IOStoken (IOST) Review: Blockchain for The Internet of Services

IOStoken has taken the market by storm, and up until recently, few in the community had heard about the project.

However, IOST currently sits just outside the top 50 currencies based on market cap. IOStoken is a blockchain platform from Singapore, aiming to gain real world usage and solve the existing issues concerning scalability, transaction throughput, and security that currently hinder widespread integration and mass adoption.

In this IOStoken review, we will take a look at the project, team, technology and token. Let's jump in!

What is IOStoken (IOST)?

IOStoken revolves around the Internet of Services, and aims to provide a solid infrastructure for new online service providers. The team behind the project has focused on delivering a high TPS rate, and creating a highly scalable, private and secure blockchain. They also like to claim that the IOS (Internet of Service) blockchain is a secure, scalable blockchain that actually works.

The team also promises that the IOS platform can handle up to 100,000 transactions per second, which puts it way ahead of many of the more established blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Interestingly, IOStoken is built on top of the Ethereum network; however unlike many platforms that operate on Ethereum, IOStoken did not perform an initial coin offering (ICO), and raised funds through private sales to institutional investors.

How is IOStoken Special?

IOStoken makes use of an innovative Efficient Distributed Sharding Technology, which dynamically partitions the network into sub spaces by randomly assigning different nodes to work together. This results in a system that works more swiftly and efficiently than many of its competitors.

The project also makes use of a brand new consensus mechanism known as of proof of believability (PoB), with this mechanism nodes are validated based on past contributions and behavioural patterns. This system also incorporates a “fairness” algorithm that randomly distributes data to various nodes in order to help guarantee a fairly decentralized blockchain protocol.

The team behind this project is also extremely impressive and is comprised of highly decorated individuals who merge top level qualifications with a considerable amount of industry specific experience. IOStoken was founded by the quartet of Terence Wang, Jimmy Zhong, Kelvin Tan and Ray Xiao.

They head a team filled with PhDs and graduates from institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and the University of California, while a number of team members have experience of working for organizations such as Google, Deloitte, and Morgan Stanley.

How Viable is the Project?

IOS incorporates a number of features that make it a viable option as an enterprise blockchain; the protocol has been developed in order to support service-oriented products and services that retain large customer bases.

In addition to their sharding technology and consensus mechanism, the IOS team have also used a Hyper Universe Distributed System (HUDS), which acts as a decentralized, secure way to store information. HUDS also allows the IOS platform to be used by a wide range of different services, which can vary in size from a small business enterprise all the way up to an enormous organization like Amazon.

IOStoken also employs a number of methods aimed at helping to achieve scalability which include Atomix, a fast grade commit protocol to ensure consistency among cross-shard transactions, and Scaleout, a perfect partitioning state for multiple groups handled in parallel. The Bias Resistant Distributed Randomness (BDR) mechanism helps introduce unbiased randomness into the network both effectively and securely.

The IOS team has targeted scalability and high transaction throughput as tangible ways to improve the blockchain and state in their white paper that:

The IOS is a next-generation blockchain technology that provides the network infrastructure to support a service-oriented ecosystem.

IOS also has room for the implementation of decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts that will prove crucial once the platform is adopted by existing businesses.

On top of all this, IOS has been well supported by institutional investors, and conducted a private token sale in January with sixteen companies publicly declaring that they have invested in the IOStoken project. These investors are mostly blockchain oriented companies and VC funds groups such as Matrix and Sequoia.

Is IOStoken Worth Investing In?

IOStoken has attracted a lot of attention due to its recent performance, however whether or not the token will continue to perform well depends a lot of the development roadmap.

The MVP private testnet was scheduled to be launched in Q1, while the implementing and testing of EDS and PoB are scheduled for Q2. The release of the IOS smart contract document draft and deployment of HUDS are both planned to take place at the end of this year.

While the IOS team has a great idea, there is currently no working prototype, which can lead to doubts as to whether the project can truly develop into more than just an impressive whitepaper.

Having said that, IOST caused quite a stir once it was listed on the Binance exchange and managed to make its way to the top to become the most traded coin by volume on the leading exchange platform.

When it first launched, the token performed extremely well in a short period of time, and has also risen significantly in value during a bear market. The digital token launched on January 16 and began trading at around $0.02, however, within ten days the price spiked to a high price of approximately $0.12 which gave the token a market cap of approximately $927m.

IOST also achieved a 24 hour trading volume in excess of $770m which saw it outperform the majority of coins on the market in mid January. However, despite the sudden rise in value, the token quickly began to pull back and soon reached a price of $0.03.

However, given the massive sell off in cryptocurrency markets since February, IOST has fallen along with most of the market. The token currently trades at $0.027 which not that far from the price that it originally began trading at. Currently, IOST has a market cap of about $230m.

There are also around 8,400,000,000 IOST in circulation while the total supply stands at 21,000,000,000, meaning investors should expect a natural depreciation in price as more tokens are introduced to the ecosystem.

The early statistics are actually quite worrying as investors have to try to figure out just what led to a massive run up in price and an enormous amount of trading in IOST. While the project is well backed, it isn’t one of the most hyped blockchain platforms and actually flew under the radar in comparison to projects such as Zilliqa, POA, and Wanchain.

Unfortunately, the IOStoken chart resembles that of a pump-and-dump token and only time will tell just how reliable and sound an investment IOST can be.

VC Investments & Exchange Listings

Despite the worries about the Token performance, the project has a great team and has attracted a good amount of investment from established entities such as Sequoia, Nirvana Capital, and Matrix.

The token is also already available on a number of leading exchanges with Binance, Huobi Exchange, and OKEx all listing IOST, this leads to a large amount of liquidity but there is also less chance of the token jumping in price once a major exchange listing is announced.

IOStoken has a very strong community and commands over 212K Twitter followers, and 39K Telegram members, and the IOStoken Reddit community currently has just over 2,300 subscribers.

This bodes well for the future, and the team is also open for engaging with its community via their social media channels and potential investors can keep up with developments by staying active in one of the groups.

Conclusion

It’s still very early for this project, and the explosive price action in January has rather unsurprisingly resulted in IOST gaining a lot of attention. At this point, much depends on how well the team can stick to their promises and continue to execute all the steps laid out in the whitepaper and roadmap.

Once the hype dies down, IOST will be left to compete with a number of Internet Service tokens such as IOTA (MIOTA), IOTChain (ITC), and Internet Node Token (INT). Moreover, there are also a number of high performance platforms such as EOS (EOS), Zilliqa (ZIL), and High Performance Blockchain (HPB) which also boast impressive transaction throughput rates.

IOST has developed a good amount of hype which is crucial in the world of digital currencies and has an impressive team that are backed by established financial entities, however, due to the early volatility of IOST, the best bet may be to keep an eye on the overall development of the project and then jump in once it has developed a solid foundation and begun to stabilize.

Disclaimer: These are writer opinions and should not be considered investment advice
Featured Image via Fototlia