In this post we analyse the Stratos project, and explain it's rating in terms of the 'Vision' criteria in the SVET framework. This rating is conducted from an unsponsored, unbiased perspective and serves merely an informative purpose- not as financial advice (!)
Recap of Framework
The framework is designed for technology analysts to be able to assign as close to an objective rating as possible on the merits of a project.
Within the review of a project's 'Vision', the following criteria is assessed:
SVET Vision Rating:
- Singularity: you have to check out project’s Competitors.
- Volume: you have to gauge project’s targeted Market’s Size and number of platform’s Users.
- Empathy: you have to weigh up project’s Community.
- Timing / TimeLine: you have to analyse project’s future Development Plans.
The rating is assigned from a scale of a, b and c, with the +/- variant indicating a strong/ weak performer respectively in that category.
Vision Review
The Stratos project is a unique solution in the data mesh sphere, with the developers flaunting their "one-of-a-kind features, such as high availability, self-balanced storage, high performance database, [and] trusted computation" (Stratos, 2021). This judgement isn’t without substantiation in the relatively new field, as the term ‘data mesh’ only originated in 2019 and "is picking [up] popularity" according to analysts at Deloitte (Mutatiina et al, 2021).
Hence, on the 'Timing' criteria (a), it promises to be robust, and offers innovative infrastructure that is much required in the Blockchain and decentralised industries. The data mesh product cannot easily be facilitated by existing projects, and so there are a lack of existing competitors - a key win on the ‘Singularity’ criteria (b+). This is because present blockchain projects are “not designed to support storage expansion”, as the ledgers at each node are restricted by a physical local storage capacity (Stratos Whitepaper, 2021). This awareness is just as appealing to the impressive line-up (in quantity at the very least) of strategic investors as it is to the tech savvy proponents of the community with the former raising close to $1.83 million for the project (Stratos, 2021).
Although this markedly represents commercial support for the project, which will be the bulk of the target consumer, it scores quite a basic ‘Empathy’ score (b). Unfortunately, the present community, especially on Telegram of a mere 20,000 participants, seems both inadequate in size (to the end they wish to achieve of market dominance) and distracted from the main goal of the project, rather, focused on the price potential of the STOS token itself which will be used for the “internet of value” envisioned by the team. This is not necessarily a ‘bad’ but perhaps a symptom of why a project so well equipped to take on its goal of “compet[ing] with major monopoly Cloud vendors, and ultimately obtain[ing] half of the market” (Stratos Whitepaper, 2021), is not taken more seriously by a Crypto community encaptivated by arbitrage and price mechanisms.
That being said, the project “is still in its infancy” as the team admits in the whitepaper, refreshingly self-aware once more, leaving the possibility of market dominance wide open whilst careful not to disappoint the same herd of Crypto enthusiasts waiting for overnight gains in token value. They may find respite in the team’s vision of taking the internet from one of “information” to one of “value”, in the backdrop of believable, but non-quantified demand in the industry for data meshes as it is such a new development.
Overall, their product is to help “data sovereignty transition from centralized system to new democratic decentralized system” (Stratos Whitepaper, 2021) which substantiates the 'a' ‘Timing’. Yet, even without a clear competitor in the realm of decentralised data meshes and the four specific services they will provide (decentralised storage, database, computing and blockchain), there are questions raised by Deloitte which the project does not have answers to.
Two such issues raised which might raise competition from outside the data mesh industry, are of the industry itself: namely the “significant level of management change required” as well as the question of cross-domain analytics which will allow the “aggregation and consolidation of various data products into one report” (Mutatiina et al, 2021). These management-related questions are all important to the target consumer- businesses hoping to decentralise their operations- the bulk of interest in data mesh products. For this reason, if “centralised” data meshes can do a better job than “decentralised” ones, then it will be a threat to the position of Stratos which is aiming to be the face of the latter. This directly leads to a ‘b+’ rating in ‘Singularity’ as competition from within that specific sub-industry is not the only thing to worry about, and yet there certainly is an undisputed trend towards the decentralised world with the rise of Blockchain where it has an early-mover advantage.
Presently the volume rating sits at ‘b+’ similarly due to the aforementioned concerns and strengths; whilst the volume of vision-sharing users on their social media is still quite low, the potential is clearly there for rapid expansion with adoption. The team is confident that Stratos's "genes" are built for success as their founder's old platform, developed from scratch, 'Mindgeek', achieves 100 million users worldwide every day. However, this is not enough to upgrade the volume rating alone but is interesting to see if the team follows through with their promising past expertise at top internet traffic volume companies. On the other hand, with a lack of 'popular' marketing channels which are used by a majority of high-volume Crypto-related projects, including Facebook and Instagram, to raise hype and support in the community, the project is at a disadvantage in terms of winning attention in the Crypto sphere over the short-term.
Verdict
Singularity (b+), Volume (b+), Empathy (b), Timeline (a).
References
Mutatiina, J., Yurtseven, C. and Blaauw, E., 2021. From data mess to a data mesh. [online] Deloitte Netherlands. Available at: <https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/strategy-analytics-and-ma/articles/from-data-mess-to-a-data-mesh.html> [Accessed 21 August 2021].
Stratos, 2021. About Us. [online] thestratos.org. Available at: <https://www.thestratos.org/about.html#scroll> [Accessed 21 August 2021].
Stratos, 2021. Product. [online] thestratos.org. Available at: <https://www.thestratos.org/#Data-Arch> [Accessed 21 August 2021].
Stratos, 2021. Stratos Whitepaper. 1st ed. [ebook] thestratos.org, pp.6-40. Available at: <https://www.thestratos.org/assets/pdf/stratoswhitepaper.pdf> [Accessed 21 August 2021].
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