Insolar is a project focused on developing distributed business networks which will use new innovations in blockchain technology to make them secure and interoperable. Insolar aims to develop much more than a standard protocol layer for other’s to build on. The project’s platform is powered by blockchain as a service (BaaS) architecture. By putting enterprises on a trusted, scalable and transparent network, Insolar makes it possible for business to cut down on costs and risks and discover new revenue streams.
Insolar, which initially started out under the name of INS Ecosystem managed to raise over $40 000 000 during the duration of the crowdsale.
Domains are the first part of the Insolar ecosystem, they manage and adjust Insolar capabilities to different applications by establishing work rules, policies, standards, generic processes and data formats. Insolar only registers domains. Management procedures are defined by each domain individually.
Contracts are the second essential part of Insolar’s infrastructure. Insolar is a unified platform designed on the everything-is-a-contract principle. Contracts are composed of a compact, stand-alone application in the form of a smart contract, a contract aggregator, an oracle providing access to an external system and others. Contracts guarantee full compliance with the rules established by domains.
The third part are the Clouds. Insolar’s cloud is a set of nodes represented by computing power and storage providers. Clouds ensure storage and the execution of contracts in domains bound to the cloud. A standard cloud implementation is based on blockchain technology.
Being developed as a one-stop solution, the Insolar platform has applications among many industries. When applied to the agriculture industry, it provides efficient supply chains, real-time product quality monitoring tool and streamlining aggregation of customer data, efficient advertising tools, diversified consumer incentives when applied to the Retail industry, among many other use cases.
The project initially started out as INS ecosystem a decentralized platform focused only the grocery manufacturing and consumer sector before rebranding. While expanding areas of operation is not a bad thing, it clearly shows that the INS team may have had second doubts about their project and opted for rebranding. In my opinion, projects that are focused on a certain industry are always better than jack-of-all-trades, one-stop solutions, as the blockchain industry in particular has quite a lot of those.
The Insolar project isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it doesn’t have much going for it either. There are no working products or a platform to find on their website, so INS continues to be a whitepaper-only project and there isn’t much more to be said about it.
