HBAR or Hashgraph Blockchain Advisor Review is an independant investment ratings agency for ICOs. The idea behind their ratings are that there needs to be more accountability in how coins are rated review, since most of them are paid for by the ICO leading reviewers to give higher ratings and more positive comments since they use that money.
The idea behind HBAR is that it wants to be a free and independant of community based ratings review for ICOs. For this, the company plans on using their own cryptocurrency called HBR as payment method for their services. The currency will follow the ERC20 protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_token-generation_event) native to Ethereum (ETH), with 1 billion tokens total in supply, with 40% available during the presale, 40% available post initial offering, 15% for development incentives and 5% retained by founders(which is actually quite high).
Their goal is to distribute enough tokens the system that it will allow them to be free of any external influence while still being dependent on the community for validation, which looks like a bit of an oxymoron since it is difficult to get validation from someone who has no stake in the system.
Speed- Since it claims that transactions on its network are near instantaneous there needs to be evidence supporting the claim. If the company cannot demonstrate this speed then they have nothing special due to their very similar competitive blockchain counterparts. For example, if Ethereum shows 20 Tps (Transactions per second) and Hedera hashgraph shows 5 Tps then it would mean that they are slower than Ethereum, which would render their system useless as it implies that Hedera hashgraph is not up to date with the latest technology available.
Incentivization- The company needs to have a very strong incentive for those who validate transactions on its network. Right now those involved in the process of validating transactions gets rewarded for this with a complementary cryptocurrency to the main currency being used by the platform. But if there are no incentives to validate then there will be a processing bottleneck, meaning slower transaction speeds and higher costs associated with them. This means that these other currencies need to ensure enough security to prevent hacking from happening while keeping processing times low enough so they can still compete with other networks out there. In addition, HBR will need to maintain a low enough price so that the incentives are not completely drained.
Network size- A blockchain is only as strong as its network size in terms of security and speed. Since HBR promises fast transactions speeds in near instant, this means that it needs to have a large number of nodes which will guarantee security against hacking attempts. If there is not enough incentive for people to run their own node then the system becomes vulnerable to attacks since everyone runs on centralised servers with no one securing it at all times . This situation puts the company at risk of getting taken down by competitors or hackers (state actors) if they wanted to use their resources for illegal gains via taking down the entire system or censoring certain users. Without decentralisation there is no blockchain and with a centralised ledger, the company will never be able to reach its stated goals of security, speed and cost effectiveness.
Operating systems- Interestingly enough HBR's actual platform for its services does not run on Windows as they claim in their whitepaper as it makes use of Linux as an operating system. This means that most people who need to participate onto the network would rather not since they will have to go through the trouble of getting a new OS if they want to participate and support this network (especially if they were already invested into another blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum). Therefore, investors looking into investing might think twice about supporting this platform since this will make it difficult for the average user on the street to use their tokens without having some knowledge of Linux.
