Emotiq aims to be the most accessible and friendliest blockchain of them all — the Apple to other blockchains' Android and Windows.
Emotiq is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain using a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (pBFT) consensus protocol with strong consistency. This combination means there is a negligible chance of forks occurring in the blockchain allowing for quick finality and confirmation of transactions within seconds.
The weighted proof of stake model requires validators (aka nodes) to stake EMTQ tokens with the chances of them being selected as a “lead” validator for a new block weighted by the percentage of tokens staked relative to the total amount of tokens staked by all validators.
Cryptographic sortition takes this percentage chance into account to randomly select a “lead” validator for each new block in an unbiased manner with each leader of a block rewarded in EMTQ tokens that are collected from transaction fees associated from the transactions included in the block.
Emotiq proposes to solve the following three primary core challenges present in blockchains:
Emotiq builds on top of OmniLedger technology to achieve greater scalability and transaction throughput. With the combination of Proof-of-Stake and sharding technology, Emotiq can practically achieve thousands of transactions per second with potential for even more.
It incorporates MimbleWimble to prune old and spent transactions from their blockchain, resulting in a small blockchain size that allows new nodes of the network to efficiently validate the blockchain without having to download and store old transactions.
This will ensure greater levels of scalability at lower levels of centralization of nodes within the network as storage requirements for the blockchain will be much lower.
Our bank accounts and personal financial transactions aren’t publicly available for everyone to see however most major public blockchains today offer minimal privacy features.
The implementation of zero knowledge bulletproofs in Emotiq for the privacy of financial transactions will hide financial value amounts transacted throughout their blockchain. The integrity of the network can still be maintained under this cloaking as the validity of transactions can be verified by users without having to reveal any sensitive financial information - such as actual values transacted – thanks to the use of zero-knowledge proofs.
One of the biggest factors differentiating EMTQ from other blockchains is the introduction of Ring, a natural smart contract language that aims to allow everyday users to create smart contracts in simple plain English.
Users won’t have to engage programmers or developers to create smart contracts as Ring will allow them to independently create their own smart contracts, which can then be tested in the “Ring Virtual Machine Sandbox” before they are deployed live on Emotiq’s blockchain.
The EMTQ token is a utility token that will be used to pay for computing power and resources consumed, it is similar to Ether being used on Ethereum to pay for “gas” that is used throughout the Ethereum network.
Emotiq’s smart contract system also offers machine language translation of any Solidity (EVM) smart contracts into Ring so that all EVM smart contracts can be easily ported over into Emotiq’s blockchain network.
Joel Reymont, Founder, and CEO of Emotiq was previously the CTO of Aeternity and has 25 years of versatile programming and management experience working with different programming languages and under different application settings.
The rest of the team boasts an equally strong technical pedigree and programming experience:
As you can see, the team boasts a very strong technical background and expertise with cumulative programming experience exceeding 100 years.
Emotiq have not released further details as to their current advisors, investors, or partners to the project. The only public announcement of investors includes Thomas Capital, a Chinese crypto investment firm based out of Marshall Island.
Emotiq has been in development since January 1, 2018, with their roadmap spanning throughout 2018. The launch of their mainnet is scheduled for Q4 2018 and the following is a quarterly breakdown of their goals:
The Emotiq testnet is slated to be released in late June or early July.
Emotiq is privately raising $39m USD for 51.25% of total tokens, a fully diluted market cap will value Emotiq at $76.5m. $39m raise is in the medium to high range, however, does not come close to some larger raises that are being made by similar blockchain projects aiming for $100m to even $200m raises.
The EMTQ token will follow a deflationary schedule with a fixed percentage of yearly transaction fees being burnt. Further details of how the deflationary schedule will work have not been released.
51.25% of tokens are being sold to private investors with 13.75% to be held in a foundation reserve, the remaining 35% will be distributed to the team, advisors, and partners.
35% allocated to the team, advisors, and partners is on the high side however it is unclear whether a portion of that will be allocated to marketing efforts or bringing onboard partners and further developers to build out the blockchain network and ecosystem.
Emotiq is highly transparent and has publicly disclosed details of their private raise including token distribution and the price of tokens for seed round investors as well as subsequent private rounds.
The community has taken note of seed round investors being given a 10x bonus over the last private round of sales raised. It is unclear what the current lockup for seed round tokens is as it is still being decided.
Emotiq’s whitepaper provides a high-level overview of the primary features they seek to incorporate and is accompanied by a yellow paper providing further technical details and a comprehensive breakdown of their consensus protocol and cryptographic algorithms used.
Their github is completely open sourced and does not have any private repositories. The Emotiq repo, as of writing, has over 1,500 commits. Andre Cronje has performed a code review on Emotiq and was impressed with what he saw reinforcing the teams’ technical strength and capability.
The Emotiq website is in need of an update as it displays outdated information. Most of the information used in writing this report was found via Telegram and indirect messages with the team.
As there is no crowdsale scheduled (due to regulatory risks and concerns), social awareness and interest surrounding Emotiq are fairly moderate.
A well-planned bounty campaign, airdrop, or other community building effort to get EMTQ tokens into as many user’s hands as possible would greatly help with the adoption of Emotiq. As Emotiq is catered toward everyday users with Ring’s natural smart contracting language, they will need to put forth greater effort in building out their community.
To participate in Emotiq’s private sale a minimum investment of $100,000 USD is required and this severely limits smaller investors from being able to acquire a stake. This barrier may result in a limited diversity of Emotiq token holders and potentially be stunting community growth.
Emotiq is extremely interesting from a technical development standpoint as they have taken some of the latest research in distributed ledger technology and are attempting to combine them to build a new, robust, scalable, and privacy-enabled blockchain with the potential to bring blockchain into mass market adoption.
The implementation of Ring as a natural smart contracting language could see the crypto community witnessed a monumental shift in the adoption and use of blockchain technology, considering that natural language smart contracts do indeed take off. And that is a big if.
The potential for non-programmers and programmers alike to unleash their full creativity to unlock the potential of blockchain technology is yet to be seen, however, Emotiq is definitely a project to keep an eye on moving forward.
The author has no affiliation with the above token or with the promotion/marketing thereof.
He does not hold any tokens but is attempting to participate in any private or public sales.
No payment has been requested or received for this review.
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