Arionum- banking on PHP to print investors that sweet adoption paper.
This article was first released to the CryptoBirb Exclusive Moon Club.
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To date, the biggest drag on crypto valuations has been the lack of mainstream adoption. If you are reading this, you are likely already a member of the crypto-chorus, so I won’t bother preaching to the potential of blockchain, but the fact remains that without proper use, the promise of cryptocurrency is akin to a Ferrari collecting dust in the underground bunker of a forgotten dictator. Crypto needs adoption if its engines are to roar, and Arionum, (ARO), plans to move the conversation forward in a language that web developers around the world can readily understand.
When the vast majority of blockchain projects are derivatives of BTC, or Ethereum, or exist as a fork of a fork that make you want to review parentage on Ancestry.com, ARO already distinguishes itself as having been written from the ground up in the scripting language PHP, (which is especially suited for web development, and may be directly embedded into HTML). Although some would say that PHP is an antiquated language that lacks the luster of Java, Python, or even C++, PHP has amassed a strong community of developers and is used in some of the most heavily trafficked websites to date, (measuring back end server traffic). At the time of writing, PHP comprises the vast majority of server-side market share at 78.9%.
Where PHP may have lost its kitschy appeal, its proof of continued utility is in the ‘pudding’ of the internet, and the value of a blockchain platform being built from the ground-up in an immediately available coding language makes it much more approachable for even the novice coder to appreciate, (as opposed to Ethereum where the coding barrier to entry is greatly increased by the use of Solidity). Instead of spurning history for flashy new coding models, ARO devs argue that the true extent of PHP’s potential yet to be explored, and smartly seek to leverage its availability to increase adoption, one of whom is quoted here in this developer interview —
“I know there’s a lot of hate against PHP, but most of the allegations are false. PHP has gotten a bad reputation mostly due to its popularity. A very popular programming language creates a lot of applications, and a certain percentage of those are flawed. The percentage of flawed applications or libraries is the same as any other programming language, but due to its popularity, it stands out as a big number. I generally do not believe there are bad programming languages, there are mostly inexperienced programmers. Of course, some languages would be a better fit for certain task than others, but that does not mean the language itself is bad. Beside all this, PHP has advanced a lot since the version 7, making it a very fast and robust programming language. Its security features have also been increased considerably, one can easily check the argon2i implementation. Arionum proves PHP is just as fast and as powerful as any other language”.
Anonymous Devs: No premine, no problem, and more!
In addition to the PHP-promise mentioned above, there are a number of endearing aspects to the way the devs have navigated the project thus far. Under normal circumstances, anonymous devs give investors reason for concern. Offensive premines, and dev fees are in most cases, cash-grabs by another name, (ZCASH has a post-mine in the form of a gob-smacking 20% dev fee on miners, (honestly, what in the actual FAQ)), but I would say that on every count, the ARO devs deserve to be every bit as public, or private as they see fit. It is with a hefty sigh of refreshment that I write, there was no pre-mine, and there are no dev fees associated with ARO. Along with this rather forward thinking notion, the project originally set out to be entirely mined by CPU’s in order to deter centralized mining farms from gaining too much network control. However, once it was determined that similar power imbalances could be accomplished through cloud mining abuses, the team set forth to design a unique HYBRID mining system that shares rewards with CPU miners, GPU miners, and Masternodes. You can find a brief summary of the masternode metrics here.
Running through a few other metric points on ARO, the current circulating supply is around 82,114,680 (accounting for the 42,500,000 currently locked in masternodes), with an eventual max supply of 545,399,000 to be reached at the end of an 8 year mining period. The block reward drops by 1% each month, allowing for late comers to enjoy a tidy mining reward.
Keeping in line with ARO’s end goal of widespread acceptance as an electronic currency and payment processor, its fee system is quite attractive at 0.25% (max 10 ARO) per transaction. The fee structure will be crucial to its future asset system which would allow developers to easily implement the blockchain into their applications and launch virtual assets on a blockchain. Traditional online payment processors charge retailers on average about 10x ARO’s transaction fee, so it is quite reasonable to assume that a growing number of online retailers who are tired of getting squeezed by traditional processors would be open to exploring alternatives. It’s feasible too, that ARO and other crypto payment methods would join the growing trend of retailers offering discounts on goods paid for in crypto in order to avoid egregious fee structures.
Competition: something old and something new
ARO has two competitors which have saddled up to unique programming languages in the same way that ARO has to PHP. The first to the party was Lisk, (JAVASCRIPT), and the second is Bismuth, (PYTHON). I won’t delve too deeply into either LSK or BIS for the purposes of this article, but it is worth noting that of the 3, ARO is the only project yet to have gone through a full market cycle. If you have followed my spotlight series up to this point, you will know that I am not keen on price speculation, so this note is not to inspire mass market-buys, but it is worth noting when looking at the projects comparatively.
I may lead the ‘understatement of the year’ category when I say that the internet is quite a large place. In terms of web developer blockchain integration, there doesn’t need to be “one ring to rule them all”. Similar to any spoken language where certain languages hold dominance in a given geography, there will always be varied preferences across the coding landscape to accommodate for different coding objectives, and styles. As detailed above, there is no shortchanging PHP’s prevalence among the coding community to date. To be sure, there is plenty of web traffic to spread around between the coding methodologies, and where PHP isn’t used on the application end, it is often used on the server side, leading to a good deal of linguistic crossover.
Ridden hard, put away wet —
As with any project, there are some elements of ARO that are underdeveloped. Their whitepaper for one, will likely take you less time to read than this article did, but that’s not by any means a deal breaker. I can think of a couple of large caps which blatantly plagiarized large portions of their whitepapers, but still gained enormous valuations. However, the modern day crypto market has become more discerning, and projects can no longer rely on frenzied investors to throw funds into “blockchain 5.0” on a pitch and a promise. Also, with the kind of adoption necessary to see the project reach potential, I would like to have a more grounded approach to scaling solutions. One of the interviewed devs said here that “if the blockchain becomes too big, we plan to create a sharding mechanism to split the load on multiple nodes… We have a few more ideas on this matter and we know we’ll have to design it very well. The good news is that we have a lot of time until such a solution might be needed”. While he/she is correct that they will in all likelihood have plenty of time to figure it out before it becomes a problem, I’d like to see a scaling solution in place from the outset. Again, by no means necessary, but it would inspire greater confidence on investors and retail adoption alike to have these answers ready and available. My final point of desire, (akin to the minimalist whitepaper), is their roadmap, which is currently only mentioned in their Bitcointalk announcement.
While it details an impressive list of accomplishments, (including their beautiful API), I would like to see a more exuberant vision for near, mid, and far term milestones. Yes, the assets system, and payment processor services will be paramount, but afterwards, what will decide the project’s success is ultimately adoption. I would love to see the team acknowledge on the roadmap the kind of marketing budget necessary to educate devs on the usefulness of ARO, as well as online retailers. The Lisk team has deep pockets, but they have been relentless is courting the global community at conferences, meet ups, galas, bikini car wash fund raisers, (ok, that last one wasn’t confirmed), but they have been hitting the pavement non-stop, and these are the kinds of projects ARO will be competing with.
All in all
Although the points of dissatisfaction I listed above are not insignificant, in a way, they give me greater confidence in the ethics and substance of the team behind ARO. They didn’t produce a razzle-dazzle white paper detailing a plan to rope the moon and pull it down to earth every once and again, nor did they bombastically claim that their competitors would some day bow in submission. When posed with the scaling challenge, they rightly stated it is a delicate issue, and will take some figuring out. No additional noise, no fuss. Just a couple of very talented coders delivering a promising product piece by piece. They have to have known that by generating false fanfare, they could have gotten handsome short term gains, but all of the above indicates to me that this is a close-knit team of professionals who are focused on doing what they do best, until the ground is laid for the next stage to be traversed. At this time in the market, it is refreshing to encounter a project with lofty, but attainable goals, and enough humility to know that if the project is to succeed, the road will likely be had by hammering out late night code binges until the product is ready to take to market. Seems to have been the path that CHAINLINK has taken, and it hasn’t worked out so bad for them..
