While 'Blockchain' is the buzzword these days. People talk about it all over the social media, whether they really understand it or not. The simplest definition of Blockchain is, 'It is a distributed Ledger', where information is kept at more than one place, therefore change at any given point is reflected in all the ledgers, and unauthorized information update in one of the ledger triggers alarm in all the others. As a result, the data authenticity holds true at all times.
However, 'Blockchain' comes with its own challenges with limited speed capability of processing only few transactions / second. (e.g 7 transactions for Bitcoin & few more for Ethereum), and this exact phenomena is discouraging companies to invest in developing Decentralized Apps, as they prefer to stick to non-Blockchain apps for now. Additionally, we all all know transactions over Blockchain are not 'FREE' either, as miners have to be rewarded for keeping the main net live and allowing to utilize their computational processing power for transactions to happen.
ArcBlock, a new Blockchain service in the making, to address these exact challenges and does it thoughtfully in explaining it to their readers in their Whitepaper. The aim is to make the development of downloadble decentralized apps from the Blockchain browsers convinient enough similar to the experience of downloading apps from various AppStores such as Apple AppStore, Google PlayStore, Amazore AppStore. As well as having the ability of developing centralized apps leveraging multiple Blockchain platforms. Therefore ArcBlock service in not platform agnostic. ArcBlock achieves this by implementing "Open Chain Access Protocol" in its service, that provides an abstract layer to work with different Blockchain platforms, without requiring developers to alter 'Business Logic' of their decentralized apps to make it work with multiple chain technologies.
Moreover, ArcBlock is designed to run natively on CLOUD which is a huge bliss, thus opening the door of limitless possibilities. If this is to be compared to early technological era to understand the utility of ArcBlock better. Compare it with World Wide Web as "BitCoin", Internet Browsers as "Ethereum" and JAVA/HTML technology as 'ArcBlock', which led developers to build cross-platform web apps without worrying about the it's compatibility to run on various hardware architecture (e.g Solaris/Linus, IBM, Windows, MacOS).
Now that we have the basic understanding, on the utility that ArcBlock intends to bring in Blockchain space. Developers are given flexibility to orchestrate decentralized apps in manner that are best suited to achieve a certain task, whereas ArcBlock provides them the abstract structure with a set of governing guidelines in form of "Blocklets", a server less blocking computing architecture component that could be used for smart contracts, resource and asset handling or off-chain business logic. Moreover, ArcBlock further strengthen the concept of decentralized apps marketplace, by enabling anyone to use 'Blocklet' to build services and components and receive ArcBlock tokens in return when community members consume their components or services. This sort of incentive system helps grow a much bigger developer community and a widely adoptable ecosystem.
It can be said that 'Blockchain' is still in an infancy stage, one of the potential risks investor are haunted with is TRULY understanding the unique value an ico of interest brings on to the Blockchain and whether it will succeed in delivering and meeting the given timelines.
ArcBlock is certainly an ICO to watch out for acknowledging the next Blockchain Quantum leap associated to it. Additionally, the team's aggressive milestones of establishing founding clients in Q1 2018 powered by ArcBlock and implementation of adaptors for Ethereum & Hyperledger using its 'Open Chain Access' Protocol later this year, seems to make this leap possible sooner than we may realize. The Roadmap of “2019" looks even very exciting, as the year of mass adoption happens, widespread deployments and DevCons for ArcBlock Developers.
Robert Mao, CEO and chief Architecture of ArcBlock & Flavien Charlon both brings an extensive software development & research experience and have nurtured few startups in the past as well. Both the founders have been part of Microsoft team in 2010-2014, which should translate into establishing trust among investors, in the team's capability of delivering the new service on the Blockchain, and techies resonating it across the boards.
Also, some of the very renowned team of advisors are backing ArcBlock up, naming few such as Ding Lei, CEO of NetEase ranking #52 in Forbes list of billionaires with an estimated holding of 17.2B$ and Justin Tomboulian Vice-President at Liquid Hub who previously held Position of CIO at Microsoft, Japan.
For Investors / Public: ArcBlock Website
Additional Information for Tech nerds: ArcBlock Whitepaper
Author BitCoinTalk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1547297