Agoric

Basics

• Founded in 2018.
• Testnet release: 4-2021
• Mainnet release: scheduling for the summer (9-4-2021).
• Based in:
• From Crypto Briefing (7-6-2020): "Agoric is backed by highly-experienced engineers who helped work on some of the very first smart contracts long before blockchain technology existed."
• From an Interchain (who has funded Agoric) blog (21-2-2020):

"The Agoric team has been at the forefront of secure models of computation in distributed systems for decades. Their chief scientist, Mark Miller, was an early pioneer in object-capabilities and smart contracts. Their CEO, Dean Tribble, has a distinguished history building financial infrastructure and secure operating systems, including as a Principal Architect at Microsoft. Their engineering lead, Brian Warner, has created many popular open source projects, including BuildBot, magic-wormhole, and Tahoe-LAFS, and was one of the original auditors for the Ethereum mainnet release. Through their work over the last decade in the Javascript standards committee, Mark, and later Dean, have played instrumental roles in championing features necessary to secure Javascript.

More recently, the team came together as the Agoric Systems Operating Company, with a mission to empower individuals to securely execute transactions, establish new markets, and craft novel patterns of exchange — without centralized control. They are currently building the Agoric platform, a secure, distributed, object-capability based Javascript smart-contract runtime designed to securely interoperate across a diversity of hosts, from mobile phones to blockchains. At the heart of their design are progressively more restrictive subsets of Javascript, including SecureEcmascript, a maximal secure subset supporting object-capabilities, and Jessie, a more narrow subset of Javascript designed for writing secure smart-contracts.

Naturally, the Agoric and Cosmos visions have a substantial amount in common, including the focus on object-capability based security and on interoperability between heterogeneous and self-sovereign hosts. When deciding which blockchain infrastructure to build their application platform upon, the Agoric team chose Cosmos. The current version of their platform is built using the Cosmos-SDK, where they have integrated their smart-contracting environment as a module. While they plan to generalize their platform across blockchains and other devices, they are currently targeting a launch with the Cosmos technology stack.

Beyond the investment, the ICF has funded Agoric with service contracts to help design and implement the IBC protocol to be sufficiently general to satisfy both Cosmos and Agoric use-cases. The design of IBC has benefited tremendously from their expertise and decades of experience with similar protocols, and is culminating in a protocol that we can together build the Internet of Blockchains on top of, much like the Internet itself was built on top of TCP."

Token

Token Details

• From an Interchain (who has funded Agoric) blog (21-2-2020):

"Token economics are still being worked out"

 Tech

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: Cosmos
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

Upgrades

• From Crypto Briefing (7-6-2020):

"The project’s current iteration, called Zoe, offers yet another degree of safety. This framework helps users and developers ensure that they are receiving the goods or services they paid for when interacting with a smart contract. It is like a waiting room for blockchain transactions. Users send their “offer” for a specified transaction to this waiting room. Only once the conditions of this transaction are met, do the funds get released." 

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Team, investors, partners

Team

• Dean Tribble; CEO and founder
• Mark Miller; chief scientist and founder
• Brian Warner, Bill Tulloh are also founders
• Jessy Irwin; has been in the Cosmos ecosystem since 2018 while working at All In Bits.

Investors

• From an Interchain (who has funded Agoric) blog (21-2-2020):

"Agoric was founded in 2018, with initial funding from the Electric Coin Company, Polychain, and Naval Ravikant. In 2019, Agoric raised a larger round from a number of major investors, with participation from the ICF. The funds are being used to develop the Agoric platform and to launch it as a public blockchain network."