The “new impossible triangle” of academic projects: a decent team image, a good looking k-line and a satisfied private equity investor.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the strategic cooperation blockchain media “Odaily Planet Daily” (Public ID: o-daily, < a href="https://download.odaily.com/">APP Download)
文 | Aloe Vera
Edit | Lu Xiaoming
A star project chief scientist left the job.
On the morning of August 5th, the ThunderCore English Community Telegraph Group and the Chinese WeChat Group Administrator announced that ThunderCore co-founder and technology core Dr. ElaineShi will not continue signing after the end of the two-year contract.
According to the block rhythm report, some investors in the community said that the project team had already known this and had concealed it, and that the project side “sneaked the slap.” According to the data of Bituniverse, the current token price of ThunderCore Token (TT) is 0.006 US dollars, which is close to 80% compared with the decrease of 0.029 USD in the last year of this year. The decline rate in the last week is 22.93%. .
It is understood that ThunderCore privately raised the first round of $0.01, the second round of $0.02, and the third round of $0.1. The third round of private placement investors and secondary market investors may have suffered a lot of losses in the investment of this project.
In the official group, many investors lamented the “buy-in and buy-in” and slammed the project.
The past academic aura
In fact, two months ago, the project was in doubt. At the beginning of May, the ThunderCore project sideIt was exposed to the 50 million and 30 million chips that were transferred to Upbit and Firecoin before the start of trading, and the investors thought that they were “cash-up”. As soon as the news came out, the community began to panic, and the price of TT tokens plummeted 50% on two days. However, at the time, the respondent’s response was that the original plan was to be issued as an employee in the future, and there was no intention to sell it.
This resignation of Dr. ElaineShi is an important asset for Thundercore’s fame. As a co-founder, ElaineShi has a strong academic background. He graduated from Tsinghua University with a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Carnegie Mellon Computer and taught at Cornell University. And in the blockchain field, there are also many title blessings: the forerunner of the smart contract and distributed algorithm industry, and the co-founder of IC3 (Distributed Smart Contract Initiative). ElaineShi’s departure, an industry insider commented, “This will let ThunderCore’s story go on.”
Reviewing ThunderCore six months ago, it is also a star project of Silicon Valley technology big bulls aura, holding a 50 million US dollars worth of well-known investment institutions. At that time, investors should have a hard time imagining that the future Thundercore will be so rough.
The academic founder who left midway
If you break into the controversial blockchain star project this year, Thundercore is by no means the only one, with the same kind of work, the same as the “founder’s departure” and Dfinity.
This is the benchmark for the Silicon Valley star public chain in Ethereum. The vision is to create a “world supercomputer” and declare that it has pioneered the intelligent governance mechanism – “Block Neural Network” (BNS). The meaning of this system is: In the event of a major systemic event, errors can be recovered, minimizing damage and impact. The co-founder Tom Ding has an enviable background. Public information shows that he got a bachelor’s degree in computer science when he was 14 years old. He was called a child prodigy when he was a child. He graduated from the China Europe Business School MBA at the age of 20. He has been in Ali and Ebay. Worked too.
With the above background, the project was favored by capital. In 2018, it received financing of 166.9 million US dollars including well-known encryption funds such as a16z and Polychain, with a valuation of up to 2 billion US dollars.
But in June of this year, Dfinity smashed moths frequently: first, the telegraph group’s announcement center was hacked and released fraudulent information; then the media exposure Tom Ding had already withdrawn from the team, and was fascinated by the study of “longevity,” The consciousness persists after the body dies.
At present, Dfinity is far away, and the trace of the project is even more embarrassing.
These projects have star professors, well-known capital, and enough grand blueprints to be blessed by many investors, and they are regarded as the next Ethereum.Or the next EOS, even if the private equity is difficult to grab, you can’t get on the bus. But once the core asset “star founder” leaves, often face the dilemma of the capital story is hard to say.
For the Zilliqa project, which is known for its fragmentation technology, in the previous public information, Dong Xinshu and technical director Jia Yaoqi, who graduated from the National University of Singapore, and Amrit, a research director who graduated from the University of Grenoble, France, are Zilliqa. “Three carriages”, but the current Zilliqa official website has disappeared from Dong Xinshu’s official scene, and the three have changed into two. Although the public opinion that can be affected is not very big, whether it will delay the project process is really worthy of scrutiny.
Academic big cattle who are still participating in the project
In addition to Thundercore and Dfinity, what are the star blockchain projects that are also the trend of the times in 2018?
Oasis Labs, which targets Ethereum and tries to break the bottleneck in scalability and privacy protection of current public-chain projects, received $45 million in financing last July. The list of announced investors includes the a16z crypto, coin incubator, Foundation Capital, Metastable, Pantera and Polychain, which are among the world’s largest cryptocurrency investment institutions. Professor Song Xiaodong, founder and CEO, has a reputation as the “mother of computer security.”
Conflux also received $35 million in financing in 2018, with a valuation of more than $400 million. Investors include Sequoia China, F2Pool, Fire Capital, Metastable and IMO.
Despite the negative news, there seems to be no loud voice in 2019. These academic gold-plated projects often have high valuations in the primary market due to the glamorous founding team background. After entering the secondary market, can the aura of the founding team brand only pay for the capital market? ?
At least Algorand’s answer is obviously not.
As a representative project shared with Cosmos and Polkadot to be treated by major exchanges, the founder title is definitely the biggest label for Algorand. Founder Silvio Micali is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) & Turing The winner, the vision is to solve the “impossible triangle” problem in the blockchain project. In 2018, Algorand, in addition to the $4 million venture capital, added an additional $450 million.
The Dutch auction launched a few months ago is even more gimmick, attracting a large number of spectators and group followers. But as of today, the price of the currency that fell more than 80% compared to the opening price is a big surprise; late Dutch