Orchid

Researcher: Goku Yilmaz
Score: 3
Date: June 07, 2018

Analysis

Distributed marketplace for computation, storage, bandwidth.
They are hiring and building a team fast.
Sequoia, A16Z, DFJ, Metastable, Polychain, Blockchain invested in this. Thats every legit crypto fund in the world except USV. (Verified)
Uses an overlay network built upen the existing internet.
Gavin Wood is an advisor.
They already raised $41M privately.
Goktug: “I was emailing with founder about investing into them. I got a response at April 16. I said I’ll check later. They raised $36M on April 20 without me. Fuck.”
Private SAFT Fundraise Closing Friday, June 22. Aim to complete sale with a final target of up to $125m. $90M more will be sold.
In private alpha, will be open sourced late 2018
CEO has PhD from Cambridge. Worked on AI, search, storage, venture capital. IPO’ed a company, worked in Sun Microsystems, Pantera Capital, invested in Bitstamp, Xapo, 21, Chain, Circle, Korbit, Civic, Zcash, Polychain, Veem, Firestartr.
CEO is very well connected. Just from my linkedin knows ONT founder, Baris Ozistek, Shellpay founder, Softbank VCs etc..
CTO Brian wrote GNU Bash Shell, maintained GNU Emacs, wrote the first online banking software for Wells Fargo, created an open source election system. A+ engineer. Also been working on anonymous, secure internet since 2009. First open source foundation employee in the world.
Cofounder, Gustav was core developer at ETH. 159 commits(2M lines) on go ethereum in 2015. 9th top commiter. Worked in Dfinity, Erlang, Sumup.
Cofounder Jay made Cydia, iPhone jailbroken appstore. A+ engineer. 500K twitter followers.
Cofounder Stephen founded a few tech companies. 2 VC companies. Mostly in Asia.
Paper states their competitor I2P and Tor lack widespread adoption because lack of economic incentives.
Has “bandwidth mining”
Couple founders seem to be very active in reddit and hacker news.
A blockchain-based stochastic payment mechanism with transaction costs on the order of a packet
Has a fully distributed anonymous commodity bandwidth market
Exit Nodes can have whitelists to prevent traffic from viewing illegal content via their Exit Node
Orchid’s underlying payments system utilizes ERC20 tokens
Technical problem? Peddlers on the Orchid Market must change keys every 100 Ethereum blocks.
Note: Didn’t understand Orchid Market completely.
Using a PoW like mechanism to discourage attackers. Exploring Proof of Space.
Fixed amount of 1 billion ERC20 Orchid Tokens.
Protocols like Orchid have no judgement of their own, and so cannot tell if they are routing traffic for a freedom fighter or a terrorist, villain or hero.
Possible future stuff: File sharin, messaging service, mderation service, static website hosting.
200M tokens are sold. 35% network incentives, future sales, 35% SAFT, 12% employees, 18% founders.
There will be no ICO, all funds will be raised privately.
Need to go through Coinlist KYC process.
The applicable exchange rate shall be the closing price of Bitcoin or Ether in U.S. Dollars according to coinmarketcap.com on the day immediately preceding the date that the SAFT becomes effective.
The private presale round TOKEN price was 0.03$ USD and the private sale 0.70$
$50K minimum to enter the round. In some cases they accepted $25K.

SAFT Options (choose one): $0.50/token SAFT: $0.50/token, lockup: 1/2 unlocks 12 months after Network Launch, 1/12 unlocks each month from months 13-18 $0.70/token SAFT: $0.70/token, lockup: full amount unlocks 12 months after Network Launch

Questions:

How will ERC20 tokens provide enough TPS to make this system work at scale? Is it going to batched? Like 1000 packets per Orchid token?

Conclusion

They will probably raise $125M already and would possibly be too overvalued. But they might not reach the higher limit because no one is working on marketing this coin. This is an insta top 50 coin which can bring market cap to $350M. Easily 3x with high possibility of going top 10 ($4B), which means 25x realistic upside. Not the best investment but less risky. Any amount invested is locked up for at least 1 year. They have a lot of competition in this space.