Investment Rating Stable+, review by ICORating

As a result of our analysis, we have assigned a “Stable+” rating to the Airbloc project.

The existing data marketing ecosystem deals with owners, managers and brokers inefficiently and often ineffectively, costing businesses untold millions in unnecessary time and money, and untold more in opportunity losses. Blockchain could help make data-driven marketing more transparent by validating and analyzing every consumer’s journey through verified ad delivery, confirming that a real person has seen an ad.

Via Airbloc, users can submit, track, control and monetize data. Advertisers can access and purchase the required amount of data to run their targeted marketing campaigns effectively.

The project has the following strengths:

The team is experienced and is supported by a successful database analytics company.
Strong advisors
Its GitHub is very active
Notable investors (ICON, Signum Capital, etc)

However, we note that the project has the following significant risks:

No MVP/prototype is available as of yet
No vesting periods are specified in the whitepaper or on the website, and the mainnet launch is in Q3 2019
No smart contract code on Github
Relatively strong competition
The roadmap does not cover business operations
There are fundamental factors which will put pressure on the token price in the long run

Based on the analysis performed and issues identified, we assign a “Stable+” rating to the Airbloc project.

General Information

Airbloc is a decentralized personal data protocol where individuals will be able to monetize their data, and advertisers would be able to purchase this data to conduct targeted marketing campaigns for higher ROIs.

KEY FEATURES

Platform: Ethereum-based blockchain
Foundation date: November 2015
Location: Singapore
Restricted countries: China, North Korea, USA
Website
Whitepaper
MVP
KYC
Founders: Roi Nam (CEO and Founder of ab180), Wonkyung Lyu, Hunjae Jung, Naeun Kim
Team: 22 members, including onsite engineers, R&D and business development managers
Advisors: 9 members with relevant experience in the blockchain industry

Investors: 3 funds, including ICON (a decentralized network), Deblock (a blockchain accelerator), Foundation X (a venture capital fund and accelerator)

Community: ~11k Telegram , ~800 Facebook, ~700 Twitter, ~400 Instagram followers

https://www.facebook.com/AirblocOfficial/

https://twitter.com/AirblocOfficial

https://t.me/airbloc

https://open.kakao.com/o/gXIW11J

https://medium.com/airbloc

https://www.reddit.com/r/airbloc/

Partners: 7 partners including an online home shopping retail platform, start-up supporting firms in the legal and data science spheres, a blockchain accelerator, a cryptocurrency exchange and a venture fund
Ecosystem partners: 6 Korean companies including a comics platform, a medical customer relationship management platform, a fintech software company, a sharing economy platform,  a decentralized data market and a decentralized social network for professionals
Development: ab180, a data company that tracks over 13M active devices in real time through its people-based attribution analytics, Airbridge

 

Private Sale

1st Pre-Sale

2nd Pre-Sale

ICO (public sale)

Start date

 

23.04.2018

21.05.2018

19.06.2018

End date

 

01.05.2018

30.05.2018

29.06.2018

Token

ABL & AIR / ERC20

Token Distribution

43,500,000

17,250,000

43,700,000

50,000,000

Total Volume of Tokens

400,000,000

Soft Cap

7,000,000 ETH

Hard Cap

20,000,000 ETH

Exchange Rate ETH:ABL

1 : 14,500

1: 11,500

1 : 11,500

1: 10,000

Bonus Ratio

45%

15%

15%

0%

Currencies accepted

ETH

 

In the initial stage, a total sum of 400 million (400,000,000) ABL tokens will be issued and will be distributed. Below is the scheme for token distribution.

Tokens will be mined based on an annual inflation rate of 2.5% with a depreciation rate of -10.9%. Mined tokens will be stored on an AIR rewards pool. The block reward has a half-life of 6 years.

We note that vesting terms are not specified, which significantly increases risks for investors.

Due to high interest in the Protocol from institutional investors, on June 11th, 2018 the project announced a reduction in the public sale cap volume from 11,700 ETH to 5000 ETH.  The other 6700 ETH would be offered to institutional investors.

Raised funds would be used as follows:

As of June 15th, 2018 the following investors already vested their interest in Airbloc:

ICON FOUNDATION is a Korean decentralized network of blockchain communities.  The project enables independent blockchains with different governances to transact with one another without intermediaries. Below is a comparison of coin technologies.

Website: https://www.icon.foundation/en/

Deblock is a new Korean corporation jointly established by the ICON Foundation and AD4th, a AdTech company leveraging blockchain technology in 2018. The company plans to be involved in exploring and investing in blockchain projects, supporting office space and infrastructure for ICON, and jointly developing and marketing blockchain-based business models, but as of May 2018 there is no portfolio of clients on their site.

Website: http://www.deblock.co.kr/

FoundationX is one of Korea’s rising blockchain venture capital funds and accelerators. The company’s portfolio includes 8 projects, however there are no direct links to their sites or descriptions.

Website: https://www.foundationx.io/

Coinplug is a blockchain patent holder that provides bitcoin exchange, wallet, okBitcard and payment processor services targeting Korea and the Asian market.

Website: https://www.coinplug.com/

Amber Ai is an Asian technology-empowered trading firm combining state-of-the-art machine learning with sophisticated quantitative research.

Website: http://www.amberaigroup.com/

BlueBlock is a Hong Kong-based advisory company offering software algorithms and custom trading solutions that can help projects reduce transaction costs, facilitate trades, and provide liquidity on related exchange platforms.

Website: http://blueblock.co/

Signum Capital is a Singapore-based consulting company in the blockchain industry.

Website: http://www.signum.capital/

Fenbushi Digital is a crypto/digital assets venture capital fund company based in Shanghai, China.

Website: fenbushi.vc/index_en.html

Node Capital is a Hong Kong based venture capital firm with a strong focus on blockchain innovation.

Website: http://www.nodecap.com/

 

The Airbloc main marketplace will be driven by data providers.

The project is already cooperating with the following partners and ecosystem partners:

GS SHOP is a Korea-based company engaged mainly in the home shopping business. In 2017, GS Shop’s gross merchandise volume amounted to $3.5B USD.

Website: http://www.gsshop.com/index.gs

Allbit is a Korean decentralized exchange. No English version of the site is available.

Website: https://allbit.com/

FoundationX is one of Korea’s rising blockchain venture capital funds and accelerators. The company’s portfolio includes 8 projects, however there are no direct links to their sites or descriptions.

Website: https://www.foundationx.io/

VEAT Law Firm is a Korean law firm focused on providing legal counsel to startups. No English version of their site is available.

Website: http://veatlaw.kr/?ckattempt=1

ORANGEFARM is focused on incubating promising startups within Korea. No English version of their site is available.

Website: https://orangefarm.smilegate.com/main/main.asp

SENTIENCE is a Korean data science company comprised of top researchers from KAIST University in Korea. No website available.

Website: https://www.sentience.rocks/

Deblock is a new Korean corporation jointly established by the ICON Foundation and AD4th, a AdTech company leveraging blockchain technology in 2018. However, as of May 2018 there is no portfolio of clients visible on their website.

Website: http://www.deblock.co.kr/

BATTLE ENTERTAINTMENT is a comics platform within Korea serving as a supplier of personal data (preferences, reading history, etc) to the Airbloc data marketplace. No English version of the site is available.

Website: https://www.battleent.com/

HUMANSCAPE is a Korean medical customer relationship management platform which helps hospitals to monitor patients’ status after surgery and provide aftercare services to patients.

Website: https://humanscape.io/index.html?ckattempt=1

RAINIST is a Korean fintech software company which provides recommendations for financial products based on  lifestyle patterns. No English version of the site is available.

Website: https://rainist.com/

KMONG is a micro business matching platform in Korea, enabling individuals to sell and buy services. No English version of the site is available.

Website: https://kmong.com/

FYSICAL is a code-complete, fully functional decentralized location data market based in Singapore.

Website: https://fysical.org/

INDORSE is a decentralized social network incentivising users to add their  skills / accomplishments and endorse those of others. Market capitalization as of June 7th,  2018 is about 361k USD.

Website: https://www.indorse.io/

In the early stages, the ab180 company will participate in the market as a data consumers, not as a centralized player but rather as a separate non-profit entity constructing the DApp and the AIRBLOC Network.

During this time ab180 will use some of the initial funding (up to 10%) from token sales to appeal to users to provide data.

The project outlines the following stages for marketplace development:

Involvement of data providers and data consumers through a reward mechanism. In this period ab180 foresees collecting high-demand data.
When sufficient data is collected, advertisers start to purchase data, essentially creating a market where demand and supply intersect.
Once data sales begin, users and advertisers will learn which data has high value.
This would motivate data providers to provide more data and increase their revenue.
With more data provided to the marketplace, a virtuous circle for advertisers will be reached.

SUMMARY: General and technical information is fully available online; the project makes regular main announcements and updates.

The technical side is comprehensive. Development is led by ab180, one of the leaders in online advertising with more than 300 clients including eBay Korea and Woowa Brothers.

The project is well-represented on the main social sites and supported by the community; the team is involved in communication and actively sharing news on the project.

The token distribution proposal seems optimal, reflecting an interest from the team, rewarding investors/participants’ involvement in the project. The list of investors is expanding as the project advances, and includes several profitable funds. The project has a wide range of partners and ecosystem partners; the interest from investors and partners confirms the project’s viability. Although it should be noted that related parties are too localized, some of the parties do not have an English version of their sites. This could affect the project’s adoption by the global market.

The budget plan looks rational, with the main emphasis on development and sufficient funds for marketing and emergency issues. 

 

Description of services 

Airbloc is a decentralized data exchange platform for individuals and apps to aggregate and sell their anonymized personal data.

 

The mission of AIRBLOC is to democratize the data market to a level where individual users, and small and medium-sized apps can participate in this market in a transparent and equitable manner.

The protocol is based on the following principles:

protecting data privacy
rewarding data suppliers
providing data transparency and traceability

 

Within Airbloc there are several layers that define the project’s architecture.

Application Layer: Composed of third-party DApps, including Airbloc Client, Airbloc DMP, and SDKs.
API Layer: An interface provided for communication with the Airbloc network and third-party DApps.
Service Layer: Airbloc contract that includes the entire features of the Airbloc Network.
Core Layer: This layer is Airbloc’s blockchain platform based on Ethereum. It adopts Aero, Airbloc’s internal subchain network for data validation, and an interchain network to link the two blockchains.

There are two initial services to be launched by AIRBLOC:

AIRBLOC Personal Data Main Marketplace (hereinafter “Marketplace”).

On the Marketplace, users’ personal data is freely traded; at the same time it serves as a data management platform (DMP) to advertisers, assisting them to run advertising campaigns. In the White Paper as of June 2018 the team is considering new types of marketing campaign that could be offered by the network. The services are presented with an approximate view of its interface.

AIRBLOC Main Client Service

The AIRBLOC Main Client Service controls user data traded on AIRBLOC . This application allows users to submit direct data by responding to survey questions in data campaigns, and enables token rewards to be managed. The service is presented with an approximate view of its interface.

These services will be built by ab180 and launched via the AIRBLOC Network; they will used towards settling the early stage ecosystem and its development.

Apps are required to execute KYC (Personal Identification) for users. KYC can be done through phone number opt-in, social logins, and other decentralized services like uPort and Civic.

STAKEHOLDERS

Data Providers are the end users, individuals who provide the data and receive incentives in return. They have full control over the data’s use and its circulation.
Gatekeepers are the Aero Network’s nodes. They guard the network against fraudulent behavior by validating data and detecting fraudulent users.
Data Collectors are apps that collect data and monetize it on behalf of users. They can collect indirect data by DAuth or collect direct data by questioning users directly.
Data Refineries analyze the provided direct and indirect data collected from data providers and refining them into other user-level attributes. Then the refined data is added to a user’s profile so that data consumers can filter it by user attributes when creating a new segment.
Data Consumers are advertisers who purchase data for targeted ads. They will use ABL tokens to purchase and provide rewards for data.

DATA PIPELINE OVERVIEW

The user – Data Provider –  creates data (via direct and indirect methods) with full control either via limiting the data types to be collected, or by configuring the data’s distribution limits.

Indirect data automatically collected from a user’s device via Airbloc’s Main Client Service app or via services using Airbloc’s SDK when permission is confirmed. Indirect data include lists of installed apps, app usage, purchase histories from Google Play, WiFi history, GPS and Beacon data.
Direct data collected via data campaigns, where advertisers use various questionnaires to collect user responses.

Sales revenue is distributed to users at a fixed rate, and a user can choose the type and authority of the data to be sold.

Data is gathered by the Data Collector through DAuth (Indirect data) or data campaigns (Direct data) and monetize data on behalf of users. To collect data, data collectors should first register their app on the Airbloc Network. For this, the data collector is required to hold a certain amount of ABL tokens in advance. It is pre-determined that at least 30% of the app’s revenue must be shared with users.

Aggregated data is unified and cleansed for storage by a Gatekeeper within the data ingestion process. Data ingestion for Airbloc is performed by its own data validation network, known as Aero. Gatekeepers guard the network against fraud by validating data and detecting fraudulent users.

The data storage process is undertaken by the Data Collector outside of the Protocol. Various repositories including S3, HDFS, IPFS and Swarm could be used when access conditions are met according to need. 

Gathered data can be sold directly on the raw data Marketplace or could be processed to become more valuable and insightful to Data Consumers in the form of personal interest data, or predictive indicators via the data refinery. Data Refineries process and serve data analysis run by advertising analytics agencies. Data Refineries enable interaction between direct and indirect data, towards greater reliability and accuracy.

Airbloc has three data pricing methods. One is “Reward-Once”, another is “Reward-Per-Pay”, and there is a hybrid model combining the two methods. When a consumer buys data on the Marketplace, a unique identifier is delivered in addition.

As mentioned above, Airbloc performs its data management on its own separate blockchain network, known as Aero. Nodes of the Aero network play the validator role for Airbloc; they perform various validation tasks on data and receive block rewards from the AIR Pool. Nodes maintain a distributed ledger for the Active Data Table (ADT), which contains a queue for performing and recording tasks. The Aero network uses a “Consensus-By-Bet” proof-of-stake consensus for verification tasks and distribution ledgers, so a gatekeeper receives rewards in proportion to stakes. Aero is only responsible for data validation tasks and most of the functionality is implemented as a contract on a service layer on Ethereum.

SUMMARY: The product description is extensive, with plenty of detail of the product’s features. The mechanism seems overburdened with many constitutive elements, conditions and no final view of the Protocol as yet. 

Roadmap

The roadmap describes not only the main milestones for the Protocol, but refers also to the role of ab180 in AIRBLOC’s development. Below is a combined version of the roadmap from the site and the White Paper.

Summary: The roadmap seems quite ambitious, and reflects the main milestones of SDK. It should be noted that the versions on the site and in the White Paper are not consistent.

According to IDC worldwide, revenues for big data and business analytics will grow from $130.1 billion in 2016 to more than $203 billion in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7%. In addition the industry shows the greatest investment in big data and business analytics solutions (nearly $17 billion in 2016).

“Data monetization” will become a major source of revenue, as 180 zettabytes of data (or 180 trillion gigabytes) will be created in 2025, up from less than 10 zettabytes in 2015.

By 2030, data contained in the blockchain ledger might be worth up to 20% of the global Big Data market and generate up to $100 billion in annual income.

53% of companies are using big data analytics currently, up from 17% in 2015 with the telecoms and financial services industries fueling the fastest adoption.

Nevertheless, there are several issues for big data highlighted by the Company:

Individuals / Privacy. Data privacy is compromised, and users are not compensated. Security breaches penalize people from the point of view of reputation, but also in terms of business. The Aon Corporation, an insurance and risk management company, estimates that 80% of business security breaches result in less than $1 million in damages, 15% of breaches cost between $1 million and $20 million, and 5% are mega-breaches costing more than $20 million.
Application / Legal. Difficulties in selling accumulated user data in a legal manner. The biggest concern here is how to regulate internet privacy rules. In 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be fully implemented, with the primary goal of “giving citizens back control of their personal data.”
Enterprises / Access to the Information. Direct personal data for advertising marketing campaigns is expensive and hard to access. According to the latest research, nine key brokers generated approximately $426 million in revenue by selling customer data via marketing, risk migration and people search.

Airbloc identifies centralized data brokerage companies like Rapleaf, Recorded Future, Intelius, PeekYou, Acxiom, Corelogic, and Datalogix as its competitors.

However, companies like Facebook, Google and YouTube that process a huge amount of information daily should also be taken into account.

The main issue that these companies could face is legislation that is actively developing at the moment and could require investing money in data storage and privacy.

Also, individual users can’t monetize and don’t have full control of their data.

Below is a comparison of Airbloc with two other decentralized projects:

Project

Ocean Protocol

Basic Attention Token

Airbloc Protocol

Description

Decentralized data exchange protocol that lets people share and monetize data while guaranteeing control, auditability, transparency and compliance to all actors involved.

Open-source, decentralized digital advertising platform.

Decentralized data exchange platform for individuals and apps to aggregate and sell their anonymized personal data.

Token

OCN

BAT

ABL

Finite token number

1,410,000,000

1,000,000,000

400,000,000

ICO end date

not announced

31.05.2017

19.06.2018

Raised funds/hardcap

USD 22.1 mln/USD 22.1 mln

USD 35 mln/USD 35 mln

TBD/USD 10 mln

Valuation as at ICO date

USD 221 mln

USD 50 mln

USD 18 mln

Current market capitalization

N/A

USD 252 mln

N/A

Key partner

Singapore is supporting an 18-month development roadmap.

Partnerships with a donation system and a brand referral program, with YouTube content creators and Twitter Streamers.

Developed by ab180 - Korean leader in online advertising with more than 300 clients, including eBay Korea and Woowa Brothers.

We note that the Airbloc protocol seems to be undervalued compared to competitors, which creates opportunities for investors.

Summary: The data analytics market is very attractive from the perspective of growth and demand on technical development. The market appears very competitive both for centralized and decentralized projects. The main decentralized competitors – BAT and Ocean Protocol – have already entered the market and have strong partnerships. This will require an innovative proposal from Airbloc for attracting customers.

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