Wanchain - The Future Global Financial Super-Highway of Crypto-assets?

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way associated with the Wanchain team. Neither am I a financial advisor, nor is this meant to be financial advice. Whatever follows, just reflects my understanding of the project, and my personal opinion on its future outlook.

The objective of this post is to lay out, in simple terms, what Wanchain is, and why I think Wanchain’s native coin, Wancoin, could be one of the best cryptocurrencies to hold, not just through the coming months, but years.

So, let’s dive into it!

What is Wanchain?

Wanchain’s vision is rebuilding financial services. Wanchain is a global financial platform that connects, and exchanges value between different blockchains. Simply put, Wanchain is a ‘decentralized’ version of traditional banks in the current and future financial landscape.

Why do we need Wanchain?

We are living in times of a major digital transformation, a time where digital assets are entering the financial ecosystem at an unprecedented rate. As the adoption of digital assets is increasing, we are witnessing an appreciation in the value of these assets. This necessitates the existence of a ‘digital bridge’ to transfer value, in the form of digital currencies and/or assets, between different blockchains.

How is Wanchain achieving this?

Wanchain’s distributed ledger allows:

Cross-Chain Asset Transfer: Asset transfers would be possible across major blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as across consortium blockchains developed based on Wanchain protocol. Community developers can create independent services. Any blockchain — private, public, or a consortium chain — can integrate with Wanchain to establish connections between different ledgers and perform low cost inter-ledger asset transfers. The protocol also ensures stability and security of all cross-chain transfers.

Transaction Privacy Protection: Wanchain protocol provides the option to execute private transactions, similar to those provided on privacy coin platforms, based on one-time addresses and ring signatures. Wanchain also allows digital asset holders to remain anonymous on its protocol.

Functional Extensibility: Wanchain protocol allows credit and lending facilities, for businesses and individuals, for different digital currencies. Also, once consortium blockchains are integrated into Wanchain protocol, it also allows the issuance and trading of brand new digital assets.

Complex Application Support: Community developers can develop more complicated applications based on smart contract and universal protocols. The intra-chain and cross-chain connections provide more options for further application development.

What are the key strengths of Wanchain?

1. Wanchain’s association with Factom gives a deep sense of confidence in what Wanchain can achieve over the coming years. Wanchain was envisioned by the Chinese firm Wanglu Tech, founded by Jack Lu, who was also the Co-founder and CTO of Factom: a blockchain technology firm that has developed ways to use the blockchain to keep records and identities more secure. As of this writing, Factom is valued at about $560 million, has partnerships with several corporations, including Smartrac, Rongdu Technology, iSoftStone, and Netki, and blockchain firms like ShapeShift, Tether, and Synero. Factom’s investors include Fenbushi Capital, Draper Associates, Bill Gates, Stewart Title, Overstock, Harvest Partners, The Department Of Homeland Security, and the Honduran Government. Three of Wanchain’s current team members, and one advisor, David A. Johnston, have previously worked with Factom.
2. Wanchain = Ethereum + Ripple + Monero + Chainlink, all in one, and in a lot of ways, better! First of all, Wanchain is a hard-fork of Ethereum, but will be Proof-Of-Stake (PoS) implemented (after mainnet launch), allowing it to scale better. Secondly, Wanchain is commonly labelled as the ‘Chinese Ripple’, however, Wanchain is much more decentralized than Ripple, truly representing what a ‘distributed’ super financial market should be like. Thirdly, Wanchain has Monero-style privacy features allowing the generation of new one-time addresses for each transaction, with ring signatures, keeping transactions private, and digital asset holders anonymous. And finally, just like Chainlink uses blockchain middleware to allow smart contracts on various networks to connect with critical external resources and data feeds, Wanchain protocol seamlessly connects blockchain networks together, recording cross-chain and intra-chain transactions.
3. Wanchain has a stellar team with some of the brightest minds in blockchain technology and cryptography. Wanchain has 23 team members and 11 advisors, ranging across all domains of their business. The team comprises of three PhDs with applied mathematics degrees, and highly experienced software engineers, cryptographers, computer scientists, financial experts and media and community managers. The team has rich commercial expertise and resources in countries such as China, the U.S. and Singapore. The amount of words needed to do justice to the width and depth of experience and competence of Wanchain’s team would turn this blog post into a lengthy article. But the bottom line is, it is rare to find such a strong team in global blockchain projects.
4. In November 2017, Wanchain formally entered the Blockchain Interoperability Alliance (IOA) with ICON and Aion, with a common goal of promoting interconnectivity between the isolated blockchain networks, through joint research and collaboration. ICON is an interconnecting blockchain network that connects independent blockchains without additional intermediaries. Aion aims to become the common protocol used for these blockchains, enabling more efficient and decentralized systems to be built. This partnership is monumental, and means that Wanchain would be able to utilize synergies outside its ecosystem to be able to achieve its objectives globally.
5. Wanchain is racing down its roadmap! Theoretical proof for token privacy protection of smart contracts based on one-time addresses and ring signatures was completed in 2016, and the Proof-Of-Concept (PoC) was completed at the beginning of 2017. At the beginning of 2017, Wanchain completed the design of the cross-chain transaction mechanism and the cryptographic technology. Wanchain Alpha was released and tested in October 2017. The Beta platform was released in December 2017, and is still under testing as of this writing. Wanchain mainnet launch, Wanchain 1.0, is scheduled for January 2018, and is going to be just the start of numerous developments to follow.
6. The extremely high public interest in Wanchain, since its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in October 2017, reflects investor confidence in the project. The public token sale on 4th October 2017 was one of the quickest ICO sell-outs in the history, being completely sold out in less than a minute. Several investors were unable to contribute to the token sale despite sending their transactions within the first minute of the token sale. Such was the magnitude of demand despite the fact that China, U.S. and South Korea were not allowed to participate in the ICO. Therefore, the unmet demand for Wancoins is enormous, and expected to be in wait when Wancoin trading goes live.

To put it in a few words, Wanchain is a very ambitious and potentially disruptive project, aiming to become a super financial market of the world. The project has some of the brightest minds in the business working behind it. Wanchain is solving a real world problem and has an immensely vital use case.