The partners of TOP Network and why they matter (a lot)
Hi there! I am back with another update on the TOP Network project. After writing a bit what TOP Network is and the inner workings of the main chain, service chains, and the nodes, I thought to myself: “Hey, what is a recurring thing in projects I saw so far that might need a bit more exposure?”
So here I was reading my Twitter feed and saw Crypto Twitter making fun of Justin Sun and the alleged partnership between Tron and the British football club Liverpool, and it came to me — a lot of projects virtually live on hype and not much else. even when projects are legit, it is often unclear what these partnerships actually entail.
Let’s start with the first partnership (that put TOP Network on my radar):
Ontology Trust Network:
From Ontology’s own site:
“Ontology is a high-performance public blockchain project and a distributed trust collaboration platform.”
The Ontology project came to my attention as soon as the whitepaper was released, I read it and immediately loved the idea: setting up a blockchain ecosystem that is fast enough to overcome the scaling issues, flexible enough to adapt itself to whatever business that wants to migrate its data logic to the blockchain with common and custom solutions that use the core principle of blockchains: cryptographically secured data that is immutable and only accessible with the right verification. Ontology took this a bit further than keeping a ledger or even smart contracts and understood that comprehensive profiles in the future can and will be stored by the same principles.
The beauty of this is that parts of these profiles can be shared and not in its entirety. Think about age verification without having to show your entire ID. Or accessing places online or in the real world based on profiles for digital or physical entities. The data that is amassed this way is valuable as well and can be bought and sold on Data Exchanges build on Ontology.
The partnership between Ontology and TOP Network is mutually beneficial, as it has and is creating momentum for both projects.
What Ontology will do for TOP Network:
- ONT ID and ONT DATA are powerful infrastructure services for any blockchain.
- Integrate ONT and ONG in the TOP Network ecosystem as a means of payment for the services in the TOP ecosystem
- Technological support from both parties
- Ontology helped secure more investment funds for TOP Network
“The rapid development of communication network has gradually broken down the silos of information, bringing us closer to the goal of the Internet of Everything,” Ontology founder Jun Li said. “Blockchain technology can speed up the whole development process.”
OK, I kinda got ahead of myself. The first partnerships were not other projects in the blockchain space, but actual investment companies who obviously see potential in the blockchain space. These first partnerships certainly deserve to have taken a look at.
Fenbushi Capital,
This is one of the first venture capital investment companies from China that solely invests in blockchain projects. Other known projects that are in its portfolio are (but not exclusive) Block.one(EOSIO), Polkadot, VeChain, Circle(Acquired Poloniex), Dfinity, Zcash, Factom, and more
Danhua Capital (DHVC)
This is a venture capital investment company that solely invest in tech start-ups, their incubation and growth phase. The man behind this investment company is an actual quantum physicist (funfact)
NEO Global Capital
NEO is a phenomenon in the blockchain space, dubbed the Chinese Ethereum and had a peak moment in 2017 and is having a major update till 2020. The NEO foundation has an investment vehicle that is NGC. Needless to say, this is a very strong force in the space and in its portfolio are (but not exclusive):
Zilliqa, Algorand, Certik, Aergo, IoTex, NEX(NASH), Switcheo, nOS, Atlas and more
LD Capital
Like Fenbushi, this is one of the first blockchain venture capital investment firms. Based in Shanghai, but spread out all over the world, this investment firm has a LOT in their portfolio, but not exclusive:
Quark, Certik, Fantom, EOS, NEO, Stellar, VeChain, Quantum, Binance, Huobi and more
We can tell from this that there’s serious money behind TOP Network and for good reason. Steve is a successful serial entrepreneur, that has a lot of technical experience and is a programmer himself. This tells us he has a keen sense for business as well as a more than a thorough understanding of computer science and the future of communication cloud-based networks.
No wonder other projects see the potential of TOP Networks as well.
As we can see, two of the venture capital firms have invested in Algorand. This is a very interesting project, founded by cryptography pioneer, MIT-teacher and Turing Award (2012) winner Silvio Micali. Silvio did remarkable work on zero knowledge proofing. Been a leader in cryptography since the 1980s, he designed the Algorand platform, along with a small army of leading cryptographers, researchers, mathematicians, and economist to solve the blockchain trilemma and guarantee scalability, decentralization, and security.
What Algorand will do for TOP Network:
- Bring even more scientific weight to the team. TOP Network is a high-performance blockchain that focuses on real-world business and with the technological exchange, the focus can remain on TOP’s mission while enjoying the research by the best in the field.
“TOP Network’s progress at building service-level applications complements the foundational academic research and theory that Algorand has transformed into a decentralized, scalable and secure pure proof-of-stake consensus platform. We look forward to working together with TOP Network to develop new, scalable blockchain solutions that can deliver the potential of blockchain technology to the masses.” — Silvio Micali
Like for Ontology, TOP Network will provide the Algorand platform with pluggable decentralized cloud communications services, providing access to a massive user base to help jumpstart adoption of the promising protocol.
I am really interested in this project and started to dive in and looking to get involved. Stay tuned on that one! UPDATE: As promised, here’s my blog on Algorand
Blockcloud is a recent partner of TOP Network that focuses on mainly on IoT. The Internet of Things is something that will be a major milestone in human technological advance and the groundbreaking technology will make it possible that one day we will see self-driving cars, not as a novelty, but as a standard. Blockcloud is building on a blockchain improved TCP/IP protocol, which in turn is a very interesting thing, considering the internet mainly runs on this protocol (that dates back to the 1980s). The whitepaper can be found here. Reading about the architecture of Blockcloud, it is easy to see where both projects find common ground — the architecture is built out of layered solutions and a DAG for fast confirmations.
… the future of IoT is threatened by frail connectivity, poor scalability, absent trust, cracked security and broken business model .
What Blockcloud will do for TOP Network:
- Provide products for TOP Network and TOP Network will provide products for Blockcloud. This ensures users for both projects
The next one on the line is partnering with Blockcloud as well: MultiVAC. MultiVAC is a ecosystem that specializes on sharding and has reached tremendous progress during its testnet, reaching 30k TPS with 64 shards, one single shard reaching 533 TPS. Of course, this only counts when actively used with dApps, and this is where projects like TOP Network come in.
What MultiVAC will do for TOP Network:
- Both project with enjoy each others technological advances to accelerate their public blockchains. TOP will have another market for the cloud-communication services.
MultiVAC had been audited by Certik, the same company that has been auditing TOP Network’s upgraded erc20 smart contract. Brad Laurie is both an ambassador to both TOP Network and MultiVAC, one of the very few I truly respect as a transparant researcher in the crypto space.
Last, but not least, Conflux, a very interesting project that combines Proof-of-Work and a DAG(Directed Acyclic Graph) to scale. This solution allows to concurrent block to be worked on, without forks! So effectively no orphan chains nor long confirmation times to verify the longest chain. This wouldn’t be a blockchain at all, but more like the IOTA structure or NANO’s DAG. So far it has claimed 6,500 TPS with 20,000 nodes support. Brad again has this project on his radar as well and did an interview with the COO of Conflux, Forgiven Zhang.
- The exact nature of this partnership is something I am still exploring.
EDIT: Fresh from the press! TOP Network is partnering with Tripio. Tripio is an online traveling marketplace, it works kinda like AirBnB, or Experia. It has a very friendly interface and the cool thing about it is that it accepts crypto. The nature of blockchain makes it so that the platform is reliable for all participants.
What Tripio will do for TOP Network:
- Create a demand for the TOP token and thus provide liquidity
- Reward holders op the TOP token with benefits (loyalty program)
- Develop each other’s communities and raise awareness for both projects
This will be an article that I will regularly update, as TOP Network is prone to have a lot more ecosystem partners in the future and the nature of each partnership will unfold.
You can find TOP Network on:
Email Contact: contact@topnetwork.org
Official Website: http://www.topnetwork.org
Telegram: https://t.me/topnetwork_top & for Dutch https://t.me/topnetwork_topNEDERLAND
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 $167 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.
