Meet Madana, Lisk’s First Sidechain ICO

Lisk has risen to top cryptocurrency status for many reasons, but primarily because of the sidechains it’s going to enable. Sidechains take the transaction pressure off the mainchain by only transmitting essential transaction data to the core chain. Take the analogy of Lisk core chain as districts, its sidechains as the streets in the districts, and the (d)applications as the shops in those streets.

The Lisk community has long been anticipating the arrival of Lisk’s sidechains, which are expected early 2019, and we now have the first official sidechain ICO in the form of Madana.

What is Madana?

Madana stands for MArket for DAta ANAlysis. It is essentially a decentralized marketplace for data analysis that allows network members to participate in data markets while preserving their privacy.

Data is rapidly becoming one of our most valuable assets, but this value isn’t ending up benefiting those producing it. Through Madana, data producers – which is anyone using the digital applications – can monetize their data. This is the opposite of the current situation, in which data producers hand over their generated data to third parties.

In addition to enabling users to monetize their data, Madana also provides a function where they can hand their data over to data analysts for a reward, who in turn design models and algorithms to extract informational value from the data while unable to control it or access data sets’ details. Once data has been analyzed, it can be sold to parties requiring data insights.

The platform thus connects data producers, data analysts, and data consumers – plus, it protects the data from third parties and cyber criminals through the use of blockchain technology.

Currently, Madana’s technology is in the patent-pending process, which gives the platform an edge over their scarce competition. The patent concerns the process of data handling employed by Madana, thus letting people use and analyze data without a single party controlling this data.

The Madana project has a strong, sizeable team (especially for a pre-ICO project) and has the scope to not only be an application for the Lisk ecosystem, but also for companies other than Lisk and even outside of the blockchain industry. Moreover, since Madana is a sidechain, it will allow for all kinds of data-relevant applications to be built on top of their protocol.

Madana will be Lisk’s first sidechain ICO, and along with their ICO there will be a native token. The Privacy Analysis Exchange (PAX) token will fuel the Madana data ecosystem.

The public presale will start on September 1 and close on October 31. During this presale, PAX tokens will be sold for $0.50 and investors will receive 10% bonus tokens if they also invest in Lisk. The main sale will then take place at the beginning of 2019, depending on the progress of Lisk, and during this sale, PAX tokens will be $1.

Why Lisk?

The CEO of Madana, Christian Junger, is a long-time friend of Lisk co-founder Max Kordek. Kordek announced that the first investment of Lisk’s Pioneer Vault, 1.7 LSK belonging to Kordek personally which he has pledged to put towards Lisk sidechain projects, will be made in Madana.

Reasons he gave for this decision is the enormous value he expects Madana to contribute to the Lisk ecosystem, their patent-pending data-handling technology, the high quality of the team, their focus on regulatory compliance, and — on a minor note — his personal connections to the project.

The friendship between the Madana and Lisk founders has been a reason for the two to be closely cooperating and paying attention to each other’s projects, but it’s far from the only reason for Madana to choose Lisk. The team was looking into Ethereum, but concluded that the blockchain would not be capable of managing the workload expected to operate Madana.

As stated by the Madana team:

We researched various other Blockchain application platforms taking into account project funding, team, scalability, flexibility and usability and came to the conclusion that Lisk is the most promising choice as it showed two years of continuous development and very strong development funding.

A Growing Ecosystem

Even though Lisk’s sidechains are still in development, the project’s ambitious technology has already managed to attract various projects. Madana, however, is the first sidechain ICO, and the first round of sales is already happening next month.

The Madana project displays professionalism and is positioning itself in an industry that shows no sign of declining growth. It could be a sidechain that puts Lisk on the map once more, this time not as a promise but as a working product.

Related: Top 10 ICOs to Watch in Q3 2018