Akash

Akash aims to build a marketplace where users could sell their idle capacity for those who need it. Services like Akash are likely to be on demand as two major trends take place: ever-increasing amount of data stored and higher demand on its processing. The idea idle capacity marketplace is currently new and some competitors must be noted: SONM, Dadi, Golem, Dfinity, Friends and etc. These competitors are very promising and finished one demonstrated good tokensales and ROIs. The reason is that the blockchain is a good fit in these products that contributes to good community relation. Competition is tough but Akash may turn one of these success stories.

Capacity providers are able to sell their surplus capacity and benefit. Akash aims to lean on data centres as their capacity is not used much so they are able to monetize slack server capacity. Slots are sold through auction between capacity providers. The winner is a provider with the lowest price bidden. Then a smart-contract is signed and stored on blockchain. If a connection breaks a new connecction is automatically created. A provider entering the ecosystem must stack AKSH tokens that are taken if it turns a bad actor. In comperison to competitors Akash is not far different from them, and it is just one of the other good blockchain applications in cloud computing industry. Team demonstrate a high activity on Github updating their product every day. The prototype is available but only developers can test it. There are some rumors about Sequoia Capital participation but in fact it was invested two years ago in Overclock – associated company

Blockchain and smart contracts are applied well but token itself has poor functions - it is only a means of payment. Providers are obligated to stack some tokens for security reasons. Tokens not sold will be held by the company for future sales that is a risk of token market supply uncertainty. ICO has rational ground. Hardcap is 20M USD that is below the average success stories of competitors (SONM and Dadi raised 35M and 29M). Otherwise Golem has attracted only 8.6M in 2016 but Dfinity aims to attract 90M. VC investments before any tokensale are 1.2M USD. Total token pool cap is about 50M USD that is not much for these projects as well. All investors will be locked into vesting tokens for six months, with one-sixth of tokens being distributed to your wallet every month. Early investors get 30% but slots here are likely to be closed now. Next tears offer 15%, 10% and 5% with relative caps of $5.7M, $5.7M and $9.5M. Only 40% of token are for investors with 20% for team. The team does not disclose in detail how these 20M USD will be spent.

Akash is a project of Overclock Labs that «develops protocols, tools, and infrastructure to make foundational elements of the internet open, decentralized and secure». The team includes 5 members with 3 developers only. CEO has wide experience in tech architecture - 2 years in IBM and 10 years in other companies including 6 years of relevant management experience in this field. CTO has software engineering experience since 2005. VP of product has been working in IT since 2000 in management positions. Team has a lack of marketing and legal professionals.

Market Competitive environment:
In April 2018, the research company Gartner published the results of the analysis of the world market of cloud computing. Last year the total expenses of companies for public cloud services increased to $153,5 billion (on 30%) as compared to $118 billion in 2016.
By 2020, cloud infrastructure providers will account for 53% of global internet traffic (Cisco 2016), out of which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will deliver 80% of the payload (Forrester 2017)
There are both large centralized players and projects with blockchain:
Golem - capitalization - $480M, from the date of exchange entering the GNT price increased 38 times
SONM – in the course of ICO $42M was raised, capitalization - $69 M, ROI USD - 1,23x
iExec RLC - capitalization - $125M, from the date of exchange entering the RLC price increased 5,6 times
Elastic - capitalization - $22,1M, from the date of exchange entering the XEL price dropped 3,25 times
Hypernet – is at the stage of preparation to ICO
DFINITY, 0chain

The project advantages:
Akash’s container-native approach offers significant advantages over other distributed infrastructure approaches that join disparate resources via a single blockchain-based virtual machine. Applications need not be re-architected to run on blockchain because they’re run in industry-standard containers and performance does not suffer as more processes are run on the network.
The Akash Network is fundamentally different because it uses generic compute resources to host Docker containers in which any cloud workload can run. Any workload that can run in containers on AWS, GCP, Azure, or your own hardware can be run on Akash without rewriting it to run on a supercomputer.
Akash also differs in that users have access to block storage on the servers running its containers. The Grid Projects either only offer compute with no storage at all or object storage – useful for storing large amounts of unstructured data but not for applications or databases.
Akash’s blockchain marketplace also provides a significant price advantage because each workload is bid on by all providers willing and capable to host it. This auction process is visible to all and the resulting competition will provide downward pressure on prices charged by all providers.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY
The project popularity in the social networks and discussion forums
Telegram: 4.7k members, user activity is medium
Facebook: 382 followers, average number of likes per post is 2, average number of sharing ings per post is 1.
Twitter: 330 readers, average number of likes on one tweet is 5, average number of retweets per post is 3