually used by the network (and you will just need to trade a BLZ for a BNT and it will be easier). It is a bit the same as the GAS and ETH for the Ethereum project.

The reason for having two tokens is that Ethereum and its ERC-20 tokens are too slow and expensive for real-time database accounting. The BNT internal native token exists to enable high-speed, zero-cost, and real-time database accounting, while the BLZ allows customers to easily obtain access to the Bluzelle service.

Note that the conversion from BLZ to BNT will generate 0.10% fees that will go directly in the bank account of Bluzelle to “work on improving the product”.

3 Team: 2.5/5

Project initiated in 2014.

Reward: Technology pioneer (reward by the World Economic Forum) in 2017 with previous winners like Google and Airbnb (even though that prize seems a bit “honorific”).

Headquarters in Singapore.

• Pavel Bains, CEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavelbains/. Has no strong presence in the crypto world prior to the Bluzelle adventure. He mainly worked in the financial field.
• Neeraj Murarka, CTO https://www.linkedin.com/in/njmurarka/. Has a great experience in data architecture and some experience in blockchain.

They have listed 5 software engineers which is not bad at that stage.

Despite the relative inexperience (that anybody lacks to be honest), looking at the WP these guys aren’t kidding, and seem technically ready.

Some notable advisors: Gil Penchina (Business Advisor — a super-angel with a successful investments track record), Brian Fox (Open-Source Advisor — author of GNU Bash Shell and current CTO of Mesh Labs) and Prashant Malik (Database Advisor — ex-Facebook Engineer and co-creator of Apache Cassandra)!

4 ICO details: ?/5

Nothing for the moment (coming VERY soon)

5 Community & Communication: 3/5

No buzz for the moment.

Some articles on coindesk and cointelegraph and~350 people on slack, ~100 on Telegram. Not a bad sign though given the early stage of the project.

But at least they have a blogpost/medium that is very active with a lot of articles posted like:

• https://blog.bluzelle.com/how-is-bluzelles-database-performance-reliability-and-scalability-better-f725e1949dca
• https://blog.bluzelle.com/a-breakdown-of-the-decentralized-internet-6c2e6bf90040
• https://blog.bluzelle.com/how-is-bluzelle-different-from-ipfs-filecoin-storj-sia-and-ethereums-swarm-1d1d792658f8

6 Verdict

• Invest Long-term: depends on the ICO details to be revealed, but considering the seriousness of the project the opportunity is very interesting in the long-term.

Need to monitor the partnerships they are going to sign as it is key to enter the B-to-B business. But the project seems very solid (especially the tech part). The data/storage sector is really fancy (do not ask me why). There are many projects initiated and it is not finished.

=> POSITIVE FOR THE ICO AND HODL

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