Ink Labs Foundation ICO: Blockchain Assets Trading Protocol?

What Is Ink Labs Foundation?

Ink is developing a platform that offers blockchain-based solutions, including copyright management and a blockchain-as-a-service system that gives developers access to a highly scalable architecture that it calls “sovereign consortium blockchains.” The company is also issuing its own cryptocurrency, the INK token, which will be used throughout its platform. While the company seems to have developed a powerful platform, its website and whitepaper are often unclear and missing important details, but its large international user base suggests that this is merely the product of poor translation.

Ink Labs Foundation Team

Ink is being developed by a very large team. While the company is legally based in Singapore, its team hails from all over the world, and has dozens of managers, developers, and investors based in Russia, east Asia, Europe, and the United States.

The company's English-language whitepaper struggles in some sections to thoroughly describe the service's features, but the service seems to have a robust base of followers, so it's likely that its resources are written more clearly in other languages. Between its Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram pages, the company has tens of thousands of social media followers, and it has attracted at least 20 partner organizations from all around the world.

Ink Blockchain Assets Trading Protocol Technology

Ink's primary product is a platform that content creators can use to control their work's intellectual property rights and be fairly compensated. While it mentions in passing that content creators will be paid using the platform’s INK tokens, it doesn't describe how this monetization works, what sort of platform is used to distribute these works this works, or even what sort of works are accepted.

The company has also released a beta version of InkStone, a blockchain-as-a-service platform. InkStone is available for software developers, who can use it to create powerful blockchain services without personally managing the back-end.

Both the intellectual property platform and InkStone use the company's “sovereign consortium blockchain” system, which allows applications to access a powerful, flexible blockchain without the need to maintain their own. It is a central blockchain connected to a network of smaller ones running parallel, allowing the system to scale up much more efficiently than through a single blockchain.

This architecture is more commonly called a “sidechain.” The company claims that it has engineered a particularly efficient protocol for communicating between these networked blockchains, allowing disparate applications to quickly access the central data for copyright verification or other services.

Ink Labs Foundation ICO Details

A total of one billion INK totens will be released, with only half of these being released to the public. The company's whitepaper describes it as a utility token that will be used across the platform; some use cases described include paying content creators for their work, and registering and verifying users' IP addresses.

The token is based on the QRC-20 standard, meaning it adheres to the standards defined by the Qtum blockchain. The company doesn't mention anything about its know-your-customer measures, or details about special rights associated with ownership.

Oddly, the company's website and whitepaper mention no dates for an ICO, and provide few details about its availability on brokerages or exchanges. However, a press release published on Yahoo! Finance provides these details: the ICO took place in November 2017, and it is being traded on a handful of public exchanges. A blockchain explorer and wallet service are available through the company's website; at time of writing (March 2018), INK tokens are worth $0.10 apiece, and nearly 13,000 addresses have completed over 37,000 transactions.

Ink Labs Foundation Verdict

While Ink has developed an innovative platform, and its mission of helping independent content creators is important, the company's services seem ill-defined by its website and whitepaper. Given the company's large number of international users and partner organizations, it seems likely that this is simply the product of harried translation; while this is forgivable, Ink must focus on better explaining its services to English-speaking consumers in order to develop a strong user base in these markets. Investors curious about the INK token should learn more about how it is used in the platform, and what drives demand for it.