DxChain Review - all the hype?

DxChain
DxChain’s website (https://www.dxchain.com/)

AIMS
DxChain is a public chain, aims to design a platform to solve computation of big data in a decentralized environment. In technical terms it is a decentralized platform for big data, powered by a compute-centric blockchain protocol. Companies could use DxChain to store and trade big data, so as to make data more valuable with the computation.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
DxChain is designed to provide a multi-chain architecture that handles data acquisition, computation and storage on a single network.

The Master Chain serves as an Ethereum-compatible, immutable ledger to record asset-related transactions on the network and it orchestrates the storage chain and computation chain to maintain the master blocks, where participating nodes may provide storage and computation power to obtain incentives.

The Data Side Chain (DSC) facilitates the transfer and storage of data via a decentralized p2p network such as IPFS. Data is broken down into smaller pieces and stored on the p2p file network, while corresponding metadata and a hash of each fragment are recorded on chain. A DxChain Storage Layer, designed as a virtual logic layer, sits between the DSC and p2p distributed storage to facilitate the distribution of storage tasks, data transfer and verification. The DSC utilizes a Proof of Spacetime (PoST) consensus mechanism.

The Computing Side Chain (CSC) is similar to Data Side Chain (DSC) and provides an environment for organizing and distributing parallel computing tasks between users and nodes on the network. When a user makes a computation request, it is propagated through the network to miners. Upon completion, the result is sent to the CSC for verification.

The Communication cross chains shown above from the whitepaper illustrates the mechanism of the flow of transactions across the whole system between the master chain, DCS and CSC, starting with the task giver U.

INNOVATIONS

The DxChain team have stated that there are some innovations in their project notably,

• CHAINS-ON-CHAIN ARCHITECTURE
The revolutionary Chains-on-chain architecture is designed to solve the data computation, storage, and privacy issues.

• VERIFICATION GAME
Verification game provides a framework which securely perform any computational task and vastly reduces the number of redundant network node computations.

• PDC (Provable Data Computation)
PDC is a statistical framework to verify the correctness of computation results with few copies of redundant computing.

• PoSt & PDP
The Proof of Spacetime (PoSt) is used as the consensus protocol of storage. It provides the foundation for the decentralized storage network.

• DATA MODEL ENABLES PRIVACY PRESERVING
DxChain does not only provide the data storage function, but it also gives the flexibility of retrieving files at a more granular scale.

TEAM

There are 13 members on their website, most notable 4 are

Allan Zhang (Co-founder) has over a decade of experience in cybersecurity. Allan served as a Senior Security and Vulnerability Research Engineer with nCircle, TELUS, and Palo Alto Networks, before moving on to found his own start-up. In 2013, Allan established Trustlook AI Cybersecurity, launching a line of malware threat protection products for mobile and IoT devices

Wei Wang (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) is the former Principal Scientist for Blockchain Database Research at AT&T, and 2 years as the Principal Scientist of Big Data and Parallel Computing at Hortonworks, building and designing a big data platform based on Hadoop.

James Li (Co-Founder) spent over a year as the Manager of the Mobile Department at Trustlook before joining DxChain full time. He has over 12 years of experience at nCircle Network Security as a Principal Security Engineer.

Daniel Dai (Blockchain Researcher) Ph.D in computer science at University of Central Florida. 10+ years’ experience in distributed systems, security and big data. Apache Pig/Hive PMC (Project Management Committee) member. Member of Apache Software Foundation.

DxChain ICO Strengths and Weaknesses

DxChain recently debuted a demo of their Alpha MVP, called Rocky Mountains which demonstrated storage and retrieval of files on a 5 node network. The demo also introduces the mining and storage functionality of nodes, and the successful upload and download of a test file.

With a testnet release scheduled for Q3 2018 and mainnet in Q1 2019, the debut of the Alpha MVP before the public sale provides an important indication of the team’s commitments.

The first enterprise partnership that will leverage DxChain is with Trustlook, Allan Zhang’s own company, an AI-based cybersecurity to protect against malware. Enterprise users of Trustlook products include Huawei and Qualcomm. Trustlook provides the built-in virus scan engine for Huawei mobile phones currently in use on hundreds of millions of devices.

To test the product in a real use case scenario, DxChain plan to launch a dApp via Trustlook rewarding users for sharing behavioural data, which will in turn be analysed and utilized by partner companies. The partnership with Trustlook provides a channel to streamline acquisition of users via an existing, successful product- a crucial element most competing projects lack.

DxChain has established a highly strategic partnership with QuarkChain, as DxChain will benefit from the success of a project that would otherwise make for more competition. The two projects also plan to collaborate on building a shared ecosystem of partners and users.
DxChain faces good competition in the transaction, distributed computing and data storage markets. Contenders such as Golem, iExec, and Sonm in the distributed computing space and Filecoin, Storj and Arweave in the decentralised file storage means they have some early market competitors

FINAL COMMENT

DxChain offers a full complement of data processing features that would otherwise require the use of different blockchains. If this factor can be emphasized to the community it would enhance their goal of user adoption and therefore for the long-term success of the project.

White Paper: https://docsend.com/view/8w3fman

Barred Countries: Canada, China, South Korea, New Zealand, USA

Whitelist: Yes

KYC: Yes

DxChain’s website (https://www.dxchain.com/)
(https://t.me/DxChainBot?start=dwwwaf-dwwwaf)