0Chain (ZCN)

Token contract address: 0xb9EF770B6A5e12E45983C5D80545258aA38F3B78

Project website: https://0chain.net/

TL;DR

• Proposal to activate single-sided exposure and IL protection for 0Chain.

• 250,000 BNT co-investment limit

• Full proposal at gov.bancor.network

• 0Chain is a decentralized data storage network, and introduces an out-of-the-box, data regulation-compliant product set to disrupt a $1T industry.

• The ZCN token is locked in exchange for cloud storage access.

• The initial seed investors and team’s token vesting, representing 20% of the fully diluted token supply, has been linearly vested over 4 years (2018-2021). The single greatest private holder of ZCN has approx. 1% of the total ZCN supply.

• There are no obvious exploits that could affect the Bancor Network, vis-a-vis developer rug pulls, or whale price manipulation games.

• There is an existing, active liquidity provider community lying in wait, ready to move liquidity to Bancor at the first opportunity. The proposed co-investment limit allows ample space for Bancor to absorb the lion’s share of the total DEX liquidity, while maintaining a substantive incentive for ZCN LPs to buy and stake BNT to increase the pool depth thereafter.

Tokenomics

Storage Consumers, aka Clients, can lock tokens and obtain cloud storage in return. Storage Providers, aka Blobbers, can stake ZCN and earn yield on their stake plus a service fee on data written / read by the Clients. ZCN holders can also delegate their ZCN to Blobbers, and earn a yield on their stake plus a percentage of the Blobber’s revenue. Such delegation enables further scalability of the 0Chain storage network by allowing Blobbers who can provide the adequate storage hardware but do not have the required ZCN tokens to join the storage network.

Ultimately, the ZCN token value is directly correlated to the amount of data stored on, and read from, the Blobber’s storage network; and thus in turn to the amount of tokens staked by Blobbers (and delegators) for availing such storage capacity. [4]

0Chain decouples this storage network from consensus, which is handled by a different set of service providers. The active consensus set is made up of 100 Miners and 25 Sharders, and is shuffled every 7 days. Miners are responsible for producing blocks and Sharders are responsible for storing blocks. This active set behaves as a control layer for the storage network, facilitating handshakes between Clients and Blobbers amongst other things.

0Chain decouples consensus and storage at the infrastructure layer and couples them at the economics layer albeit via different reward mechanisms; however are all ultimately token centric. This allows for a fast, scalable and lean network that is not resource intensive nor one that constrains or favors any one aspect or group over another.

Github | 17 Pub. Repos , 200+ Branches

0Chain is a project which has been in development for the last three (3) years. This development went through a two-pronged process of research, third party review, and eventually code implementation.

Cutting edge research was done in collaboration with researchers from San Jose State University, University of Maryland, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and Imperial College of London. Whitepapers are available 0Chain’s website [1].

Code implementation over 3 years and ongoing, 17 active public repositories, 200+ branches, and more than 3000+ commits, is available on Github [9]. The code is production ready and available for download.

Enterprise Awareness & Collaboration

0Chain collaborates with different entities in the Info Tech field.

On the infrastructure side, data centers are collaborating and offering one-click buy configurations for 0Chain miner and blobber rigs in the US and EU [10]. This collaboration is currently being expanded to other regions as well. These click and buy is expected to accelerate adoption beyond crypto enthusiasts.

On the tech stack, companies such as Oracle and others have been working with 0chain to address new data compliance regulations. GDPR and CCPA regulations have created a necessity for big tech to innovate the way they handle and store data whilst mitigating liability of such custody.

0chain has been featured on Oracle Blog several times [6].

Storage Network Capacity

More than 140 blobbers have thus far committed close to 3PB of storage capacity towards 0Chain mainnet at an average of 20TB per blobber. At this rate, network capacity is estimated to exceed 10PB within a year. As more data centers and companies provide one-click server hosting (colo) solutions this rate should increase.

Most blobbers are collocated in Tier 3 data centers worldwide, and thus most if not all, have 1gbps connections. This provided for an enterprise grade decentralized storage network with low latency and high availability.

Developers can build applications to make use of this capacity. 0Chain has itself developed 0Box, a Dropbox-like dApp that makes use of this decentralized storage network. Other developers have developed video streaming dApps. Others are integrating into data marketplaces such as Kylin and Ocean. The possibilities are endless and 0Chain is just getting started.

Interestingly, this network capacity lives on the edge of the internet, in data centers within cities. This makes cheap IoT storage a reality. IoT providers can now unload data with low latency to a decentralized storage network within source proximity and simultaneously sell this data on decentralized marketplaces such as Ocean via 0Chain’s Proxy Re-encryption technology without forfeiting data ownership. Cross network marketplaces are inevitable, and IoT data streams sold on such marketplaces is now becoming possible. The road ahead is exciting.

Community and Communication

The 0Chain community is a large proponent of DeFI, so much that the community independently crowdsourced its liquidity through a smart contract: a “Geyser” [5] that functions in a very similar manner to Bancor’s Liquidity Mining reward protocol.

The Geyser issues a reward multiplier that increases over time as the liquidity position remains staked. Today, the Geyser currently holds over $700,000 in dual sided liquidity from community members. Since the liquidity on 0Chain’s Geyser is dual sided, it exposes the 0Chain community to IL and is a risk they happily take. However, a whitelisted ZCN on the Bancor Network would see the Geyser liquidity replicated on its Bancor pool, since it enables IL protections that Uniswap cannot, removing the risk and thus increasing staking incentives.

0Chain has an active Telegram, Twitter, Newsletter and Facebook. There are two official chats: the main chat (general and tech related questions), and a “Service Provider” chat (questions related to Mining / Sharding / Blobbing).

There are several articles on Medium regarding updates, partnerships, and tech. You can also find us on Youtube, Facebook and Reddit.

The founders, Saswata Basu and Tom Austin, have 15+ years experience operating in Silicon Valley. Saswata has founded several successful startups, with previous experience at Nortel, Harris, and Intel. Tom currently teaches Computer Science at SJSU, with previous experience at Cloudflare and Mozilla [7]. The core team has more than 20 developers.

Market Data

Max total supply: 400,000,000 (50% is mineable - block & interest rewards)

FDV: USD $244,372,607 [8]

Circulating supply: 135,178,082* (67.5% of minted tokens) [8]

24h trading volume: circa USD 1M+ [9]

Exchanges: Uniswap, Gate.io, Bitfinex, Bilaxy, Bancor

Distribution: 25,000 ERC20 addresses.

Token Distribution

Max Cap is 400 Million. 50% mineable and 50% pre-mint. Overall, the token distribution on a fully diluted basis is as follows:

50% Asymp. declining emission over >50 years for BLOCK and Interest rewards. Block Emissions is 10.5 mil tokens in the first year of Mainnet and declines 10% yoy. Interest rewards emission is dependent on how many tokens are staked and locked by blobbers and clients respectively.

10% Reserve for partnerships and development. Reserves unlock on a trigger of 90 days sustained token price of $10 per token or more. Once unlocked, reserves vest thereafter at a rate of 1% over 10 years.

10% Network Security and incentives for data acquisition.

15% Team [Vests linearly over 4 years 2018-2021]

10% Community Sale [2018]

5% Seed investors and advisors [Vests linearly over 4 years 2018-2021]

Co-Investment

We seek a co-investment of 250,000 BNT and whitelisting of ZCN for IL protection at this stage. We believe Uniswap has limited the interest from LPs due to IL as is apparent from our liquidity profile below.

1. At the hype of Uniswap our total liquidity increased to $4 million. Unfortunately this growth was interrupted, as LPs soon realized that IL is a serious issue and have proceeded to downsize their positions or leave completely.

[UniSwap Liquidity Profile History]

2. Moreover, our volume has room to increase with our liquidity as is evident from our UniSwap volume profile history.

[UniSwap Volume Profile History]

3. The number of transactions on ZCN today is clearly dominated by Uniswap as shown by data from etherscan below. We believe there is ample share for our nascent and recent Bancor pool to grab here.