Scam or legit? ioeX

	Decentralized Peer-to-Peer network blockchain ecosystem that allows manufacturers to save money on IoT device upgrades. In turn, users/owners of these IoT devices have the option of participating in the support of the entire P2P network and get ioeX coins as a reward. Users can even mine Bitcoins and ! simultaneously. Strong team, good idea, nothing questionable found.

Our verdict: Not a scam, Approved!

# Overview
## Concept
Decentralized Peer-to-Peer network blockchain ecosystem

Architecture based on distributed networks — combining the Internet, IoT, and blockchain solutions.

## Actual Product
At this stage, they are offering the infrastructure itself and a platform for updating IoT devices based on this infrastructure.
# Site
Standard for these types of projects one-pager site without accepting any data input - thus cutting down on security issues.

# Social Media

Telegram_en: 5521 members
Telegram_cn: 6462 members
Facebook: 10166 likes
Twitter: 7539 followers, 44 tweets
Medium: 15 posts

Social activity and follower numbers are actually very impressive for such a young project (1 1/5 month old).

# Team
The project's founder, Aryan Hung, gathered around himself an experienced group of experts. The core of the team worked at Foxconn at some point. No team member seems out of place - their collective experience 8-15 years.

Note that the more experienced team members worked at Kortide, which morphed into Elastos Foundation — one of the main strategic partners of this project. All in all, looks like the team's professional capabilities are enough to deliver on their promises.

# Consultants
Almost all of the project's consultants are from their strategic partners and vendors. The exception is Colin Cheng — Founder of FintechCPA, which is a rather well-known organization in Japan. The most noteworthy consultants here are Rong Chen, the founder of Elastos Foundation, and Simon Szeto, Director of SBI E2-Capital HK.

We see no reason to doubt the competency of these consultants.

Interesting that ioeX is financed by an investment from SBI E2-Capital. And it's also one of the first projects financed by an investment from EOS VC.

On the downside, their website doesn't list team members' or consultants' social profiles (even though all of them have social media profiles).

Another annoying thing is that not all of the team member names on the English version of the site are quite the same as their names on LinkedIn — this is common for Asian projects, but should still be corrected.

# Whitepaper

## Project Summary
Number of IoT devices is growing rapidly. Upgrades via OTA servers are too costly for manufacturers (both server and traffic cost).

ioeX offers a "Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Network" solution. Such a network allows to maintain and relay content with minimal expenses.

For starters, they're offering a solution for online updates. Eventually, will add new features.

## 1. Motivation and outlook
Of course, the IoT device market is growing in terms of both the number and variety of devices sold.

Each such device needs periodic updates (for adding new functions, fixing errors, maintaining a high level of defense from hackers, etc.). Both the software and the firmware needs updating.

When an update comes out, all the devices start updating automatically. This overloads the servers much like a DDoS attack would. There have been plenty of cases of servers shutting down because of big updates. Which adds repair costs. Adding multiple servers to handle the update volume also raises costs.

Beyond server maintenance costs, traffic costs are also significant, as noted in an example provided by ioeX:

With 5 million active devices and a 50Mb update, using network traffic cost of US$0.1/GB (Amazon Web Services), this one update costs around US$25,000. Frequent and bigger updates are thus very costly for a manufacturer.

Even beyond updates, all IoT devices have to store and relay a lot of information to the network.

When a user wants to contact an IoT device via the Internet, there are often direct access issues (multi-level routing, firewalls, NAT). Which forces manufacturers to launch and service relay launchers. Again, this is an additional cost.

All of the above problems is what ioeX is offering to solve.

## 2. The ioeX solution
ioeX is offering their Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Network to fix the above problems. (referred to as "Carrier" in this section).

The network itself is built on Elastos (which merits a whole other review).

What's this Carrier? It's this perfected Peer-to-Peer network. It uses nodes s peers. And communication is Friend-to-Friend.

The network can contain two types of nodes:
- Bootstrap Node (Connects all peer nodes to form a network and assist peer nodes to relay data)
- Peer Node (Saves and transports files for self and keeps files for remote delivery for other nodes)

Initially, the network will not have trusted (Friend-to-Friend) relationships between nodes. Which allows them to avoid hacker attacks via direct network address.

Since Carrier is a communication framework and does not have any application features or attributes - it doesn't store any information about users (like what and where is sent by a node). Instead, the node itself stores all the info.

Nodes can freely exchange information only if they implemented a trusted relationship.

App developers can flexibly control all aspects of the Carrier.

Any data passed through the network can be encrypted. It can be translated using UDP packet-like mode (active by default) or TCP-like streaming mode - depending on an app's need.

To transfer large files, developers must provide support to the Socket through own application (if they want interrupted downloads to be supported).

All user APIs are asynchronous — which allows to initiate many operations without blocking or waiting for any operations to complete. The process can retrieve the result of an operation later or when it receives a notification of its completion.

If a node cannot connect directly to another node, it's assisted by the Bootstrap Node, which acts as a Relay node. Carrier will choose the optimal route to transfer a file between nodes, including relay nodes (Bootstrap Nodes). Regular nodes don't store locally a list of all the Bootstrap nodes, just the nearest.

UID acts as an indentifier in this network. The white paper indicates that if User B gets the same UID as User A, he will not be able to receive access to all the data of User A. To do that, B would have to establish a trusted relationship with A.

The Carrier ID generated it first appears in the network is a public key corresponding to a key on the ECC Curve. All connections and transfer of data is encoded end-to-end between the nodes on each side.

Carrier does not support offline messaging.

Using the functions of Elastos, the team hopes to develop cross-network application.

ioeX will contain a number of large-scale self-operated seed bootstrap nodes and seed peer nodes to provide peer-to-peer networking functions.

IoT device upgrades will take place as follows:

1)  ioeX receives the update file from the manufacturer
2)  ioeX sends this file to seed peer nodes
3)  All Friend relationship nodes get updated by seed peer nodes
4)  Every update file will have its own address in the network.
5)  The manufacturer initiates the process of updating its devices.
6)  Randomly selected devices download the updates from a random address (until all devices that need the update are updated).
7)  The device is updated.

This uses IPFS and so the update file is stored - in pieces and encrypted - on multiple seed peer nodes, which is safe.

## 3. How ioeX creates a Peer-to-Peer Networking ecosystem chain

**Market Entry Method**

- Equipment manufacturers can build-in support for P2P software during production.
- Solution providers can provide manufacturers with solutions that embed P2P network capabilities
- Chipset manufacturers can provide software and hardware integrated production solutions that come with P2P network capabilities
- Collaborate with software companies from other authorized chipset manufacturers to license software with P2P network functions

The target audience are the manufacturers of IoT devices. The White Paper indicates that ioeX is in negotiations with the leading manufacturers of various hardware (including Realtek and Mediatek). Later, they plan to work with Cisco, Fujitsu and Huawei.

The team hopes that large e-commerce systems will want to integrate P2P networks incentivized by crypto. Which will add more Bootstrap Nodes to the system.

And distributing apps to cell phones will allow any phone to become a Peer node — adding more Peer Nodes to the system.

## 4. ioeX token
The platform will use blockchain technology. In this blockchain, they will record, for example, the amount and time of bandwidth. Node reward size will be based on this data.

Token uses:

- Pay with ioeX to get the network service
- Reward miners of blockchain ledger
- Reward bootstrap nodes to share the bandwidth
- Reward peer nodes to share the storage capacity
- ioeX eco-system can interact with Elastos / ELA
- As a new payment tool in many industries

Nodes will get ioeX tokens for providing network traffic and storage. This encourages device manufacturers to join the ecosystem (and incentivizes consumers to buy those devices because such devices can earn crypto)

Through strategic cooperation with Elastos to share Bitcoin computing, the Bitcoin miner can generate additional rewards by simultaneously mining ioeX without extra costs in the mining process.

To support the mining credit line, ioeX issue will increase by 3% every year. To keep the price of ioeX steady, the company will use 25% of its profits to periodically repurchase ioeX tokens.

**"GAS" token issued on ioeX**

To protect users from falling prices of ioeX and to pay for services within the platform, they will use GAS.

GAS is fixed at US$1.

The sources of GAS tokens are:

- Exchange from user's ioeX wallet with ioeX coin.
- Others may transfer GAS from their ioeX wallet to user's wallet.
- Exchange ELA (Elastos coin) for GAS from the ioeX wallet.
- Become a bootstrap node or peer node of a P2P network and obtain the award quota by providing P2P network services.

Reward amount will be announced after the ICO.

Using GAS, users can pay for:

- Private cloud drive storage
- P2P instant online communication tools
- Remote screen control
- Smart home device control
- etc...

**Token Economy**

ioeX token holders can exchange them into GAS.

ioeX token allocation:

- 55% private sale and crowdfunding
- 17% are used by the ioeX Foundation for the future development of ioeX coins
- 10% will be held by team members in sealed state for 30 months and gradually released every six months.
- 5% will be held by angel investors in sealed state for 30 months and gradually released every six months
- 5% will be held by strategic investors to be sold to chipset vendors and solution providers and other strategic partners
- 3% will be held by consultants
- 3% will be initial mining reward
- 2% will be used for promotional incentives as marketing expenses for project promotions.

Funding use post-ICO:

- 40% Future P2P network development
- 30% Marketing, exchange listing
- 15% Alliance building in strategic manufacturers investments
- 15% Reserve fund for future development use

## 5. ioeX Roadmap
**2018 Jul**
- Release of basic service SW of ioeX P2P network
- Messages and files can be sent by single-peer-to-single-peer and
- single-peer-to-multi-peer.

**2018 Aug**
- Import ioeX P2P network function into IoT box and its remote Zigbee
control APP.

**2018 Sep**
- Import ioeX P2P network function into AI Smart Speaker and its
remote control APP.

**2018 Oct**
- Android/iOS/Linux/Windows version of ioeX P2P network function are
ready.
- Form the personal VPN through ioeX P2P network, creating a private
and secure connection.

**2018 Nov**
- P2P network function incorporates blockchain ledger function to
enable ioeX cryptocurrency reward mechanism.
- Cryptocurrency wallet of ioeX, Alpha version.

**2018 Dec**
- Cryptocurrency wallet of ioeX, Beta version.
- Beta version of OTA upgrade through ioeX P2P network function; more
than 200,000 peer nodes and over 500 bootstrap nodes distributed
throughout Asia, Europe, Americas, and Australia.
ioeX P2P network will begin the project to incorporate IPFS function.

**2019 Jan**
- OTA upgrade through ioeX P2P network function officially released 1st
version.
- All devices can be rewarded.

At the start of 2019, they will plan additional milestones.

# Whitepaper conclusion
Everything is logical and to the point. No big questions for the project. Plenty of illustrations for easy practical understanding how everything will work.

On the downside, there's a lot of repetition in the text — same things explained over and over. Makes the White Paper a bit long and confusing. Some points are hard to fully comprehend. The Taiwan and Chinese versions leave the last two pages completely empty — strange and not professional.

# Questions for the project
Q: "For sealing terms please refer to Appendix 1" Where is this Appendix? Didn't find it in the White Paper.

A:

Q: Will the new updates work a la uTorrent? If not, why? It would speed up upgrading all of the devices without overloading the network.

A:

# Conclusion
Strong team. Their significant experience will play a role, and the project will be useful. The idea itself is quite real. All aspects of making it work are described well in the White Paper (even though confusing at times).

No big problems or questions for the project. Although such a team and infrastructure could do a lot more than mere "IoT updates." So waiting for new ideas and their implementation in 2019.

# Verdict
Not a scam, Approved!

_**Disclaimer:** The above audit is not in any way financial advice or a solicitation to buy - it's merely our collective opinion that we are kind enough to share with you. Don't make us regret that._

**The report is prepared in partnership with** https://t.me/ico_reports

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