Finding digital gold in the crypto desert: Sparkster ico review and analysis

With so many projects competing for market share in the crypto space finding an ICO that performs well and holds up in a bear market can be like hunting for water in a desert. That’s why it helps to know what you are looking for. In the world of crypto where things move so quickly fomo is your ultimate enemy, it’s by using a clear frame work and taking your time that you can really spot the hidden gems and open yourself up to some pretty life changing financial gains. With this in mind it’s hard to identify a more legitimate ICO opportunity than Sparkster.

What is Sparkster?
Ever had an idea for a killer dapp but didn’t know how to get it started? If you have been in crypto long enough then you will be well and truly aware of one fundamental issue, its accessibility. This is where sparkster will come into play by removing the underlying complexities that are associate with coding so that customers don’t need to worry about how something works but simply define what it is that they want their software to do. In order to achieve this Sparkster have built a decentralised cloud-based platform that runs the smart software so that people can bring their ideas to life without the need to write any code.

At its heart Sparkster is trying to tackle three fundamental issues, the limitations of smart contracts, the limited scalability of existing blockchain platforms and the expenses associated with standard centralised cloud computing. To tackle just one of these issues on its own would be impressive but addressing all three shows where these guys are setting themselves apart. So, let’s break each of these areas down so that we can take a look at exactly what it is Sparkster is trying to achieve:

Cloud computing
By running their decentralised cloud services through personalised devices, they drastically lower costs by not needing to pay for rack space, cooling, dedicated hardware, networking infrastructure, backup power, and support personnel. In comparison to existing cloud services, personal devices have near zero marginal cost per operation. Now while this may sound great there is still one fundamental issue and that is privacy, no company would want their private data at risk of being easily hacked. Sparkster address this by splitting the data stored on the cloud into fragments which are encrypted and spread across a network of nodes. To further add to this Sparkster also use zk-SNARKs to ensure that client data is obfuscated even from other network participants. This right here is a real game changer and sets Sparkster apart from its rivals such as google, amazon and Microsoft in what is already a 200 billion-dollar industry on its own.

Smart Software
The problem with existing Smart contracts is that they are a piece of code running on thousands of people’s computers which need to be executed by these same computers. Sparksters example of the issues seen with this are evident in their lightbulb app demonstration which turns a light on and off. With traditional smart contracts the contract is executed by many if not all of the nodes in the network meaning that at times there could be thousands of nodes trying to turn this single light off. Not only does this result in a flooding issue but it also poses problems for arriving at consensus as each “turn-off” message arrives at different times. To solve this in the current environment oracles are used in a centralised manner requiring the users to trust the source of data. Sparkster have overcome this by assigning the “turning off” of the light to one compute node which can simply be a tablet or mobile device. In order to be sure that the compute node performed the required task, the reply from the IOT device is sent to a different node. When a successful reply is received then the first node is rewarded. This novel idea allows sparkster to take what Ethereum has given us with smart contracts and create a much more user-friendly alternative where customers can write smart software in plain English without needing to write a single line of code.

Scalability
Sparkster have designed a platfrom that uses clusters of cells running their own individual distributed ledgers. While other platforms have looked to sharding which breaks down this distributed ledger into pieces and stores these individual pieces it still doesn’t deal with the original issue, which is that the entire system needs to be aware of all txs (transactions). In this type of system there are still large communication overheads due to thousands of nodes sending information back and forth trying to arrive at consensus and update the distributed ledger across thousands of participants. Sparkster breaks things down into individual groups without each individual group needing to update one another, building clusters of blockchains that are isolated from one-another. This means there is no communication overhead where the distributed ledger from one cluster is needed to be replicate in another. This system is designed to support millions and millions of companies all in parallel by isolating groups of companies from one another depending on needs and characteristics. In the same regard a huge company like amazon needing to process millions of txs could limit sets of customers to specific cells. In this instance consistent hashing is used to turn a customer’s ID into a number and uses this number in order to identify which cell contains a particular customers information. This approach allows Sparkster to take what has already been achieved by a project such as Zilliqa and refine it a level more suitable enterprise adoption.

Below is a link to see Sparkster scale to 50,000 tps (transactions per second) in only a matter of minutes. This puts its leagues ahead of its nearest competition using sharding which has achieved tps counts in the low thousands.

With something like Sparkster it’s easy to get carried away in the tech but I don’t want to get lost here and make this article unbearably long so for an additional information refer to their white paper.

The Sparkster team
The team of any crypto project is one of the most important things that needs to be evaluated, in a space where real talent is limited it pays do your due diligence. When it comes to Sparkster I can comfortably say that these guys have an impressive rap sheet. The CEO Sajjad Daya calls the team he has surround himself with corporate SEALs and he isn’t far off the mark. The Sparkster team have shown themselves to not only be gifted technically but also smart commercially in the way that they are handling their ICO. With all of the publicity they have gained it would be easy for them to run a gas war or sell out to large investors but instead they are running a program to enable anyone willing to engage with the project the opportunity to participate in their ICO. The best way to liken what they are doing is to a gorilla marketing campaign. If crypto is meant to empower the masses, then who better to have behind your project but a mass of informed and enthusiastic supporters.

While the core team bring experience from big names such as IMB, cisco, AT&T, wipro and CITI they are also backed by 17 developers with years of experience at companies such as Lockheed martin, HSBC, wipro limited, OLA and many more. With a team like this you know they have the man power to get the job done which is seen in the fact that they already have a working product.

Token Metrics

Where to buy Sparkster
By now if have already started to fomo mid article and looked for where to buy Sparkster you would have noticed that they are still yet to hold their ICO. Sparkster are taking a truly unique path with their ICO offering 25% of the white list positions to randomly drawn winners of a lottery while the remaining 75% of allocations will be given away in a proof of love campaign. As I sated earlier this can best be likened to a gorilla marketing campaign where you can gain whitelisting positions from performing a wide variety of tasks to help the Sparkster community as a whole grow and develop. So no matter if you are a crypto OG or just getting started there is something for everyone.

Check out their website here and sign up to earn Spark tokens: http://sparkster.me/try?r=U49p50Sg

Review by @Mo_Betters, check out my twitter for other crypto related info