Blockstack PBC announced on Jan. 29 the completion of its “Milestone II” that unlocked $6.eight million from its 2017 preliminary coin providing.
Blockstack PBC announced on Jan. 29 the completion of its “Milestone II” that unlocked $6.eight million from its 2017 preliminary coin providing. The undertaking claims to have on-boarded a million verified customers, an achievement that some in the neighborhood didn’t imagine. Cointelegraph performed an evaluation of blockchain knowledge to see if this declare could possibly be confirmed.
The significance of the milestone
The Blockstack preliminary coin providing (ICO) was conducted in November 2017 by way of the CoinList platform. It was notable for being “SEC-qualified,” that means that it had stronger reporting obligations to the regulators and implied that it was not in danger from getting prosecuted by the Securities and Alternate Fee. It was provided to each accredited and retail buyers.
The providing was additionally structured in result-based milestones that might unlock parts of the collected funds. There have been two of those milestones, with the primary one requiring the profitable launch of the community’s mainnet by January 2019. To unlock the second milestone, the undertaking needed to attain a million verified customers, a outcome that might be checked by an ostensibly unbiased advisory board.
Notably, Blockstack pledged to return to the buyers 80% of the funds locked by every milestone if it did not ship.
Blockstack’s core worth proposition is to supply a verifiable id secured by blockchain, which could be utilized by accredited entities. That is getting used to create an ecosystem of apps which can be authenticated with Blockstack ID.
It stands to purpose that given this method, the presence of 1 million verified customers could possibly be conceivably verified by analyzing Blockstack’s blockchain knowledge. The definition utilized by the advisory board consists of all attainable manners of verification, together with by way of social media accounts or government-issued ID. These needs to be seen on the platform’s API.
How a verified account seems to be on the platform — word the Twitter icon. Supply: Blockstack Explorer
Methodology used
Whereas Blockstack makes use of Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN operation to retailer knowledge on the blockchain, it’s not instantly readable. Blockstack supplies its personal Bitcoin explorer that features detailed data on all of the usernames saved on the blockchain.
We used penetration testing instruments to crawl by way of your entire historical past of Bitcoin blocks till Could 25, 2018 — the date of the primary operation recorded on Blockstack’s pockets used for assigning names. We filtered by way of solely the blocks that the API reported as having “identify operations,” which netted an inventory of 17,000 blocks.
This checklist was fed into one other crawler that extracted 1.5 Gigabytes value of block knowledge, which crucially included particulars on all identify operations.
We filtered this checklist to solely embrace usernames, with none further knowledge corresponding to time of creation.
The blockchain recorded a complete of 1,997,949 names, although this determine additionally consists of duplicates from prime degree domains (about 15,000).
Searching for to totally affirm whether or not the customers are verified, we got down to concern API requests for every person discovered by way of this technique. Nonetheless, the sheer time required to make 1.9 million requests, along with eventual server restrictions, meant that we needed to restrict ourselves to a pattern of simply 50,000 customers.
Curious findings
Whereas the analysis seems to at the least affirm the person rely reported on Blockstack’s explorer homepage, a deeper look exhibits some peculiar traits to the usernames.
Particularly, many usernames have both an “fc-” or “bc-” prefix on them.
A peek into among the usernames on Blockstack. The checklist is ordered chronologically, not alphabetically.
Actually, there are 1,316,894 “fc-” names and 325,356 names with “bc-” in them. Looking for these names within the block explorer yields a “no outcomes” web page — which is distinctly completely different than querying for a person that really doesn’t exist.
Given these findings, it seems that solely about 400,000 of Blockstack customers are literally verifiable indirectly by way of the platform. The API does return legitimate knowledge for each “fc-” and “bc-” names, however after greater than 2,000 probe requests the software program didn’t present verification particulars for a single certainly one of these customers — which led us to interrupt the search.
Out of the 50,885 customers we sampled from the remaining 400,000, just one,565 had any point out of a verification. This can be a fee of roughly 3% verified customers.
In a July 2019 filing with the SEC, Blockstack revealed its personal figures:
“Of these 115,780 accounts, roughly 16,100 accounts had offered a “social proof” as proof of getting a human person, corresponding to a GitHub hyperlink or Twitter message hyperlink.”
The determine of verified accounts quantities to 14% of Blockstack customers. This may nonetheless be effectively wanting the mandatory 50% dictated by its complete person rely.
Are the bizarre names the reply?
Blockstack used a number of initiatives to onboard customers towards the tip of 2019. Considered one of these is the Blockchain.com airdrop,…