Hey everyone, so I’m here to talk about a project criminally underrated which is iExec mostly because I think their communication has not been very efficient compared to a lot of other projects.
Disclaimer: I own a bit of them (not even close to be a whale though, more of a shrimp in fact and it’s not the majority of my portfolio either) and of course I wouldn’t mind if the price went up but I’m a long term player and I think it’s better to do educational posts with informations I gathered and personal analysis (not investor advice so).
So what is iExec?
Well it’s a blockchain based distributed cloud platform where anyone can:
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sell his computing power (in short you loan your CPU/GPU to do calculations for someone in exchange of money) to companies/other people on a marketplace
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develop and rent applications on an Appstore
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buy the services listed before
In short it’s like a AirBnB but for cloud computing.
Why do we need that?
First there are 4 BIG problems with today cloud:
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it’s extremely vulnerable since it’s centralized. You probably heard about Amazon or OVH cloud services outage recently: it’s a huge issue because it paralyzes hundreds of thousands of business and millions of workers. For now it's fine because the consequences are merely economic but imagine in the futures with IoT and Smart cities, it could literally cost people lives.
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server farms where the Cloud is hosted are popping everywhere and are an ecological disasters because they basically generate heat that is not used for anything, iExec on the other sides opens the window to greener solutions by for example delocalizing servers to warm office/residential buildings.
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the offer is too rigid: let’s say Bob owns a middle sized cloud hosting platform, Bob signed a limited pool of clients after doing a lot of door-to-door sales, now Bob has to invest in an infrastructure (=hardware) that can handle of the load in case of a peak, the problem is that it happens like once in a week the rest of the time the uptime is around 30%, in short 70% of his machines are turned off the vast majority of the time. With a solution like iExec he can not only downsize the marketing dept (sorry sales guys) but he can drastically augment his uptime and not being worried about having an over or undersized infrastructure thanks to a global marketplace.
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it’s too closed and undersized compared to the ressources available, with iExec in practice even a guy with gaming rig can become a part-time cloud provider
iExec makes the cloud much more resilient, ecologic and cheaper than any tech giant can.
Why do I think it is undervalued right now?
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They already have a working base product since November, called the V1, in which you can start developing on today, contrary to their main competitors, also they delivered it on time (I’m looking at you Golem and your Brass we are waiting since more than 6 months).
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The engineers behind it are 3 PhD in grid computing who developed numerous softwares (Bitdew, XtremWeb-HEP, etc...) used by scientific institutions (like the CERN) and continuously published research and algorithms during the last 20 years (see google scholar), they know their stuff better than everyone and deliver on the clock, if you are a developper and intrigued I invite you to come on the Slack and have a chat with them (they are very available).
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It’s the first solution providing the possibility to do off-chain computation for Dapps the project is sino-french which means they have foot both in 2 massive markets (China and the EU), they have for now an office in Lyon (it’s in France not far from Switzerland) and they are opening one in Hong Kong.
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The company benefits from the support of the Tsingua university (chinese equivalent of the MIT), INRIA (french equivalent of the MIT), the CNRS (the biggest french research entity) and Chinese Academy of Science (pretty self-explanatory).
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They are members of the Entreprise Ethereum Alliance.
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90% of the RLC are in circulation which is one of the fairest distribution I know
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the marketcap is only (65 millions, meaning 20% of its direct competitor Golem despite the project being more advanced)
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they are making partnerships with other projects on the blockchain like Request, Flixxo or Signal and they were present at multiple HPC shows recently (they are discussing with IBM but nothing is confirmed but it's just to point they are credible).
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The RLC will need to be staked to for « workers » (people selling their computation power) to gain higher rewards
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The cloud computing market was evaluated at $290 billions last years and some forecasts say it could reach $410 billions in 2020, I let you meditate on these numbers and the possibilities of iExec once the V2 will be released
- Their Appstore will be out in 15 days (the 20th of November)
What is the catch?
Despite all these very solid arguments iExec underperformed notably on one point: marketing and public awareness. The little that has been done was made hastily and with no real strategy, they participated to a lot of conferences/shows to present their technologies to companies like IBM/Intel/Docker/etc… but they forgot the average developer and crypto-enthusiast, in consequence nothing was done since the ICO in April to encourage community growth or vulgarize the project and now it’s playing against them, that said if you just heard about the project it’s an opportunity because not many has.
However there has been some efforts done recently notably with a prize pool of $150 000 dollars for a Dapp challenge and plans to reach Asia (website translation in korean has been done yesterday and very soon they will have a chinese CM and open social medias).
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