Today we’ll be taking a look at Ambrosus, a “decentralised IOT Network” for Next-Generation Supply Chain.
Before you dish it off as another supply chain project, Ambrosus is currently in discussion with Nestle to food and beverage giant for a potential partnership. So it’s definitely a project worth knowing about!
There is a video link at the bottom for those who prefer an audio version
Ambrosus is a blockchain supply solution. Like Waltonchain or Vechain or Wabi or TE Food, it offers both hardware and software to monitor and track the location and condition of products from the farms, all the way to the consumers.
Unlike Vechain and Waltonchain, it doesn’t focus on retail, but rather on 4 specific industries, food, medicine, commodoties, and high value products.
These 4 industries are specifically chosen because they are in dire need to a good supply chain solution.
Currently, up to 35% of fruits and vegetables are loss during the transport phase. A study published in the Foods journal estimates that food safety incidents cost the U.S. economy alone $7 billion a year.
Regarding medicines, 10% of the world’s prescription drugs are counterfeit, and are responsible for one million deaths per year, according to Interpol. The World Customs Organization estimates that the counterfeit drug market is worth $220 billion. According to the World Health Organization, counterfeit pneumonia and malaria medicines alone cause 200,000 deaths every year.
High-value items like aviation and electronics parts, along with short-run valuables like precious stones and jewellery, traditionally use serial numbers, barcodes or holographic stickers to trace their products. But serial numbers and barcodes can be damaged, and stickers can be tampered with or counterfeit.
A 2013 Boston Consulting Group study found, 90 percent of executives view commodity hedging as a key competitive advantage, but less than a third believe they are implementing best-in-class hedging practices. Measuring performance and data for different commodities to improve operations is one of the biggest supply chain challenge.
Why blockchain? Can’t you get a good supply chain solution without blockchain?
Not really. The decentralised nature of blockchain is the most tamperproof solution to conterfiets, and furthermore tracking the flow of goods from hundreds of suppliers, producers, distributors, retailers and customers, becomes extremely messy. But smart contracts, help to streamline the entire process and make it clean and simple. For these reasons, supply chain solutions are becoming one the first areas of mass adoption for blockchain technology and I think over the next couple of years, projects in this area will boom massively.
Furthermore, unlike protocols, the blockchain projects in this arena are generally still very small in marketcap and a good investment generally. Look at Ambrosus or Wabi or Te-Food, even Waltonchain, all very undervalued and cheap projects to get into.
And one last thing which I can’t resist saying is, supply chain blockchain projects generally tend to produce their own hardware for tracking. With the exception of Vechain who buys its hardware, most of the others actually manufacture their own hardware for tracking purposes and I think any good hardware gives a project a lot of value and longevity in the market.
With that in mind, let’s now look at the technology of Ambrosus in details.
There are 4 key aspects of Ambrosus technology, if you understand these four aspects you understand Ambrosus.
The first is the sensor system.
So this is their hardware.
Ambrosus has probably the most sensitive sensor amongst all the supply chain projects that can be set or tailored to measure sensitive details during the transportation phase. Or e.g. if its milk, it can measure the temperature, the fat and lactose content. If its pharmaceutical products, it can measure temperature, humidity and even sunlight or fluorescent light content. It works by ultrasound sensors, so its all non-invasive. It’s very impressive.
Apparently INS ecosystem (a different project) will be using their sensors, so it’s a hardware that can be adopted by other supply chain projects as well. Other hardware they plan to release in future include food grade tracers and reusable connectors, and something makes them different from other projects like Waltonchain is their future connectors will enable information sharing with legacy systems e.g. SAP or Oracle. So Waltonchain for example, makes custom made RFID chips that can connect directly to the blockchain. Ambrosus sensors cannot connect directly, they need a connector, but they can connect to legacy systems as well as blockchain which would make their technology easier to be mass adopted, but it will also make their hardware attractive to non-blockchain supply chain solutions as well. Meaning a non blockchain project can still buy their sensors for use on their own system.
The next key feature in their technology is their blockchain protocol.
Ambrosus will use two blockchains. Ethereum blockchain will be the public ledger and the Ethereum blockchain will host the Amber tokens and be responsible for the smart contracts running all the transactions.
Ethereum is good as a transaction source, but it is not good as a data library. So for that purpose, Ambrosus will be using a private blockchain and utilising Merkle Tree technology to store data. Merkle tree technology, in simple is data that is spread out like tree branches, but you can confirm the validity of each branch by examining the root.
The Ambrosus protocol will have masternodes, initially these masternodes will be industrially run, but the plan later on is to open it up to the public.
The next key feature is their data storage.
So coming back to this diagram.
Ambrosus will use a 3-layer architecture to store data.
- The first layer is a library used to store large quantities of small data with blockchain and distributed file systems.
- The second layer is dedicated to data from the supply chains.
- The top layer is Ambrosus.js, a specific protocol dedicated to food and pharmaceutical supply chains only, with specific types of measurements and requirements related to those industries.
The final core feature of the project is their developer tools.
So Ambrosus will be open-source for developers to build Dapps on, and these dapps will be compiled into a portfolio for consumers and enterprises to choose from. Presumably if a Dapp is chosen, the developer gets a reward.
Ambrosus recently announced their Beta release 0.95. So officially they are now open sourced and developers can start building on them. Compared to the other supply chain projects in the space e.g. WTC or Vechain, they are a very new project so as with all new projects, it good to see that their technology is making good progress and open to public inspection and use.
So tech wise, I think this is a solid project.
Support and Recognition
Their website has a couple of pages for support and recognition, it’s not very impressive to be honest, this page, every link is broken and links back to the Ambrosus homepage.
Most of the articles from this page are from last year with the majority in July and August, and some articles are not really relevant to the project itself. E.g. the link to Reuters which is a very reputable media source, is a link to a short article that the CEO wrote on supply chain for Reuters, but it’s a generic article and doesn’t actually mention Ambrosus as a project. So I thought it was a bit misleading to put it up there.
Team
This is their team. It’s a huge team, and it’s also a very impressive team.
Now recently they changed their chief marketing officer to a guy by the name of Stephen Croncota. He’s has served twice as the chief marketing officer of Versace, he has also held senior global marketing and executive roles at Warner brothers, Sony pictures television, Cartoon Network and Escada. That’s pretty wow. I’ve never actually seen a CMO with a super impressive resume in the blockchain scene. Usually it’s the CEO and CTO who carries the team, but in this case, Stephen Croncota’s experience in marketing is so huge, I wouldn’t be surprised if he carried the team to great heights in the near future. Everyone is expecting big things from him.
Their CEO is no pushover either. He is Angel Versetti, he previously worked at the UN, World Resources Forum, Bloomberg and was trained at Google. At the UN, he was the youngest project leader and lead published author. He is a recognised expert and frequent speaker on innovation, technology and economic development.
Their CTO is Dr Stefan Meyer, who has over 20 years of R&D experience in food analysis, ultrasound sensors and data encryption. He previously led R&D projects at Nestlé, MHM Microtechnique and Vitargent Biotech and also sold two projects to Maersk Group and Perrot GmbH. He was the Founding Managing Director of the Integrative Food and Nutrition Center at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), holds a PhD in Food Science (ultrasound applications in food industry) and is also a Member of the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture.
Wow, you can go through the rest of the resumes in your own time, but this is an impressive team.
Advisors
These are their advisors, it includes Party which is led by Ethereum co-founder Dr Gavin Wood.
There is also Oliver Bussmann who is the President of Crypto Valley Association and Founder of Bussmann Advisory. Also previous CIO at UBS, CIO at SAP and CIO at Allianz North America & Mexico, in addition to the executive roles at IBM. He was also previously named COO/CTO of the year by the Wall Street Journal and European CIO of the year by INSEAD/CIONET and was twice included in the Financial News "Fintech 40" list of innovators shaping the future of finance.
There is also Dr Fabiola Dionisi who is Nestle’s Global Rand D programme leader since 2014 and more.
Heavy weight team. Overall this project resumes actually inspires more confidence in me than the vision and tech of the project. I mean the vision and the tech is good no doubt, but the team’s resume is outstanding.
One thing I need to point out here is they have no partners/ users using their product. No partners listed on the website, and I asked in their social media as well, no one answered. To the best of my research, right now there is no one signed up to use their product. This is, I believe, largely due to the fact that they don’t have a product yet.
Their roadmap is a medium article not actually on their website persay, but as you can see, it is only in 2019 that they aim to transform their IOT sensor into ready use products. And it doesn’t say which part of 2019. So where other projects like WABI, Te-FOOD, Waltonchain and Vechain etc.. are already up and running these guys are still developing their tech. In the big scheme of things, they are probably still early in the blockchain supply chain scene, but right now, they are still quite under developed and Im thinking that’s why they don’t have any partnerships.
This is where the risk with early projects come in, you have no guarantee it will work and attract users and partners because nothing is guaranteed in life. They are very cheap now, and if they achieve what they say they will, it’s gonna be high returns, but as an investment, they are a higher risk than the other projects who already have working products and partners. I mean TE-Food has over 6000 partners already, so that’s the kind of difference I am saying is hard to ignore. Ambrosus is a good project and they are in discussions with Nestle, and given their CTO is from Nestle and their advisor is Nestle’s Global Rand D programme leader, it’s quite believable that they will have a partnership in future, and that would be massive, but it’s always an if until it happens. So high risks for high gains you decide.
One last consideration I want to mention is the fact that their hardware sensor can be used by other projects, even non-blockchain projects sounds really good, but is potentially a double edged sword. On one hand it means the company and their technology can achieve wide spread use quickly. In fact the company might even become rich just selling those sensors! However, as a token investor, you want token use and demand for the token price to rise. If the feature technology is used by other projects, there is no token use in that case. In fact, the other project might do better and their tokens become more in demand. Does that make sense? So their hardware being used by others, will definitely mean the Ambrosus project being more successful and the company earning more money, but not necessarily mean the token price will go up. I like this project a lot, but this is something token investors in this project should pay attention to moving forward.
Price prediction
So right now their marketcap is $56 million, that’s really small. Vechain the biggest supply chain project is sitting at $1.9 billion. If Ambrosus ever got there, that would be a 35-40x gain. Is it possible, yea I think so. I think supply chain blockchain projects are going to be huge and whole industry is just going to grow and all the current good supply chain projects including Ambroso have a chance to hit Vechains current marketcap which btw is Vechain in a bear market, not even the peak of Vechain.
Also I feel Ambrosus has always being flying under the radar. Back in their ICO, they aimed for a hardcap of over a hundred million which was abit ridiculous, and they only achieved $38 million which was a good amount, even by today’s standard, but a bit embarrassing given how high they pitched. But I think it also reflected they didn’t have the FOMO and popularity that they thought they had. I think the recent change in CMO is going to make a difference to that, I definitely think watch this space, cos if he can do something to hype Ambrosus and start a FOMO, which is what the current market is driven by, unfortunately, than this project could be huge.
There are also potential big news like Nestle partnerships etc.. to bump up the price. The only thing Is we have no idea when that might be cos this project still has quite a whilst away before it is up and running. So higher risk for higher gains, Ambrosus is a promising project in promising industry but its most likely going to be a HODL, not a swing trade.
That’s my thoughts on Ambrosus guys. Let me know in the comments what you think of Ambrosus, especially if you support it, let us know why you like this project. If you found this post helpful, do give us that upvote and follow. It really helps us to build this channel.
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