Competition in the sphere of scalable dApp-protocols is more severe than in others, so it has to be taken into consideration. The existing blockchains, though not as scalable as Alza might become, still have first-mover advantage and might be better-off if they introduce scalability features, such as Lightning network, Sharding, Plasma, State Channels.
Competition in the sphere of scalable dApp-protocols is more severe than in others, so it has to be taken into consideration. Alza aims to deliver its testnet only by the end of 2018. By this time, the already-existing blockchains may already run its Mainnets and add scalability features, such as Plasma, Sharding, Lightning, etc. The registered entity of Alza is unclear.
ALZA will charge transaction fees for each transaction on ALZA, paid in native tokens. The team proposes that the transaction fee will be low(the website claims that the size of the fee will be ~$0). For comparison, the average transaction fee for Bitcoin is ~$25-30, ~$3 for Ethereum, and ~$0.05 for EOS. However, now there is no information on the expected size of the fee. More information on the token economics is TBA. It should be noted that Alza will only sell 25% of the tokens for public. Moreover, it is unclear how the 40% tokens for "Block producing rewards" will be used. Alza Soft and Hard cap will be equal to $5M and $19M accordingly. The team aims to allocate 25% of the tokens for sale. This gives company valuation in the range between $20M and $76M. The company valuation looks similar to the competitors. To compare, Quarkchain has a market cap of ~$48M. The private sale round discount will be 20% and will be subject to a 7-month vesting scheme. Alza will issue 4B tokens.
There are 7 people in the Alza team. The core team consists of ex-Google Software Engineers and is located in San Francisco Bay Area. They have previous experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, Computer Vision. However, there are no tech specialists with a background in blockchain within the team. One of the team members - Chris Liu - previously won ACM/ICPC world programming contest several times. However, he does not mention Alza as a workplace on his LinkedIn page. Several team members hold PhD in Computer Science from US Universities (State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Illinois at Chicago), Apart from Google, the team members previously worked at Microsoft, Foxit Corporation, Yahoo, Intuit, Fujitsu. Overall, the team looks quite strong and experienced.
