Blockcollider Review
Block Collider proposes Proof of edit Distance consensus to create a blockchain that will be the mother of entire blockchain ecosystem. Some existing chains have quick block times, some chains have expressive smart contracts, some are excellent store of value etc. BC wants to let each blockchain do the things it does well and wants BC to be the chain that connects existing blockchains. In the beginning BC will connect 6 chains – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Neo, Waves, Lisk and another chain that is yet to be named. Block Collider’s blockchain is built by “weaving” together chains using PoD which makes BC a multi-chain or an aggregate of member chains. Such chain would be great for decentralized exchanges, “atomic swaps” and ICOs as well.
Unlike Polkadot (block collider competitor) block collider prides itself by needing no validators – A validator is a third party to whom the network gives some level of trust. block collider builds it’s blockchain with a mining algorithm which removes the requirement to place trust in a third party. Block colliderclaims to be truly decentralized . Everyone is well aware that in the current crypto market a centralisation of power is taking place around a few mining pools. block collidertries to address this by:
- Splitting the mining of blocks and transactions:
– Allowing for competition in two spaces hence there is reduced risk of centralization, since an actor would have to win the centralization game at both levels.
2)Secondly by how Emblems (one of the BC’s tokens) regulate Block Size Bonus (we’ll talk more on that in the token section)
Proof of Distance
The “mining” of the Collider multichain is the challenge of finding a hash that satisfies a minimum hash similarity (or edit distance) between the hashes of member chains.
Once a block miner finds a nonce whose resultant hash satisfies the requirements, he wins the block reward. There are other interesting concepts explained in the whitepaper such as marked tokens, rovers, promises and callbacks but I do not want to spend 30 minutes explaining every detailed technical aspect of how BC plans to deliver its goals instead I’ll move on to the roadmap.
Roadmap
Whitepaper specifies few tantative high level future goals however we perceive these as block coliders vision as there is only one specific timeframe mentioned which we can see here- “Once the initial six blockchains have been deployed to the Collider multichain and the core protocol passes the incubation window of two years, the protocol switches to an “Evolution Mode – where new chains can be added or removed based on voting system”
Team
The team has in total 7 members, 4 of which are developers- 2 of which do not have block collider mentioned on linkedin and per linkedin are currently employed somewhere else. Secondly there no advisors listed on the webpage either.
Competition.
Block collider does a good job comparing with Polkadot and others however they did not mention Fusion or Wanchain.
There are differences between Wanchain , fusion and BC, mostly on HOW they try to reach their main goals but from high level perspective – Wanchain and fusion are also a cross-chain protocols or blockchains with smart contracts , Wanchain putting focus more on the financial sector, fusion additionally plans to support off-chain data-sets directly.
Block Collider could leverage off-chain data-sets as well via other coins that do support that. Since BC is plugged into 6 chains – BC could run its own ICOs which can collect funds from several chains. So all in all in our opinion Wanchain and block Collider are to certain extent “same same, different, but still the same”.
Token & token utility
BC hard cap is 7 Mil USD – ICO date is unknown but the whitelist registration will take place on 20th of March. BC is going to have 2 tokens- Emblem and NRG (Non-Relational Graph). In ico 100 our of 300 mil. ’emblem’ tokens will be sold – 1 ethereum will equal 12400 emblems – which with the current price of ether makes 1 token worth around 7 cents.
Emblem can be perceived as a basket of tokens — each of which contains a fixed number of marked tokens on other chains.
BC implements dynamic block sizes through the use of Emblems . Miners can “stake” Emblems which will allow them to expand the size of the block, thereby fitting more transactions into a single block for greater rewards. However there is going to be an “optimal number of Emblems” – let’s say it is 100 Emblems, staking beyond the 100 emblems does not significantly increase your rewards, hence incentivises for further decentralization. If someone wants to split his tokens into multiple mining rigs he would have to be connected to the least number of identical peers than his original mining rig – in other words he would have to expand to other regions. This leads to less centralization regionally and increases the overall efficiency + speed of the network
The Second token – Non-Relational Graph (NRG) is the native, mineable currency of the Block Collider multichain and is used to reward miners – Without them you cant really utilise the network.
Concerns:
There is no publicly available MVP, the team has 4 core developers- 2 of which do not have block collider listed on linkedin and are currently employed somewhere else, on top of that per linkedin none of the developers have blockchain related experience. However the team plans to release the code prior to the ICO so the community can validate both the MVP and developers’ knowledge and skills.
Thirdly – advisors unknown:
We asked the team on advisors and this is the reply ” “The team does have advisors and other strategic partners- We will release our investors/advisors only if they explicitly ask us to do so the day before the ICO. Technology should stand on its own.” – while we get the point this is a concern for us as ‘courtesy’ is just not good enough of a reason to not share this information in our opinion
Lastly, the roadmap – Whitepaper specifies few tantative high level future goals but we can’t call this a roadmap. We approached the team and they stated a non-technical roadmap will be released soon as well.
Verdict: this is not a financial advice
The idea behind Block Collider is great and the hard cap is unbelievable however there are many unknowns about the project – MVP not publicly available, advisors undisclosed, roadmap non-existent but on the other hand the team claims it will release the code prior to the ICO , team is working on a roadmap and might share the advisors before the ICO as well.
