If you’ve been following me since the beginning of the year, you’d know that I’m currently quite happy. I haven’t really felt the bear market and my portfolio is quite significantly larger than it was at the start of the year. The key to making money in both bull and bear markets is knowing where to put your money (and by paying attention to previous articles like this one). I have been indirectly ‘shorting’ BTC since December, but I do it by investing in lesser known projects with good short and long term potential, rather than risking my money on BitMEX for short term trades or throwing it on any hyped ICO. The plays in question have been MATRIX, Huobi Token, and FUSION which have all performed very well. That leads me to my next topic… IoTeX.
When evaluating a project I have what I like to call “The five pillars of a perfect blockchain”. I only invest in platforms, not dApps, and I only invest in projects after they have come up favourably when being addressed with the following questions:
- Is it suitably decentralised?
- Is it fast, extensible and scalable?
- Does it have competitors? How does it compare to them?
- Is the team competent enough to develop what they’re proposing?
- Is the team competent enough to facilitate mass adoption?
IoTeX scores very well on all accounts.
What is IoTeX?
IoTeX dubs itself as the next generation of the IoT-oriented blockchain platform. With vast scalability, privacy, interoperability, and development ease for incubating IoT applications and ecosystems, the easy way to sum it up would be as a combination of Monero, IOTA (without the buggy tangle) and Ethereum.
When I first evaluated this project in February, my first thought was “why would an IoT solution need privacy?” — which I’m sure is the first question of many readers too as privacy has become a bit of a buzzword as of late. After some thinking I realised that actually, some privacy in an IoT environment is absolutely necessary — everything being connected does not mean everything has to be known by everyone. Individuals, machines and businesses will all want to utilise the network, but at the same time they will all have data they need to remain private for personal and professional reasons.
One of the main differences between IoTeX and similar platforms is that it utilises “sidechains” in addition to the core chain which they call the “rootchain”. The team have cleverly understood that for something as big as IoT, all applications cannot take place on a single blockchain, because each application will have different needs. For example, in some cases, complete openness is ideal and so such a sidechain could exist where privacy isn’t feature, a chain which exists only to relay transactions between two chains has no need for turing completeness and so on. A breakdown of the differences between the rootchain and the sidechains can be seen below.
In terms of scalability, the platform has a similar idea to one of the other projects I follow, MATRIX. IoTeX has designed a RDPoS system, in which 21–50 delegates are voted in and elected to produce blocks for a certain length of time or ‘epoch’. This enables scalability and speed akin to something like EOS, but allows near perfect decentralisation similar to Ethereum.
There is so much to unpack with this platform and I don’t want to make this article prohibitively long by delving deep into the tech — please refer to the whitepaper for more.
The IoTeX team
A list of some of the companies the IoTeX team has worked for
The IoTeX team is one of the best globally. I say that with confidence. They are not only smart technically but also commercially as is clear from the way they have operated so far. They opted to only have a private sale with no ICO due to the incredibly high demand, but they held charity events which allowed ordinary investors to get some IoTeX at the private sale rate by donating to charity — a really classy move.
They are comprised of engineers coming with years of experience at S-class companies such as Facebook, Google, Uber, Intel, MIT, Stanford and more.
Who invested in IoTeX?
As I mentioned, IoTeX only held a private sale and no ICO due to the big interest from institutions. The two most notable institutions to invest in IoTeX are NEO Capital and Draper Capital — these are both names that speak for themselves. They have also been invested in by giants from Silicon Valley and more traditional companies such as ZMT Capital, Ceyuan Capital and Hofan Capital.
Roadmap
At the time of writing, IoTeX has reached all of their roadmap milestones on time. They recently released a test-net preview which can be watched here as it is explained in simple terms by one of the developers. In the next month they will add further functionality including their improved ring-signature implementation, an innovative new yellow-paper for the RDPoS system, and a full test-net release to the public.
In October the mainnet releases with subchain interoperability and the first dApp will be launched as early as November.
Token metrics
The token metrics are outstanding. 24% of all tokens were sold during the private sale, but they will be released gradually across 12 months in order to prevent dumping — there will be 6% released every quarter.
This means that currently circulating is 6% from private sale and 2% from the charity and bounty programs, which is an 800,000,000 circulating supply and at the time of writing a $25 million USD market cap, I personally believe this is extremely low for this project and personally value it anywhere between $500m and $1.2b, which I have no doubt will be reached very quickly once Binance lists the project.
Where to buy it
By now, if you felt FOMO mid-article you would have noticed the project isn’t on coinmarketcap yet. This is how early I’m presenting this project to you. You can buy IOTX on idex, Gate.io, and Kucoin. IoTeX also won the ‘super-node voting’ on HADAX and so will be listed on there any day now, which gives it a direct route to Huobi Pro.
For me, this is both a short term and a long term play. In the short term, some well known influencers have expressed similar sentiment to me and are accumulating, and in the longer term, as development continues, partnerships are signed, and word gets out further, this will just keep going and going. There are no limits on how far good IoT projects can go.
My twitter followers will always be the first to know of my newest picks, so follow my twitter to keep on top.