Good news everyone! I’m back with an “exclusive” SONM whitepaper/ICO review. Here is the download link to SONM whitepaper.

Disclaimer: I am not connected with the team, but got Whitepaper before the official publication.

As a starting point i would like to show you one thought about “Google killers” and “Amazon competitors”:

This is from one of the best startup books ever written — “From Zero to One” by Peter Thiel. You should read it if you haven’t done that yet.

Of course, we are working in a “disrupt everyday” industry and all that crypto stuff is new to the world. Imagine internet in 1990. I don’t think that the quote above should be a real “red flag” for anyone who is trying to change the world. But what Peter Thiel is trying to say is that success is very rare if you select $100B as your starting target market. But I am looking really positive at all these crypto-startups and let’s be positive with SONM project too. I want to believe.

What is fog/grid computing?

Fog computing or fog networking, also known as fogging, is an architecture that uses one or more collaborative multitude of end-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of storage (rather than stored primarily in cloud data centers), communication (rather than routed over the internet backbone), control, configuration, measurement and management (rather than controlled primarily by network gateways such as those in the LTE core network)

A good example of “fog computing” is the BOINC project. I was using SETI@Home (based on BOINC) almost 10 years ago. The idea was that you can connect each computer into a single network and use this big distributed super-powerful network to “analyze” cosmic signals in order to search for extraterrestrial communications, aliens, spaceships, all that funny stuff. I am not a big fan of Twin Peaks or the StarTrek series, but Fox Mulder was my superhero when I was a kid.

I remember some good and bad points about the SETI@Home project. The good side was that you could run their software instantly without any setup. And then in one minute you searching for aliens… The bad side was that I remember how someone disassembled their code and saw that it was VERY INEFFECTIVE and wasted a lot of CPU time. It could be optimized up to 100x times “easily”. You can Google that. Hope that nowadays they have fixed the performance issues. Otherwise aliens can come and kill us.

As a conclusion — the concept of fog computing is not new. Fog computing means a lot of power, but cryptocurrencies mean decentralization. We can now connect two things into one “easily”, and that is what SONM is aiming to do.

Idea — 6/10

SONM is a decentralized worldwide fog computer for any general purpose computing − from site hosting to scientific calculations. The purpose of SONM is to replace hash-based traditional cryptocurrency mining, which now dominates the blockchain community. Unlike widespread centralized cloud services, the SONM project implements a fog computing structure — a decentralized pool of devices, all of which are connected to the internet (IoT / Internet of Everything)

I gave minus 2 points because doing the actual “balancing of all rules and economy” is quite difficult in a project of that size. Even Ethereum had a smaller scope of implementation I think.

I gave an additional minus 2 points because SONM aimed at very big market with a big competitor already released (Golem). Please see Peter Thiels’s quote above. If the project’s target market were smaller — I would add more points here. Anyway…it will be very difficult to compete with Amazon.

From the technology point of view the main question is: can Ethereum serve as a “base” for such projects today ?

Team/Founders — 8/10

It looks like half of SONM’s team is from the DrugDiscovery@Home project: Voronkov Andrey, Sergey Ponomarev, Krzysztof Piszczek, Krzysztof Faryna, Barnaba Pawełczak. Some are Russian, some are Polish. The team has a Сhinese community manager and it means a +100 for doing ICO.

By February 2016, a group of miners was looking for a way to use their idle mining hardware for useful purposes, while simultaneously staying part of the cryptocurrency movement. This desire led to the modern DrugDiscovery@home

It looks like most of the team are crypto-enthusiasts. The team will look like a 10/10 if they add some advisor(s) from the Ethereum community.

Whitepaper — 9/10

One of the best good-looking white papers I ever saw. Thorough. Clear. Business model explained. Problems (like result verification and security) and solutions defined. Ivan Pupkin in the examples is an extra plus for Russian-speaking audiences.

The only con here is that the roadmap does not feature clear dates. The whitepaper states only that “Assuming that SONM crowdfunding attracts maximal ICO cap, we will release SONM v.2. in 1–1.5 years”. What is important to understand is that this is a multi year project, and with this roadmap this should be very clear.

Market potential — 7/10

Competitors are: Golem, Elastic, Amazon AWS (hehehe), other fog computing startups.



Let’s compare SONM with Golem only. Here is what the Golem team says in their recent blog post: “In the original roadmap, we indicated that Brass should make it out the door within 6 months of the close of the crowdfunding. As always, promising a specific date in bleeding-edge technology is risky, but we are still working towards a Q2 2017 release, and — at least for now — my judgment is that we should be able to deliver”. Golem’s team looks strong now. I believe that SONM’s team will look stronger too after they get big ICO bucks.

The white paper features “5.2.1. SONM in comparison to Golem Network” section that i recommend you read before investing. The one thing I really like is that “SONM uses a more common and standardized BOINC platform, also used in lots of existing distributed projects, therefore SONM is compatible with many of them”. However SONM plans to get rid of the BOINC platform once they reach version 2 (in 1–1.5 years).

Business Model — 7/10

Why do they need money? Obviously, for development: “The main part of the funding is needed for full-time nancing of team work and for involving new team members, when needed. In addition, external contractors and complementary services are expected“.

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What is the go-to-market strategy? No clear definition in the Whitepaper. I hope they understand what they are doing. And will not send me f***ing spam like Emercoin does:

ICO Terms — 8/10

The crowdfunding is divided into 2 stages — the presale and the ICO. 19% and 20% of all funds are sent to the team as a reward. Development and marketing will require equal amounts of money: 34% for the development and 32% for marketing after the presale; 30% for the development and 33% for marketing after the ICO. It looks good and fair.

The goal is to get at least 20K of ETH, the max is set to 586740 (values can be changed due to high ETH volatility I think). The goal is looking ambitious but from the technological point of view i believe that SONM is a good project that can raise >$2M. Chronobank (as an example) looks worst to me.

Conclusion — 45/60

One of the best Whitepapers that I have read. Big project. Big goals. The presale and ICO are gonna be big.