TOP Network is a decentralized DAG-based blockchain network and communication services. The goal is simple and clear, to make your communication truly decentralized. It removes centralized parties as a medium for communication, such as WhatsApp, WeChat and so on. What you text and what you receive, only exist in your phone/device and your partner devices. Long story short, TOP is building massive decentralized communication services, starting from messaging to storage services.
The problem that TOP aims to solve are interoperability, privacy, security and communication cost. I think privacy and security are already clear enough. Using a centralized communication provider such as WeChat or WhatsApp put you on a big risk with your data. The Facebook case is the best example of this. TOP will also help to allow interoperability between communication services via single protocol and network, which in theory, will make you able to communicate with other people regardless of what apps that they use as long as it follows TOP network standard. TOP Network will also help to decrease the cost to build and host our own communication network/stack, by making communication services and network to be decentralized.
In other words, TOP aims to make communication point to be purely decentralized, secured and interoperable for anyone who participated in the network. Rather than setting up a central database/storage services, TOP will encourage anyone to contribute and set up their network. Their contribution will be rewarded with TOP and on top of that, communication will be much more secure.
There are a lot of services that claimed to be available in the TOP Network. Starting from messaging to live stream. The team explained in detail about TOP differences to certain messenger & other blockchain projects but didn't give enough comparison on how they would be different to existing communication services such as live streaming. Compared to WeChat and WhatsApp, the key differences is quite clear. TOP is claimed to be decentralized, open source, protect their user information and give user sovereignty over their data, free of censorship and so on. In contrast, WeChat and WhatsApp are centralized, closed source code, they didn't give enough protection for user data and can censor what they wanted without extra support for the cryptocurrency.
At this point, the advantages of TOP (TOP Messenger) is quite clear for privacy enthusiast and crypto enthusiast, but it needs a little push in order to make the regular user who doesn't know about crypto and doesn't really care about privacy to use it. Education, great user experience and promotion should be the key to global adoption. TOP Network might have another competitor in this area, which is Mixin. However, compared to TOP Network, Mixin services is limited in blockchain interoperability and messenger, but not focused on providing decentralized communication protocol and services.
If we look at the team, they have successfully produced many communication and information services such as Dingtone, CoverMe, and SkyVPN. Each of this application/services has a big userbase, at least 4 million users. This is a big plus because TOP Network adoption could be greatly accelerated, and in fact, it is planned. Dingtone, CoverMe, and SkyVPN will become a decentralized app on top of TOP Network. With this scenario, the team can encourage users to participate in TOP Network to earn additional benefits without too much effort as users of those services should already be familiar with the importance of privacy.
There are at least 5 key figures in TOP Network. Most of them have worked previously at WebEx. The CEO, Steve Wei have founded at least two companies, Cenwave (which later got acquired by Huawei) and Dingtone with Kelven Yang (Chief Architect in TOP Network). Long story short, their background looks solid and it should help to design their product, especially the communication services. On the executive summary & whitepaper, there is no mention of blockchain/DAG expert, it would be nice if this information is also presented on the whitepaper.
Another interesting point to talk about TOP Network is VC behind them. There are at least 20 VC that supports TOP Network, including but not limited to Fenbushi Capital, Elysium, ONTology and so on. This means that TOP Network shouldn't have any problem with their funding and furthermore, individual investors an at least feel safer to join the ICO or public sale, especially if there's enough anti-dump measurement after they got listed on an exchange.
We will talk about TOP Network technology and comparison with other blockchain projects in the next article. At this moment, feel free to read further on TOP Network resources below.
TOP Network Website: https://www.topnetwork.org/
TOP Network Executive Summary: https://www.topnetwork.org/pdf
TOP Twitter: https://twitter.com/topnetwork_top
Telegram Group: https://t.me/topnetwork_top
This article is created for potential rewards from TOP Network bounty program. The writer of this article profile in Bitcointalk is joniboini. Readers are encouraged to study TOP Network on their own.