Bluzelle (BLZ) ICO review

Review

Who is Bluzelle?

Bluzelle Platform Ltd is a company with it’s headquarters in Singapore. They chose this location because Singapore is the hub that allows them to expand their business into Asia. They also have an R&D center in Vancouver, Canada. The majority of the technology team is situated in Vancouver.

Bluzelle offers a low-cost, quick to deploy, high performance, scalable and decentralized database system, for dApps, that is designed for software developers who are dissatisfied with the costs, limited scalability, and complexity of existing database systems. Their goal is to become the decentralized version of Oracle, offering the Database as a Service (DbaaS).

 

What problems are Bluzelle trying to solve?

Databases need high throughput and fast access times in order to work properly: Current blockchains like Ethereum are not designed for data storage and management because it requires a network-wide universal consensus. It would therefore be impractical to do so due to high latency, long confirmation times and mounting transaction costs.

Current systems cannot sufficiently scale for future demand:  Current centralized systems are not set up to scale at the rate that will be demanded over the next decade. In 2015 and 2016,  90% of all existing data was created and with the rise of Internet of Things ‘IoT’, data creation will accelerate even further.
Current solutions are complex and expensive: It takes enormous time, effort, and coordination to provision new databases today because of a lack of resources to meet the administration challenges of rolling out complex clustered systems.
Single point of failure, no privacy, not immutable: Current solutions have a single point of failure, offer no real privacy and are not immutable
dApps are currently managed centrally: dApp developers are building the world’s next apps on the blockchain using traditional cloud-based databases, which essentially negates the whole advantage of decentralization.

 

How does Bluzelle aim to tackle these issues ?

The Bluzelle database was architected from the get-go to employ three key technologies, one of which is database sharding (breaking up the data in little pieces called shards). In this way, Bluzelle accomplishes massive scalability by sharding all database data and then ensuring shards get properly stored into Bluzelle’s own flavour of network partitions – swarms.
A Bluzelle swarm is a collection of nodes that all replicate the same shards of data, where all these nodes are part of a unique network that defines that swarm.

There is no need for a network-wide universal consensus:
Imagine Bluzelle as a tree with thousands of leaves, each leaf representing it’s own little blockchain containing one project which is identified by their unique partition id and managed by a dedicated group of computers ‘swarm’.

This configuration means that not every node in the network needs a copy of all the data in the network, only the nodes who work together at the leaf level need to replicate the data amongst themselves.  This is one of the key differences between Bluzelle and a traditional blockchain. Blockchains are inherently slow and do not scale well, as every set of transactions or blocks is 100% replicated everywhere, putting severe vertical scaling limitations on the network. In Bluzelle’s blockchain there is no need to achieve consensus over all the leaves in the network (at the same time), only a need to achieve localized consensus at the leaf level.

This configuration creates the high throughput and fast access times that is needed to host databases.

Bluzelle Product Features:

 

How does the Bluzelle network work?

Bluzelle takes blockchain principles and sharding & partitioning concepts to create an AirBnB like marketplace for data storage and management. There are two groups within the Bluzelle Network, the producers and the consumers.

Producers (Farmers or Miners), provide resources in the form of CPU processing power, memory, permanent storage, and network connectivity to enable database shards to be stored with sufficient partial replication across a swarm of nodes. A proportional “stake” is put up as collateral by a producer as an incentive for them to guarantee reliability. The stake can be proportionally lost, if sufficient metrics are not met or the producer is deemed a bad actor.

Consumers use Bluzelle’s database services provided by the collective whole (all the producers), and in turn pay for the services using the Bluzelle ERC-20 Token (BLZ) and Bluzelle Native Token (BNT). They have control over attributes that dictate how and where their data is stored which have to be paid for with BNT tokens.

A consumer only pays when he needs access to the network and can also be a Bluzelle producer earning money by sharing computing resources.

 

Bluzelle Product Roadmap:

 

Team 

Bluzelle is a team of 10 and growing with mainly top engineers with backgrounds in computer science, AI, cognitive science, blockchain, security, networking and more. We will only mention the leadership team here:

Pavel Bains – CEO/Co-Founder
Pavel has over 15 years experience in operational management, digital technology and finance. An NCAA honor roll student-athlete from UCLA, Pavel was co-founder of Storypanda, a digital book platform that published titels that are accaimed by DreamWorks, Warner Bros and more.

Neeraj Murarka – CTO/Co-Founder
Neeraj is an engineer and computer systems architect with over 20 years experience. He has  worked for Google, IBM, Hewlet Packard, Lulhansa, Thales Avionics

Nitin Cunha – Senior Developer
Past Experience: Programmer at Whitewater Industries, Analyst at Deloitte, Resource manager CNC Global, Business Analist at AdPerfect, Recruiter at Pulse Energy, Director at Datassurant, Talent Manager at TEEMA Consulting Group.

Advisors:

Bluzelle has put together a specialized unit of advisors to guide the growth of the business. Each person is a technology heavyweight contribu_ng to companies like Facebook, PayPal, LinkedIn, Ethereum and more. These include the following:

Gil Penchina angel investor
known for Investing in Ripple, Civic, LinkedIn and more.

Prashant Malik
Ex Facebook. Co-Creator of Apache Cassandra

Alex Leverington
Core Ethereum Developer

 

Token Sale Details:

Start :                                  18 January 2018
Token distribution date:     TBA
Token standard:                  Ethereum ERC20
Tickersymbol:                     BLZ
Tokensupply:                       165,000,000
Token Sale Target:             $ 19,500,000 (hard cap)

 

Token Allocation:

Token Sale: 33%
BLZ will be offered for sale so that consumers and producers can become part of the ecosystem early and have tokens needed to be used for Bluzelle.

Retained by Bluzelle: 27%
The retained tokens can be used in additional offerings to further development and staff Incentives

Developer Fund: 10%
Used to incentivize, reward and attract outside developers to build projects, integrations, partnerships, hackathons and community involvement. Growing the ecosystem is important.

Founding Team: 15%
Bluzelle’s founders have been working on the business for over three years. Allocation of their BLZ tokens will vest over three years.

Early Backers, Equity Investors and Advisors: 15%
Bluzelle has been fortunate to have early investors and advisors to help with the development of the technology. Part of the equity investments have been converted into tokens.

 

Use of Funds:

Research & Product Development: 55%
Use to continuously develop the product, grow the team globally.

Network Costs: 10%
Initial capital needed to seed the network with nodes and kick-start the decentralized service.

Sales and Marketing: 20%
Grass-roots marketing to start and expand to conferences, sponsorships, advertising.

Operations: 10%
General overhead and administration costs for running the business on a global scale.

Legal, Compliance, Accounting: 5%
Important to Bluzelle to maintain high standards for its operations and provide transparency.

 

Bluzelle’s token dynamics:

Bluzelle is powered by two tokens:

• Ethereum ERC-20 external token: BLZ

This externally-tradable token bridges the Bluzelle network’s native BNT token with

Ethereum’s own native ETH token.

• Bluzelle Network Token: BNT

The BNT token is native to the Bluzelle network. It is internal for use in the Bluzelle ecosystem alone.  There is a  need for an internal token is because ERC-20 tokens are too slow and expensive for realtime database accounting.

The BLZ and BNT tokens can be interchanged via the Bluzelle token gateway. For the public sale, people will be purchasing BLZ tokens. When a new participant to the network wishes to use its services as a consumer, they will need to acquire BNT tokens.

 

Opportunities

Huge market: Databases are used in every organization and every market sector in the world, even a small portion of the market captured by Bluzelle would be an exponential increase in the capitalization of this project.

Team/Investors/Advisors: Bluzelle has a strong team that is rewarded with the trust of prominent investors and investment funds. This is a sign that the big players have confidence in both the project and the team. Another sign of confidence is that they where appointed by the World Economic Forum as the Technology Pioneer for 2017 and where named in the Global Fintech 100.

Security/Performance/Reliability: Current Database infrastructure suffers from performance, reliability and security issues. Using blockchain sharding for Databases will solve these issues.

Community:  Every succesfull project needs a big community that plays a major role in the success and impact of the project. Bluzelle already has an active following of over 25.000 users. This shows that there is a tremendous interest in this project… so big.. that they had to close their whitelist for registration prematurely.

 

Concerns:

Core Technology Risks:  Bluzelle is built with core technologies that are in some cases immature and unproven, including the Ethereum blockchain platform and various open source software applications and libraries. If those core technologies do not perform according to Bluzelle Platform’s needs or expectations, Bluzelle may be required to change the specifications and to reduce or eliminate features on the platform

Smart Contract risks:  Certain key features of Bluzelle will be implemented in smart contracts on the Application and on the Ethereum blockchain platform. The nature of smart contracts makes them difficult to change and to fix bugs, improve performance, or add features and functions.

Regulatory Risks:    The regulatory status of Bluzelle, BLZ, and the Token Sale is unclear or unsettled in many jurisdictions. It is not known if, when, or to what degree different jurisdictions will interpret existing laws and regulations or adopt new laws and regulations that could adversely affect Bluzelle.

Lack of Market Penetration:  This project depends on attracting users and/or third parties providing services to Bluzelle at the intended level or at a level sufficient to become or remain useful or viable. Any such lack of use or interest could negatively affect the development of Bluzelle and/or the value of Bluzelle and/or BLZ.

Risk of Dilution:  Bluzelle will create and distribute BLZ other than via the Token Sale, as described in their White Paper. In many cases those other BLZ will be distributed for less per BLZ than a Participants will pay for BLZ in the Token Sale. The distribution of those other BLZ will increase the overall supply of BLZ in the market, and may affect as well as result in downward pressure on the market price of BLZ. In addition, Bluzelle reserves the right to create and distribute new BLZ in one or more other token sales.

Conclusion:

Overall we are bullish on this ICO, The Bluzelle team has already installed various blockchain solutions for Asian financial institutions like OCBC Bank, HSBC and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) which shows they have the expertise to delever what they embark on.  Besides that, they have been appointed by the World Economic Forum as the Technology Pioneer for 2017. They have a huge following on social media which also shows the level of enthousiasm for this project.

Our Rating based on our pointing system is as follows:
Bluzelle gets a rating of 98 %

We are investing in this ICO!

This is not investing advice, we merely show you in what ICO we are investing. As always do your own research!