Arcblock ICO

Category:  Off chain transactions

  Sentiment – Pleasant/quiet.  Extremely low negativity currently.  Looks to also have significant twitter marketing (lots of similar retweets, bounty program, etc).

  Geography – Evenly distributed across markets

  Recent news – Lots of KYC / Whitelist

  White paper - https://www.arcblock.io/file/whitepaper/WhitePaperEnV2_en-US.pdf?v=3

Overview:

Took me a bit to figure out what these guys were trying to do.  Their video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXMol2EjAwA#action=share) has soooooo many buzz words its almost like it was a parody! I thought maybe they were trying to make a joke with this video for the first minute.  I understand this is to get the non techies excited about this but it put a bad taste in my mouth to start because I just wanted to understand what they were trying to deliver and the video just made it foggier.  The whitepaper however was much better in describing what they are delivering.  So basically if im understanding this correctly they are literally trying to do what the lighting network is trying to accomplish.

Info on lighting network:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
https://lightning.network/ ← long video but good technical info.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A ← good short video on lighting network.

If what they are describing is what I believe it is (another version of the lighting network), it is the future and I 95% believe it.  The problem is there is about 3 companies that are much farther ahead and haven’t done an ICO.  https://blockstream.com/ is one of them which you probably have heard of – Adam Beck is on their team. https://lightning.engineering/ is another one – Elizabeth stark is on their team.  To really simplify it, they are basically building a dApp that mimics an exchange.  This allows you to trade off chain between chains like LTC to BTC without taking on the transaction costs of on chain transactions.  It’s a system of IOUs that after x time get aggregated up to the main chains.  Banking 2.0.  Big deal here and I would currently keen in finding a way to setup a major lighting node.  So what arclbock is describing seems to be what lighting is trying to solve.  These 3 companies have come up with “basics of lighting technology” AKA BOLT which is a shared protocol so these different companies can “speak” with each other.  That’s important because if it really takes off this year, Arcblock would be left behind.   The opposite would be also true.

Suggestion:

The tech (if I understand it correctly) is a big deal.  Who is going to come out on top, LN or Arcblock?  I think whichever one makes it frictionless for users.  Overall the sentiment is pleasant, very little negative info on Arcblock.  I’m 60-80% if I would go in on this ICO.  The community needs this type of tech.

Notes:
This is all my assumption after reading the whitepaper and what they are describing in it, I could have read it with a basis lens and incorrectly associated to LN.