DRC Due Diligence Report - blockchainfestival.com · DRC Community I. Project Overview Achain was originally developed by the Achain Foundation. At its early stage of development

DRC Due Diligence Report

Achain Project

DRC Community May 15, 2018

DRC Community

78

49

4672

73

Project Overview

Project Team

Business PlanTechnical Solution

Economic Model

DRC Community Distributed Due Diligence

Project Name: Achain

Time: May 4-14,2018

Contributors: Weidong Zhu, Youlan Wang , Songya Yu, Ice Sun, Xin Ye, Jim

Zhang, Xu Zhang, Zhu Lee, Putin, Sunny, YanPing Yu, Jiayi Tang , Peter Bian

Organizer: Sunny, Xin Ye

Report Writing: Sunny, Xin Ye

Translation: JP, Shine Wu

DRC community initiated a one-week comprehensive and in-depth due diligence

investigation into Achain, which covered 5 aspects: Project overview, Project

team, Business plan, Technical solution, and Economic mechanism.

The result unveiled a total grade of 62, a project rating of BBB, and a project

risk rating of Medium risk level (high).

Project Name

Project Rating

Risk Level

Total Grade

Achain

BBB

Medium

62

DRC Community

Category Sub-category Total Grade Grade Given Subtotal

Project Overview

Project outline 9 8

78

Project team 8 5

Reception on capital

market 5 2

Project promotion 9 9

Project popularity 9 7

Subtotal 40 31

Project Team

Founder’s profile 32 14

49 Core management team 16 7

Core development team 17 11

Subtotal 65 32

Business Plan

Market analysis 14 7

46

Business solution analysis 17 9

Project governance

structure 9 7

Information disclosure &

risk management 10 0

Subtotal 50 23

Technical Solution

Distributed ledger

technology 20 14

72

Application novelty 3 2

Technical applicability 3 3

Technical maturity 8 5

Technical soundness 16 12

Subtotal 50 36

Economic Mechanism

Token information 9 8

73

Token allocation plan 11 7

Token issuance model 9 7

Token liquidity 5 5

Economic model design 11 6

Subtotal 45 33

Total 250 145

Total Grades 62

DRC Community

I. Project Overview

Achain was originally developed by the Achain Foundation. At its early stage of

development in 2015, Achain proposed its blueprint of technological innovations, including

modular design and smart sandbox, which cultivates a more stable and secure network for

decentralized applications on its platform.

A stable and secured public blockchain, Achain has facilitated over 900,000 transactions，

has over 230,000 accounts and run over 120 smart contracts without major incidents.

Through the methodology of modular design and smart sandbox, Achain has created an

evolving, user friendly, low cost and customizable blockchain network. By having the

unique RDPoS consensus mechanism, an increased block capacity, a reduced the block

generation interval and an optimized algorithm, Achain is able to achieve 1000 transactions

per second.

Similar to the ERC20 protocol on Ethereum, Achain created the ATP1.0 protocol which all

tokens issued on top of Achain platform need to follow. ATP1.0 also provides a standard set

of smart contract interfaces so third parties are able to issue and use their tokens quickly.

Currently Achain is also run by a Singapore registered foundation. It has a large global

community base of more than 2 million community members, with 200 core members. It

also has a large number of followers in social medias including Slack, Twitter, Medium,

Reddit and Facebook.

Achain’s main net is live and the feedbacks from the users are positive overall.

Achain’s official website is https://www.Achain.com. Achain conducted its token sale on

Huobi on Jul 20, 2017, and was fully subscribed in 1 minute.

Category Sub-category Total Grade Grade Given Subtotal

Project Overview

Project outline 9 8

78

Project team 8 5

Reception on capital market 5 2

Project promotion 9 9

Project popularity 9 7

Subtotal 40 31

DRC Community

II. Project Team

Achain’s Team Assessments：

Achain is developed by the XinHeYun Team under Beijing GuoRenBao Technology Pte Ltd.

The company’s founder and CEO Cui Meng is in charge of this project’s management,

development and publicities.

Achain has a team of over 50 people, of which 17 are core development team members.

Little disclosure was provided on the marketing and operation staffs, therefore they

received a below average score for this section.

Category Sub-category Total Grade Grade Given Subtotal

Project Team

Founder’s profile 32 14

49 Core management team 16 7

Core development team 17 11

Subtotal 65 32

DRC Community

III. Business Plan

Market Analysis: Achain aims to solve the pain point in the market, which indicates certain

demand and use cases.

Competition：Achain is a public blockchain platform that competes with Ethereum, EOS,

ZIL, NAS and AE. While each platform is unique, the future depends on the technology

and community developments.

Completeness of Proposal: Achain has some unique technologies, such as RDPoS and

smart sandbox. However, the white paper lacks detailed discussions on these technologies

and reveals limited background information on its team members.

Innovativeness: Achain uses the RDPoS consensus mechanism, which has the following

features:

Transactions are categorized into ordinary transactions and contract transactions. There

are 2 steps for contract transactions. First get consensus over all the nodes in main net,

next start the Virtual Machine which runs on Achain to process the contract codes, then

complete the whole transaction.

Achain’s un-delegate nodes only need to verify the original transaction and selectively

verify the result of the transaction. This feature improves the transaction efficiency of

the whole network.

For delegate nodes, they need to verify all the original and result transactions and are

also responsible of voting and the currency-generating mechanism.

A normal node on Achain can apply to become a Delegate Node candidate. The first 99

candidates in the election will become Delegate Nodes and can start producing blocks.

The block time is set at 10 seconds (7 seconds to produce the block and 3 seconds to

broadcast it to the network to get consensus)

Viability：The mainnet is currently live and being used in supply chain finance and

commodity traceability projects. It has run over 120 smart contracts as of May 2018.

Planning：The roadmap is reasonable, and development and marketing has been carried out

on schedule. Achain is currently at “Galaxy” stage, which is slightly behind its schedule. It

DRC Community requires further technical improvements to go into the eventual “Cosmos” stage.

Project Governance：Limited disclosure. The lack of information leads to a below average

score on this part.

Information disclosure and risk management: There has been frequent announcement in

Wechat and other social media platforms. There is little disclosure on risk management.

Category Sub-category Total Grade Grade Given Subtotal

Business Plan

Market analysis 14 7

46

Business solution analysis 17 9

Project governance

structure 9 7

Information disclosure &

risk management 10 0

Subtotal 50 23

DRC Community

IV. Technical Solution

Blockchain Technology Assessment：Achain is a public chain with the unique RDPoS

consensus mechanism. It incorporates Turing complete virtual machine and smart contract

running mechanism and able to support 1000 transactions per second.

RDPoS not only inherited the benefits of DPoS (it doesn’t consume large amount of

hashing power to produce a block) but also the execution results of contracts are able to be

verified by delegate nodes or all the nodes depending on the state of the networks.

To meet the high demands for technology upgrades and construct the boundless blockchain

world, Achain initiated the concept of “Free Fission, Shared Platform” in 2017. Achain

initiated the “contract network - fork network – interworking network” development

roadmap and took an in-depth study and research on subchain, BaaS, security isolation and

event-driven mechanisms.

Innovativeness: Achain is Turing complete, and through smart sandbox and Value

Exchange Protocol, it enables high transaction speed. Its smart contract, however, is not

much different from that on the Ethereum blockchain, and is based on Lua-alike

programming language.

Open Source：Achain’s source code is completely open sourced, which is available on

Github (https://github.com/Achain-Dev/Achain).

Technical Maturity：Achain’s mainnet is live and operating without major issues.

Technical Community: The codes were completed 3 year ago. It has been running smoothly

for 1 year since the main net went live. There is minimum maintenance and updates

needed.

Shortcomings：

Personal Identity：Achain doesn’t incorporate any personal identity verification system

Technology Management：Not included

Privacy Mechanism：With blockchain forking and the common virtual identity

structure, the platform offers certain privacy protections but there is still large room

DRC Community for improvements.

Category Sub-category Total Grade Grade Given Subtotal

Technical Solution

Distributed ledger

technology 20 14

72

Application novelty 3 2

Technical applicability 3 3

Technical maturity 8 5

Technical soundness 16 12

Subtotal 50 36

DRC Community

V. Economic Mechanism

Basic information of the token:

Achain token ticker: ACT

Total ACT token quantity: The total supply for ACT was not disclosed. It announced

the initial size of 1 billion at the time of crowd funding (ICO).

Achain plans to release 20,000,000 ACT in the first year after ICO. Further token

issuance is scheduled to decrease annually.

Time of crowd funding (ICO): July,2017 on Huobi.pro

Issuance price is at 1 BTC=100,000 ACT, 1 ETC=10,638ACT

Total amount raised from ICO comprises 30% of the initial token supply. The founding

team has 10%, early investors 30% and the foundation has 30%. Later on 34,000,000

ACT was called back due to regulatory reasons. The community decides to utilize

these called-back tokens for future project improvements.

ACT is now listed on 9 exchanges: Huobi.pro，OKEX，MasterDAX，COINEGG，

BTCTRADE.IM，KUCOIN，ALLCOIN，COOLCOIN

Token Liquidity: Until May 12, 2018, ACT has a market cap of 137,562,599 USD, ranked

115th according to coinmarketcap.

Category Sub-category Total Grade Grade Given Subtotal

Economic Mechanism

Token information 9 8

73

Token allocation plan 11 7

Token issuance model 9 7

Token liquidity 5 5

Economic model design 11 6

Subtotal 45 33

DRC Community

VI. Methodology of DRC Due Diligence Investigation

The whole due diligence investigation process follows 4 steps:

Our due diligence investigation focuses on the following aspects:

Below are the benchmarks for project rating:

Project Rating Grades Project Risk Level

AAA 100%-90% Low risk level (very low)

AA 90%-80% Low risk level (low)

A 80%-70% Medium risk level (low)

BBB 70%-60% Medium risk level (high)

BB 60%-50% High risk level (high)

B 50%-40% High risk level (very high)

CCC 40%-30% Not Recommended

CC 30%-20% Not Recommended

C 20%-10% Not Recommended

D 10%-0% Not Recommended

Due Diligence

Investigation Expert Comment

Clarification by

Project Team

Conclusion of Due

Diligence Report

DRC Community

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