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Ambrosus
TypeETH Token
Websitehttp://ambrosus.com/

Basics

"Ambrosus is a blockchain-base protocol built on Ethereum for supply chains designed and deployed to improve the quality and transparency of the complex supply chains for life-essential products, specifically food and medicine, according to the white paper. Ambrosus is optimizing for a sufficiently flexible protocol that can be used for any sort of shipped good and supply chain as well as a plug-and-play structure that allows anyone to use and develop on the platform. The Amber token is the name of the native ERC-20 compliant asset for the Ambrosus protocol."

  • AMB-NET went public on 18-4-2019. AmberEx (their explorer) 3.3 got released in early 2020. The team is now focussing on Layer 2 apps.
  • Has (27-2-2019) KYC
  • It also says it will have a marketplace for the products that are on their network.

ICO & Token

Presale and Tokensale: 40%

Partner Development Pool: 25%

Team and Advisors: 16.8%

Partners and Early Investors (2016): 16.9%

Security Audit and Bounty Campaign: 1.3%

  • As of 7-3-2020 one address is holding 60.18% of all tokens. With the two following ones holding 10.46% and 7.53% respectively.
  • "Much like ambrosia was the food of gods in ancient Greek mythology, giving them strength and immortality, Amber powers Ambrosus’s ecosystem, activating and operating the network and all of its associated services."
  • Token supply is increasing at a rate of 2%/year as blocks get validated and the rewards given to Apollo's masternodes.

Token Uses

  1. Run operations; perform activities on the network: every time you create an asset or record an event, you need amber to reward the nodes.
  2. Create digital certificates; create digital records of real-world assets and store the store the associated date for the entire lifetime of the product. By locking up Amber, you ensure that your product's birth and life history are immutably recorded.
  3. Staking; staking Amber into Masternodes helps maintaining the network and validating tx.

"Ambrosus issues a few percent of new tokens each year for proliferation. When will this be issued and distributed to Apollo? Once a year? Or daily?"

  • Someone else mentioned in the same AMA 'getting the short end of the stick' for being a hodler for a long time:

"Will there be any benefits for long term wave 0 holders who waited in line and held through the bear market diligently and helped go through all the teething problems? We definitely got the short end of the stick once the floodgates opened all of a sudden for node applications."

The AMA in question has not been answered yet.

Tech

  • Their long read blog post about their Ambernomics can be read here (5-5-2018).
  • From Messari (7-2-2020):

"Ambrosus is encouraging development and use of this platform by developing a toolkit for app creation on the platform and an API, which the Ambrosus team says is tailored to the needs of food and pharmaceutical supply chain participants. Ambrosus has also launched a JavaScript interface that sits on top of the blockchain layer and allows users to develop to the platform without any programming knowledge."

On how they will do it

"Ambrosus’ robust variety of sensors, biosensors and food tracers capture and monitor, in real-time, each individual product’s physical attributes and its surroundings, through unique electronic ID-tagging and anti-tampering mechanisms.

Commercial agreements between manufacturers and their supply chains are encoded as smart contracts on AMB-NET, Ambrosus’ Ethereum-interoperable blockchain. Quality, safety and logistical data generated by sensors and transmitted by AMB-NET Masternodes initiate contract self-execution and automate incident resolution, in the event of counterparty disputes.

Once Ambrosus sensors digitise data and issue product identity tags or attribute certificates, all readings are recorded on AMB-NET’s distributed ledger, providing an immutable and tamper-proof record of the product’s entire lifecycle.

Ambrosus promotes ecosystem growth through its robust offering of developer tools and modules that empower community members to build dApps, extensions and protocol upgrades. Interoperability with other Ethereum-based protocols ensures seamless integration and functionality of Ambrosus dApps."

Sidechains and Tokenization

"First, with the help of sidechains, unique forms of customer engagement such as loyalty programs, tokenised assets, and product-specific coupons can be managed on the Ambrosus Network at scale.

Second, sidechains provide an effective means of managing high-speed transactions without compromising the main network. From Internet of Things Devices (IoT), to micropayments, this increases the value proposition of Ambrosus to enterprises wishing to manage and store potentially millions of data entries at a cost-effective and manageable rate.

Using the Ambrosus Bridge, a token can be created on the Main Network, but then can migrate to a side-chain to become its own native token, owned and managed by a specific enterprise for a specific use-case. When it comes to creating your own tokens on an Ambrosus sidechain, a specific explanation can be found here.

  • However, 'using' is more as a future goal (5-2-2020):

"Just a few days ago we were also informed that no sidechains are operational "

Masternodes

  • From this blog (4-2019)

"Ambrosus offers three classes of Masternodes:

  1. Apollo — verifies transactions, maintain the decentralized network consensus
  2. Hermes — introduces data to AMB-NET
  3. Atlas — collects and stores data entered using Hermes API"

"The split between Apollo nodes is 33% per category (33% clients & users, 33% community, 33% Ambrosus Team & partners) assures the decentralization and exponential network scalability. As the rewards are distributed automatically the cap on distribution will not be applied."

Bundles

  • From this blog (4-2019)

"Ambrosus blockchain, AMB-NET has a bandwidth of 10 TPS, with 45 to 50 bundles in each block, which occurs in 5-second intervals. Each bundle can store up to 16,384 assets and events — readings from sensors / scanners and other devices that collect physical data.

The cost of one bundle is fixed at $12 USD."

Governance

On-Chain Governance

  • It is mentioned sometimes, but no details are yet to be found (7-2-2020)

Masternode Decentralization and Hodl Premium

  • According (4-2-2020) to an old time holder, they 'had gotten the short end of the stick' by holding through the bear market. When asked why someone explained:

"in like 2018 when they announced the economic model, they had a vague seniority system where the people who had held tokens the longest had priority for getting a limited number of masternodes. They asked for an ETH address to prove how long you've held for. They also made it clear that if you transferred tokens out then in again then your seniority would be lost. This encouraged holding and not selling. The price absolutely TANKED over the course of the next 6 months as people waited for news about onboarding of masternodes. Eventually what happened is that they completely scrapped the seniority policy and just opened the doors completely to let anyone have a masternode, so the holders got fucked over big time. They betrayed the people who supported them the most.

EDIT: to add more, part of the problem might stem from the fact that on the application form for reserving your spot as an early masternode holder, they FORGOT TO ADD A FIELD FOR AN ETH ADDRESS. So what they ended up doing is free xmas AMB swag giveaway (hats, bags, shirts, etc). They used THIS application form as a way to make up for their missing ETH address data. They then had to match the email addresses of the giveaway application to the masternode application and apply the ETH address to the masternode application.

This is a bit foolish because not everyone cared about getting a shirt, so what would have happened is that the people who wanted a shirt and applied for a masternode would have seniority over people that applied for a masternode and not a shirt. So the giveaway was kind of the seniority marker. Not everyone even knew about the giveaway. The whole thing was executed extremely poorly"

This information makes the following 'decentralization program of opening up masternodes for everyone' have a weird aftertaste.

"[The project] aims to permit Ambrosus ecosystem to grow to over 1 000 masternodes within the next 6 months and make our network truly decentralised and community-driven."

It had started opening up the masternode network on 18-4-2019.

The plan included:

"This update will outline the initial goals of this plan:

  1. how AMB-NET will drastically expand in the coming months;
  2. how AMB-NET has matured to a point where its first spinoff can actually come to life;
  3. how new leadership will join the Ambrosus Team to ensure that the Ambrosus Ecosystem can productively and efficiently continue to develop and expand according to its goal of being both a cryptocurrency in its own right, and an industrial management platform for enterprise business solutions"
  • On 5-8-2019 they gave an update:

"We are now fully permissionless. The Ambrosus developer team now onboards all prospective Atlas Masternodes, and up to 200 Apollo Masternode operators."

Then weirdly enough following with:

"Based upon estimates from the onboarding team, operators who need help to set up their masternodes can expect a response to their application within 72 hours."

If you need help from an onboarding team to become a masternode, how can it be fully permissionless?

  • Another update (2-9-2019) on the masternode count was given:

"Counting more than 460 masternodes."

And on a Reddit thread someone mentioned 584 nodes online (12-2019). Which means they have come a bit over half of the planned 1000 masternodes after 6 months. Update (17-4-2020): Has crossed the 600.

Regulation

  • They wrote the following as a response (17-9-2019) to growing regulation (TLDR: sidechains as sollution when regulation is difficult):

"Since the project started, GDPR regulations have induced massive modifications to the manner in which blockchain infrastructures can be deployed in Europe. While many competitors decided to centralize part of their data storage system or moved into IT projects keeping blockchain only as a back-end, Ambrosus has decided to remain committed to its original vision of complete decentralization. This is because the core team at Ambrosus believes in the ecosystems’ potential to impact the future principles of digital business and, in general, how data is structured and managed in the modern world.

By now, the challenges posed by GDPR are well understood and under control by Ambrosus. In parallel, due to the maturity of the Ambrosus Ecosystem and the high level of deployed IoT solutions on the network, a number of new core blockchain features must be designed: the Ambrosus team will be building multiple side-chains to accompany its main network chain. These side-chains will be capable of complying with local regulations across different jurisdictions around the world, and contain not only a distributed ledger, but also embedded software connected to different hardware infrastructures. With this new architecture, Ambrosus will be able to flexibly build solutions for enterprises in the food, pharmaceutical, logistics and health care industries. In short, where regulation is stringent and local data management is required - the case for many of our current clients."

Roadmap

  • From this blog (5-8-2019):

"With AMB-NET positioned as a refined, robust, and industrial-grade blockchain and IoT platform, the new focus is concentrated upon decentralisation, transparency, and community engagement.

First, a number of new statistical monitors are going to be implemented — for internal analytics and for sharing network developments externally with the community. 

Second, a new network interface will naturally accompany the new monitors and indicators that the developer teams are focused on building.

 In the future, focus is devoted to bundle transitions within and between Masternodes on the Network to allow operators to seamlessly upgrade their masternode if they obtain enough Amber."

  • In an Q1 2020 update (30-1-2020) it was again said that the protocol itself was done:

"The network now has all functionalities of the core protocol and various Masternode classes fully implemented. Layer 2 applications on top of AMB-NET core will now be the focus of further community-driven development.

As for the next things to look forward to we are preparing the release of the Development roadmap 2020 together with the strategic vision for the Company’s progress and key milestones will be updated and posted within next four weeks"

"What’s the purpose of Ambrosus token swap in Q1 as plan?"

Usage

"In the previous AMA we were assured – several times – that companies are indeed already using AMB-net. Not only that, it clearly stated that the mainnet is already leveraged by corporates. As is evident, this is not reflected in bundle generation."

Someone even going as far to claiming:

"How late is it compared to the original plan? Previous admin said he expects to have one million bundles by the end of 2018. But actually 0."

  • Seems like (15-10-2019) Vanilla is their flagship:

"Ambrosus has long been the most visible face of blockchain-based quality assurance in the vanilla industry. Last year, the Ecosystem was even featured in a first-of-its-kind mini-documentary that explained how blockchain could be used to certify the origin and quality of some of the world’s finest Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla."

Also has a partnership with a DNA tracer company to ensure that precious metals and jewellery are genuine.

  • From this blog (5-8-2020):

"First, Ambrosus is working on developing and implementing a new project for the automotive industry in Japan. The jointly proposed goals are to not only trace car parts throughout the supply chain, but to also manage the production lines within the factory itself utilising a variety of Ambrosus IoT devices.

Second, in West Africa, Ambrosus is pleased to report a new industrial project focused on the traceability of all-natural mango purée from hundreds of farmers in the region. While each sack of mangos will be individually tracked, the Ambrosus Smart Pallet can be applied when the product is transported outside of the region — to Europe and beyond. Based upon previous solutions surrounding vanilla and coffee, Ambrosus brings unique expertise to the mango industry when it comes to creating valuable solutions in remote regions of the world.

Members of the Ambrosus team will be travelling to Vietnam in the coming week to concretely develop a previously mentioned project concerning the dairy industry."

  • From this blog (19-8-2019)

"A second project has also grown significantly in the past two weeks focused on the production of acerola. The fruit is a type of cherry, especially rich in Vitamin C and predominantly cultivated in South America. The current industrial project is focused on tracing a small percent of a much larger harvest of acerola. Comprehensive industrial adoption of the entire supply chain will be dependent upon the results of this project, and further discussions in the near future. Notably, previous Ambrosus expertise in working with raw commodities in supply chains lacking technical infrastructure has made the current acerola project fluid in its design and implementation, with mutual excitement from both sides."

  • From this blog (2-9-2019)

"Since its official announcement, the Ambrosus Smart Pallet is witnessing a significant increase in interest from important players in the logistics industry. These discussions are starting to bear fruit as a pilot project is in the works, that specifically focuses on the Ambrosus smart pallet. Along with a partner company Ambrosus will trace a shipment of durian (Asian fruit) that will be refrigerated from Malaysia to China."

Audits

  • Had a second audit done by Hacken passed on 27-2-2019. "they individually simulated external attacks through the Hermes, Apollo, and Atlas Nodes, as well as through access to the core API." And a whole bunch of other things. The outcome was as follows:

"Overall, the test was seen as a success insofar as the Ambrosus Network passed all penetration tests and analyses without any network-threatening or large-scale failures. The code was evaluated as being of very good quality, and all nodes and tooling tested functioned as originally planned.

The audit also revealed a select few ‘medium level’ issues related to the security of the core blockchain protocol. More specifically, these tests revealed particular vulnerabilities of the network when simulated through certain amounts of traffic, and under situations of high network usage. Additionally, for extra security we have decided to also build a multi-signature smart contract controlling the core operations of the networking such as onboarding of nodes and setting the bundle price, strengthening the security of the network in the short term and also setting the groundwork for decentralising the governance of our network down the road."

Critiques and Doubts

Censoring

  • Some people have been throwing out the word 'Scambrosus'. And when one Reddit user asked why there were so many deleted comments in a community thread (22-12-2019) the answer of one user was:

"The sub has been brigaded in the past by holders of other supply chain tokens, so the mods are rather heavy handed with the moderating"

While another responded:

"lol. more like people are getting annoyed at ambrosus for doing a shitty job at communication and are still yet to produce any meaningful results afters years of "soon""

Missing tokens and lying about clients

Ambrosus had an AMA at the beginning of 2-2020. With some questions showing concern over clients and network conditions. Has yet to be answered (Update, after many vague delays it has been answered 25-2-2020):

"AMB ERC20 tokens are being removed from the bridge wallet for almost 4 months. The removal of the tokens is being done using native AMB that was never backed with the ERC20. Initially 12 million were gone from the bridge wallet, afterwards 4 million disappeared but came back and in the last 2-3 months the ERC20 AMB is being removed from the bridge wallet by massive onboarding and retirement of Apollo nodes (that to my knowledge their stake was never backed with ERC20). As a node holder this situation is not positive at all since there was no announcement for the massive removal of the tokens the bridge wallet (that were deposited in there by node holders) and there is no official announcement of what is going to happen with those token."

And another:

"Dr. Meyer, thanks for taking the time to communicate with the community.

  1. There are roughly 12 million "missing" bridge tokens as pointed out by community members following wallet addresses. Where are these tokens?
  2. This is probably the most burning question for the community, as everyone wants reassurance that there is/will be network usage and bundles. It was said in the past that Ambrosus had something like 50 clients and 150+ PoC's. How many clients actually are there? How many of those PoC's have continued with Ambrosus as a solution? Can we expect bundles from those clients anytime soon?
  3. There was a bit of a marketing faux pas in Nov/Dec. Will we soon hear about the 80B MNC? If not, why? There was also a second company announced, and tweets deleted, but that hermes is still producing "transactions" on mainnet. Will we soon hear about them as well?
  4. There was supposed to be a 2nd documentary about coffee from India. Is Ambrosus still active in India, and with coffee in general, being that it is part of the Swiss Coffee Alliance?
  5. Is Ambrosus still active in INATBA, and has it produced anything fruitful for the company?
  6. Sensors. Are any being mass produced for enterprise use? Are any, like the L1 or other smart sensors, currently in use by any companies? And can/will we get more information on those use cases?"

One person replied:

"In the last ama they picked my comment and it was filled with questions. They answered only the most convenient to them. They will just pick the easiest one and go with that. 40 amb they will not talk about the missing tokens"

The AMA answers did talk about it (25-2-2020).

And another:

"If you wan't to know anything about this company just look at the Glassdoor reviews. If they con their own staff out of wages they are not going to give you an honest answer about the missing tokens. This project is no longer remotely credible."

Which another one rebuked:

"lmao dude, some of us wrote those reviews as FUD. Smarten up. This was just released today. Not the first time Ambrosus was mentioned in articles like this. I'd say theres plenty of credibility."

  • Ambrosus itself answered (25-2-2020) question 1 with:

"With the commencement of mass onboarding of the masternodes on our Main-Net there has arisen a necessity of seamless interchange of tokens between ERC20 AMB tokens and native tokens. For the time-being the conversion of ERC20 tokens into native Amber is being facilitated by the tech team, and, obviously, from time to time technical transactions from the bridge wallet are being conducted within the framework of scheduled testing and security operations. Our purpose is to complete the switch from ERC20 to native AMB by the end of Q1. The transactions that took place were thus in the preparations for the upcoming token swap and should not be assumed to be missing. The switch from ERC20 to native AMB will allow all interested parties to utilize the full capacity of the network and extend the scope of operations to be performed on AMB-NET. Please await the release of Roadmap 2020 to learn more about the progress and stages of token swap. It will be released soon."

Question 2 with:

"As of today, all the PoCs announced previously are ongoing and bundles are generated on AMB-Net on a day-to-day basis. We still have ongoing relationships with many of our business contacts and partners and most of our clients were now transferred to the ecosystem: close follow-up is performed."

Question 3 with:

"The client in question is a large corporation that is indeed in the size mentioned. However, due to the legal and bureaucratic hurdles the possibility and time-frame of making a public announcement is currently under review. It is simply taking them additional time to get green-light for announcement, which will hopefully be arranged soon."

Question 4 with:

"We are working on a number of scenarios for a new exciting use case for AMB-NET to be showcased in a documentary. However, we are not sure where the idea about filming it in India has originated from. The updates are coming soon!"

Question 5 with:

"Ambrosus takes special pride in having become the founding member and Co-Director in the Supply Chain Working Group of INATBA."

Question 6:

"Use cases for the platform ranges from cold-chain logistics, to clean energy quantification, to quality assurance of food products, with additional use-cases expected soon. L1 sensor is now being upgraded to assure compatibility with a wider range of communication protocols and enhanced data transfer security. Soon we are planning to announce a new and better security and scalability of sensors and new hardware/casing amendments, thus solving the existing design challenges. In particular, the additions to the current functionality scope will enable utilizing low-energy consuming standards such as LTE, extend the battery life, switch between the device casings, and transmit metadata to BLE and AMB-NET gateways seamlessly. A specific update on these hardware solutions will be coming soon."

Low Company Funds

  • Another person asked (2-2020) about the companies funds:

"Does the company still have funds to continue operations beyond 2020? My understanding is that the development fund is running low (please correct me if this is wrong)."

Another:

"Please provide a clear answer on funding issues. The last AMA response didn't know what the team would do. She said it was true that she would run out of money by mid-2020"

Announcements not coming true

  • About (2-2020) big announcements:

"There was a teaser "collaboration" proposed with an "80b+ revenue MNC" for Power November, which is yet to be announced. Is this still going to be divulged to the community? If not, why was it announced if it was not yet finalised?"

And someone else:

"In the previous AMA, there were a number of things said that have not yet come to fruition (a number of partnerships announced before end of year, detailed blog about smart cities, etc.). We've also had blog posts promise x and not get delivered. We get excited about these things and then get despondant when they don't materialize. Could you explain why it's so difficult to deliver on these things? Is it time constraints, under staffed, outside influences, etc?"

Another:

"From the september '19 blog a marketing and communication plan is stated to be 'in the works'. I don't believe we have yet seen this plan. Is it to be published soon?"

  • The team answered (25-2-2020) in their AMA with:

"Due to the massive demand on masternodes onboarding, and especially the incoming requests on increasing the seniority of the nodes in Q4 of 2019 the technical team had to throw-in extra resource to make sure that all the requests had been accommodated on time and each interested community node operator could receive extensive support, often outside business hours. Predictably, this resulted into a short-term divulgence with the announced roadmap development time-frame, not exceeding 90 days though. Check our Github - the devs are patiently working event over the weekends to deliver fresh updates!"

About early masternode access:

  • Someone else mentioned in the same AMA 'getting the short end of the stick' for being a hodler for a long time:

"Will there be any benefits for long term wave 0 holders who waited in line and held through the bear market diligently and helped go through all the teething problems? We definitely got the short end of the stick once the floodgates opened all of a sudden for node applications."

Further explained:

"in like 2018 when they announced the economic model, they had a vague seniority system where the people who had held tokens the longest had priority for getting a limited number of masternodes. They asked for an ETH address to prove how long you've held for. They also made it clear that if you transferred tokens out then in again then your seniority would be lost. This encouraged holding and not selling. The price absolutely TANKED over the course of the next 6 months as people waited for news about onboarding of masternodes. Eventually what happened is that they completely scrapped the seniority policy and just opened the doors completely to let anyone have a masternode, so the holders got fucked over big time. They betrayed the people who supported them the most."

Failing Usage

About actual usage (2-2020):

"In the previous AMA we were assured – several times – that companies are indeed already using AMB-net. Not only that, it clearly stated that the mainnet is already leveraged by corporates. As is evident, this is not reflected in bundle generation. Just a few days ago we were also informed that no sidechains are operational at the moment. So the pressing questions are:

  1. Exactly how – and in what capacity – are the companies currently «live», leveraging AMB-net?
  2. Seeing as current activity doesn't: How do we know future client usage will benefit node operators?
  3. If sidechains are eventually going to see all the action, how will you make sure that current Atlas nodes won't become obsolete, and are appropriately rewarded for maintaining network integrity?"

Someone even going as far to claiming:

"How late is it compared to the original plan? Previous admin said he expects to have one million bundles by the end of 2018. But actually 0."

Spin-off Startups not being loyal

  • From the same AMA (2-2020)

"How does Ambrosus ensures that all the spin-off startups will use AMB-Net and stay loyal to our long term vision? What is stopping them from going to the easier path (not using AMB-Net, like OriginFood ) ? We know that some of these startups took ideas (such as chipless), clients, and other resources from Ambrosus, it is pretty self-explanatory how bad this is for Ambrosus if these startups end up not using AMB-Net.

In the previous AMA, you explained the benefits of a decentralized business model; what are your thoughts about this negative side of that model (Ambrosus gives patents and clients to startups that end up not using AMB-Net) and what is Ambrosus doing to prevent it?"

Meet-ups not happening anymore

  • From the same AMA (2-2020):

"Opportunities for meetups have dropped dramatically. Why is that? Some believe that it has already been recognized by many companies. However, it is not well known, and it even looks as if the project has failed."

  • The team answered (25-2-2020) in their AMA with:

"During the handover period to the new technical team and transitioning to AMB-Net the Team was concentrated on the internal strategy and delivering the state-of-art, robust network! Now it’s time to present our most recent achievements to the wider public! Our first spring meet-up will be held in Berlin soon and then will be followed by a string of community meet-ups, corporate meetings and AMA sessions in the major European capitals and tech hubs. Ambrosus team-members are frequently invited to speak at the expert panels on blockchain and IoT across the world, so there will be a plenty of opportunities to meet our team-members and hear the news on our progress! Stay tuned!"

Team, investors, partners

Team

  • Full team can be viewed here. However, according to many blog posts and reddit users questions, it seems like it needs updating. Their recent AMA answers (25-2-2020) says there are 25 members.
  • Stefan Meyer; CEO
  • Vlad Trifa; CPO "is transitioning (31-5-2020) from the role of CPO of Ambrosus to being the Founder of an independent enterprise-grade solution on top of the open-source code of Ambrosus Network (AMB-NET)."
  • Igor Stadnyk; CTO (from 31-5-2020) guides InnoLab
  • Angel Versetti; ex-CEO and co-founder, "is leading (9-2019) the shift of our projects by pioneering ChipLess - a wireless, real-time tag and biosensor that is uniquely cost effective and silicon-free"

Advisors

"Support & Recognition"

Parity, Bitcoin Suisse AG, ValidityLabs, Vaud+, Hello Tomorrow

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