By Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures
1. Introduction
Recently, 4 EVERLAND, a Web3 comprehensive cloud service provider that has been established and operated for more than 4 years, finally held a TGE. It started with decentralized front-end hosting services and gradually expanded to Web3 gateways, customized decentralized storage solutions, RaaS (Rollup as a service), blockchain RPC and AI RPC services, forming a product matrix centered on Web3 development needs.
In this article, the author will investigate some key issues of the project to provide readers with an intuitive impression of the project, including:
The projects core products and business content, and main customer groups
Business data of the project
Fundraising, Key Partners, and Token Model
This article is the authors interim thinking as of the time of publication. It may change in the future, and the views are highly subjective. There may also be errors in facts, data, and reasoning logic. Criticism and further discussion from colleagues and readers are welcome, but this article does not constitute any investment advice.
The following is the main text.
2. 4EVERLAND Business Overview
4EVERLAND is a Web3.0 cloud computing platform that integrates storage, computing and network core capabilities. It is a typical TOB project.
The underlying layer of 4EVERLAND is the computing, storage, bandwidth and other requirements of various developers. It integrates these resources into various tools and APIs that are convenient for developers to use, greatly reducing the threshold and cost for developers to independently connect to complex resources.
From the products that 4 EVERLAND has launched, there are Dapp hosting services and storage services built on decentralized infrastructure, as well as AI RPC services developed based on traditional Internet technologies such as AI. In addition, 4 EVERLAND has also built the 4 EVER Network, which coordinates the supply and demand of a series of resources (storage, computing, network bandwidth). Specifically:
Dapp Application and Website Hosting
Websites built on centralized servers face many challenges including censorship resistance and single point failure (for example, it is almost impossible to find a directly accessible front end for Tornado.Cash after it was sanctioned by OFAC). 4 EVERLANDs hosting service can help developers host websites and decentralized applications (DApps) on multiple protocols, including IPFS, Arweave, ICP, and BNBchains Greenfield. Developers can freely choose which underlying protocol to host.
In addition, 4 EVERLAND hosting services also provide some advanced features and capabilities, such as advanced caching (used to improve the performance and response speed of websites or applications) and CDN functions (to improve the access speed of websites and applications in different regions around the world), as well as automatic SSL certificate management and other security features, gateway services adapted to hosting protocols, etc., to reduce developers maintenance costs on the product front end.
Currently, Dex syncswap on zkSync, leading lending platforms Venus and Astar on BNBchain, etc. are all using 4 EVERLANDs Hosting services.
store
4 EVERLAND can provide distributed storage services based on IPFS, Arweave, Greenfield and other protocols, and its storage services greatly simplify the way developers adopt distributed storage services. The 4 EVERLAND API it provides is compatible with the AWS S3 API of traditional cloud services.
Currently, the well-known decentralized voting governance platform snapshot, decentralized identity protocol SpaceID, and Rollup project Taiko all use 4 EVERLANDs storage services.
RPC
RPC service can be simply understood as a bridge or communication interface between programs (such as wallets, DApps) and blockchains. Its function is to enable programs to communicate with blockchains, obtain data or send instructions. 4 EVERLAND provides RPC services for most mainstream chains. Web3 developers no longer need to run their own clients, and can directly request to interact with various chains through APIs.
Arweave ecosystems everpay and permaswap currently use 4 EVERLANDs RPC services.
RaaS
4 EVERLANDs Rollup Stack uses OP Stack and Polygon CDK. In addition, it introduces Arweave data availability (DA) to support Perma Blobs archiving services.
4 EVER Network
Compared with the above modular services, 4 EVER Network is a system that aggregates resources on the supply side. This system consists of two parts:
One is DePIN Aggregator, which directly targets the existing mainstream Depin networks, such as IO.NET\Akash for computing power, Arweave for storage, Fleek\Menson for bandwidth, etc., aggregates these network resources for developers, and is now online.
At present, even the leading Depin network protocol has a large amount of idle network resources, and even the networks that provide similar resources have different standards. The role of DePIN Aggregator is to provide a unified Depin resource interface for a large number of developers, output customized, low-cost, and instantly available services for them, and on the other hand, deliver business needs to the idle Depin networks.
Another part of 4 EVER Network is 4 EVER Node. This protocol directly aggregates various idle resources of users, including computing power, bandwidth, and storage, to provide resources for developers. This part is still under development.
AI RPC
In addition to hosting, storage, RPC, RaaS and 4 EVER Network, 4 EVERLAND also has AI RPC services, which provide a unified interface and access to major mainstream AI models, allowing developers to access cutting-edge AI models more efficiently in their businesses.
Business Model
4 EVERLANDs business model is relatively simple, that is, users pay for the agreement by using 4 EVERLANDs various services. Currently, users have a certain amount of free usage, and after exceeding this amount, they need to pay according to the amount of resources used.
3. 4EVERLAND Business Situation
3.1 Number of Users
According to official data, as of now, the number of users who have registered and consumed resources on 4 EVERLAND has exceeded 250,000.
In addition, developers will link their github accounts in the 4 EVERLAND system, and push requests to 4 EVERLAND when code updates occur, and 4 EVERLAND will automatically help build and deploy a new version of the website.
Currently, the number of daily active updates of 4 EVERLANDs associated accounts on Github is about 30,000+.
Github developers push updates on 4 EVERLAND
3.2 Storage
4 EVERLAND is currently one of the top data storage service providers for Arweave and Greenfield.
In Greenfield, the amount of data stored in the past 7 days is 1.2 GB, ranking 4th.
https://dappbay.bnbchain.org/ranking/chain/greenfield?sort=totalStorageSize
On Arweave, its 7-day Bundle storage is 397.6 MiB, ranking 8th.
https://viewblock.io/arweave/topStats?tab=bundlestime=seven
3.3 Agreement income
The fee information of 4 EVERLAND’s agreement is not currently open source. According to the information obtained by the author and the team, the current monthly income of 4 EVERLAND is between 40,000 and 50,000 US dollars.
4. Financing, Partnerships and Token Model
4.1 Financing
4 EVERLAND has completed two rounds of public financing. The first round was in August 2021, with a financing of 1.5 million US dollars. Investors included Distributed Capital, FBG Capital , Bixin Ventures , Mint Ventures, etc.; the second round of financing was in December 2023, with a financing of 2 million US dollars. Investors included Arweave , Waterdrip Capital , Bing Ventures , Arweave SCP Ventures , GTS Ventures , Web3.com Ventures , Hillstone Finance , Forward Research, etc., and the specific financing valuation was not disclosed.
In addition, 4 EVERLAND has received multiple official grants from BNBChain, Polygon, Optimism, IPFS, Arweave and ICP.
4.2 Partners
In the ecological partner map listed by 4 EVERLAND the day before yesterday, in addition to some representative projects mentioned in the business section, many public chains or L2 projects also have in-depth cooperation with 4 EVERLAND. Through the services provided by 4 EVERLAND, developers can develop and maintain projects on the public chain more efficiently and conveniently. Some public chains and Rollup ecosystem parties will also directly purchase 4 EVERLANDs services. For example, Taiko is using 4 EVERLANDs gateway service and using storage services to manage the projects NFTs.
4.3 Token Model
4 EVERLAND announced its token model on December 9, the details are as follows:
The project has dual tokens, of which Land is a payment token priced at USD and used to pay for various resources, as well as for repurchasing the governance token 4 EVER; 4 EVER is a governance and utility token.
4 EVER tokens total 10 billion, issued on Ethereum
The specific token distribution is as follows:
Node rewards 40%, community funds 15%, operating funds 10%, user rewards 5%, and the rest include token sales 15%, core team and consultants 12%, and initial liquidity and market making funds 3%.
According to the current secondary market price (December 16), the FDV corresponding to the 4 EVERLAND project is only about 60 million US dollars, and the current circulating market value is only 4.8 million US dollars.
5. Conclusion
As a Web3.0 cloud service platform that integrates storage, computing and network core capabilities, 4 EVERLAND aims to provide Web3 developers with convenient resources and tools. In addition, the 4 EVER Network it built is a system that aggregates resources on the supply side. On the one hand, it matches the needs of developers for various Depin networks that are currently idle, and on the other hand, it provides developers with lighter, cheaper and more diverse Web3 comprehensive resources. With the further advancement of the Web3 industry and the expansion of the developer community, the resource demand for the Web3 D side will also expand, and 4 EVERLAND will benefit from this.
