Today on Emerging Coins This Week we discuss Factom, an immutable data storage on blockchain system.
Factom’s aim is to create, design and build products to make the world more transparent and honest. It is a blockchain-as-a-service organization that runs the open-source Factom network. Its purpose is to provide immutable data storage secured on the blockchain, making it more secure than current methods. A Factom-based application gives a single version of the truth through a Decentralized Network of Authority. They also offer a solution for tracking physical items on the blockchain with their dloc technology, which uses Near Field Communication technology embedded in a sticker to secure and track important documents and records.
Factom was launched in 2014, and is headquartered in Austin, Texas with 26 employees. Rather than launch with an ICO, the company secured a $4.2 million Series A round of investment in 2015, led by billionaire Tim Draper, who believes Factom could be greater than Oracle, Palantir and IBM combined. Also that year, the team was awarded a $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. High-profile partnerships continued to roll in, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security affording them a grant to advance the security of digital identity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Although they provide blockchain-as-a-service at an enterprise level, Factom is blockchain agnostic. Their systems can run on top of various blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Factom’s FCT token (currently trading at $10.76) doesn’t rely on mining, making its consensus algorithm much faster and cheaper to use than Bitcoin (BTC). This is key to storing large amounts of data at a price that can scale to the largest use cases. One of the biggest issues with Bitcoin is that it can be expensive and slow when scaled, making it a poor choice for large businesses. Factom doesn’t have these problems due to the way it reaches network consensus.
The token crowdsale launched in March of 2015, ultimately raising $1.1 million. It went live a few months later at an initial price of $0.21. While it’s current value of just over ten dollars is a far cry from its all time high of $78 in early 2018, it has made a lot of progress since its launch date. Factom currently has a market cap of $94,135,776 USD and a circulating supply of 8,745,102 FCT. As data security becomes more critical in our increasingly digital lives, there’s no telling how far this company will go.
