This will be an in depth report covering these key areas:
Executive Summary
Problems vs Solutions
Real World Use Cases
Value Proposition
Technology
Tokenomics + Team
Roadmap
Price Metrics
An Executive Summary
Aleph.im wants to decentralize and revolutionize the web and the cloud by building a layer 2 network solution especially focused on data storage and computing power for dApps.
You can have smart contracts on Solana, which is great. You can even do way more on smart contracts with money, which is great. But for sustainable function you need a front-end. So you need to have storage for that front-end.
That’s not all. A smart contract doesn’t have all the data that you need. So you will need some kind of indexing to get the history and data for that. Therefore you will need a back-end for that. Thats where Aleph.im comes in…
The Problem Aleph.im Solves
Let us first address the blockchain industry aggregately. Most of the blockchain infrastructure still faces huge barriers to be able to handle mass adopted applications, barriers such as scaling, UX/UI, high costs, interoperability, speed, amongst others.
We face an onboarding problem. Where individuals/investors will not use any new application unless it has clear advantages compared with existing ones.
Let’s talk about this in terms of a current hot topic. DeFi.
Most of the DeFi application that we see have some centralized back-end behind them. They’re running on AWS, perhaps on dedicated servers or other sort of centralized entities.
If a government wanted to shut down the DeFi protocol that is organized like that, they can.
With Aleph.im what they are trying to do is decentralize this “back end”, because for that last mile most projects are using AWS, so they need to decentralize AWS to ensure operability in a worst case scenario.
Jonathan Schemoul, the founder of Aleph.im had this to say:
“I really want DeFi to be totally resilient because until it’s totally decentralized, you can stop DeFi. When it’s totally decentralized, you can’t. And if there is only the smart contracts that are decentralized, you can still stop it.”
The Solution Aleph.im Provides
Aleph.im aims to provide a solution for dApps to store, exchange and compute data in a scalable and interoperable way which leads to a large number of use cases.
It will provide file storage for the front-end files. It will also provide database storage, because most applications are just databases.
They will provide this by having these properties:
Real World Use Cases
Value Proposition
Technology behind Aleph.im
Tokenomics + Team
ALEPH tokens have the following utilities:
The token is living on multiple blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and a few others, but those are the most used today.
You need a token for your data to stay there. If you don’t have anymore tokens your data gets garbage collected. They are technically a layer two database which is computing pre storage and writes over other Layer 1 blockchains.
For the core channel node you need to have 200,000 Aleph to start a node and 500,000 Aleph, staked on a node, so that it can start to run.
Circulating Supply is 184,266,831 ALEPH
Max supply is 500,000,000 ALEPH
They have many different pools use to improve growth within Aleph.im:
Let us now discuss the Team.
The team is composed of 9 members and 3 advisors. The core team worked in NULS blockchain together before Aleph.im.
Overall they are a very experienced team in different industries such as finance, cloud, consulting, law, software, fashion, automotive, media, and others.
Here are some names for reference points:
Jonathan Schemoul Founder / Lead Developer
Angel Manzano Alcaraz Senior Developer
Claudio Pascariello Senior UI/UX Designer
Jonathan Quali Business and Partnerships Development
Gehendra Acharya Data Storage Specialist
Ashley Richardson Operations / Business Development
Amongst others.
Roadmap
Announced less than 24 hours ago, this is their roadmap for 2022 Quarter 1:
Source: @aleph_im on Twitter
1/ Q1
Launch the load balancer on http://aleph.cloud. With this we redirect traffic and requests to the right nodes!
2/
Create an aggregator for our #Solana Indexers. One to rule them all!
Release our Indexer Framework so projects can run their own indexers on the Compute Resource Nodes.
After our @Ubisoft partnership it speaks for itself that we will integrate #tezos as well
3/
Monitoring system for nodes to follow the performance of your nodes even better.
Release of our Storage Resource Nodes
The #dID system will go live with our partner @synaps_id
Our Virtual Machines will get a major boost once we introduce Secret Management
Price Metrics
Current Price — $0.6378
Market Rank — #414
Market Cap — $117,643,989.05
Fully Diluted Market Cap — $319,221,827.51
Volume 24h — $2,900,725
Aleph.im token bottomed out at 0.124 earlier this July (2021). Since then it has tested and rested all time highs currently trading at $0.6378.
My Thesis
I believe based off of the fundamentals, it is hard not to be bullish especially with the upcoming events just in Q1 of 2022. In combination with other narratives we have discussed such as Optimistic Rollups or Zero Knowledge Proof, a decentralised data storage solution would work very well in cohesion.
To my reader on Medium, I hope you enjoyed this article.
I hope I was able to provide a greater understanding of Aleph.im through this research report.
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Once again. Wishing you a happy new year,
Crypto 8 FI