Ankr

Cloud computing market is projected to reach $410B by 2020, according to Forbes and Gartner. More data stipulate additional demand for such services resulting in projected CAGR of about 18%. So, the market Ankr enters is attractive and future-oriented. But it is monopolized now by giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Alibaba. These vendors are widely known and respected with high guarantees, but the prices are also high as well. Blockchain is a beautiful solution and decentralization here has some rational grounds. If blockchain startups offer high-level security and stability the market may transform significantly. Most of the projects are still in development stage but are rated well by community resulting in high investment returns: SONM, Dadi, Golem, and some of the projects did not finish ICOs: Dfinity, Akash. Technical details of Ankr are unavailable now but according to brief description the product is not similar to its competitors and is likely to has value.

The key drawback of the project is that prototype and even whitepaper are unavailable now but it is only private sale stage so the prototype and whitepaper will be available by July 2018. This date is currently the final point in the roadmap but team promises to release details soon. Ankr infrastructure may be divided into 3 components: (1) Resource-efficient mining scheme based on Proof of Useful Work, (2) Scalable Blockchain framework through Plasma sidechains and sharding, (3) Oracle service connecting real-world data of existing Internet solutions to on-chain entities. New Proof of Useful Work concept allows nodes to earn tokens from two streams: cloud computing and transaction processing. Transforming energy-inefficient PoW to useful computing is a good idea but not new. But Ankr is first in applying this concept to cloud computing and building an integrated ecosystem. Ankr is a permissionless blockchain framework can support dApps not only related to cloud computing and etc. Even without prototype and whitepaper project’s idea looks very promising even in comparison to competitors. Thanks to the idea the project faces up to strong hype from community. Due to the lack of prototype we cannot rate Product high, but we expect to see it in the near future.

In the model described in Product section token is likely to be a means of payment and a reward for nodes both for processing tasks and transactions. The infrastructure makes blockchain reasonable here so ICO is also has rational grounds

Financial details are not published yet but Hardcap is about $16M (gossips) that is reasonable in comparison to similar projects from Cloud Computing

Website indicates 13 team members and telegram has 15 in admins. Most of them have technical education in well-known universities. CEO does not have enough experience for leading the company graduated in 2017 and having research experience and internships (but it must be noted that internships are in Amazon and SAP). The other team seems to be more experienced. For example, CTO has 10 years’ experience in Amazon being Tech Lead and working with AWS Cloud service as well. Chief Security Engineer has been working in Palo Alto for 2 years and in General Electric and Electronic Arts. Other engineers and researchers are young but have interesting academic and career achievements. BDO has VC experience from 2013 so he is able to lead processes. The bottom line is that tech expertise is enough for developing the product but we see the lack of marketing and legal specialists.