Searching for a gem in crypto for 2018? : ARCBLOCK.

Cloud computing, decentralized applications and blockchain technology. If you are interested in all of this, then probably you should take a look at ArcBlock. ArcBlock is the 3.0 of blockchain. It’s an ecosystem for building and deploying decentralized blockchain applications in a presentable, easy to use presentation. 

What makes ArcBlock interesting is the fact that they are aiming to solve the problem of blockchain adoption which is caused due various reasons that I’m going to briefly explain to provide an idea to what ArcBlock is changing in the current blockchain space. 

One of the biggest flaws of blockchains their poor performance, meaning they can’t handle enough transactions to be widely used on a daily basis. So they are not fast enough or light enough. For some blockchains, you need to store the whole chain data which can easily occupy some GB of space in your computer. They are not consumer friendly either. Several crucial tasks in your wallet require some technical steps that the average user is, most likely, not be familiar with, like backing up your wallet, encrypting it, or perhaps setting up a masternode. 

Currently, the costs of using blockchains are high, considering that for every task or action you can execute in the blockchain, there’s a fee, and this limits mass adoption because our current system already lets us use apps for free, why would people migrate to a system where you have to pay for every minor action. Imagine if I want to send Bitcoin to a friend, because of the price, (around 14,000 USD) I have to pay 100,000 satoshis in fees (0.00100000). That’s 14 dollars. What if I just wanted to send 10 dollars? I of course can adjust the fee’s price, but I will have to compensate it with a slower transaction. That’s a crucial existent problem: fees. If you have a platform that is feeless, you can focus in monetizing in new valuable services rather than having users pay fees to use the network.  

As it’s usual with any beta product, upgrades are necessary the more the technology is researched and developed, but with blockchain technology these upgrades mean scalability, and being modular. Modular blockchains allow developers to freely evaluate and choose which blockchain layer they want to choose to develop the dapp. Some applications might need to run in multiple platforms, and this is the flexibility the current blockchain space lacks of.  

As you can see, blockchains face a big challenge: delivering a functional product at a worldwide scale. And with the current model that POW algorithms and POS algorithms are approaching, that challenge might not be realized. The ArcBlock Platform will be built precisely to solve this problem by being a platform service, to build an abstract structure, rather than a standalone software package, that is too dependent. ArcBlock mixes cloud computing with blockchain technology to restructure the way it works.  

Arcblock, as it says in the whitepaper (you can read more in detail the whitepaper here: https://www.arcblock.io/file/whitepaper/WhitePaperEnV2_en-US.pdf) “is an incentive-driven marketplace for reusable services, components, and even applications”. So this applied to the concept of mining, it makes a truly decentralized incentivized community where people that contributed resources or services will be rewarded with tokens to continuously evolve and robustly grow. 

 One of the most important components of Arcblock is their Open Chain Access Protocol that enables open connectivity over multiple blockchain protocols, so they can communicate, interact and execute actions across all of them. This protocol, coupled with Blocklet, another component that can be implemented with any platform or language. Because its full flexibility and modular nature, blocklet can perform both on-chain and off-chain computing. Accessing to multiple blockchains encourages your application to work on different blockchains, taking advantage of their different benefits and not get stuck by their particular limitations. And what’s better, the current protocol provides an abstract layer for accessing blockchains, but chain adapters can be built to further expand the protocol’s utility and take advantage of multiple blockchain protocols. 

Chain adapters essentially translate protocol layers into a unified API that’s defined in the Open Chain Access layer. ArcBlock initially will implement chain adapters for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperledger. After the code releases as open source, anyone will be able to contribute to support additional blockchain protocols. You can buy and sell these chain adapters in the marketplace so that everyone has the chance to use them. The people that contributed to the development of the adapter will receive rewards when others use it. This incentivizes the community to create and build high quality chain adapters for various blockchains so the ArcBlock ecosystem gets more robust.  

One of the things I’m pretty excited to see it realized is when ArcBlock begins implementing clout computing platforms so that users can manage BaaS services from directly within ArcBlock applications. That will boost ArcBlock’s adoption with mainstream customers.  

Arcblock is optimized for the best experience, it upgrades several limitations of current blockchain technologies and truly leverages blockchain’s complete potential. ArcBlock will be built on top of AWS and Windows Azure, and further provide support for Google Compute Engine. A token economy is established in ArcBlock. Applications can build their unique utility tokens that automatically inherit all ArcBlock features.

A cloud node is a new concept that Arcblock introduces. Groups of cloud services may serve as a node, instead of a physical computer. Arcblock is the first blockchain platform that integrates a cloud node. This enhances security, performance and structure’s abstraction. A cloud node takes decentralization and security to the next level. Cloud servers are more secure and reliable than self-hosting servers and far more secure than p2p connected nodes. 

The same way ArcBlock completely innovates the node structure of its network, the miners also serve a particularly different role than Bitcoin and Ethereum miners. There are resource miners that provide cloud computing resources or contribute self-hosted computing resources. And then there’s component miners that contribute software components to the system, suck as chain adapters.  

Another innovative feature of ArcBlock is that it’s based in Algorand, founded by Silvio Micali, a blockchain and cryptocurrency pioneer that developed Algorand as an improved solution’s to Bitcoin. For more details you can read a detailed explanation of Algorand in ArcBlock’s whitepaper. 

 ArcBlock truly shifts and improves the way we currently know how blockchain works. We have standard software to record and create decentralized transactions; we can call these protocol 1.0 blockchain protocols. Then we have 2.0 blockchains that implement smart contracts, an innovative approach that boosts their utility. But 3.0 blockchains such as ArcBlock are not only upgrading every single aspect of how a blockchain 1.0 or 2.0 work, but are also adding new technologies that can maximize their real value and utility for a definitive mass adoption.

  This is one of the special gems for 2018 that will definitely challenge and push bigger projects to keep up with this fast paced industry, to adapt, change, improve, innovate, or die trying. Arcblock have the foundation to challenge top 10 coins to step up their game because as of now, 2018, there’s lots of coins with outdated buggy protocols, that are still holding quite big caps, some over 50 or 100 million dollars, for achieving what so far? These 1.0 blockchains are ready to drop and transfer their value to real projects that deserve this type of valuation because they have proved that they haven’t been able to improve and realistically delivered a functional product.  

So be guaranteed that there are millions if not billions waiting in the market, ready to be transferred to ArcBlock once investors realize blockchain 3.0 begins with ArcBlock.   

You can find me in bitcointalk here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=882182;sa=forumProfile

I also analyze charts in tradingview: https://www.tradingview.com/u/JungleOnion/

If you want to participate in ArcBlock ICO, the public sale will begin February 3rd: https://www.arcblock.io/

Also go and get updates for the project here in their Bitcointalk ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2699379