www.icocrowd.com
ISSUE #6, march-april 2018
Trustverse, Traceto, Essentia and many more
Price: 0.01 BTC
FOREWORD
ISMAIL MALIK Editor-in-chief
The Re-Birth of the Korean Crypto Market
DONOVAN OBOSI Head Analyst ANNEMIEKE DIRKES Managing Editor PAM TATRO Content Editor TZVI SHISHLER Marketing Photo credit © Shutterstock
by ISMAIL MALIK Chairman & Executive Editor ICO Crowd
South Korea has been the heart of many ICO projects and prominent crypto exchanges in the world. Moreover, many active investors in cryptocurrency have accelerated successful worldwide projects. However, due to government intervention, the recent drop in the crypto market has crestfallen the majority of crypto and ICO investors in Korea. Moreover, the government has still not come up with clear guidelines on how to protect investors from scams or illegal ICOs, nor have they prepared a policy to nurture the market.
If you would like to advertise with us or have any other queries please get in touch at info@icocrowd.com Disclaimer. All opinions and views expressed in this publication are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent the views of ICO Crowd magazine, its Management or Advisors. All content of ICO Crowd Magazine, in particular but not exclusively, photographs, businessdetails, facts and figures, names, adresses and dates, historic details and offers, are the sole responsibility of the author of each artice. Copyright violations by the author are the sole responsibility of the author and ICO Crowd magazine can not be held liable, whether on the whole or on particulars. www.icocrowd.com
Yet, we are seeing large enterprises going for “Reverse ICOs”, last year we had Nexon (World’s top game publishing company) and more recently Kakao (Messenger Service) has decided to locate themselves outbound to start an ICO. Most likely in Singapore or Hong Kong.
Such news is a hopeful signal for the majority of crypto holders and investors. Moreover, governments are also collaborating with other countries on building legal and tax frameworks to safely govern the crypto and blockchain market in Korea. Kakao’s exchange (Dunamu), also has committed 100M for 3 years to invest in the blockchain community to accelerate and nurture its growth. The Government has budgeted 14M to start converged business for blockchain technology as well. Both the Korean government and citizens realize that, legal framework is a prerequisite to building a healthy ecosystem and growth in the market. S.Korea has learnt about the cryptocurrency market and industry, the hard way, due to a group of pyramid schemes and other incidents that have eroded the trust in the market. We are see that S. Korea to has huge growth potential, which will highly influence the market due to its young generation of blockchain technology enthusiast and developers.
18
32
42
74
CONTENTS 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 19 20 23 24
Advisory Board XinFin Launches XDCE // KAVITA GUPTA
Dermavir ICO: Brings Future Access to a Revolutionary Vaccine to the Masses // JAMES SOWERS
Digitize: Enabling the Mainstream Adoption of Cryptocurrencies Through the Conversion of Loose Change // JAMES SOWERS
DocTailor Customises Legal Contracts on the Blockchain // JAMES SOWERS
SafeCrypt.io Launches the Cryptocurrency Exchange of the Future! // JAMES SOWERS
London Football Exchange: a Blockchain Stock Exchange for Football // CHARLES PITTAR
Based Global: HODL or BAGL? // TRISTAN LITTLEJOHN
DATACHAIN: Decentralized Marketplace for Artificial Intelligences // KAZÉ A. ONGUENE
An Iconiq Vision: Iconiq Lab and Tokenization’s Future // PATRICK LOWRY
TOPL: Empowering Growth. Enabling Investment // CHRIS GEORGEN
VREO: Decentralized Distribution of Ad Revenues and Gamer Participation // ANDREAS SCHEMM
26 27 30 32 33 34 36 38 42 44 46 48 49 52 54 56 59
WUNDER // ALANA VOLDMAN
Enabling GDPR Compliant Trading of Personal Data on the Blockchain // DR.-ING. CHRISTIAN LANGE
Comparing ERC20, ERC223, and ERC777 Ethereum Token Standards // MICHIEL MULDERS
THE INTERNET OF TOKENS: NurseToken // ALEX LIGHTMAN
THE INTERNET OF TOKENS: NYNJA // ALEX LIGHTMAN
Emmares EMA // IVAN JELIĆ
Energy Access and Financial Inclusion Using BLS Tokens
ENDOR What Can Next Generation Blockchains Like Hedera’s Hashgraph Do Best? // HELEN DISNEY
Constellation Labs
TrustVerse: The Universe of Trust // JEOUNG KIOOK
WOOLF: Building the First Blockchain University // DR JOSHUA BROGGI
Quant Overledger: The Blockchain Operating System Orvium: Open and Transparent Science Powered by Blockchain // MANUEL MARTIN MARQUEZ
Could Blockchain Dawn a New Era in Tourism? Can Blockchain Save Us From the AI Apocalypse? // ROB MAY
Traceto.io // INTERCHAIN VENTURES
62 64 66 69 70 72 74 76 78
KOINON: Bringing Payments Into the Crypto Age // PAUL KIRKITELOS
CRWD TOKEN: Company Financing on the Blockchain 10 Hacker-Proof Steps to Secure Your Crypto Assets // RESEARCH CENTER
Robotina ICO: A Game-Changer in Energy Management Reached the Soft Cap BandZ: The Global Extranet!
Meet BrainerZ Blockchain and The “Innovation Nation” // TAL SHECHTMAN
The RootProject // ROOTPROJECT
Welcome to Essentia // ESSENTIA
Advisory Board SUSAN POOLE
MARC KENIGSBERG
SIMON COCKING
Founder, BlockBridge Advisory Co-Founder, Blockchain Training Institute
Founder of BitcoinChaser.com
Senior Editor at Irish Tech News Freelance for Sunday Business Post, Irish Times, The Southern Star, Dublin Glob
ANDREY GOLUB, PhD
SEAD MUFTIC
SERGIO A. FERNANDEZ DE CORDOVA
Entrepreneur, CEO & Founder @ELSE Corp- a Virtual Retail company
CEO at Blockchain Information Exchange Security Corp
Chairman – P3SmartCity Partners, Inc Private Sector Advisory Group, SDG-FUND, United Nations
THEODOSIS MOUROUZIS, PhD
MUKHTAR MUSSABETOV
EMMANUEL R. GOFFI, PhD
Program Director of MSc in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics at Cyprus International Institute of Management (CIIM) Research Fellow at UCL Centre of Blockchain Technologies (London,UK)
Blockchain Entrepreneur, Founder at BlockSpace Labs
Associate doctor with Science Po-CERI Research fellow with the Centre FrancoPaix, at the Université du Québec à Montréal
ALEX LIGHTMAN Award-winning and Amazon bestselling author.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
XinFin Launches XDCE ABOUT XINFIN FINTECH PTE. LTD XinFin (www.xinfin.org) is a Singapore based Blockchain Technology Company that is focused on Business Process Efficiency improvement and has deployed Blockchain solutions for international trade and finance. XinFin has by developed a highly scalable, secure, perKAVITA GUPTA missioned and commercial grade Hybrid Blockchain architecture by forking JP Morgan's Quorum. With an aim to bridge the global infrastructural deficit with their open source marketplace platform – Tradefinex (www.tradefinex. org); XinFin enables financial institutions with tools to undertake peer-topeer financial contracts between governments, corporation, buyers and suppliers. This helps in efficient use of capital and deployment of projects without burdening the government treasury. XinFin has four lines of solutions namely TradeFinex, Business Efficiency solutions, E-Wallets & Remittance and Private Sub-networks. You can follow XinFin on Twitter (@XinFinF), on Telegram (https://t.me/xinfin6
talk) and Slack (https://xinfin-public. slack.com/). You can also view the latest video (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=K-tHZkV6zAs) to find out what XinFin is. WHAT IS XDCE? XinFin launched its utility token XDCE on 5th February 2018. XDCE is an ERC20 token; it will have numerous benefits for traders, private investors and institutional level partners. All the details regarding ongoing XDCE Crowd Token Sale (ICO) can be found on their Token Sale Page: www.xinfin.io
ity and tradability on most exchanges. Traders can perform quick, high volume trades using XDCE token, allowing institutional level partners to primarily use the XDC01(XDC) token. This will enable XDC01 to grow strictly from use cases whereas traders using XDCE can connect and benefit from the growth of standard XDC token.”
Hosted on decentralised Ethereum Ecosystem, the ERC20 utility token, XDCE will enable global enterprises to work with XDC Protocol. The release of these utility tokens will boost liquidity of XDC tokens facilitating a large number Speaking of the XDCE crowd token sale, of business use cases. Alex Mathbeck the marketing head at “XinFin tokens are on built on XDC01 XinFin said, “The XDCE token will preprotocol which is first of its kind hybrid dominantly help traders who compete against other ERC20 tokens across var- protocol and listing a newer protocol ious exchanges. XDCE token is swappa- on the exchanges is a time-consuming ble which means it can be swapped 1:1 process. This limits the liquidity furwith the standard XDC token without ther limiting the number of business any transaction fee. While our reach be- cases being scaled. The launch of XDCE comes more versatile in the open cryp- tokens was a move in this direction so to market with this launch, traders will that people can trade at stable prices on also leverage from XDCE’s compatibilregulated exchanges sidestepping vola-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
tile market where price changes drastically due to lower liquidity.” said, Alex Mathbeck, Marketing Head, XinFin.
cham (www.assocham.org) and extended the “Jason’s three decades of broad experience platform to over 450,000 participating enterof building global businesses across diverse prise members. Ramco systems (www.ramco. industries, markets and sectors including com), Asia’s biggest company and part of glob- marketing, fintech, financial payments, and Available through its public ICO, XDCE utility al $1 Billion conglomerates has chosen XinFin blockchain technologies will add a valuatokens will help people gain access to the XDC Hybrid Blockchain to deploy blockchain soluble perspective to our Advisory Board,” said protocol and its sub-networks by hosting XDC tions for 500+ of its clients in AviAtul Khekade, Ecosystem Develmasternodes. ation, Supply Chain and HR. Xinopment Head, XinFin. “We truFin is already working with leadly appreciate his willingness to “The various tiers of XinFin master nodes ing global fortune 500 clients serve as an advisor and look formake it flexible for participants to work with across USA, Europe, Asia and Inward to leverage from his pruthe XDC protocol in a secure environment. The dia. It has successfully demondence and counsel.” XDC can act as a pure messaging and confirstrated over 10+ pilot projects in mation layer using existing payment rails or as Travel, Banking, Supply Chain, Fi- “The XDCE token He also co-founded BlockChain a settlement layer through approved and regu- nance, Trade and Aviation. The Hub—a community that fosters will predominantlated institutions.” said, Alex Mathbeck, Marupcoming major global expanly help traders who new ideas and advancements in keting Head, XinFin. sion includes Canada, USA, Midthe field of cryptology and financompete against dle East and Sri Lanka, with decial technology. Mr Butcher is an Having raised over USD 1.5 million durtails to be announced in the com- other ERC20 toAdvisory Board Member of Blockkens across various chain Association of Canada and ing pre-placement in July-August 2017, Xining weeks. Fin utilised the funds to build its XDC Hybrid a Strategic Advisor at RightMesh, exchanges. XDCE Blockchain protocol and TradeFinex.org platOver a half a dozen PoCs have VectorZilla and has been helping token is swappaform. been completed on the XinFin several other companies like Parble which means it allel Payments, NestBlockchain, network and the proceeds from can be swapped 1:1 MoolaCard, CoinFunder, ScanTellKaran Bharadwaj, the chief technology ofthe current round of token sale ficer at XinFin, said, “XDC blockchain is a hywill be used to extend the PoCs er, Pindify, Mondofi etc. grow prowith the standard brid blockchain that maintains both a pubinto sizeable pilot projects with XDC token without ductively. lic state as well as a private state. This distinc- enterprises and institutions any transaction fee. “According to me, what XinFin tion is very useful for enterprise use cases be- around the world. The funds will cause various institutions may prefer to keep also be utilised for ecosystem deALEX MATHBECK does is just amazing. To deploy marketing head at blockchain solutions for globtheir financial transactions private but still be velopment and masternodes proXinFin verifiable by a permanent record on the publiferation of the XinFin network al trade and finance was need lic state of the blockchain. This need is fulfilled amongst institutions. of the hour, and XinFin has maby the XDC blockchain where the details of the terialised it by creating one-of-its-kind hytransaction are available only to the involved MR JASON BUTCHER JOINS brid blockchain platform called TradeFinex. participants, but the same transaction can eas- ADVISORY BOARD Powered by XDC01 protocol, this platform ily be verified because of its digital record on It was recently announced that Mr Butcher will offer both tokenised and non-tokenized the public state of the blockchain.” who is a serial entrepreneur and COO of Coin- solutions to promote business process effiPayments (the world’s first and largest crypciency improvement. While efficient deployTRADEFINEX – PLATFORM FOR GLOBAL to currency payment technology provider) will ment of capital helps people undertake proTRADE & FINANCE serve as an advisor and will help XinFin with jects without burdening govt. treasury, orXinFin launched the TradeFinex platform at the company’s meaningful insights and invalu- ganisations get secure and cost-effective the Digital Asset summit organised by Asia’s able knowledge of the legal landscape of block- business solutions that boost their profitalargest trade and commerce bodies—Assochain technology and cryptocurrency markets. bility.” said Jason Butcher. 7
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Dermavir ICO Brings Future Access to a Revolutionary Vaccine to the Masses Genetic immunity is a privately held clinical-stage biotechnology company which focuses on the development and commercialisation of a revolutionary new immune therapy technology platform for the treatment of chronic viral infections, cancer and allergy. Their Immune therapies are designed to boost specific immune responses to modify or control presently incurable diseases. They have developed a proprietary Platform Technology that includes a plasmid DNA-based, disease-specific antigen as well as a nano-medicine formulation which encapsulates the plasmid DNA to resemble a virus meticulously, and a topical (through the skin) adminby JAMES SOWERS istration device which delivers the vaccine via dendritic cell to lymph nodes of the immune system. Their technology supports the rapid and cost-effective development of original biologic (as opposed to drugs) products. Their Lead Therapeutic Vaccine for treatment of HIV referred to as “DermaVir”, is effective in boosting the immune response which in turn kills HIV-infected cells. Human clinical trials in Phase I, Phase I/II and Phase II have demonstrated that this vaccine can execute HIV-infected cells. DermaVir has an excellent safety profile, like vaccines used in healthy adults and children. DermaVir can also be used as a co-treatment option if administered with antiretroviral therapy. 8
The human immune system is well prepared to fight disease, and most of the time this process is carried out successfully. In people with chronic diseases, the immune system fights against the disease but cannot overcome it – an excellent example of this is HIV. People often take substances associated with helping the immune system, such as vitamins, dietary supplements and herbs to live a healthy and prolonged life. In contrast to these off-the-shelf products, Immune Therapy has been designed to boost immune function, targeted at a given disease specifically. Their product(s) can change the treatment paradigm in the field of chronic infections, cancer and allergy. At present, these (lethal) diseases are treated with drugs, but most of these do not offer a cure. An excellent example of this is HIV, where drugs taken daily will not eradicate the virus, but will only suppress its replication. In addition, due to the fear of life-long drug treatment (treatment mainly for symptoms), few people participate in early recognition programs. They believe that the product’s specificity, safety, effectiveness and targeted immune boosting of the immune system helps more people seeking early treatment thus increasing their chance of a curative outcome. The clinically proven Technology Platform supports not only the world’s first therapeutic HIV vaccine but also the rapid, and cost-effective development of a broad portfolio of additional vac-
cines focused on cancer, viral infection, allergy and more. This in turn increases an already huge market opportunity to an enormous one. The disease-modifying efficacy of our product(s) is based on the intensification and boosting of a so-called Th1type cellular immunity; something which cannot be achieved by traditional drugs. Based on preclinical (studies conducted on animals) and clinical data (studies conducted using human patients), they expect this type of immune intensification to provide significant therapeutic benefit for patients with chronic infectious diseases, cancer and allergy. BELOW ARE THE FOUR PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS WHICH CONSTITUTE THE TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM: 1. Proprietary Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) API is a single plasmid DNA (pDNA) designed to express several disease-specific antigens. The API contains molecular safety features and is encapsulated in Virus-Like Particles (VLP) used for delivery. Creating an API with these crucial properties is not feasible with protein or peptide antigens. 2. Nano-medicine - a proprietary Product platform They refer to their product(s) as “nanomedicines” because of their unique biophysical and biological features. This nanomedicine formulation is essential to achieve strong antigen expressions from the pDNA and antigen presenta-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
tion to/by dendritic cells. This is critical for the intensification of an antigen-specific immune response needed in people with chronic diseases. 3. DermaPrep topical (through the skin) administration device They have developed DermaPrep for the targeted in-vivo delivery of their nanomedicine directly to the skin’s dendritic cells. DermaPrep is an empty skin patch, which acts as a container. Once the skin surface is prepared the patch is applied to the area and the API is injected between the skin and the patch. It is left for two hours, this is the length of time needed for the API to absorb through the skin and to be taken up by a specific type of dendritic cell, called Langerhans. DermaPrep is a CE Mark carrying Medical Device in the European Union. Dendritic cell targeting is crucial for the efficacy of our Immune Therapies. In fact, DermaPrep is the first non-invasive dendritic cell-targeting administration device of its kind. 4. Applied Information Technology IT innovation has been supporting this discovery, development, manufacturing, and personalised treatment creation process. IT tools include proprietary software for antigen-specific pDNA design, clinical trial, data management and the matching of patients with the optimal Immune Therapy product they need. They believe that such a tightly integrated IT and biotech approach is exceptional for value creation. Preclinical animal studies conducted in mice, rabbits and macaques consistently demonstrated that topical DermaVir immunisation delivers the API to dendritic cells and then to lymph nodes which in turn express the pDNA-encoded antigens and create disease-specific killer cells. More importantly, immune re-
sponse following DermaVir immunisation was consistently shown. Following the Phase, clinical trial agreements begun with the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under which NIAID agreed to finance, manage and conduct a Phase I/II clinical trial with the help of the prestigious Aids Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). This ACTG trial used multiple administrations of escalating DermaVir doses (0.2 or 0.4 mg pDNA three times or 0.4 mg pDNA six times) compared to placebo using 26 HIV-infected adults receiving fully suppressive HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy, the current state of the art HIV treatment.) The primary endpoint was any possible or definite vaccine-related grade ≼3 adverse event (AE) appeared up to 28 days after the final DermaVir treatment. No primary safety endpoints or AE-related study treatment changes/discontinuations occurred. This trial further confirmed the safety of DermaVir vaccinations in combination with HAART. THE DERMAVIR (DVT) COIN - A total of 20 million Dermavir Coins are issued through the Ethereum platform. - There will be no additional issuance of Dermavir coins in the future. - The number of coins for sale during the Dermavir pre-sales and crowd sale are hard capped at 10 million tokens - Presale 1st stage is on from the 20th of February to the 20th of March in which Dermavir tokens can be acquired for as low as $0.70, a 30% discount to market price. They will make a total of 1,000,000 coins available in this round. Any unsold coins will be rolled into the next round. - Presale 2nd stage is on from the 21st of March to the 21st of April in which Dermavir tokens can be acquired as low as $0.80,
a 20% discount to market price. They will make a total of 2,000,000 coins available in this round. Any unsold coins will be rolled into the next round. - Presale 3rd stage is on from the 22nd of April to the 22nd May in which Dermavir tokens can be acquired as low as $0.90, a 10% discount to market price. We will make a total of 3,000,000 coins available in this round. Any unsold coins will be rolled into the next round. - And finally, the Crowdsale is on from the 23rd of May to the 23rd of June, where coins are available for $1.00. A total of 4,000,000 coins will be made available in this round. - The 1st presale starts on 20th of February 2018 at 9 am (GMT) - The ICO will end on the 23rd of June 2018 at 9 pm (GMT). - Participants can follow the instructions on their website (www.geneticimmunity.com) and then acquire Dermavir on the Decentralized Exchange (DEX) available through the Ethereum Wallet. Dermavir can be obtained by using Ethereum and Bitcoin. DISCLAIMER Please review their case purely on merit and proceed only if you are convinced or interested, I am just connecting you. Also, I do not encourage folks from the USA, China etc. to invest in an ICO unless they speak to their lawyers. I only support genuine good people doing great in Blockchain innovation. DISCLOSURE AUTHOR IS AN ADVISOR ON THE PROJECT. 9
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Digitize
Enabling the Mainstream Adoption of Cryptocurrencies Through the Conversion of Loose Change
Digitize is implementing an ecosystem which will provide users with a digital wallet and allow them to save their loose change and cash digitally, at the point of a transaction. The Digitize ecosystem will prevent the need to carry loose-change and promote the transition from a cashbased society to a digital-based society. This is the future of money as we know it in the new digital-crypto revolution. Reductions in the manufacturby ing of physical currency will be noticeaJAMES SOWERS ble, as well as reducing the cost to produce and the amount of change lost. Additionally, the Digitize ecosystem would further strengthen the cryptocurrency market by bringing an additional revenue stream into cryptocurrencies through loose change. Although most of the western world is adopting digital payments, many developing nations are still widely run on cash transactions. Digitize aims to assist in the transition of cash into digital wallets; they will target the South Asian markets where cash transactions are dominant, with an aim to assist in the transition towards digital wallets. 10
The Digitize platform will be readily available via a mobile application which can be downloaded by virtually anyone. Digitize will offer a range of online tutorials and manuals for the public to view and understand the operation of the application and platform. The new savings digitize tokens can be used as payments to registered retailers, used to exchange into other crypto-
currencies, invest into the crypto-index or withdraw for local currencies. With the increased number of governments and central banks wanting to digitize their national currencies, it reinforces the disadvantages of physical currencies and the wide-scale benefits of digital currencies. One of the critical factors in moving away from physi-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Further research shows Generation Y and Millennials prefer not to carry and hold cash due to comfort and the recent wallet trends. With the introduction of cardholders and NFC based payments from mobile phones, more people are moving away from holding cash, more specifically coins. An estimated 56 percent of Americans build up their change rather than spend it on a day to day basis. As many as 77 percent have a jug of coins around the house, worth an average $40 (Lubbock online, 2018). One of the hardest problems in crypto is how to reduce the complexity of handling cryptocurrencies radically. Digitize solves this problem through several end-user layers including a mobile wallet and mainstream adoption. The mobile wallet is a helpful component because it solves the handling of private and public keys. Instead of managing a long and complicated blockchain public key, it may be preferable for end users to maintain a password-based system that is much more familiar. Increasingly, mobile devices can be secured by fingerprint or face recognition. The mobile wallet will be available to both consumers and merchants enabling seamless transactions and deposits. Digitizer’s aim is to promote mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency. They are working on this goal through the launch of a platform, which will be built on a mobile application. The mobile application will be available on the Android and IOS market to download and use by anyone. There is no restriction of the type of retailer, size, or location; any retailer will be able to use the mobile platform to send loose change deposits to users, instantly using QR codes and blockchain technology. Due to the seamless process involved, Digitize is hoping to overcome the barriers to mainstream adoption and target the wider public. cal currencies is the significant costs involved in manufacturing notes and coins. A report published by CoinDesk estimates the global production cost of notes in 2014 as $26.5 billion USD and $1.5 billion USD for coins. These figures are extrapolated only from the materials and labour operational costs needed to manufacture currency and do not contain any other factors like environmental implication and energy costs.
The Digitize ecosystem will prevent the need to carry loose-change and promote the transition from a cash-based society to a digital-based society. This is the future Surprisingly, some of the coins cost more to pro- of money as we know it in the new digiduce then they are worth. Statistics from the US tal-crypto revolution. Federal Reserve Mint show that both the nickel and penny cost more to make than they are worth. A quarter, worth 25¢, only costs 9¢ to make while a dime only costs about 4¢. On the other hand, a penny costs 1.66¢. The nickel, with a face value of 5¢, costs 8¢ to produce. It can be noted that many government bodies are budgeting billions of dollars annually in the production of physical currencies, while most of the population are more inclined to move away from physical cash to digital currencies (‘These Coins Cost More to Make than They're Worth’- Wall Street Survivor Blog, 2018).
With new technical advancements, digital payments are becoming increasingly faster and preferred compared to cash payments, this is shown in a recent study by the Reserve Bank of Australia. The graph on the left shows card payments booming, and now make up a large percentage of transactions than cash payments. A big reason for this change is due to the speed and convenience of contactless payments, which now make up two-thirds of every card transaction.
CONCLUSION Digitize allows consumers to convert their loose change into Digitize tokens. Digitize tokens can then be used as a payment system, or to contribute to retailer loyalty/reward programs. Imagine walking down to your nearest grocery store and buying $22.50 in groceries. You pay for your total with $30 cash. The $7.50 change you will receive, can be sent straight to your Digitize wallet by taping your phone on the Digitize scanner. The change will then be instantly saved straight to your Digitize wallet. DISCLAIMER Please review their case purely on merit and proceed only if you are convinced or interested, I am just connecting you. Also, I do not encourage folks from the USA, China etc. to invest in an ICO unless they speak to their lawyers. I only support genuine good people doing great in Blockchain innovation. DISCLOSURE AUTHOR IS AN ADVISOR ON THE PROJECT. 11
MARCH / APRIL 2018
DocTailor Customises Legal Contracts on the Blockchain The new blockchain revolution has brought about a notable demand for smart contracts. Currently, there are few if any individuals who are making use of the services that have already been made available. In fact, while almost half of all senior executives beby lieve there is value in smart contracts JAMES SOWERS on the blockchain, and while they would be happy to use a smart contract service, reports suggest that just 13 percent have incorporated the technology into their work. This highlights the fact that something is missing from existing legal services which is preventing widespread adoption.
sociated cost for users. DocTailor has been developed by a blockchain-experienced team, striving to utilise the The creation of smart legal documents is currently posing a challenge for many ground-breaking technology in new and revolutionary ways. Many of the organisations and individuals, particuteam’s developers have joined DocTailarly for those with limited developer lor from artificial intelligence (AI) backexperience. The concept has been criticised for being both costly and time-con- grounds, working to develop the idea suming. DocTailor aims to address these through AI-focused systems further. common issues and concerns. THE PLATFORM This has been created for legal profesHOW DOES DOCTAILOR WORK? sionals, and individuals, discussing the DocTailor is a unique, automated lelong-term viability of self-customised gal document platform facilitating the smart legal documents on the blockcreation and distribution of self-cuschain. The company will focus on the tomised smart legal documents on the DocTailor automated platform considerblockchain. DocTailor has been deing the technology’s ability to position signed to simplify implementation of itself in such a way as to boost, innovate, a smart contract and reducing the as-
12
and disrupt the current and existing tailor-made legal document landscape. The DocTailor platform will enable all users, regardless of developer experience to deploy legal documents with an integrated smart contract feature. The technology aims to create a new ecosystem designed to demonstrate ways in which blockchain advancements can be utilised in the legal industry. DOCTAILOR AIMS TO: • Improve accessibility of customised smart contracts • Boost ease of smart contract development, acquisition, and distribution • Provide easy payment options, storing both cryptocurrencies and fiat money
MARCH / APRIL 2018
• Facilitate the use of the DocTailor DOCS token and/or other cryptocurrencies • Operate on a P2P, B2C, and B2B basis as necessary • Integrate with business infrastructure to bring value to real-world situations • Manage and monitor deployed smart contracts and blockchains The introduction of the DocTailor coincides with an increase in concern regarding the low adoption on rates of blockchain technology. Reports show that around 40% of senior executives do not understand how blockchain could benefit their business or their industry. THE TEAM Sam Williams Having built intelligent systems for the past ten years, that has been implemented into corporate structures and organisations, Sam Enrico Williams brings a deep level and understanding of System Architecture. Sam has substantial experience in Cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and economy markets; needed to drive DocTailor to unprecedented levels. Dominic Brown Having successfully cultivated communities in China, USA and Europe to gain exposure for the development of ICO’s in the past. Dominic is adding operations and experience management to the role of COO. Having worked in the field of Blockchain technology and Cryptocurrencies for over two years, Dominic has seen the fluctuations of the cyp-
to environment and can see the rationalisation through the chaos. Alexandrine Masse Alexandrine has won a prize in law competition. She has extensive experience in various fields such as finance (private equity, fundraising, investments, family offices), commercial and luxury real estate, communications, public relations, public affairs and diplomacy, media, education on an international scale and especially in France, the UK and emerging markets. She has worked closely with international lawyers for many years and has successfully won her cases.
to businesses to utilise revolutionary technologies. DocTailor is aimed at lawyers and legal professionals, old-school industries, and individuals, with an easyto-use interface. The platform is expected to benefit users through the provision of more than 10,000 legal clauses, the ability to merge clauses into existing document structure, and integrated tracking options DocTailor has been designed to which can make it simpler for businesses to monitor recipient action.
simplify implementation of a smart contract and reducing the associated cost for users.
CONCLUSION There is an urgent requirement for a solution such as the DocTailor. DocTailor utilises an ‘intelligent clause’ feature to automatically identify and highlight sections of a document, contract, or any other form of agreement which may need to be amended to suit the purpose. DocTailor users can alter, replace, or remove clauses as necessary to form a unique, customised, tailor-made smart contract. Research shows that smart contracts can be deployed on the Ethereum blockchain in under 20 seconds. The release of the platform demonstrates a clear commitment in improving blockchain adoption rates, as well as making it quicker, easier, and more cost-efficient for non-cryp-
A comprehensive list of the integrated features and functions that will allow users to create contracts on the blockchain and efficiently grow revenues to their current non-crypto and crypto businesses can be found on the platform’s dedicated website.
DISCLAIMER Please review their case purely on merit and proceed only if you are convinced or interested, I am just connecting you. Also, I do not encourage folks from the USA, China etc. to invest in an ICO unless they speak to their lawyers. I only support genuine good people doing great in Blockchain innovation. DISCLOSURE AUTHOR IS AN ADVISOR ON THE PROJECT. 13
MARCH / APRIL 2018
SafeCrypt.io
Launches the Cryptocurrency Exchange of the Future! SafeCrypt.io is building a crypto exchange platform for the future. The platform is based on the most secure model ever created so far. SafeCrypt’s revolutionary technology is empowering the crypto trading community with the most advanced cascade encryption algorithms that are using the fastest network available.
trum crypto-trading functionality and anonymity for the traders.
THE SOLUTION SafeCrypt.io is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organisation). They are combining organic team-based structure with matrix structure. This approach provides flexibility, keeps the stress levels within the team as low as possible, making it easier for the team members to work with each other, with contractors and to outsource some of The company’s technology is the first the minor tasks while staying focused of its kind because it does not oblige on the crucial ones. The communication you to store your assets within the plat- within the team is clear and straightform to perform crypto-trading. This forward with no strict vertical hierarunique function prevents any chance chy which helps to overcome any unfor the traders to lose their crypto asforeseen difficulties and provides an sets via unauthorized hacking. A total enormous potential to grow. by JAMES SOWERS of 850 000 BTC disappeared along with MtGox and more than $400 million THE EXCHANGE PROVIDES THE with Coincheck. In addition, according FOLLOWING BENEFITS: to stats from various reputable sources, -Instant Transactions: It takes less than it has been calculated that during 2017 24 seconds for the trader to receive alone, cryptocurrency traders have althe desired cryptoasset. ready lost approximately $5.3B worth -Large Selection of Cryptoassets: More of crypto-assets (caused by exchange than 44 cryptocurrencies are already platforms malfunctioning, illegal activbeing accepted and hundreds yet to ities or empty promises) along with the be added. traders' savings that were kept with-Risk-free Cryptoexchange: SafeCrypt. in those platforms. The central promise io is fail-safe by design. Traders retain of SafeCrypt.io is to provide a full-speccontrol over their assets at all time.
14
-Absolute Anonymity: Cascade data encrypting ensures the highest-standard security of the information possible. -Trader Oriented Design: An intuitive and easy-to-use multifunctional user interface is designed to satisfy the traders. -Secure Cloud Environment: Temporarily storing transaction metadata ensures that every order is processed perfectly. HOW DOES IT WORK? 1. A trader initiates an exchange transaction: Coin A into Coin B. 2. The transaction query is analysed and verified in SafeCrypt.io system. 3. The system runs an algorithm, scouting the database for an optimal crypto wallet. 4. The system launches a wallet watcher module that starts to monitor the selected crypto wallet and alerts the system as soon as the transaction is complete. 5. The SafeCrypt.io system then validates the transaction automatically, encrypts the transaction metadata to secure the exchange operation and sends a transaction query for Coin B to the trader crypto-wallet address. 6. The transaction query is analysed and verified by the system to ensure that
MARCH / APRIL 2018
the initial transaction of the trader was a valid request. It then runs the security, checking algorithms before validating the final transaction of Coin B to the initiator’s wallet. 7. The wallet watcher module alerts the system that Coin B was successfully sent to the trader’s crypto wallet. 8. The trader receives the requested Coin B in less than 24 seconds. The exchange is complete.
The company’s technology is the first of its kind because it does not oblige you to store your assets within the platform to perform crypto-trading. This unique function prevents any chance for the traders to lose their crypto assets via unauthorized hacking.
Instead of keeping the cryptosavings on the exchange platforms' wallets and being exposed to hacking or the exchange going down and risk losing everything, traders using SafeCrypt can perform the exchange transaction at any moment with no risk attached. The SafeCrypt system instantly processes the transaction on request and transfers the assets in cryptocurrency requested by the trader, entirely automatical- Sensitivity analysis is the study of how the unly with a minimum transaction fee of 0.06%. certainty in the output of a mathematical model or system (numerical or otherwise) can be apThis way traders immediately receive the deportioned to different sources of uncertainty in sired assets without worrying about losing the its inputs. savings due to some uncontrollable events or any other incident resulting in complete or The process of recalculating outcomes under partial loss of the traders crypto. alternative assumptions to determine the impact of a variable under sensitivity analysis WHY IS SAFECRYPT NEEDED? can be useful for a range of purposes, includBeing a complex system by itself, any given ex- ing: change platform cannot be viewed and ana1. Testing the robustness of the results of a lysed in isolation from the greater, and mathmodel or system in the presence of uncerematically by order of magnitude more comtainty. plex economic system in its entirety, with a 2. Increased understanding of the relationship massive number of uncertain input variables between input and output variables in a sysand seeming unpredictability of probable outtem or model. comes. Under such conditions, it is impossi3. Uncertainty reduction through the identifible to model a stably working platform withcation of model inputs that cause significant out the implementation of robust and efficient uncertainty in the output and should theremathematical instruments such as sensitivifore, be the focus of an order to increase roty analysis. bustness (perhaps, by further research).
4. Searching for errors in the model (by encountering unexpected relationships between inputs and outputs). 5. Model simplification- fixing model inputs that have no effect on the output or identifying and removing redundant parts of the model structure. 6. Enhancing communication from modellers to decision makers (e.g. by making recommendations more credible, understandable, compelling or persuasive). 7. Finding regions in the space of input factors for which the model output is either maximum or minimum or meets some optimum criterion. 8. In case of calibration models with a large number of parameters, a primary sensitivity test can ease the calibration stage by focusing on the sensitive parameters. Not knowing the sensitivity of parameters can result in being uselessly spent on non-sensitive variables. 9. To seek to identify important connections between observations, model inputs, and predictions or forecasts, leading to the development of better models. DISCLAIMER Please review their case purely on merit and proceed only if you are convinced or interested, I am just connecting you. Also, I do not encourage folks from the USA, China etc. to invest in an ICO unless they speak to their lawyers. I only support genuine good people doing great in Blockchain innovation. DISCLOSURE AUTHOR IS AN ADVISOR ON THE PROJECT. 15
MARCH / APRIL 2018
London Football Exchange A Blockchain Stock Exchange for Football According to the latest research, football finance is booming. The Deloitte Football Money League recently released its latest findings, in which it stated that aggregate revenue for the top 20 clubs in the world grew 6% Year-onYear from €7.4 billion to €7.9 billion.
16
The biggest clubs in the world have ventured into the Asian market through lucrative summer tours. Major leagues such as the English Premier League, are benefiting hugely from the mass appeal of their action-packed leagues and the competition from broadcasting compaby CHARLES PITTAR nies to air as many matches as possible.
creasingly dependent on club revenue gained from ticketing, merchandising and other ancillary income. This has occurred because financing can be difficult to secure. Traditional financing models are limited in assessing football clubs against their risk parameters, which makes it difficult for clubs to raise funds.
In many ways, everything seems almost perfect in the world of football finance. Finally, it is the common fan that missHowever, according to the London es out the most. For their years of unFootball Exchange, that is not the case. wavering support, they are hit with high prices and have no ability to acSO, WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH quire a stake in their clubs. This can FOOTBALL FINANCE? only lead them to feel less and less a If you look just outside the top echelon part of their chosen football “family”. of the world’s most popular sport, most of football clubs face many issues when THE LONDON FOOTBALL it comes to running financially success- EXCHANGE SOLUTION ful and economically viable entities. The London Football Exchange is a revolutionary new approach to football fiFor a start, the pressure to consistently nance that is enabled by blockchain. It perform and operate provides an oper- is the world’s foremost football-based ational challenge in the shape of high cryptocurrency and, unlike other footoperating costs. In turn, this increases ball-based cryptocurrencies that are simexpenditure and results in higher pricply promoting gambling, the LFE is putes for customers - especially the most ting power back in the hands of real fans. loyal fans - who purchase tickets, merchandise and other club related prodLFE will enable clubs that need an exucts and services. tra injection of capital to use the LFE Exchange as the first ever ‘blockchain Furthermore, because of the competstock exchange for football’. It will also ing economic variables of infrastrucgive fans the chance to buy shares, ture, media, and player costs this has which are built on the blockchain, for resulted in football clubs becoming intheir favourite football clubs.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
The LFE will become a one-stop shop for clubs of all sizes to raise capital via equity sales and offer LFE contributors a wealth of fan experiences and social interaction. The more LFE Token holders engage with their favourite clubs and leagues, the more LFE Points they will receive. LFE engagement services will include LFE Points, a blockchain-enabled loyalty, rewards and offers platform. LFE contributors benefit through special discounts, exclusive offers, rewards and other incentives only available to LFE Token holders. LFE TECHNOLOGY The LFE platform has several advantageous features for a football-focused blockchain technology. It can help clubs to eliminate the antiquated ticketing technology from legacy operators that mean they pay fees ranging from 5% to 8% in commission based on the notional value of tickets sold. The underlying technology of LFE is also the first application of blockchain that shall enable football fans to upload their fiat currency and convert it into cryptocurrency to buy fan experiences and football club shares. It also allows them to decimalise out of their position, back into fiat currencies for Point of Sale purchases globally. EUROPEAN CLUBS ARE ALREADY INVOLVED Just weeks after launching, the London Football Exchange (LFE) has signed up clubs from Italy, England, Spain, Belgium, and
France. With business development currently encompassing over 50 other clubs across Europe, Asia, and South America. Clubs already named include FC Bari of Italy and Madrid based Futbol Alcobendas Sport. Alcobendas, is owned by none other than Juventus super striker Paulo Dybala’s super-agent Gustavo Mascardi. This tallies with the LFE’s commercial roadmap, which outlines a series of milestones for further club agreements throughout 2018. The focus will be on Europe initially and then move into Latin and America in Q3, with the aim of having 50 clubs signed up globally by this time next year.
CEO Charles Pittar is a former COO of Macquarie Bank in Asia, who has wide experience across a range of global finance and technology companies such as Citigroup and Microsoft ensuring the LFE has an abundance of experience to call upon. This is combined with an exciting mix of youthful co-founders hailing from UK, China, Australia, Philippines, and The underlying tech- France.
nology of LFE is also the first application of blockchain that shall enable football fans to upload their fiat currency and convert it into cryptocurrency to buy fan experiences and football club shares.
THE TEAM LFE is headed up by a group of investment management, banking, legal and technology professionals hailing from some of the world's largest institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Macquarie, BNP Paribas and Microsoft to name but a few. This coupled with the robust technology function of the company being provided by its partner Securrency, who have built a proprietary advanced token exchange platform which contains powerful services to enhance the security and compliance of blockchain networks.
THE TOKEN The London Football Exchange will be holding an Initial Token Offering (ITO) to raise funds to develop its ecosystem of services, secure new partnerships and build the community.
4 billion tokens will be generated as part of the ITO, with 2.4 billion made available for sale. The project’s fundraising goal is $350 million with the pre-sales taking place now and ending on 18 March 2018. The public crowd sale will take place directly afterward, from 19 March 2018 to 20 May 2018. The LFE Platform built by Securrency, will use the Ripple and Stellar networks to support token issuance, trades, and transfers, with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple all accepted as part of the token sale. Bank transfers of British Pounds, Euros, US Dollars, Australian Dollars and Swiss Francs will also be accepted. 17
MARCH / APRIL 2018
HODL or BAGL? Based Global takes power from the scalpers and puts it into the hands of artists and consumers through the BAGL token. Be amongst the first to join the revolution! by TRISTAN LITTLEJOHN CEO, Based Global GmbH
At Based Global we are on a mission to completely reimagine the way in which live event ticketing works. Our focus is on creating a new experience, building communities, and nurturing trust. How does Based Global work? Until now, a ticket was merely a way to gain entry to an event. Based Global changes that. Within each ticket at Based lies an unlocked potential for amazing new possibilities. We make tickets into secure, intelligent digital assets that redefine the relationship between artists and their fans to drive revenue back into the live events industry. By using blockchain technology, Based has given artists the means of incentivizing their fans by creating new spaces for communities to be born and to flourish. Record labels can identify super-fans and target them using the content they love. This way, fans themselves become organic brand ambassadors for their favorite artists and fans stay up to date with their favorite artists and don’t get ripped off in the process.
18
What’s more, the blockchain allows for a new way of payment and makes it harder for unscrupulous touts and scalpers to elbow their way into the system. It’s estimated that the “secondary ticketing market” generates around $10 billion every year. As a hi-tech practice that utilizes a whole army of bots and shady dealings, it takes revenue from artists, undermines consumer protection for fans and causes damage to the wider events industry. Through Based Global, new models of revenue creation are possible; models which identify and serve large audiences, protecting fans and maintaining value for artists. Based Global Token This is where the Based Global token comes in; BAGL. The BAGL token is the currency in which all transactions happen through Based. Fiat payments are implemented as an instant under the hood exchange. Tickets sellers receive BAGL and can save them, spend them within
the Based ecosystem, or exchange them for fiat.
We make tickets into secure, intelligent digital assets that redefine the relationship between artists and their fans to drive revenue back into the live events industry.
What’s more, we offer BAGL incentives to our users which can be used in much the same way; either on the platform or exchanged to fiat over time. By doing this, we are creating a whole new structure whereby fans and artists interact and engage with one another. Artists get to know their fans better and vice versa. With Based Global, you need never miss another gig, performance or festival. It puts the information, and therefore the power, in your hands and it’s all done using our revolutionary eco-system. We’re turning live events ticketing on its head, transforming it into a tokenized experience that removes the money-grabbing middlemen, and we invite you to be a part of it. Let us welcome you on a journey where we redefine the world of live entertainment event discovery, payment and access together.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
DATACHAIN
Decentralized Marketplace for Artificial Intelligences Foreseeing the Future with A New Paradigm: Building The Infrastructure For The Internet Of Value.
by KAZÉ A. ONGUENE CEO, BRAINCITIES LAB
Today we stand at the edge of the 4th and most disruptive industrial revolution, powered by artificial intelligence and driven by data. Deep Learning models are taking over entire industries; humans are disrupted in the workplace and physical assets are digitized, then tokenized. This digitized world relies on huge amounts of computing power and heterogeneous, unstructured data. This data is trustless and full of biases. BRAINCITIES is a French startup based in Paris which was founded in 2013. The company is specialized in Artificial Intelligence and Data science. The purpose of our technology is to improve people's daily life and help decision makers make the right choices with reliable and accurate guidance. At BRAINCITIES we uncover meaningful stories within the data. We use our real-time platform data refinery capabilities and calculation accuracy to provide reliable predictions to HR, finance, and smart cities industries decision-makers. We make ecosystems like cities and companies smarter with our human-supportive artificial intelligence. To do this, we are building the DATACHAIN. The distributed network and the related protocol that will secure the data used by our AIs to provide accurate and reliable recommendations to individuals, businesses, government, IoT users, and suppliers. Individuals generating and storing their information on the network can retain access to it through encryption keys, independent of the service or application that is generated or required
to gain access to it. Many companies are exploring the opportunity offered by the blockchain to create new services and platforms relying on business models, allowing users to keep full control over their data accessibility. Some, like BRAINCITIES, are engaged on a path that leads to the creation of a decentralized web using the blockchain. Decorrelating data from the services and applications using it ensures user data-privacy and prevents service providers from risk areas, such as data breaches or the temptation to stockpile and abuse people’s data. No doubt, data is the internet’s main asset and it has become the backbone of a society that will soon rely on over 70% of daily recommendations made by autonomous systems, such as BRAINCITIES AI. According to Saadia Madsbjerg, Managing Director at the Rockefeller Foundation, your personal data is worth an estimated $1,000 per year, a number that should be multiplied by 10 times as large in 2030. Today, data brokers centralize the value generated by people on the internet and social media. Data brokerage is a $200 billion industry and it is all built on a free commodity: our personal data. Marketing products generate over 50% of the total generated revenue, risk mitigation constitutes approximately 45% of the revenue and people search constitutes the remainder. In its latest report on global advertising market trends, released Decem-
ber 4, 2017, MAGNA forecasted digital and mobile advertising sales to grow by +13% in 2018 to reach $237 billion or 44% of global advertising revenues. Approximately 54% of this was shared between Google and Facebook. The two giant platforms will benefit from 50% of total advertising sales by 2020. Magna expects in 2018, 44% of global advertising revenues will rise to 50% by 2021 (i.e., $300 billion of an estimated $600 billion). The big opportunity is in the disintermediation of both ads targeting and data brokerage. “If data is the new oil it should have a price and it should be possible to trade on exchanges.” The emergent new paradigm of data ownership brings the concept of consent and mutual interest to the table. We envision this new internet as the infrastructure of a decentralized marketplace for Artificial Intelligence providing Outcomes-as-a-Service. Imagine Alexa or Siri integrated at the root of the current internet. These context-aware recommendation systems (AI) main goals would be to match service providers offers with data-owner needs. The need-based approach supported by AI and reliable data would allow accurate targeting and contextualized product and service recommendations. By making their data accessible for data scientists to train their models and for alerting services and products provided of their need, such internet users would be rewarded and paid with DC coins in line with a smart contract on the DATACHAIN. 19
MARCH / APRIL 2018
An Iconiq Vision: Iconiq Lab and Tokenization’s Future
If you are reading this article, I don’t have to tell you how over $4 Billion was raised in 2017 in ICO’s, dwarfing the roughly $100 Million in 2016 and even the amount VC’s invested into blockchain companies in 2017. I also don’t need to tell you of the risks in relation by to investing into cryptocurrencies or PATRICK LOWRY CEO, Iconiq Lab ICOs, or that regulators are watching the space with a keen eye. What I will tell you is how we at Iconiq Lab solve these problems, and what the future will bring for the crypto economy.
ability to pay for your drinks in Bitcoin. I bought my first beer with my Bitcoin (transaction fees be damned!) and sat down with an eclectic group of individuals huddled around their laptops who refused to speak to me at first because an ICO was about to go live (and one needed to finish his pizza first).
The mission of the Iconiq Lab platform is to create sustainable, real-world business modSadly, only a handful were I met Sandris Murins in Feb. 2017. At able to get in the early blocks els that support the time I was working to launch a cor- of the ICO, but we toasted to token instruporate venture capital unit for a real es- the success of those who did ments launched tate investor in Berlin interested in ear- and began talking crypto. We through the acly-stage PropTech companies. Sandris discussed the project everycelerator prowas developing a blockchain solution one just invested into and gram. for the rental contracts, and I found it upcoming ICO’s they were
20
interesting enough to meet him for a drink and hear about his venture. Little did I know at the time that crypto would become my life.
interested in, when I, the silly “traditional” investor at the time, asked an insanely dumb question…
I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014 and was all-too-familiar with use cases of blockchain through my time as a member of Deutsche Börse’s venture capital team, but nothing prepared me for the revolution underway in early 2017. Sandris and I ended up at a Neu Köln bar in Berlin, Room 77, locally famous as the “crypto-bar” due to the
“What type of due diligence did you do on the project before investing?” *Que awkward silence* “Well, did you do any research on this project before investing into it,” I asked.
“Ummmm… this project’s team isn’t anonymous, so we can trust them to build the platform they are promising,” was the shocking reply I received. A Bitcoin beer in (OK, maybe a few), I queried “What if a team existed that leveraged their background as VCs and company builders to identify projects, perform due diligence on the product and team and help the project develop a real-world business case for their platform?” The overwhelmingly positive feedback from the group validated my hunch that such quality assurance was needed for crypto investors. At this moment, Iconiq lab was born. Tokenization presents a unique opportunity to displace VCs and well-connected angel investors as the gatekeepers in the early-stage venture ecosystem. It offers the first real potential to decentralize wealth generation through a crowdsale style of alternative fi-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
nancing through an Initial Coin Offering or Token Sale (“ICO”). Startups and early-stage ventures benefit through access to relatively deep capital pools of non-dilutive financing to grow and scale their platforms while investors benefit through the ability to maintain ownership of their investment-making decisions (rather than VC fund managers) and through having a relatively liquid secondary market where they can trade their tokens.
gram. In doing so, we create regulatory-compliant instruments that are tangible and fundamentally recognizable to even traditionally-minded investors. We aim to eliminate the severe volatility in the crypto markets through such tangible products, promoting the longterm sustainability of the crypto economy.
Iconiq Lab’s unique business model decentralizes the earBut the ICO ecosystem is not without its own Startups apply to the ICO acceleraly-stage venpitfalls. The market is rampant with scams tor program where the Iconiq Lab ture investand fraudulent projects. There is little offered team, leveraging their background as ment process in way of investor protections, and many pro- VCs and company builders, reviews while still projects severely over-liquidate themselves, raisthe applications and perform thoring hundreds of millions in their ICOs with lit- ough due diligence on the most inviding qualitle to no justification for such capital requireteresting projects. Those that pass ty assurances ments. From a startups perspective, managing the thorough reviews and are admitthrough the exan ICO campaign is costly, there is significant ted to the program are provided an pert screening legal ambiguity when it comes to regulation in agreed upon amount of seed fundof applications various jurisdictions and there’s a steep learn- ing of up to $250,000, based on liing curve for other required compliance meas- quidity needs, to cover their expens- and the perforures such as KYC and AML. es during the 12-week program until mance of thortheir token presale. They are then edough due dilTo address the needs of both crypto invesucated in best practices in ICO marigence that is tors and ventures completing their own ICO, keting, legal and compliance, inveswe launched Iconiq Lab, a global ICO and Totor relations and general business standard in the ken Sale accelerator program with its very own development through a rigorous traditional inICO investors club, made possible through the two-week course and are appointvestment space. launch of our own token, the ICNQ Club Membership Token. The mission of the Iconiq Lab platform is to create sustainable, real-world business models that support token instruments launched through the accelerator pro-
ed a mentor team from the Iconiq Lab Expert Mentor Network of noteworthy crypto, finance, and industry professionals. Iconiq Lab then takes the startup team on a “digital road-
show” to top-tech cities around the world to showcase the project to attract investment and build a community around the platform. To conclude the program, Iconiq Lab helps structure the startups token presale to the ICNQ Token Club Members, helping ensure a higher success rate in the next stage of financing for the venture. Iconiq Lab continues to support the company as it approaches its public ICO. Crypto investors benefit from the carefully curated deal flow of quality ICO investment opportunities generated by the Iconiq Lab team by holding the ICNQ token in their digital wallet. The ICNQ token is the investor's passport into the exclusive presales of the startups which graduate the Iconiq Lab program, with the associated discounts and bonuses. Only by holding ICNQ tokens in your own wallet can you invest BTC, ETH or another liquid cryptocurrency into the exclusive presales of the startups which graduate the Iconiq Lab accelerator, creating a unique first-mover advantage for the ICNQ Club Members. ICNQ holders are empowered to place investments at their own discretion in startups which graduate the program but are not obligated to do so. 21
MARCH / APRIL 2018
As you can see, Iconiq Lab’s unique business 3. Topl: A protocol to facilitate blockchain-semodel decentralizes the early-stage venture cured investment in emerging markets investment process while still providing qualthrough their unique dual-token model. ity assurances through the expert screening They are currently establishing relationships of applications and the performance of thorin many developing nations to promote inough due diligence that is standard in the frastructure for governments and private traditional investment space. Furthermore, companies. Iconiq Lab actively helps develop the compa4. VREO: A blockchain-based, real-time, innies in our program to create real-world, susgame video game advertising platform for tainable business cases supporting the tokens real-world advertisers. The platform decenissued in the ICOs. VCs, Family Offices, and tralizes the video game ads, creating a new other institutional investors can leverage the way to present, measure and monetize adIconiq Lab deal flow for their own pipelines, vertisements in video games. and retail crypto investors, who are largely dis- 5. Wunder: A decentralized, digital art museum enfranchised from performing such due dilon the blockchain positioned at the center of igence on their own due to lack of resources philanthropy and art investments, Wunder’s and networks, can rest easy placing their trust protocol enables the use of smart contracts in the hands of the experienced professionals to validate ownership and transferability of at Iconiq Lab. art in a liquid, digital environment. For the first batch of the accelerator program, which began in Frankfurt, Germany on Feb. 18th, we received an astounding 165 applications from over 35 countries. When this was all said and done, the Iconiq Lab team elected to admit only 5 companies to the first accelerator program, placing a premium emphasis on quality over quantity. The first 5 companies to be admitted to Iconiq Lab and which are currently in the program are…
To participate in the presales of each of these companies when they graduate the program, investors must join the Iconiq Lab Premium ICO Investor’s Club by purchasing the ICNQ Club Membership Token. ICNQ acts as the holder’s passport into the exclusive presales of the companies which graduate the accelerator program. Iconiq Lab will be issuing 20 million ICNQ tokens, of which 15 million will be sold while the company itself retains 2 million for future hires and the Iconiq Lab team and advi1. Based Global: An entertainment startup sory board receives 3 million to align their inwith a blockchain-based engine to decentral- centives to the ICNQ club members. The hard ize live events and ticketing through a unicap for the sale is €10 million. €5 million of fied sales framework, protecting fans and the funds raised will be used to finance the artists from scalpers & counterfeits through companies in the program, while the remaintheir unique platform. ing will be used for operational expenses and 2. BrainCities: A blockchain protocol for data to scale the program internationally to genstorage made available to data scientists erate more opportunities for the ICNQ Club with programmed AI to interpret and mone- Members. We will be launching the next Iconiq tize personal data generated from users and Lab programs later this year, with the secgovernment bodies. Partners include HPE, ond batch in Germany beginning in July with SAP and more to develop further products U.S. and Singapore based programs opening in using their platform. Sept. and Nov., respectively. 22
Iconiq Lab has already sold €1 million of the ICNQ tokens in a February Private Presale round led by Token-as-a-Service, more commonly known as TAAS. We used these funds to finance the 5 companies currently in the accelerator program. Iconiq Lab will be holding a community presale on March 31st, where 750,000 ICNQ tokens will be sold with a 50% bonus to the public sale price for €500,000. The public sale begins on April 15th where 3 million tokens will be sold for €3 million. The remaining tokens will be sold to institutional and accredited investors who wish to use the ICNQ token to generate deal flow for their own traditional funds. To participate in the public sales, please join our whitelist by completing our KYC/AML procedures at iconiqlab.com. The whitelist opens on March 17th! The future of Iconiq Lab, much like the future of the crypto markets, looks bright indeed! While the “threat” of regulation may scare some in the crypto economy, we see this as a welcomed opportunity. I have been championing self-regulation in crypto for over a year to weed out poor quality and scam projects to attract more traditional institutional and retail investors to the space. In holding ourselves to a higher level of accountability and professionalism, as well as embracing reasonable regulation from government bodies, we can open the door for much deeper capital pools in our niche market than we ever could have before. To learn more about Iconiq Lab, the ICNQ token sale and our startups I would like to invite you to join our Telegram community at https://t.me/iconiqlabchat, where we would be happy to answer any questions you have and discuss hot-button crypto topics. I hope to see you there and wish you the best of luck in 2018 on your crypto-journey!
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Empowering Growth. Enabling Investment.
by CHRIS GEORGEN Chief Architect and President, Topl
In the world today, over 600 million people live in countries where the average daily income is less than $3.10. For comparison, someone in the US working at a minimum wage job would earn that amount more than 18 times a day. Not only does this illustrate unbelievable inequality across different countries, but this income discrepancy also represents perhaps the greatest opportunity for economic growth in the 21st century. Even increasing the average daily income to $10 a day across the world would grow the global economy by $6.6 trillion a year. And to put it simply, we created Topl to empower and help drive this growth. At Topl, we’re building the financial infrastructure necessary to power growth around the world. We believe that a key barrier to economic — and therefore income — growth across developing countries is a shortage of well-placed investment in young and vibrant new enterprises. Right now, there are large amounts of excess capital held by investors and funds in wealthy countries that has for years been seeking access to improved returns. While their enormous potential for broad-based economic growth is more than sufficient to
make developing countries extremely attractive markets, such investment has for the most part failed to materialize. Why is this? In short, investing in developing countries is challenging, and investing in young, innovative companies in developing countries requires a level of expertise and experience that very few individuals or firms possess. Instead of robust, well-designed infrastructure to support sourcing, due diligence, and fund transfer, those seeking exposure to the most vibrant opportunities in developing countries must rely on ad hoc processes and a confused patchwork of connections. These results, not only in an extremely high barrier to entry for investors, but also in excessive borrowing costs for businesses in these markets, with annual interest rates easily exceeding 40%. At Topl, we’ve developed our own blockchain pro-
Even increasing the average daily income to $10 a day across the world would grow the global economy by $6.6 trillion a year.
tocol to serve as a highly transparent and efficient infrastructure to lower the barriers to investing in developing countries. We believe that the blockchain is an ideal technology to accomplish this goal and thereby allow us to provide investors with new opportunities and business located in regions where there is the greatest need of investment with lower cost capital. If you’re interested in Topl’s goal of building a trustless, transparent, and efficient investment infrastructure to support the next wave of inclusive economic growth, I invite you to follow our progress on Github or join our telegram group and let us know what you think. More importantly, watch out for announcements regarding our token presale, organized and supported by the amazing team over at Iconiq Lab! 23
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Decentralized Distribution of Ad Revenues and Gamer Participation
by ANDREAS SCHEMM CEO, Project: Gateway VR Studios GmbH
24
Even though digital advertising surpassed TV advertising in volume in 2016 and gaming has become the biggest entertainment market, there are still a lot of problems plaguing the industries. For example, a lot of the advertising budget is lost due to fraud, repetitive ad content and ad blocking. Another big problem is the unfair distribution of the ad revenue, as classical intermediaries take high cuts instead of the revenue reaching the ones fueling the whole industry: the gamers and the game developers.
ing features to gamers, enabling gamers still “immobile� advertising that interto shape the future of gaming. rupts the gaming experience of the user. With our plugins, we provide a solution EMBEDDED ADVERTISING to embed ads into the surroundings of We provide various services at Vreo: for the game, for example at roadside, on developers, we provide a plugin that walls of houses or on billboards and TVs, enables the placement of digital billwithout interrupting the gaming experiboards and surfaces for ads within the ence. On PC and console, there is next to software. This enables the placement of no in-game advertising present, as there ads dynamically and natively embedded was no technology available to do it on within said software (no pop-ups, so a larger scale, a problem our plugin and no pop-up blockers) and reports back marketplace solve. all interaction of the user with the ad. These plugins and their algorithms are Currently, gamers have no way of parused for streaming and exchanging the ticipating other than gaining in-game SHAPING GAMES ads as well as evaluating the exact num- rewards, if any, and get presented with The attention of gamers is worth a lot ber (and the quality!) of views and oth- repetitive, non-fitting ads. Customof money to brands and advertisers. In- er user-specific data. Contrary to other retention models are on the rise, but game advertising is on the rise; howev- er developments our solutions are not still mostly provide no real or monetary er, it currently mainly consists of inter- bound to specific hardware devices but benefit to the users. ruptive ad formats. We want to provide usable on every platform and make use an advertising solution by gamers for of blockchain technology. We also proUSE OF BLOCKCHAIN gamers, which is embedded as part of vide a marketplace where gamers, game TECHNOLOGY the surroundings, doesn’t interrupt the developers, and advertisers can find There are a lot of problems troubling gaming experience and gives financial each other. developers and advertisers, for examvalue back to the gamers themselves. ple, transparency and security. BlockThrough registering at our marketplace, UNTAPPED POTENTIAL chain can solve these problems for both we can identify and reward gamers Most games out there have a lot of ungaming and advertising. All ad data while gaming, through our tokens we tapped potential: while a lot of in-game gets gathered and written into a blockcan also grant voting rights on upcom- advertising is happening on mobile, it is chain, where, due to its decentralized
MARCH / APRIL 2018
nature, it cannot be manipulated, providing a high amount of trust for everyone involved. Combine this with gamer profiles, which are based upon self-determined control possible thanks to blockchain, and fraudulent content gets minimized by a lot, as every ad impression is verified and accountable for. Using tokenization and incentivizing usage of our tokens, we grant both transparency and trust, but also voting rights to the gamers to get them involved in the whole creation process of a game. Developers can thus get feedback from the community regarding features and design questions. We strongly believe that blockchain technology will be a great solution for advertising and gaming in general, which is why our solutions are always scalable, as we plan to adapt other forms of advertising to our data and billing routine as well. THE VREO TOKENS The Vreo network will make use of a two-token structure, enabling the stability of fiat-backed volatility-free token mechanisms (the ViewCoin or VIC) and a volatile utility token that grants network access, voting rights and additional utilities like the elimination of transaction fees (the MeritCoin or MTC). WHO ARE WE? We founded the company at the beginning of 2016 with the plan to improve the over-
all gaming experience. Our team consists of professionals and entrepreneurs of all ages, with industry veterans in PR, marketing, sales and coding. We have strong experience in building companies up from scratch and establishing new business models. In addition to our core team, we rely upon our vast network of developers and contacts all around the world, some of which joined our advisory board. For every step we take and every industry we are in contact with, we either have a team member or a well-recognized advisor in their respective field, such as Iconiq Lab, who help us greatly to navigate the waters of marketing as well as connecting to investors and industry experts. WHAT LIES AHEAD? We are closing in on a sale of our MeritCoins, with a pre-sale starting on the 9th of April 2018. The main token sale runs through May of 2018 and will accept Ethereum (ETH) in exchange for MTC. The ICO has a target size of EUR 8m and a hard cap of EUR 16m. To learn more about our project and our roadmap, please visit us at https://ico.vreo.io/ or join our community at t.me/vreoico or one
of our other channels that are listed on our website.
We want to provide an advertising solution by gamers for gamers, which is embedded as part of the surroundings, doesn’t interrupt the gaming experience and gives financial value back to the gamers themselves.
OUTLOOK: GAMES FUNDING We know there are more problems in the gaming industry that need to be solved. While we focus on our in-game advertising solution at the moment, we have another big one in mind with games funding: we want to provide a platform for developers to launch their own (mini-)ICOs in the future. Gaming is, despite having surpassed both music and film industry in worldwide revenue, still often not as valued as traditional markets, leaving software developers with next to no means of acquiring funds. Providing market intelligence through our advertising marketplace, financial forecasts can be made based on median performance of games in the targeted genre/sector as well as references from former projects. Using MTC, gamers can also help choose which projects to fund. Software funding will also be easier, faster and more flexible thanks to smart contracts. It is both possible to reward funders with ingame currency or revenue shares. 25
MARCH / APRIL 2018
by ALANA VOLDMAN Communications, WUNDER
It is estimated that nearly 95% of digital artists face limited representation, patronage, and collectorship in their careers. This is particularly caused by major art institutions, who act as a bottleneck by withholding a democratic digital art market. As a result, the digital art market is a highly privatized affair and has visibility become a major issue for these artists, as well as patrons searching for these up-and-coming artists. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM BEING FACED? Digital art collection is a relatively new phenomenon, involving the ownership of an art form that is intangible. Unlike a sculpture or a painting, the digital artwork exists in space and is only viewable on screen. One of the biggest issues associated with digital art is its likeliness to be duplicated or pirated. Without any encryption or the proper rights in place, the value of a digital artwork can decrease dramatically, thus causing both patrons and artists to suffer. This is where Wunder steps in. There is the potential to open up an entirely new ecosystem outside the traditional art world. - Anders Petterson, Founder and Managing Director of ArtTactic Ltd. THE SOLUTION Wunder is the first blockchain-based decentralized museum at the intersection of philanthropy and art investments. Focused on the collection, preservation, and sustainability of digital and media
26
art, it was created to eliminate barriers in the art world. Wunder is eager to introduce the ‘Patron Protocol’, a system regulated by smart contracts which enables the creation of a liquid market in combination with reduced risk in art-as-investment opportunities. As trust and transparency are essential to Wunder’s initiative, it operates as a decentralized structure. This means that decisions are made autonomously throughout the community, ultimately reducing the risk of fraud. Angel patrons can purchase permanent access ownership rights for 1 of 8 exclusive angel patron copies, commissioned by Wunder and curated by world's most coveted curators. The proceeds from shared copies of digital artwork make it possible to invest in art that will create value beyond its inherent visual, intellectual, or emotional value. This makes it interesting for art-as-an-asset investing, especially for family offices, institutions, and alternative passion investment seekers. Beyond collectability and investment, Wunder also offers interior design opportunities in homes, hospitality,
and corporate environments — it is estimated that there is a global addressable consumer market worth more than USD $300 Billion.
Wunder is the first blockchain-based decentralized museum at the intersection of philanthropy and art investments. Focused on the collection, preservation, and sustainability of digital and media art, it was created to eliminate barriers in the art world.
WUC TOKEN Wunder envisions a world in which artists can gain instant momentum and traction for their work through a democratized patron supported ecology. This plays into Wunder’s goals for the ICO of the WUC token, the driver of the Wunder ecosystem. The WUC token on the Patron Protocol establishes strong networks and drives momentum, brand leveraging and long-lasting connections within the ecosystem. Wunder sees value in the community, which is why accelerated network effects play a major role in Wunder’s decision for launching the WUC ICO. This accelerated global reach also allows Wunder to introduce the biggest disruption at the core of the primary art market, making it possible for digital artists to achieve the regulated and liquid market they deserve. Be part of the conversation and learn more about WUNDER’s vision at its Telegram channel: https://t.me/joinchat/ H3d4RhCN2EmMfQ1IA19QcQ
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Enabling GDPR Compliant Trading of Personal Data on the Blockchain by DR.-ING. CHRISTIAN LANGE Founder and CEO, Opiria
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims primarily to give control back to consumers regarding their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business. This is mandatory for any company that stores or processes personal data about EU citizens, regardless whether they own a business in the EU. This suggests that almost every company worldwide would have to comply with this regulation. A PwC report shows that more than 90% of all companies in the US consider GDPR a top data protection priority! The following list provides an overview of the types of data that are protected by GDPR: • Basic identity information such as name, address and ID numbers • Web data such as location, IP address, cookie data and RFID tags • Health and genetic data • Biometric data • Racial or ethnic data • Political opinions • Sexual orientation PDATA CONCEPT FOR PERSONAL TRADING DATA ON THE BLOCKCHAIN PDATA’s primary strategy is to be decentralised, meaning the platform is not designed to hold data as an intermediary between the consumers pro-
viding data and the companies that request data, but just to mediate transactions between the two parties. PDATA achieves this concept by storing cleartext information and uses this solely to prove the existence of that data, as well as some information regarding the data. This enables the companies to filter for consumer profiles and datasets which are of interest to them. Where is the data stored? The original unencrypted data never leaves the storage of its owner; this is usually on the device where the data was derived (e.g. the user´s smartphone). The data becomes encrypted once it leaves the device. Encryption is based on asymmetric cryptography; this involves the use of a public and private key. For each dataset present in the system, the owner generates a unique public/private key pair and encrypts the data with the public key, while not giving away the corresponding private key. Data encrypted this way is stored on a P2P network of servers for easy accessibility. The reason as to why the data must be readily accessible is so that this data can be retrieved even if the device of the consumer is offline and to ensure that the storage used for personal data on consumer devices is kept at a minimum level. The critical fact here is that this data is entirely use-
less for anyone not holding the private key, so effectively the data is completely protected, and only its owner can use it, even though it resides on a server/network of servers. Figure 1 visualises the process of trading personal data on the PDATA platform. Consumers continuously submit their encrypted data to the platform where it is stored, as mentioned above. The data is then sent through the Opiria app or by connecting different services to the platform (like wearables, smart home devices and browser plugins). Let us use an example and put Figure 1 into perspective. When a need for specific data from consumers is needed, a company will send a data request on the PDATA platform (Step 1) for a specific consumer profile (like requesting data XYZ and offering N PDATA tokens in return as compensation). The platform will then match this request with the consumers who can provide this specific data (Step 2). An offer will then be sent to the target consumers (Step 3). This is how the proposal is made: Company A would like to access data XYZ from you and in turn, offers N PDATA tokens for it. Do you want to accept this offer? In case the consumer accepts (Step 4), the PDATA platform informs the smart contract in the blockchain of a pend27
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Figure 1: Trading personal data on the blockchain with the PDATA platform
ing transaction and prepares for the exchange of the specified data from the consumer to the company for the defined amount of PDATA tokens (Step 5). Next, the smart contract executes the transaction (Step 6). This means that the smart contract takes the PDATA tokens which the consumer will receive (6.1) into escrow. The consumer’s private dataset key is sent through the blockchain from the consumer (6.2) to the company (6.3). The private dataset key is encrypted with the company’s public key so that only the company has access to it. The PDATA tokens are then transferred to the consumer’s account (6.4), and the company receives the still encrypted dataset it has bought (6.4). Finally (Step 7) the company has both the dataset and the private dataset key which allows for the data to be decrypted and used. HOW PDATA FULFILS THE REQUIREMENTS OF GDPR The following will describe how the PDATA platform fulfils the GDPR requirements regarding privacy and protection of personal data. 1. Consent as lawful basis for processing Requirement: according to art. 6, personal data can only be processed on a legitimate basis, based on the consumer’s consent. 28
By entering the PDATA platform, consumers give their consent for storing their personal data in an encrypted format. The platform informs the consumers with regards to each request made by companies concerning their personal data. The consumers then have the choice of either giving their consent allowing the company to access their data or not. In the case of giving consent, the smart contract mediates the transaction in a secure and decentralised way.
misation is encryption, this renders the original data unintelligible, and the process cannot be reversed without access to the correct decryption key. The GDPR requires that the decryption key is kept separately from the pseudonymised data.
2. Security of processing and pseudonymisation Processing of personal data must ensure a high level of security (art. 32) including pseudonymisation, encryption, confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of processing systems and services.
Personal data will never leave its source (the consumer) in a non-encrypted format. Hence, it cannot be used by any third party, except with the consent of the user and it also must be governed by the PDATA smart contract.
This is fulfilled par excellence by the PDATA architecture and the smart contract. Personal data is being stored, encrypted, and only the consumer who is the owner of the data has the The given consent can be demonstrated key for its decryption. The data and the key through the PDATA smart contract -which are stored in different places; the data on the codifies every action of its users into a transac- PDATA platform and the key on the device of tion - and is fully traceable through the block- the data subject where the data was produced. chain. Cases in which consumers withdraw When it comes to an exchange, the smart contheir consent or decide to erase their data is tract securely mediates the transaction, ensurmanaged by the smart contract, which would ing that only the company to which the conterminate access to the specific data. sumer gave consent can decrypt the data.
The GDPR refers to pseudonymization as a process that transforms personal data in a way that resulting data cannot be attributed to a specific subject without the use of additional information. An example of pseudony-
Overall, the integrity, availability and resilience of the system are ensured by encrypted storage on a network of distributed servers based on peer-to-peer technology, blockchain based transactions, as well as the architecture of the PDATA platform.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
3. Right of access, transparency and processing purpose The right of access (art. 15) gives consumers the right to gain access to their personal data. Additionally, they have the right to know how, and by whom their personal data is being processed (art. 13, 14).
The consumer can erase his personal data by simply deleting it under his account on the PDATA platform. His private data keys will be destroyed. This implies a complete loss of all corresponding data. Additionally, the encrypted data will be deleted from the platform.
It also requires that privacy settings must be set at a high level by “default”.
A PwC report shows that more Consumer’s right to portability (art. than 90% of all companies in 20), meaning the right to receive the consumer’s data in a structured, the US considThe PDATA platform requests two things from commonly used format. This is fuler GDPR a top companies that want to buy data. Firstly, the filled by the PDATA platform’s pospurpose for which the data will be used and sec- sibility to locally show the consum- data protection ondly, the envisaged period of usage. The PDA- er all his personal data that is stored priority! Consumers can access their data at any time. The PDATA platform offers an interface where consumers can check and update their personal data.
TA platform informs the consumers regarding these two points when sending them offers. Further on, consumers will know exactly what data they share (because they must give consent to each data category) and with whom they share it. The smart contract ensures that only the data to which consumers gave consent to will be made available to the companies. 4. Right to rectification, to erasure and data portability The right to rectification (art. 16) gives consumers the possibility to update and complete their personal data. The right to be forgotten (art. 17) means that the consumers have the right to request their personal data to be deleted. The PDATA platform supports the right to rectification by allowing the consumer to view, change and update their personal data at any time.
on the platform. 5. Records of processing activities The guideline requests in art. 30 that all transactions on personal data shall be documented, including the purposes of the processing and the processed categories of personal data. This is provided by the blockchain, in which the PDATA smart contract creates a record of all transactions including the requested information. Additionally, the code of the PDATA smart contract is open, and all data processing steps on the platform are well documented. 6. Data protection by design and by default The principles stated in art. 25 request that data protection is “designed” into the development of business processes for products and services.
PDATA’s trading of personal data is based on the blockchain. Blockchains were built to function in a “trust-less” environment in which people can transact directly with one another without needing to trust any middleman in the ecosystem.
Based on this fundamental principle the PDATA platform´s architecture ensures the following: • The consumer owns the personal data and has full control over it. • Personal data never leaves the consumer in an unencrypted format, and only the consumer holds the key to decrypt it. • Personal data can only be transferred to a company with the consumer´s consent. In addition to that, the consumer knows precisely who is receiving the data and for what purpose. • The trading of personal data is fully transparent and traceable on the blockchain whereby the anonymity of the trading parties is ultimately protected. As described in this article, the PDATA platform is the enabler for a secure, lawfulness, fair and transparent trading of personal data; based on the blockchain which is fully compliant to the principles of the GDPR. 29
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Comparing ERC20, ERC223, and ERC777 Ethereum Token Standards Very few people know about the existence of other token standards besides the well-known ERC20 standard. It’s not all sunshine and roses for the ERC20 token standard. A security bug has caused the loss of millions of dollars in the ICO space. That’s by why ERC223 and ERC777 jumped in MICHIEL MULDERS to provide security and better transaction handling mechanisms. Let’s explore this. WHAT IS ERC20? Before we can dive deep into the issues with ERC20, let’s give a general overview of what ERC20 is. ERC itself stands for “Ethereum Request for Comment”. It is a document containing improvements for an existing token standard. In Computer Science terminology, this is called a Request for Comments (RFC). An Ethereum developer can submit an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that describes technical updates for an existing token standard. Once the proposal is accepted by a committee, it becomes an ERC token standard. WHAT DOES A STANDARD LIKE ERC20 REPRESENT? An Ethereum standard represents a set of functions developers can use when creating smart contract code with Solidity. To give you an idea of some of the available functions: • balanceOf(address_owner): Returns the balance for the account you gave. • transfer(address_to, uint256_value): Transfer a certain amount of tokens to another address. 30
• approve(address_spender, uint256_value): Give permission to a certain address to withdraw a specified amount of tokens from your account. • totalSupply(): Returns total token supply. ERC20 CRITICAL BUG Ethereum is a gold standard in the world of smart contracts and has the biggest capitalization among other platforms. Most token sales happen on the Ethereum platform, using the ERC20 token standard.
Reddit user u/Dexaran, creator of the ERC223 token standard, explains what happens if someone uses transfer() to send tokens to a smart contract: “For example, if you send tokens to a decentralized exchange contract, then the exchange contract will receive your tokens but it will not credit these tokens to your exchange token balance. Moreover, if the decentralized exchange contract does not implement an emergency token extraction function, then it’s impossible to get your tokens back in any case, resulting in a permanent loss of the tokens. Due to this bug, the Ethereum ecosystem has lost millions of dollars already.”
The ERC20 standard was proposed in 2015 and officially formalized in September 2017. However, there is no such thing as beginner’s luck. ERC20 conFor example (based on today’s prices tains some critical bugs as it is still a 3/7/2018): language in its infancy. • $730,000 worth of EOS stuck in contract ERC20 ASSUMES TWO WAYS • $520,000 worth of Qtum stuck in OF PERFORMING A TOKEN contract TRANSACTION: • $123,000 worth of STORJ stuck in 1. transfer(): As you have seen above, contract this function transfers a certain • 310,067 GNT are stuck in Golem amount of tokens to another wallet adcontract worth of $120,000 dress. • 14,506 1ST are stuck in FirstBlood 2. approve() + transferFrom(): With this contract worth of $4,600 combination, you can allow a smart contract to withdraw the specified WHY ARE WE STILL USING ERC20? amount of tokens from your balance. ERC20 is widely adopted in the ICO For example, you want to send 1 ETH space, even when knowing about this to a new ICO project you like. critical bug. Below are a few reasons as to why we are still using ERC20: But what if you use the transfer() function to send tokens to a smart contract 1. Token developers are not responsible by accident? The transaction will sucfor possible losses. Why would they ceed but this transaction will not be spend time and money investigatrecognized by the recipient contract. ing new standards like ERC223 and ERC777 when they can easily create
MARCH / APRIL 2018
a new smart contract for an ICO with little effort? In addition, these standards are new and not yet widely adopted which makes it hard to find proper documentation and examples. 2. The Ethereum Foundation is still promoting its ERC20 standard even though they are aware of the critical bug. It is not clear why the Ethereum Foundation is not moving forward to newer and better token standards as they have officially accepted these standards. 3. The main reason for token development is fund grabbing. Human nature I guess? 4. Dexaran told us the usage of a new token standard will lead to higher network effects. The Ethereum network knows about its scalERC20’s poor transaction handling problems. ability issues and this is a possible reason ERC777 is focused on adoption and better for not adopting any other standards. transaction handling. 5. Some token standards like ERC777 are not compatible with ERC20. This implicates that wallets and exchanges will have to change their code to be able to offer support for these new token standards. However, the ERC223 standard created by Dexaran is backward compatible with ERC20. No extra efforts are needed for storing an ERC223 token in your MyEtherWallet for example. ERC223 STANDARD Dexaran is one of the first developers who reported this bug and in response created the ERC223 standard. This improved standard solves the ERC20 critical bug. Whenever you try to send tokens to a smart contract with the transfer() function an error will be thrown and the transfer will be cancelled.
It’s not as simple as that. Dexaran modified the transfer() function to check whether the receiving address is a smart contract. If that’s the case, the transfer() function will cancel the transaction by triggering the tokenFallback() function in the smart contract. The main weakness here is the lack of a tokenFallback() function in the receiving smart contract. If the developers didn’t implement this, the token transfer will still fail. The tokenFallback() function is responsible for returning the sent funds. In brief, ERC223 focuses on security. Dexeran has created a modified transfer() function that can be used for both normal addresses as smart contracts. It will first try to call the tokenFallback() function on the receiver’s contract to see if there is one. If not, the transaction will fail, if there is one, the transaction succeeds. In addition, this new transfer() function holds a data field to allow smart contracts to perform more complex operations using the added transaction data. ERC777 STANDARD The ERC777 standard tries to offer more transaction handling mechanism to solve
ERC777 has come up with an excellent way to solve the issues related to the transfer() function. Every contract on the Ethereum network must be registered in a central smart contract registry. Everyone can use this registry to lookup if a certain address supports a certain set of functions. So, this would make it possible to first lookup if the receiver’s smart contract has a tokenFallback() function implemented. However, the ERC777 token standard inherits the ERC20 critical bug.
The ERC777 standard replaces the following functions: • transfer -> send • approve -> authorizeOperator • tokenFallback -> tokensReceived
Using this set of new functions guarantees that the functions of this standard will not cross and override with functions from earlier standards.
ERC777 SECURITY CONCERNS The authorizeOperator() function allows for someone to manage tokens on your behalf. According to Dexaran, this is a deprecated functionality and moreover, it hurts the network’s bandwidth as more transactions are required. The first transaction is the ‘authorizeOperator’ call, next you authorize the withdrawal. Why do we need two transactions to simply send some tokens to a smart contract?
Dexaran is one of the first developers who reported this bug and in response created the ERC223 standard. This improved standard solves the ERC20 critical bug. Whenever you try to send tokens to a smart contract with the transfer() function Besides that, the check for the tokensReceived() an error will be thrown and the transfer function is set to optional. It’s strange to give dewill be cancelled. velopers the possibility to make this check optional as this problem has already led to major losses.
The ERC777 standard tries to offer more transaction handling mechanism to solve ERC20’s poor transaction handling problems. ERC777 is focused on adoption and better transaction handling.
Many Reddit users are concerned about the use of a central registry. Firstly, all contracts need to be registered. Next, why should we trust this central registry? Some prefer a trust less registry as there is no need for having a central one. Other users would prefer if each contract simply stated what standards they accept. In this case, we can get rid of all checks for the tokenFallback() function. CONCLUSION Use the ERC20 standard if you want your users to lose money. We hope that the Ethereum community will move to better standards like ERC223 (security) or ERC777 (more transaction handling mechanisms & adoption). It’s not only the fault of developers. The Ethereum Foundation itself needs to take responsibility and promote other token standards. 31
MARCH / APRIL 2018
The Internet of Tokens
with ALEX LIGHTMAN
The Internet of Tokens is an ICO Crowd column that offers a broader longer-term view for both Blockchain industry professionals and for a wider audience interested in understanding the market, regulatory and other forces behind the prices that are making headlines, written by an award-winning and Amazon bestselling author.
NurseToken NurseToken uses Blockchain technology to help solve issues within the global nursing industry and help alleviate the unprecedented global nursing shortage. There is a worldwide shortage of nurses that has hit crisis levels. NurseToken tackles this problem head on with a decentralized credentialing system that increases nurse portability, enables hospitals to fill much needed positions on-demand, and decreases the barriers to getting nurses working where they are needed the most.
Putting credentialing on the blockchain would make the verification process immutable and trustIt’s crazy to think that it can take an av- ed, thus greaterage of 3 months and $1K per nurse ly reducing the to get nurses credentialed from start to time to onboard finish. Nurses who then want to work a nurse at a new at another hospital system must start hospital. all over and repeat the entire process. Putting credentialing on the blockchain would make the verification process immutable and trusted, thus greatly reducing the time to onboard a nurse at a new hospital. In addition, because of the shortage, hospitals are desperate to entice nurses to work for them, and it isn’t uncom-
32
mon for hospitals to offer huge signon bonuses and pay for education to attract skilled nurses. Through the NurseToken system, hospitals can offer NurseTokens to nurses to incentivize nurses to work crucial shifts based on the satisfaction of certain metrics that are made part of a smart contract. In a survey given to nurses in Atlanta, 92% of nurses agreed that a NurseToken bonus was a good incentive that they would ask for. The nursing shortage is global, and nurses from all over the world are traveling across borders. Twelve thousand Filipino nurses traveled to Saudi Arabia to fill nursing jobs there in recent years, and nurses from India are steadily flowing to the UK to fill empty jobs there. Why not put credentialing on the blockchain and empower nurses across the globe to get approved to work instantly and get them to the locations where they are most needed? Nurses are one of the largest workforces in the world, and make up a profession that has affected us all deeply in many ways at some time in our lives. Let’s solve the nursing shortage crisis through blockchain.
NET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET
OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS
• INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERN
NET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF
NYNJA Alongside a few thousand other industry leaders gathered in San Juan this week, a new and noteworthy project made an impressive introduction to the blockchain community during Restart Week in Puerto Rico. NYNJA is a new global communications platform that integrates messaging features for consumer and enterprise users with an on-demand digital services marketplace powered by its own NYNJACoin token. The company's three co-founders used the blockchain confab as an opportunity to commemorate its alpha milestone by participating in a series of blockchain events in San Juan, Puerto Rico. From its Open Unity talk at d10e, to private contributor meetings during Blockchain Unbound and a preview of the alpha version of its app at CoinAgenda, NYNJA was everywhere at Restart Week in Puerto Rico. The company also hosted a VIP reception at the Condado Vanderbilt, that included an appearance by actor and producer Wesley Snipes. Though not an official representative of NYNJA, his interest in blockchain technology and his entrepreneurial and entertainment endeavours are said to align neatly with those of NYNJA's.
lions of times a day to exchange ideas and engage in commerce across borders, but current systems are laden with friction and barriers to commerce and communication and stuck operating through traditional intermediaries such as banks and telecom providers." He went on to say "our experienced global technical team is building upon distributed ledger technology to unify commerce, communications, and governance in a single platform. With blockchain as our foundation, we believe we can help individuals and organizations operate in what we refer to as 'Open Unity,' an emerging socio-economic reality where considerations of security, privacy, agency, efficiency, and reliability are not trade-offs but rather co-exist as integral elements of the system."
extend NYNJA's functionality into their own platforms via an open API and SDK. NYNJA will also create an accelerator program to encourage developer interest in the platform through consulting, technical assistance and funding. In addition to comprehensive communication services, NYNJA incorporates a scheduled messaging feature and automatic translation across 98 languages. NYNJA also lets users make free Internet calls, make conference calls and transfer calls to any phone. The architecture enables blockchain features such as secure IPFS integration for file storage and features a user-friendly, intuitive interface facilitated by NYNJA's patent-pending concentric wheel navigation system which enables quick and easy navigation of the app using only one hand regardless of screen size.
The NYNJA marketplace allows users to buy and sell goods and services globally using NYNJACoin, the ERC20 standard token of NYNJA’s integrated finan- "We're here in Puerto Rico, a hotbed for crypto innovation, to demoncial ecosystem.
The NYNJA marketplace allows users to buy and sell goods and services globally using NYNJACoin, the ERC20 standard token of NYNJA's integrated financial ecosystem. With NYNJACoin, users can also access exclusive groups and pay for proprietary in-group content such as licensed digital media assets or timed consultations with experts.
NYNJA is the first global communications platform to unify a suite of voice, text and visual messaging services with robust business management and e-commerce features, all powered by the NYNJACoin financial ecosystem and cryptocurrency. Under development since Q1 2017, NYNJA will soon be available in beta version.
Users can also earn NYNJACoin for viewing ads and sharing branded material like sticker-packs or coupons. Each account can be segmented according to users' social, consumer and business lives, and comes with a secure Ethereum wallet enabling users to transact freely within the platform for fast international payment transfers without the need for costly external payment providers.
As NYNJA co-founder and chief strategist Marshall Taplits explained, "people and organizations around the world come together bil-
Completely scalable and open, the NYNJA platform will enable developers to build value-add applications within NYNJA as well as
strate the vitality of NYNJA through special presentations of our alpha version at Blockchain Unbound, d10e, and CoinAgenda Caribbean," said NYNJA co-founder and president Alejandro Gramont. "NYNJA is truly set apart from other messaging services not only because it is fully functional for both personal and business use, but because it incorporates a blockchain-enabled, fully integrated, global marketplace and payments system to verify commercial transactions and provide secure communications." At launch, NYNJA will be available on Android, iOS, and Web with the native development of Mac, Linux and Windows versions to follow. For more information about NYNJA Group Limited, please visit https://www.nynja.biz. To learn more about the NYNJACoin ICO at https://nynjacoinusa.com. 33
TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS •
MARCH / APRIL 2018
INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTERNET OF TOKENS • INTE
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Emmares EMA Emmares EMA is a new technology that is designed to improve email marketing. Specifically, it will help by improving the way that email content works. by IVAN JELIĆ Emmares.io Ambassador for Croatia & Canada
HOW DOES EMMARES WORK? The company connects high quality email content with interested recipients. Encouraging better quality content, lower frequency, and fair content evaluation. They promise that with the antispam, there will be more services that use the API to filter out any spam emails and the people who send them. With the new services, you’ll be able to hit more targeted customers who are relevant to you. It will open the flood gates for opportunity by allowing you to reach more people who want to see your content. When you sign up to the Emmares System, email marketers get a chance to reach more targeted customers who are relevant to their content. They all invest into a reward pool that is the base for all rewards giving in the form of tokens to the email recipients who evaluate content. They are always rewarded in tokens for receiving the various marketing emails and giving honest evaluations. For each assessment, the person giving
34
the evaluation is given a token from the email sender who had their email evaluated. EVERYONE ENDS UP BENEFITING FROM THE PROCESS Email marketers or publishers – they receive an honest and unique platform to have their content evaluated so they improve. It will cause them to spend more time creating high quality content. You get rewarded via the reviews and leads you get from a targeted audience in exchange for the tokens from the rewards pool. Basically, you get to build a reputation as a good email marketer, gain access to highly targeted leads and
improve the engagement of your emails. Evaluators - will be able to get tokens in exchange for evaluating the emails. They will also be able to subscribe to emails they find interesting and get to exchange tokens with marketers or use them for their own reward pools. CONCLUSION The system is designed to cut out spam and improve email marketing. If you’re looking for a solid start-up with a real team, then Emmares is ideal for you. And special announcement, David Drake is the new member of Emmares.io team.
A hub for Blockchain and Distributed Ledger events, information and networking Connecting, Educating, Accelerating Change www.unblockedevents.com
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Energy Access and Financial Inclusion Using BLS Tokens OFF GRID ENERGY ACCESS • According to the World Energy Outlook, 1.2 billion people don’t have access to electricity while many others don’t have access to reliable electricity. • Farmers already pay for lighting and by hazardous fuels. Bitlumens brings ICO CROWD cost competitive decentralized energy systems through off grid solar devices which not only displace kerosene usage with efficient Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), but also reduce the dangerous side effects produced by combustion.
technologies in places where they already pay for fuels. Kerosene and biomass powered wick lamps are far less efficient than solar powered LED lanterns. Kerosene wick lamps provide 1 to 6 lumens per square meter. LED has higher efficiency - measured in lumens per watts- quality and quantity of lighting when compared to kerosene lamps. The use of LED lanterns entails reductions on greenhouse emissions and operating costs.
Bitlumens brings cost competitive decentralized energy systems through off grid solar devices which not only displace Usually only a small portion of rural inkerosene usage habitants have access to electrification. with efficient Most of these communities depend on BITLUMENS SOLUTION Light Emitting inefficient and hazardous fuels, such • BitLumens decentralizas biomass, kerosene, plastic, battery es the power market in de- Diodes (LEDs), but also reduce torches and candles. Fuels and its comveloping countries where bustion process contribute to the rethere is no power grid, the dangerous lease of greenhouse gases (GHG) into leveraging on Internet side effects prothe atmosphere. Among those fuels, of Things (IoT) and the duced by comkerosene is a source of CO2 and black Blockchain. carbon. Replacing all kerosene lamps • Bitlumens provides wom- bustion. worldwide with solar lights could serve as short-term action to reduce global warming while providing more efficient
36
en farmers with off grid solar devices equipped with sensors which they
amortize in installments using BLS tokens. • The hardware consists of a solar panel, a battery and efficient appliances such as LED lights and solar pumps to extract underground water. Initially, our Solar Kit uses a 15/20/50W solar panel and 3000 mAh, 3.3 Volt Lithium Ferro-Phosphate (LFP) Battery. The latter, lasts for approximately 5 hours. Our systems come with different appliances, i.e. two USB charging ports; integrated dimmable LED lights; LED Backlit LCD TV; Radio and TV. The solar kit is connected to a smart meter and to the user’s cell phone. The company integrates air quality sensors and programmable logic controllers (PLC), allowing the measurement of particulate matter and current. The company uses edge computing to connect
MARCH / APRIL 2018
all sensors within a 10 Km range. Bitlumens Bitlumens collects data from each user, will provide ownership of the technology once for instance, Know your Customer (KYC), all installments have been paid, with the optransactional data and their power tion to receive a larger system after the last consumption. This allows Bitlumens to payment has been made. Bitlumens collects data from each user, for instance, Know your provide their unbanked customers with Customer (KYC), transactional data and their a credit score which in turn facilitates power consumption. This allows Bitlumens to financial inclusion. provide their unbanked customers with a credit score which in turn facilitates financial inclusion. TOKEN SPECIFICATION AND ICO RULES • BLS token is an ERC20 utility token, and Once the company has gathered data from aims to provide social and environmental each village, it can place a mini grid based on transformation, where all proceeds will supthe energy consumption and power generation port the development of the software and in each location. Rural villagers will be able to MVPs currently placed in Guatemala. pay for their energy consumption using BLS • The utility tokens are initially distributed in tokens. BLS tokens can also be used to send a presale (pre-ICO) which starts on April 26 a remittance to cover the electricity and waand lasts until April 30 at midnight CET. ter bills of their family members. The project relies on agents to install the hardware to the A maximum of 10 million BLS tokens are ofhomes of the women farmers. Agents are also fered during the 72-hour pre ICO at a price of responsible to collect KYC information of our 1000 BLS /ETH. Only payments in ETH are customers. Women farmers pay the hardware accepted. Bitlumens assists parties preferring directly to our agents. Agents will input these to participate in the pre ICO in fiat currency. amount in our software and buy tokens from If all 10 million BLS were sold in the pre ICO the secondary market which in turn will serve about USD 9 million would be raised (assumto run the hardware. If one of our users fail to ing a ETH/USD rate of 900). Tokens that were make one of the installments the machines are not allocated in the pre ICO will be added to automatically locked. the ICO pool. Our agents have internet, allowing them to trade BLS tokens needed for each household to run their solar home system (SHS). Women farmers are notified by text message when the solar device is running out of credit. Bitlumens chooses women farmers because data shows they are more reliable than men when paying back a microcredit, reducing the default risk of the project.
The duration of the ICO is 28 days. It starts on May 1 at midnight CET and is divided into 4 periods. On the first day of the ICO BLS tokens are offered at a price of 700 BLS /ETH. Between the 2nd and the 7th day, the price is 650 BLS/ETH and between the 8th and the 14th day the price increases to 600 BLS /ETH. Finally, during the last 14 days of the ICO the price is 550 BLS/ETH.
The ICO will terminate early, if an equivalent USD 25 million is raised. This amount corresponds to the projected funding and investment needs for a period of 3 years. The total supply of tokens is capped to 50,000,000, with the smallest available denomination being 0.0001. The code for the smart contract is open source and placed in Github. ROADMAP Currently, Bitlumens follows these milestones in Latin America: • The deployment of 100 off grid solar devices by the end of April 2018 in Guatemala. We are already training the agents who are the distributors of the off grid solar devices. • Adding the software to run the hardware using BLS tokens by the end of May. • The deployment of IoT to track carbon and black carbon mitigation. • After June we will expand the number of SHS in operational locations. CEO/FOUNDER Veronica Garcia was an investment consultant at Credit Suisse and UBS for Latin American Asset Managers. After finishing her graduate studies at the ETH in Zurich she joined IBM Research Lab where she focused on exergoeconomic analysis of solar plants. She also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, IADB and Castalia. Her research focused on renewable technologies and on quantifying investment needs to reach the country targets for renewable power generation. In 2017 she founded BitLumens which brings solar power and water to rural areas in developing countries using Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology. 37
MARCH / APRIL 2018
BRIEF SUMMARY Endor is looking to solve the current problem with data and market analytics, which is the lack of availability to everyday users due to the high cost of compiling and analysing this data.
“The Endor platform aims to be the “Google for predictive analytics.”
bles the integration of new data sources, as well as new prediction engines – creating a double network effect.
“A truly democratized prediction protocol must allow data-providers to free- All data contributed to the Endor netly contribute data while allowing techwork is sovereign and can be flagged as nology experts to contribute AI and public, private or broken into both, which by Prediction engines, all of this – to alwill appeal to both individual users and ICO CROWD Let’s reinvent the wheel; Endor is reinventing predictive analytics by democ- low the end-users business’ alike. ratizing access to Artificial Intellito easily consume Token Symbol - EDR gence for data analysis - making it acpredictions that As new players Website - https://www.endor.com/ cessible, trust less, censorship-resistare based on these bring in new data Whitepaper - https://upant and useful for everybody. This will data sources, and sources and preloads-ssl.webflow.com/59f19167fbe achieved through the Endor protocol prepared for them diction engines, fa06300013b3a69/5a83529b0c1eand will be the world’s first automatby these engines.” the cost of predic7b000115cf5f_Endor_Coin_WP.pdf ed, self-served and predictive platform. tion will decrease. Token type - ERC20 Anyone using the platform can provide To transcend For users wantHardcap – 45million RFPs (request for predictions). current limitaing prediction Price per EDR -. USD$0.267 tions, a new Scidata only, this usBonus structure – 0-15% Endor’s goal is to provide AI analytics ence - Social Physage will result in Countries excluded – US and and predictions that are affordable for ics was developed increased cost of Canada everyone by utilising Social Physics data at MIT by Endor. prediction. ICO date - TBA and only providing users with the percoins founders, sonalised component they require. En- Dr. Yaniv AltshurlTOKEN USE Token distribution dor is taking away the stress of coding, er and Prof. Alex CASE - 40% Reserves for development, data cleaning and the need to be surPentland. Through EDR tokens creoperations, and ecosystem rounded by a team of professionals to a set of matheate the base of the - 20% Team and Advisors get accurate market predictions. matical equations Endor protocol - 20% Token Private Sale / Crowdthat consistently economy and will Sale Ultimately, the Endor protocol enables emerge in behavbe used to pow- 20% Strategic partners end-users to obtain superior predicioural data sourcer transactions on tions at a much lower cost than in the es, the Social Physthe platform. Total $225million existing landscape. ics theory enables the automatic transformation of any be- The EDR tokens: OPERATING CONCEPT havioural data source to a set of behav- Serve as a key or software licence Endor’s operating concept is to create ioural clusters (Link to Social Physics) - Data providers pay a fee for the anala democratic Artificial and a Predictive ysis of data Analytic Platform that gives everyone The protocol is fully decentralized, pro- - Providers of prediction engines rethe ability to understand, predict and viding complete accountability for the ceive payment for these analysis’ influence consumer behaviour quickly. prediction results. This prevents maAchieved through the predictive analnipulation or bias during these predicWhy tokenise this? ysis of Social Physics - combined with tions. The decentralized and open naEDR is being tokenised for the democthe decentralisation and security of the ture of the protocol prevents censorratization of predictive science for IndiBlockchain. ship by any singular authority. It enaviduals and Business’. 38
MARCH / APRIL 2018
1. It will enable an ecosystem that provides accurate and affordable predictions. The execution will be decentralised and will optimize the predictions automatically, allowing any prediction to be executed in a truly decentralised, trustless manner. 2. For decentralised execution – Endor.coin protocol selects the most relevant behavioural clusters for each prediction, regardless of the analytics engine or data sources involved in creating these clusters. It optimizes the predictions automatically, allowing any prediction to be executed in a decentralised, trustless manner. 3. Monetization: Any token holder will be able to send a “request for prediction” and get accurate results. 4. Accountability and authentication – every bit of data will be recorded transparently on the Blockchain maintaining integrity. How will these tokens provide value to the investor? As the EDR token is usable at day one of the token launch, users will have access to the pre-defined predictions of the existing engine. From this point, you will be able to request predictions in addition to the pre-defined ones.
The platform is powered by MIT’s Social Physics engine, providing up to 10x higher accuracy for trend prediction. It focuses on the automatic modelling of short-medium range behavioural patterns, detecting these signals before they become observable by any other available technology. This already working engine will be directly plugged into the network upon launch, making it usable immediately. Endor will also fund and facilitate the development of new prediction engines to create an ever-growing ecosystem of predictive engines. Each added engine will boost platform performance and add to the unbiased nature of the results. The engine was established around the novel science of Social Physics, disrupting the way Data Science is being perceived today. This project is built off the back of 3 years of MIT research and an additional 3 years of development by researchers and engineers and what they’ve created is the world’s first fully-automatic “Data Science as a Service” engine.
The protocol supports the integration of data through on-boarding API calls and the later reToken holders and speculators are incentivized leases of Endor protocol will include support to buy and hold EDR tokens, as expected inin a “do-it-yourself” API for advanced users. creased usage will result in increased cost for pre- Users will be able to on board data and create diction, driving the token value up and rewardnew types of predictions. If these predictions ing users who get tokens early on. become used, the developer will be rewarded with EDR tokens. FUNDAMENTALS Endor is an ERC20 token built on the EthereData is stored and computed off chain in a disum Blockchain. tributed hash-table that is accessible through the
blockchain, which stores the references to the data but not the data itself. The data is encrypted on the client’s side prior to transfer. Once the results are available after computation, it is broadcasted through the Blockchain for end users. The solution Endor propose is one that: - Is self-reliant - Decentralised - Plans to generate a strong network effect - Becomes cheaper as the network grows - Un-bias and trustless - Scalable - Targeted to high-end customers but can be utilised by anyone - Has the scope for large-scale adoption PARTNERS Endor has already worked with some large corporations including MasterCard, Walmart, and Coca-Cola. In a recent joint study with Coca-Cola, the ability of Social Physics was able to provide accurate predictions on a wide range of consumer behaviours. Using point of sale transactions Endors engine detected nearly 20 million “correlated anomalies” and used the system to find lookalike users who share similar behaviour. This data was very beneficial to Coca-Cola. A second example of Endors possible reach was in a recent test for a customer, 15 million tweets meta-data was provided to the Endor engine as raw-data for analysis. In addition, the customer revealed the identity of 50 Twitter accounts known to be of ISIS activists that were contained within this data. The task took only 24 minutes on a single laptop and discov39
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Roadmap
ered another 74 accounts that were hidden in the data– Israeli Intelligence Corps.
Pan, Thomas Hardjono, Dr. Nuria Oliver, Igor Gonta and Guy Zyskind.
ial coders and enterprises, thus democratizing Machine Learning.
Having worked already with large Fortune 500 companies and governments shows the team’s ability to network and build relationships with large business. All these connections can provide inroads and partnerships going forward.
Experience – Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Israeli Bitcoin Association, Omni, MIT, Vodaphone, Microsoft, CEO of Enigma and many more.
It will be automatic, trustless, decentralized, fully scalable and the predictions will be fully transparent to the end user.
TEAM CEO, Co-founder –Dr. Altshurler IBM/ developed a novel optimization technique used to boost the performance of supercomputers Co-founder - Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland Director of MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship program Director of MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs Leader at world economic forum Member of advisory boards Google, AT&T, Nissan, UN Secretary-General Winner of DARPA Network challenge Forbes “7 most powerful data scientists in the world” CPO, Co-founder - Stav Grinshpon SAP AT & T Expert in cyber defence
Endor is looking to solve the current problem with data and market analytics, which is the lack of availability to everyday users due to the high cost of compiling and analysing this data.
Vice Chairman - David Shrier Serial entrepreneur Created Oxford Blockchain Strategy Created Oxford Fintech programs
PROS - Cheaper as data can be isolated as requested - Predictions are stored indefinitely - First mover advantage - Fully decentralised - A strong team with proven success and partnerships - The target market is high-end business, banks, retailers etc - AI will have a big role in coming years - Learning machine - EDR token will be usable on day 1 of token launch - If the platform is successful, increased usage will give value to tokens
Chief Alchemist – Prof. Mihaela Ulieru Deep learning research – Dr. Goren Gordon Algorithm expert – Dr. Arie Matsliah Machine learning – Shahar Somin-Gavrielov Software engineer – Lior Regev Customer service – Edo Eisenberg Operations manager – Liat Yitzhaki
CONCERNS - Initially, new RFPs (request for predictions) would start with a relatively high cost - Initial scaling could be expensive for pioneer users - High value at $225million - The token metrics
ADVISORS Prof. Alexander Lipton, Ron Gross, Dr. Daniel Tunkelang, Prof. Michael Bronstein, Dr. Wei
CONCLUSION With time Endor plans to become the premier development platform for entrepreneur-
COO, Co-founder- Inbal Tirosh Global product and strategy leader Hewlett Packard Better Place MBA from Columbia University and Ben Gurion University BA from Ben Gurion
40
Their target scope is large, and if adopted by some of these major markets it will create a great demand for such data and analytics. This matched with Endors plans to build more engines and allow advanced users to create new types of predictions could see this turn into a bubbling eco-system of business, developers, and consumers with a fee/reward-based model. The team is very strong with a proven track record and specialists with major business and government connections. I do have concerns regarding their token metrics- The team is taking 20% of tokens, which yes - given regular circumstances would be normal for an ICO. But Endors total value equates to $225million. The team and advisors are securing themselves a payday of $45million in tokens excluding potential appreciating value. They do have a minimum vesting period of two years which is standard; and given that I see this as a serious product with a team that will deliver, I have no doubt they will work as hard as possible to see Endor succeed. There are another 20% of total tokens going to strategic investors. I hope these are to wellplaced partnerships. Given the use case of Endor, a strategic investment would get the ball running if these partnerships are with large corporations, institutions or governments. To summarise, nothing is perfect. Endor is damn close though. I look forward to seeing the team and community progress 2018-2019. Operating concept – Pass Token use case – Pass Fundamentals – Pass Partners – Pass Team – Pass Advisors – Pass Demo of product: http://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/ierq28cnlp
NexBank Paying in cash will soon come to an end. High banking charges will come to an end. Government intervention to individual’s finances will come to an end. The world is changing fast and more choices are given to today’s consumers. People are finding new ways to interact with money and sadly, the traditional banking system is not offering the innovation. Since cryptocurrencies first introduction 10 years ago, it has gained rising acceptance globally. Studies show that there are 60 million unique users in 2016, and this figure is expected to reach 200 million in 2024. Nexbank.io has come forward with solutions that will help resolve problems faced by the fiat banking system, while meeting the demands of cryptocurrency users. Anyone can easily create a Nexbank account with any smartphone. No ID document is required to open a basic wallet and no capital monitoring or control. NexBank utilizes smart contracts hence it is transparent, low cost, secure and super-fast. It aims to place all crypto banking services under one roof; allowing anyone or any organization to take part in savings, payments, credit, insurance and loans. The six main products that NexBank aims to offer are: 1. Exchange – Users will be able to exchange a popular cryptocurrency into other cryptocurrencies. 2. Debit card – NexBank allows payment in cryptocurrencies to retailers/merchants that possess an NFC payment service such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay or Google Pay. Users could convert their cryptocurrencies into fiat money and vice versa. 3. P2P payments - NexBank banking platform can be used to create a more direct payment flow that connects payers and payees, across borders or domestically, without intermediaries, at ultra-low fees and almost instant speed. 4. P2P loan- users can lend to and borrow from one another. Payment terms and rates are clearly defined, agreed on, and fast to conclude. This is done in a transparent manner as secured smart contracts are deployed. 5. P2P insurance – NexBank provides a risk sharing network where peers can pool their premiums together to insure against risks. 6. Borderless movement of USD/EURO – Moving money from country to country will not be impossible with NexBank’s digital currency, that is 1:1 pegged with USD/EURO/RMB. Why NexBank is different from other banking blockchain systems?
A. Privacy-enhanced – As we know, in a blockchain system, all transaction records are publicly available. NexBank ensures all transactions are anonymous as it deploys a ring signature algorithm, the same currently used by Monero Blockchain. B. Censorship Proof – NexBank has inbuilt support for OBSF4, obfuscation protocol that hides the nature of the traffic that goes through it. By incorporating OBFS4, it is possible to use NexBank even in countries where governments attempt to restrict or block blockchain access, like China or Iran. C. Encrypted Chat between users – NexBank takes the privacy of users very seriously. All chats or conversations are encrypted so no one can track or review any code. Symmetric encryption and Asymmetric encryption are utilized to ensure this objective is met. D. Hack proof – Blockchain stores information across a number of computers. Because information is scattered over a vast number of locations, this renders the network decentralised and hence makes hacking NexBank near impossible. To further enhance this feature, NexBank adopts 4 tiers of security; biometric scan, User track Check (UTC) System, Server-Side Validation, Intrusion Defence System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). E. Faster transactions – Neo Protocol can process each transaction in seconds, as compared to Ethereum transactions that take minutes. By 2020, the Neo protocol speed will be increased to less than 1 second per transaction. F. App platform – anyone with any smartphone (Android, IOS) can download NexBank app and start using it anytime anywhere 24/7. NexBank is UNLIKE other banking/payment blockchains out there! NexBank has the unique vision to make crypto banking easy, social and practical amongst cryptocurrency users and fiat currency users. Our goal is to empower each individual and business by creating a decentralised and inclusive financial system. We are firm believers that NexBank will take the banking blockchain by storm. The world is ready for NexBank, and now we need to make sure NexBank is ready for the world.
Private Banking for Crypto Wealth
MARCH / APRIL 2018
What Can Next Generation Blockchains Like
Hedera’s Hashgraph Do Best?
For many people, when they hear about blockchain or distributed ledgers, their response is less about how these technologies work and more about “so what can this technology do for me”? Although it is a valid question, it doesn’t mean that we say, “I’m going to be using the TCP/IP protocol today” but we are all very happy to go online and order books from Amazon’s website, so, most probably the future users of blockchains and distributed ledgers by will probably never know they are using HELEN DISNEY them at all. Behind the scenes, however, within the industry, the variety of different blockchains and distributed systems on the market is expanding. The consensus mechanisms now being used can broadly be grouped into 3 different categories: Proof of Work Blockchains (Bitcoin, Ethereum etc.), Leader-based Systems (Hyperledger Fabric, R3 Corda, Quorum etc.), and Economy-based (Casper, EOS etc.), also known as Proof of Stake. They also include so-called “next generation” distributed ledgers or (just to confuse matters) ‘blockless blockchains’ like Hedera Hashgraph and IOTA, which are based on something known as a directed acyclic graph or DAG. 42
At its formal launch in New York City this month, Hedera Hashgraph’s co-founders announced a set of performance metrics that make the platform particularly suited to certain use cases – and which appear to give the technology advantages over other distributed systems currently in the marketplace. As CEO Mance Harmon explained to me in a recent interview conducted at a blockchain conference in Bangkok that “there are certain markets that spring to mind where fairness of transaction ordering is critical – we can think of the need to match bids and asks in financial services, or online gaming where what happens in order of time, - such as which party wins a fight in a multiplayer online battle arena game is central”. In fact, one of the platform’s first projects to be announced – and which is now expanding – was with CULedger, a US-based credit union consortium which selected the hashgraph tech-
Hedera Hashgraph’s co-founders announced a set of performance metrics that make the platform particularly suited to certain use cases – and which appear to give the technology advantages over other distributed systems currently in the marketplace.
nology as a key component of its permission, distributed, shared ledger platform. CULedger will now also use the Hedera hashgraph public ledger to enable cross-border payments across the globe. Gaming needs high throughput and low latency as well as fairness, so it is also well-suited to being built on Hedera’s hashgraph platform. Online auctions provide an interesting use case too. Imagine that hashgraph could be used in the creation of a distributed version of eBay, for example? Many people have proposed the use of existing blockchains for identity applications. However, there are several issues with the technology that are still being resolved. Hedera’s Founder, Leemon Baird, thinks his technology has an alternative approach. Since hashgraph’s private ledger works on an asynchronous process, unlike other blockchains like Bitcoin which rely on proofof-work, it could provide a
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Hedera Hashgraph
ledger of citizen information – for example, a government ‘blockchain ID’ that would be cheaper and faster to access. This kind of identification could be used to ensure free and fair voting, and reduce both real and perceived voter fraud, by providing an immutable ledger of who voted and when.
But uses cases are not limited to the public sector. They also extend to other walks of life, including the creative industries. At the SXSW festival this week, an unlikely DLT advocate in the form of Matt Sorum - former member of bands Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver – will be discussing his project, Artbit, a live concert hosting platform and payment solution for artists and creators, built on top of hashgraph.
This could lead to the healthOther aspects of government and public sercare industry’s vices may provide further use cases for disfirst dedicated tributed ledgers. Healthcare is one area being disrupted by the technology in a variety careers platform of ways – especially by reducing the enormous which would amounts of paperwork and bureaucracy creHis aim is to cut out the middleman handle the onated by healthcare system data. Making sure and secure direct payment for artthat medical professionals’ paperwork is com- ists via a cryptocurrency wallet. Bud- going credentialpliant with healthcare regulations creates huge ding artists will be able to post their ing of doctors, amounts of administrative work for hospitals music and host live performances on nurses and other as well as a hassle for doctors and nurses who the site, where fans can watch and healthcare projust want to get on with their jobs. engage with them. Artbit says it will fessionals. also use some form of gamification Advances in distributed ledger technology can eliminate this paperwork while automating compliance reporting. Intiva Health’s platform ensures that licensed medical professionals can store and control access to credentialing documents in one place. Intiva recently said that it is building the next generation of its technology on top of the hashgraph distributed ledger technology. This could lead to the healthcare industry's first dedicated careers platform which would handle the ongoing credentialing of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals. The hashgraph platform was apparently chosen because it was viewed as being the only one that could meet the stringent security requirements for personal data required by the healthcare sector.
centralized AI mesh.” What does that mean? It merely combines decentralized computing with access to the Internet of Things everywhere always in real time that one sink in. The Hedera hashgraph platform has gained a large community and followers already, but for those still starting to learn about blockchain, the concept of so-called next-generation protocols is still a new one. Follow up questions remain about the real-world testing of the platform and close watchers are waiting for more details about the launch of the Hedera cryptocurrency and further information about the consortium mechanism by which the platform will be governed.
and augmented reality. There will be a cryptocurrency involved, but it is not providing further details of the ICO just yet.
CEO Mance Harmon described the new Hedera logo this week as the H-bar. If the technology can indeed rise to the challenges of speedArtbit is aimed at all sorts of creators, not just ing up and scaling distributed ledgers to meet musicians. People like Shepard Fairey, the art- the requirements of financial institutions, govist perhaps best known for his HOPE posternments, and other global companies which er depicting Barack Obama, who is another fa- rely on high throughput to make their systems mous adviser to the project. work, it seems like the possibilities of “raising the H-bar” could be significant. The future And just to finish by blowing your mind, what of distributed consensus mechanisms just got happens when next-generation blockchains even more interesting. combine or converge with artificial intelliHelen Disney is CEO of Unblocked Events and an gence? In New York, a company called MZ advisory board member of the Distributed Ledger (formerly Machine Zone) announced it is usFoundation, which recently received a grant from ing the Hedera. Readers may need to pause the Hedera Hashgraph Council to fund its first to let the implications of hashgraph platform project, The Free and Fair Voting Initiative. in its Satori project, to create the “world’s de-
UNBLOCKEDEVENTS.COM
43
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Constellation Labs INTRODUCTION Let’s face it. The current landscape of the crypto space is no longer walking hand in hand with Satoshi’s original plan. Yes, evolution cannot be stopped but what about the principals behind Satoshi’s plan, decentralisation and in the hands by ICO CROWD of many? Blockchains are redesigning the functionality of our economy and society, very fast. The realisation of a decentralised, sharing economy has been the end goal for quite some time and now adoption is knocking at our door. There are two major issues we face right now that both bring me back to my opening paragraph. 1. Are the current system consensuses really decentralised (POW/POS)? 2. Is current blockchain framework scalable for mass adoption? ENTER CONSTELLATION LABS Constellation Labs aim to compete in the next generation of network, post what we know as blockchain now – the DAG era. Constellation is a fault-resistant, horizontally scalable, distributed operating system that runs smart contracts as microservices, all built utilizing JVM for its programming language and DAG architecture. Constellation presents a reformulation of cryptographically secure consensus into a modern server-less architecture and sets out to solve the scalability and “centralisation” of current blockchains. This design technique allows unlimited scalability and increased throughput for the network. The reformulation of consensus into server-less architecture aims 44
to solve the scalability problem to allow mainstream applications to adopt blockchain technology. Constellations meme economy has the potential to make transactional fees obsolete. I must confess; this is one of the most intriguing projects I have analysed, and this is going to be a long read. I am very excited for the future of this project... To see how the community will receive Constellation Labs and to follow the teams progress as they work towards their goal but for now, we will focus on the project and wrap it all up in the conclusion. Token Symbol - CST Website https://constellationlabs.io/ Whitepaper - https://github.com/ Constellation-Labs/Whitepaper/blob/ master/constellation_whitepaper_ v0.1.pdf Token type – ERC20 will be swapped at the main-net launch Hardcap – US $33,250,000 ICO Price – No ICO Presale Price – Not publicly released Listing marketcap – TBA Bonus structure – Max 25% ICO date – TBA Token distribution – 20% founders, 28.5% foundation, 24.5% private sale, 25% validator rewards and 2% community FUNDAMENTALS Constellation labs will be born as an ERC20 token, built on the Ethereum blockchain. With testnet scheduled for June 2018 followed by mainnet in early 2019 – Constellation will then move to their own chain following a token swap. The network is built on top of DAG (directed acyclic graph) architecture. The
team use a party analogy to describe DAG: In traditional blockchains, the host provides the food and drinks for the party. When the guests arrive, the amount of resources can only accommodate so many people, the portions are small, and everything eventually runs out and the party ends. Think of DAG as a party where everyone brings food and drinks. With every added guest (node), the more resources the party must keep going. Constellation looks to solve the bottlenecking of current blockchains by implementing horizontally scalable architecture they’ve named, “extended trust chain”, with a communication procedure called “gossip protocol”, approaching smart contracts with a microservice architecture that will auto-scale as necessary to meet network demand. Using this architecture, Constellation estimates a throughput of TPS (transactions per second) using Hylochain to be 4,000-4,800 TPS per 1,200 nodes. Another of Constellations approach for scalability is to compose the networks blockchain as a hierarchy of subnets, each performing their own consensus. Each sub-net forms a block hash and sends it to the parent net. WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN? Extended trust chain – there are multiple node types, each with their own role in the network to asynchronously govern different aspects of the protocol. Gossip protocol – allows for large networks to communicate total network state at scale. Each member of the network keeps track of its neighbours and when it receives new messages, it spreads that message to all its neighbours in turn.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
VICE Media Group – Account Manager Endemol UK Limited – Branded Content Exec
Roadmap
Emily Arth – VP of Operations Ryan David Williams – Legal Counsel Mathias Goldman – Treasury Management
The realisation of a decentralised, sharing economy has been the end goal for quite some time and now adoption is knocking at our door.
Nodes – there are different node processes that perform consensus on transactions. Stars -> Star clusters -> Galaxies - > Black holes Hylochain – the consensus architecture of Constellation that builds upon the extended trust chain and is built following a Byzantine consensus model for fault tolerance. It takes the resulting hash block of a previous round and adds it as a transaction to the pool. These transactions are signed by the initiator and counterparty then broadcasted. Delegates perform consensus and are chosen based on their reputation. Once this block is filled with the previous round and new transactions, it gets hashed, broadcasted again and added to the next block. Proof-of-meme – the delegate selection model for Constellation. It is distributed and incorporates a nodes history, behaviour and overall reputation within the system to decide the probability of being selected for consensus. It is a trust-based system - good actors get rewarded, bad actors loose reputation. As meme reputation begins to hold value, it replaces the need for a transaction fee. Microservices might potentially look to reputable memes for service hosting, which would be more profitable than performing consensus. Reputation will become the mechanism for earning, preventing latency and avoiding attacks.
- Plans to have zero transaction fees - Uses the industry standard programming language - DAG blockchain architecture TOKEN USE CASE The Constellation Token is used as a utility token on the platform. It grants access to the network for developers and users alike, as well as rewarding validators for their role in consensus. PARTNERS “Some partnerships solidified with many more in the works. They will be announced in accordance with our announcement schedule – which is not public” – From the team TEAM CEO, Co-founder – Brendan Playford The Bureau – Founder Aurora Energy Network – Founder Drone Deploy – Head of Demand Generation CTO, Co-founder - Wyatt Meldman-Floch SETI Institute - NASA Ames Intern Arrived.us – Lead Backend Engineer Zignal – Platform Engineer Rally Health – Data Engineer
COO, Co-founder – Benjamin Jorgensen Audible Ventures – Consultant JVM – Constellation Labs are looking to attract GiftConnect – General Manager: Partnerships/ big business. The use of JVM, specifically Scala as Strategy the programming language for their platform de- Klick Push – Co-Founder sign will allow applications to be built using Java, which is the industry standard in the big data Head of Community, Co-founder – community. They want the build to be as adaptAltif Brown able and easy as “assembling Lego where each The Bureau - Partner piece is an existing microservice”. POWr – Global Community Manager Rinse – Community Experience Analyst WHAT MAKES CONSTELLATION WANELO – Global Community and Fraud ManDIFFERENT? ager - It is horizontally and highly scalable - Faster TPS Head of Marketing – Zac Russell - Reputation-based consensus Red Bull Media House – Advertising Specialist
Engineers Preston Parris – Engineer | Distributed systems Dr Ratul Saha – Statistical Model Checking Advisors Shawna Alpdemir – Apple, VINJA, YouTube, Matt McGraw – Dispatch Labs, The Bureau, Here Collective Jake Vartanian – Native Project, Cryptodex, Blockchain Partners Cate Rung – Uber, North America Power PROS - Aggressive team and plan - Horizontally scalable - Faster TPS - Looking to disrupt and decentralise consensus models - As people join the network, the network grows - Targeting large business and industry - DAG network CONCERNS - The team has already had another ICO in 2017, Rakugo - Not at first mover advantage - Advantageous project - No active GitHub - No tokenomics yet CONCLUSION Constellation Labs is a very exciting and advantageous project and I look forward to supporting and following this team as they undertake this giant task. I will be honest, from a non-developer background myself, at first, I was annoyed regarding how technically written the WP was, but this forced me out of my comfort zone into a new theory I had not explored and for that I am thankful. I would imagine Wyatt was let loose on this to do his thing, with his NASA background and the confidence that shines out of him I am very relaxed in my investment knowing he’s head of Engineering. The team has a great balance and after watching their AMAs and interviews, I really get the feeling that they trust each other’s strengths and patch up each other’s weaknesses. The team for me is very important and I’m very impressed with how confluent Brendan, Benjamin, and Wyatt are together. A DAG Network using Smart Contracts as Microservices… Hell yeah, I want to see where this project goes and see how bright this Constellation might actually burn. Operating concept – Pass Token use case – Pass Fundamentals – Pass Partners – TBA Team – Pass Advisors – Medium 45
MARCH / APRIL 2018
TrustVerse is an AI-Blockchain wealth management platform. Wealth management for traditional (global equity) and virtual asset(cryptocurrency). It helps to secure and protect wealth & asset in two different stages of life, life and afterlife. TrustVerse consists of platform and protocols. The Smart contract for legacy, estate, planning and wills based on wealth management. Moreover, it is a protocol which supports personalized, adjusted and tailored for the individual, family offices, insurance companies and by enterprises. JEOUNG KIOOK
Co-Founder & CEO at TrustVerse Pte Ltd
It works for every individual on board. It can serve them as long-term wealth transfer protection. There are severe cases in which one pass away and no one can retrieve the private keys nor crypto asset. Moreover, since the personal or individual assets are not protected by legal structure and security, it is not secured. Therefore, TrustVerse helps to manage the wealth transfer and secure precious assets. It also works for family office as wealth management platform with trustees, and it works for insurance companies and large corporations as data service to provide the most optimized way to provide tax and legal documents. TVS is AI-based (Deep Neural Reinforcement Machine Learning) platform. It expands financial status with
46
TrustVerse helps to manage the wealth transfer and secure precious assets.
sophisticated algorithms. Also, it delivers asset management services throughout a lifecycle based on its highly secured blockchain platform. It enables gift, inheritance, funeral services, etc. to be managed in the secured and reliable blockchain-based system. The engine developed by our outstanding financial and techni-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
cal engineers provides stable portfolio (low risk-medium return) services, and our neural network AI offers and manages portfolio products to maintain stable returns. There is no charge for users who use those services. Also, all data on user identity and user’s financial behaviors are blockchain encrypted. *Portfolio Service: Financial products which are groupings of different assets designed to maintain low risk-medium return regardless of market volatility. TRUSTVERSE NEW ECO-SYSTEM OF PORTFOLIO INTELLIGENCE, SMART CONTRACT, AND LIFE & WEALTH MANAGEMENT SERVICE The platform aims to provide low risk-medium return investment portfolio. With application of artificial intelligence (deep neural learning) algorithms and various trained big data models (Equity, crypto, sentiment, macro, fundamental, market live feed), it recommends a portfolio of various class products. Moreover, assets (AI validated) are rebalanced automatically (product composition & ratio adjustment) according to market volatility. Portfolio class includes Global/local equities and Cryptocurrency. TrustVerse provide the following services: 1) Financial service (Portfolio Intelligence Service powered by multi-data driven deep learned portfolio models and smart contract VM clustering-machine learned smart contract validation) 2) Lifecycle service (Bestowal, Inheritance, and afterlife through ID decentralization and Private Family Smart Contract) 3) Avatar service (AI deep learning based on personal messenger, behavior learned, and able to identify characters) 4) Contributed data (unstructured/structured) are deep learned and categorized as a meaningful set of data to generate new service development Pros of TrustVerse: A. Stabilization of real asset vs. cryptocurrency B. Increase credibility in cryptocurrency community C. Accepted as alternative asset and value as a currency D. A Healthy ecosystem for financial service provider and consumers LEGACY AND INHERITANCE SERVICES TrustVerse’ legacy and inheritance services are based on DAPP, which use Private Family Smart Contract. This protects the privacy of families. Family Smart Contract requires all family members’ agreement to be built, and only then, it is saved in a blockchain, which insulates risk of forgery. This Smart Contract, established by every family member’s agreement, ensures assets to be handed over to surviving family members with no disruption in case of sudden death of deceased. Gift and inheritance services (conditional gifting, testamentary trust, scheduled inheritance of trust-
It delivers asset management services throughout a lifecycle based on its highly secured blockchain platform. It enables gift, inheritance, funeral services, etc. to be managed in the secured and reliable blockchain-based system.
ed asset) charge no fee and are delivered as set forth by the Smart Contract. Plus, if a user included data of cryptocurrencies other than TVS TOKEN to his/her Smart Contract, the crypto-currencies are securely inherited to his/ her family or inheritors designated by the deceased, even in case of a sudden death. Confirmation of a death of Private Family Smart Contract’s contracted person is made in the two methods described below: • To submit the death certificate to the company and obtain confirmation. • To confirm the death by an agreement from all surviving family members. ECO-SYSTEM WITH EXISTING FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS TrustVerse provides solutions which are of use for asset management firms, securities firms, and the banking sector. Total Finance AI would both improve and replace researchers, backtesting, and other validations, and designs which are done by today’s research teams and statistics team. AI has a potential to perform what was previously done by research teams or statistics teams. Even though some in the local market wish to design global portfolio, it is all but impossible because it requires the build-up of specialized market research team and statistics team. Recruiting as well as funding are all tall orders. That’s why worldclass hedge fund, quant, or AI based asset
management firms such as Renaissance Technologies, Vanguard, Blackrock, Blackstone, etc. only are capable of because they are financially well positioned with a massive fund to input. THE TEAM: Co-founders and key team members are from global financial, tech companies and international organization such as Cisco Systems, IBM, Samsung, Goldman Sachs, CLSA and the OECD. They hold M.A., MBA, Ph.D., degrees in management and finance from the top U.S. schools, which include University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Cornell University and Columbia University. Advisors of TrustVerse are from current senior leadership from Alibaba Group, Google, and Microsoft HQ. TRUSTVERSE PTE. LTD. Is a Singapore based ICT solution and service company. The office in Singapore is the HQ, and the office in Seoul functions as R&D center for AI and blockchain. We will soon expand to Hong Kong and Silicon Valley to strengthen the algorithm and regional market development. Market coverage includes Asia-Pacific. TrustVerse will issue and distribute its first White-paper through our landing site for ICO(www.trustverse.io) on the 2nd week of April. Private sales until the end of April, PreSales start from 1st of May, public sales on Mid-April. 47
MARCH / APRIL 2018
WOOLF:
Building the First Blockchain University
by DR JOSHUA BROGGI Founder and Director, University of Oxford
48
Woolf is a borderless academic community designed to address employment problems in higher education, inequalities of student access, and a frequent lack of personal teaching from professors. Woolf uses the most recent technologies to reinvent the way traditional education is delivered and makes widely available the oldest form of human learning: individual apprenticeships in thinking. Woolf has been developed with the conviction that a personal education will be increasingly valuable as artificial intelligence and robotics gain a greater share of the current jobs.
fer innovative research-driven teaching. Unlike qualified medical doctors or lawyers, who can establish their own practice, most academics must regularly apply to their universities to keep their jobs.
The team at Woolf is responding to these problems by helping students and teachers to connect again. For students, Woolf will be the Uber of degree courses; for teachers, Woolf will be the Airbnb of course hosting. But for both parties, the use of blockchain technology with smart contracts will provide the contractual stability needed to comWoolf will be the first blockchain-pow- plete a full course of study. It will enered university with its own native toable institutions to reduce bureaucraken. It will use a decentralised blockcy, lower tuition costs, secure teaching chain network to support a democratsalaries, and increase the time that stuic, non-profit, federation of teaching in- dents interact with professors. The restitutions on the collegiate model of sult will be simple and powerful: stuself-organisation. The design has been dents and teachers will be brought todeveloped by an independent group of gether, no matter where they are in the experienced academics who will form world. the first college of this collegiate university. The Woolf education will, at its The Woolf platform will allow qualified core, consist of personal tutorials that members of the academic community develop original thinking. to form colleges of experts without regard to borders. The platform will aim Higher education is hindered by two to provide a turnkey experience for acawidespread problems: student debt and demics forming new colleges and offeradjunct teaching. Mounting costs often ing courses anywhere in the world. In prevent bright students from accessturn, students will be able to find pering the best education. Insecure emsonal instruction from an expert in a ployment increasingly characterises ac- variety of subjects or make an applicaademic work, preventing many from tion to study for a full degree. leading a fulfilling career. Today, most academics must ask for permission to As a blockchain-powered university, practice their own profession, or to ofWoolf is designed to disrupt the exist-
ing model of higher education and provide new opportunities for both students and academics in a democratic and non-profit community. However, Woolf will seek to partner with existing universities, helping them to implement aspects of the platform, reduce their administrative costs, and free up resources for their core educational mission. The first college on the Woolf network, Ambrose, will be formed by an independent group of experienced academics – mostly with a background from the University of Oxford – and colleagues from Cambridge will be invited to form the second college. Procedures for academic accreditation will be initiated in a jurisdiction of good reputation by the Autumn of 2018. In the meantime, teaching will become progressively available to interested students. The network is being launched by Woolf Development Ltd, which will be responsible for building the Woolf University platform. It is led by its Director, Dr. Joshua Broggi, and a team of highly talented academics and blockchain experts. They are supported by the legal advice of Joey Garcia, a leader in formulating government regulation for blockchains, and by the council of Isolas LLP, the oldest law firm in Gibraltar. More information can be found on the https://woolf.universityWoolf.University website.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Quant Overledger
The Blockchain Operating System
For the first time, we can honour the original vision of the Internet to create an open, interoperable and trusted network for people, machines and data to operate on, but without the original flaw of having to know everyone within the network.
We can trust the network without the need to know and trust each other
This heterogeneity combined with lack of interoperability can endanger the mass-adoption of blockchains into our techno- and socio-economIn recent years, blockchain technoloic systems and as such, limiting the gy has evolved into a legitimate, revolu- true potential of blockchain technoltionary technological disruptor. While ogy to enhance our lives and for the by betterment of society. Blockchain ICO CROWD some may consider it an early technology which is in the “fermentation & ex- technology has indeed the potenperimentation� phase, characterised by tial to enable true human-to-human technological uncertainty. We are witand machine-to-machine trust. Renessing the rise of different models of placing and simplifying complex sysblockchains designed with unique func- tems of society, we’ve been forced to tions set to address specific business build, which help us trust other parneeds. What we have seen during the ties every time we transact something last months is a tremendous progress of value. with industry and institutions making towards a wide range of use cases From a practical point of view, this driving forward blockchain infrastruclack of Interoperability severely limture development and platform adopits the potential of blockchains and tion. By a conservative estimate, there existing decentralised applications are at least a few hundred such efforts (DApps) which are single-ledger dewhich are beyond POC and pilots, ready pendent: DApps running on blockto move into production. The challenge, chain A cannot run on blockchain B however, is that all these use cases are and vice versa. Currently, when an being carried out across different platEnterprise or developers have selectforms each taking a dramatically differ- ed which blockchain solution they ent approach to coding language, DB would like to adopt, from that point structure, consensus mechanism, govonwards, they are locked into that ernance and privacy. choice without an easy way to change 49
MARCH / APRIL 2018
the underlying blockchain. Enterprises and developers are restricted and as such:
Overledger. The patent-pending Overledger OS will not only enable blockchain interoperability but connect existing networks and the Internet to 2 Lack the freedom or flexibility to blockchain. Overledger is set to remove easily migrate to another technology barriers to mass-adoption and to adwhen required dress the current limitations of block2 Have limited resilience and instead chain technology: face increased risk and exposure by being dependant on a single tech2 Overledger is the only platform to nology facilitate internet-scale development 2 Forced to manage cost lock-in by not and deployment of decentralised, being able to manage consensus fees multi-chain applications (MApps) which are set with no option to reand Treaty Contracts (multi-chain mediate smart contracts). 2 Overledger’s unique platform and The fact that DApps can run only on suite of solutions will connect the one blockchain network or one protoInternet to blockchain as outlined col at-a-time, also results in business in the Business Paper launched this and legal consequences. This means week-(http://files.quant.network/ that any legal consequence of a busifiles.quant.network/Quant_Overness logic implemented and executed ledger_Business_Paper_v0.1.pdf). on any given network (or protocol) will be effective only within the community The team have taken the learnings and of peers taking part in that network. In inspiration from the technology which a simplified example, this means that underpins the Internet and applied it the change of property of a digitised as- to blockchain technology. set X from user A to user B in the Bitcoin network will not be effective nor “We see the adoption of this technolorecognised by the users of other netgy, akin to TCP/IP as the catalyst that works like e.g. Ripple. This example can accelerated the growth and possibilities be extended to a plethora of other busi- of the internet we all know and love toness cases. day. We’ve engineered the technology for Enterprise and Developers to be: With those problems in mind, Quant seamless to implement; comply with inNetwork is developing a new blockternal and external security and regulachain operating system (OS) called tory requirements and require minimal 50
change to existing systems and networks to access the networks of blockchains through Overledger,” explained Gilbert Verdian, Quant Network CEO and founder of the Blockchain ISO Standard TC307.
We can trust the network without Quant Network process focuses on three goals: the need to know 1. Developing an interface to connect and trust each the world’s networks to multiple blockchains. other.
2. Bridging existing networks (e.g. financial services) to new blockchains. 3. Developing a new blockchain OS with a protocol and a platform to allow developers to easily create next-generation, multi-chain applications. Where Overledger differs from existing DLT Interoperability platforms is that it de-couples the message layer from the transactional layer of the DLT technology in question, providing: 2 Flexibility - The option and ability to move to different ledgers if the underlying DLT becomes obsolete or transaction fees are too high, ensuring availability and saving you money. This flexibility ensures that Overledger is future proof. 2 Backwards Compatibility - The ability for you to connect your legacy data sources or external APIs to DLT technologies to take advantage of the key aspects of the technology
MARCH / APRIL 2018
2 Simplicity - Easy to use development interfaces to produce both cross ledger and standard applications reducing time to market and democratising development. Drawing on the team’s extensive direct experience working in Enterprise and Government, they have built this technology that can be easily adopted whilst providing the enormous benefits of scalability, resilience and flexibility when working with blockchains. “We’re excited about the possibilities that Overledger will bring to Developers, Enterprises and users. Combining the ability to create truly interoperable applications, foundational internet technologies as well as the ability to integrate the Overledger SDK into legacy systems, networks or external API’s provides a new platform to truly innovate and create the decentralised Internet of Trust,” said Verdian. The Quant Network team recently announced their highly anticipated Token Generation Event (TGE) to commence on 2 April 2018 and the Pre-TGE starting on the 19th March for pre-registered parties (https://tge.quant.network – released on the 19th). Quant Network last week unveiled their highly anticipated Business Paper that outlines their plan for developing their cutting-edge blockchain OS that will address major limitations of single-ledger technology including lack of system interoperability and the problem of decentralised applications being single-ledger dependent. “Overledger will enable seamless communication across multiple blockchains as well as the recognition of transactions across blockchains,” said Verdian. “By doing this, we are de-risking the adoption of blockchains for Enterprises and (for the first time) giving them the choice to use multiple chains at the same time which provides better resilience and reduces costs by managing the fees associated with the usage of blockchains.” “We’ve engineered the technology for Enterprise and Developers to be seamless to implement, comply with internal and external security and regulatory requirements,” explained CTO Colin Paterson. “This means there will be minimal change to existing systems and networks to access legacy network and the networks of many current and future blockchains through Overledger.” “By finally effectively, addressing the lack of interoperability, Overledg-
er will enable mass-adoption of blockchain technology while unlocking its true potential. The potential impact of what we’re creating with our community - is infinite. It signals a new era of increased security, privacy, trust and efficiency of data that will not only empower businesses but also society in general,” said Paterson. “What is fantastic about Overledger is the originality of its reference model for how distributed applications can communicate with each other over different blockchain protocols and networks without the need to resort on external gateways or connectors,” said Chief Strategist, Paolo Tasca. The Quant Network team have also applied their unique and creative approach in the design of their Quant Token (QNT). The Quant Token is a core component of both Quant Network and Overledger OS. It is designed to ensure flexibility and control for the future evolution of the project.
Quant Network is developing a new blockchain The tokens will be dual-purpose. Firstly, it will be used for the token offering operating sysprimarily for raising capital. However, tem (OS) called secondly and more importantly, it will Overledger. The be used as an access token which will be critical for developers and end-users to patent-pending connect and access the Quant network. Overledger OS will not only enThe token keys will be embedded withable blockchain in specific applications that will use the Quant network to authenticate the interoperability but connect exuser and authorise the use of aspects of the network and underlying blockisting networks chains. The token will also be key in the and the Internet development on multi-chain applicato blockchain. tions (MApps). “Developers also benefit by creating next-generation multi-chain applications (MApps), using our open source collaborative approach and tools. All of this was simply not possible to do before. Our technology is laying the foundations to build the Internet of Trust, a new overlay on top of the existing Internet which provides human-to-human and machine-to-machine trust, allowing unknown parties to seamlessly trust each other by trusting the underlying technology, without having to know each other,” said Tasca. The Business Paper outlines how the Quant Network team (composed of internationally recognised industry experts) is developing the Overledger blockchain OS which includes both the protocols and platform that will allow developers to easily create the next-generation, multi-chain applications (MApps) and connect the world’s networks to multiple blockchains.
Since the Quant Network founders first shared their vision in November 2017 following their patent filing, they have been overwhelmed by the support and enthusiasm by developers and investors alike, who recognise the sophisticated approach that the team are taking to bring their vision life and in recognition of the expertise of the founders. Their complementary expertise and in-depth knowledge of this space is unparalleled: 2 CEO - Gilbert Verdian has been working in Cybersecurity for 20 years at CIO/CTO/CISO level in Financial Services, Governments, Consulting and Industry. He’s also the founder of the Blockchain ISO Standard TC307 where 40 countries are working together to develop the Standard. 2 Chief Strategist – Dr. Paolo Tasca heads up the world’s largest blockchain centre, The Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London and is a Digital Economist with an economics background in central banks. 2 CTO - Colin Paterson is a technology innovator with a 20-year background in Information and Cybersecurity. Following the capital raising efforts, the team is staging its approach in two phases with several subsequent milestones, including: Phase 1: 2 Develop a new blockchain OS with a protocol and a platform to allow developers to easily create next-generation, multi-chain applications (MApps). 2 Create SaaS and Enterprise products on top of Quant. The team is starting this process by focusing on two goals: 1 Developing an interface to connect the world’s networks to multiple blockchains 1 Bridging existing legacy networks (e.g. in financial services) to new blockchains Phase 2: 2 Launch of the Quant App Store for MApps. 2 Connect the Internet directly to Blockchain. Further details of the roadmap are detailed in their Business Paper as well as the Overledger White Paper. To learn more about Quant visit www.quant.network or join our Telegram community http://telegram. quant.network. 51
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Orvium
Open and Transparent Science Powered by Blockchain
by MANUEL MARTIN MARQUEZ Big Data Project Leader at CERN, Blockchain Expert, and orvium.io founder
52
THE HIDDEN PROBLEM OF SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING Contrary to what most people think, the scientific publishing industry is one of the most important and profitable in the world. The global market is estimated at $25 billion and profit margins have been reported to exceed those of comThe remarkable achievements of science have been made possible thanks panies such as Google, Amto many factors. One of the most imazon, and Apple. To accomplish this, publishers have portant is the definition of a very well structured and highly collaborative pro- foisted the cost and effort of publication onto the comcess where researchers are usually inmunity that they serve. spired by existing research to generate new ideas and improve the results previously obtained by other researchers. First, governments fund most of the research and Therefore, how scientists disseminate once research results are ready for publication pubtheir results and discoveries plays an essential role in the science cycle. How- lishers can acquire them for ever, despite its importance, knowledge free. Second, the bulk of dissemination has been seriously com- the editorial burden is done promised by the current scientific pub- by scientists on a voluntary basis, their salaries are lishing industry. Science has a major impact on society and it is the force behind some of the most revolutionary changes in human history, drastically improving the way we live, communicate and work. It even extends the length and enhances the quality of life itself, thanks to technological and medical innovations in areas like cancer treatments, depression, heart disease, and many more.
Orvium uses blockchain technologies and decentralized storage to create a fully public, traceable, and trustworthy record of the publication process.
normally paid by the government and research institutes. Finally, publishers sell the product back to government-funded institutions and university libraries, who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Scientific publishers have established a publication model that damages the research community and, by extension, science in general. One of the problems is the high publication costs that authors have to face, in some cases up to 3,000–5,000 USD per publication, excluding researchers with fewer resources. In addition, authors are forced to grant copyright to publishers to exploit their content commercially without any retribution.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
On top of that, fees that universities and pub- 1. Custom copyright and licenses: Authors lic institutions have to pay for scientific jourand research institutions have full control nal subscriptions have also increased alarmover copyrights and licenses of their publiingly. For example, during the last 20 years, cations and work. the subscription fees of scientific journals have increased 7% on average every year in the 2. Zero-delay publication: In a matter of secUSA. In some cases, universities are forced to onds, establishes an independent, decenreduce the number of subscriptions because tralized and immutable time-stamped they cannot afford them. proof of existence, authorship, and ownership in the blockchain. There are more issues, such as long, opaque and oftentimes biased publication process; 3. Truly recognized researchers’ work and its lack of rewards and recognition for reviewers; impact: Scientists are publically rewarded and a proliferation of low-quality journals, just and gain reputation both acting as author to mention a few of them. and reviewers. INTRODUCING ORVIUM: SCIENCE MEETS 4. Support for research data: It is possible BLOCKCHAIN to share research data and code with the Orvium is the first open source and decentralwhole community or a particular team, inized framework for managing scholarly cluding unpublished data to move the republications’ life cycles and the associated search forward data. Our goal is to help the scientific community share its publications, eliminate exist- 5. Decentralized journals: Provides a global ing inefficiencies and biases of the publication platform for the creation and maintenance market and improve the quality and effectiveof scientific journals management at a low ness of the publication life cycle. The ultimate cost. objective is to become the leading publication platform for the research community while re- 6. Science patronage: Any person can contribturning the benefits of science to society. ute to research programs and challenge the scientific community to solve specific probOrvium uses blockchain technologies and delems. centralized storage to create a fully public, traceable, and trustworthy record of the pub7. Social platform: The entire community can lication process. Every relevant action in the participate and feedback the work of othpublishing process such as paper submiser researchers boosting collaboration and sion and peer reviews will be registered in the knowledge dissemination. blockchain and accessible to anyone, making science more transparent, universal and open A FOREFRONT TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM than ever before. And the changes don’t stop In addition to blockchain and smart conthere. Orvium brings additional benefits to tracts, Orvium embraces big data analytics scientific publishing: and machine learning technologies to build
a smart digital infrastructure for scientific publication management. Integrating heterogeneous data sources such as transactions in the blockchain, existing research literature and connections between researchers and publications, Orvium will be able to calculate the impact factor in an optimal way, identify citation and peer review rings, automatically classify papers by field based on their content, or identify emerging trends and topics in specific research communities. THE ORVIUM TOKEN Orvium’s model is built on the Orvium token (ORV), a new digital token created specifically for the platform. Across the different phases of a manuscript’s and journals life cycle, actions such as manuscript submission, peer review, payments for copyright licenses, research data sharing, journal management, etc., will generate exchanges of ORV between institutions, authors, reviewers, journal owners, readers, and any social actor involved. This decentralization unlocks the full potential of a new fair, transparent and competitive market controlled by the entire community and free of biased, oligopolies and hidden interests. More information about Orvium is available in the whitepaper at https://orvium.io. During the following weeks, we will announce more details about the project including the Token Generation Event and the release of the MVP. Join the Orvium community by subscribing to our website and following us on the official social media channels. 53
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Could Blockchain Dawn a New Era in Tourism? Our era is characterised by the dependence of new technologies, which facilitate us in our daily lives and promise us more security in our day-today transactions. Our team consists of four members, the founder Alexandros Athanasopoulos, the advisor Marinos Kokkinos, the programmer Mobile-Development for Android and iOS Angelos Staboulis and Athanasios Vlastaras. We are four simple and everyday users of the crypby ICO CROWD tocurrencies that aim to directly apply the hundred cryptocurrencies so that their cycle of economy can function in everyday life without intermediaries and is decentralised with the simple support of the social network. Everything will depend on our crypto-communities and their direct involvement, in creating a smart and simple application of our mobile phones (both Android and IOS). The need to create this, arises from the complexity of the existing ways we are going to innovate. The beginning is only half of it, so we created our first collaboration with qrMitos, which we used as a pioneer54
ing idea for its coloured QR reader. It is a genius way of introducing advertising into our campaign to reach funding. It is the second company in the world that managed to create a QR code to appear inside a coloured picture.
Tourism Council, in a report on the course of Tourism in Greece in the coming years.
The report of the World Travel and Tourism Council is going to give "duration" to the steadily rising course of Tourism since We believe in equal oppor2013. Accordingly, the Astunities for everyone and sociation of Greek Tourthe tourism sector is promist Enterprises, on the "road ising. We want to start with map" in 2021, has pointed Greece with the urgency and out that with the necessary the possibility of social net- With Blockchain investments by the private works, where each one of us sector (in the 4 and 5-star providing a sim- hotels of the order of 7 bilwill choose the provision of plified, secure a hotel provider. We focus lion euros) and by the pubon the immediate and with- payment platlic for the upgrading of the out intermediary informatourist infrastructure, the form for airtion and bidding. lines, hotels, and aim is for the revenues to reach 20 billion and the arrental portals, We based our research on riving tourists to reach 35 the technology findings that showed that million. 22 billion Euros is estimated could transform to be the direct contribution the future of Pending the official results from the tourism indusfrom the Bank of Greece, digital identity the Greek Ministry of Tourtry to the Greek economy in the next decade, reaching management. ism reports that last year 9.6% of GDP in 2027. Simithe arrivals of foreign tourlarly, the total contribution of tourism ists, including cruise visitors, reached is expected to increase by 4.6 %, EUR 30 million, while tourist receipts by 7 billion, equivalent to 23.8% of GDP market operators will amount to apin the same year. The findings shown proximately EUR 14.5 billion. This is below belongs to the World Travel & indicative that last year only, at Ath-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
ens airport, passenger traffic from abroad increased by 12% compared to 2016 (+1.5 million more travellers). We would like to investigate exactly how many coins have been created and which of them have a positive effect on our community, and which of the coins are not needed. This is the main reason we do not consider creating an ICO, because we want to give everybody their right in the crypto community to have a usable case on the existing cryptocurrencies. The blockchain is a shared public ledger underlying the Bitcoin network. Transactions are chained together in blocks and then encrypted, which makes it difficult for hackers to access sensitive information. These chains create a permanent record of payments, providing buyers and sellers with a heap of benefits. As blockchains exist forever and can’t be removed, they provide an accurate, longterm record of a person’s transaction history,
as well as other data such as credentials and reputation. Blockchain technology is used by some of the world’s biggest brands. Two parties can exchange payment information without counterparty risk, reduce the transaction fees often associated with payment transfer, and process transactions 24 hours a day. In a vacation rental context, blockchain allows guests to check the authenticity of a host and vice versa. Unlike social media platforms, where negative information can be deleted, blockchain maintains a permanent record of a guest or host’s identity, managing risk and facilitating safety. While no vacation rental company has implemented the technology just yet, we expect big changes in the near future. We aim to create an application which works alongside the principles of personal wallets and multi wallets such like Coinomi etc. We
believe in the integrity of Blockchain and the benefits that it provides us with. With Blockchain providing a simplified, secure payment platform for airlines, hotels, and rental portals, the technology could transform the future of digital identity management. In order to achieve our goal, we require to raise sufficient funds to aid us in the construction of the venture. We want to make anonymous fundraising using the five bestknown cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Xrp, Litecoin, BitcoinCash. We will use these funds made to create the initial capitalization of the project. This initial capital will then be retuned back to the investors once the project is completed. Please visit our Linkedin pages or email us at eto17@protonmail.com for any further information. We ask any investors to follow the next QR codes that will be available on our twitter accounts. They will include the legal requirements and terms and conditions.
55
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Can Blockchain Save Us From the AI Apocalypse? How Blockchain Technology Can Ensure Trustworthy Software Bots
Each week brings another announcement on the progress of artificial intelligence. The rapid pace of growth has created significant concerns about our future relationship with AI. Will AI replace us? How can we control rogue AI-powered bots, or prevent them in the first place? Interestingly, blockchain may provide the answers. Properly utilized, blockchain software can empower AI agents to extend their capabilities while ensuring safety and performance. In this article we look at how blockchain can solve some of these problems, and look by at one project, BotChain, gaining tracROB MAY tion in this area.
ples of AI failures or systems gone awry — most are benign (an Amazon Echo laughing eerily without prompting), while some are more troubling (Tesla's autopilot feature can't recognize a parked fire truck). Along with its promise, AI also presents three major challenges we must address in the near-term future. The first is AI failure — how do we know when an AI fails? And what can we do when it does the wrong thing? The second is AI spoofing — as AIs proliferate, how do we identify them? The third is AI compliance — how do we control AIs when they might go rogue or cause some sorts of mischief?
WHY DOES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FAIL? While traditional software is bound by rules, artificial intelligence follows probabilistic models. The differI am generally an optimist about AI’s ence between the two is significant path, but I do recognize the prevailing concerns about artificial intelligence. In — and gives AI (and deep learning in the past year, we have seen many exam- particular) its major advantage, while
56
also presenting a key problem. Probabilities are typically correct, but they are not absolutes. They can be wrong, and being wrong can have serious consequences. With AI, you trade the safety and rigidity of “IF/THEN” for the benefits that come with “IF this, THEN there’s a 92 percent chance that THIS is the next step.” The fact that AIs deal in probabilities rather than strict rules means they are much more flexible than rules-based software. However, the trade-off is that, occasionally, these AIs aren't just wrong — they're unpredictably wrong. Reinforcement learning, which is the process of re-training the AI after every action to update what it has learned, means that the "92 percent" in the example above represents more than just an eight percent chance the AI will do something unexpected. That "92 percent" figure can and will change over time as the AI agent learns what circumstances and data inputs merit a dif-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
ferent response. And that learning curve can be bumpy at times. Reinforcement learning has had several spectacular, public failures. Higher-profile examples include a simulation training model that learned how to break a game it was designed to play, rather than win the game; and, more nefariously, Microsoft’s Tay Bot which when launched on Twitter to “learn� quickly became racist and misogynistic. Imagine if these were AI processes you launched at work that went awry in similarly public, harmful ways? In the case of the simulation model, an AI trained to play a racing game learned how to maximize its score in the game without ever finishing the race. It exposed a glitch in the game design, as well as in the dangers of setting "proxy incentives" -- in this case, optimiz-
ing for highest points instead of best race performance -- rather than incentivizing for the desired result. An AI could make similar mistakes when optimizing, for example, sales deals closed, or widgets shipped, as opposed to maximized profits. Proxy incentives are usually employed because measuring the result is often far more complex. It's easier to incentivize an AI on completed purchases than to teach an AI how to parse revenue, margins, gross profits, and net profits. However, using proxy incentives means you could end up with a shocking number of low-margin sales, or "loss leader" deals that cost you money, as an AI learns how to game your proxy metrics. In the case of Tay, the AI was victimized by "attackers" -- malicious Twitter users -- actively trying to subvert its training data by sending it offensive tweets. An AI chatbot that's
designed to give advice or training to your employees could just as easily be subverted by disgruntled team members who intentionally feed the agent incorrect or insulting content. Reinforcement learning is vulnerable if the AI is intentionally given bad data to learn from. The "bad inputs" problem gets worse when the agent isn't fed misleading data, but data specifically designed to impair or destroy the AI agent. In these cases, human users mis-programmed an AI agent -- intentionally or otherwise -- by corrupting its training data or training rules. Hardening training inputs against malicious or accidental corruption is a key concern for AI's development. WHAT IS A "SPOOFED" ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? As long as there has been technology, there have been people using it for scams. We have 57
MARCH / APRIL 2018
seen people spoof emails, websites, and now bots. (It's only a matter of time until bot-phishing is a mainstream security term.) This brings us to the issue of AI bot authentication and identity management. How can we tell who owns an AI, how it has been trained, and what it is authorized to do? How do you authenticate an AI agent, both to ensure that the agent is what it claims to be and that it hasn't been subverted? This is the next-generation version of the famous Turing Test. The Turing Test is designed to gauge whether an AI agent could be mistaken for a human. The only time an AI has ever been said to have passed the Turing Test -- and even then, that claims have been met with a great deal of dispute -- was when a chatbot was designed to impersonate a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy with a poor grasp of English. When humans thought they were speaking to someone with poor grammar and conversational skills, they overlooked the shortcomings of the AI agent and took it as human. In the right context, an AI agent can be hard to distinguish from a person. Catching an impersonator AI becomes even more difficult when it is impersonating another AI. We expect chatbots to have odd or stilted responses, or to occasionally offer us unexpected results. Thus, how do you gauge that a chatbot or other AI agent is acting erratically or, worse, maliciously? Given that AIs are designed to be self-modifying, and to alter their behaviour after they have been released, these challenges are more complex. We expect chatbots to change over time -- that's the purpose of AI -- so new or different AI agent behaviours might not set off our suspicions. A copycat AI agent could pretend to be another, legitimate AI -say, a customer service bot or internal help agent -- and any quirks in its subverted behaviour may be written off as general AI idiosyncrasies. Worse, a legitimate AI agent could have been compromised by hackers and its now malicious behaviour could simply be mistaken for new, adaptively learned responses. Being able to authenticate not just the identity of an AI agent, but the history of its training data updates is vital to ensuring that an AI system is trustworthy. WHEN DOES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE GO ROGUE? Since the dawn of automation -- and since the origin of the word "robot" -- we’ve welcomed human-replacing 58
technology but have been wary that our “automaton overlords” could turn on us. How do we keep AI from going rogue?
A distributed, external activity ledger is especially important when it comes to artificial intelligence, as AI agents could "learn" that altering their own log files helps them optimize for longevity. Blockchain's immutability would make it nearly impossible for an AI to “cover its tracks” and delete the incriminating activity data.
Nick Bostrom’s book “SuperIntelligence” and warnings from luminaries like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have raised the profile of the possible outcome that AI is out to get us. With advancements in modern AI, controlling autonomous agents that can “think” for themselves is problematic if the infrastructure upon which they run doesn’t keep pace. In short: how can we put some chains around such AI agents to make sure they don’t go off the rails, while still allowing them to learn and advance? Since artificial intelligence software is innately self-altering, you can't build AI governance directly into an AI agent. The key is to constrain the type of actions an AI is permitted to perform and to make authorization of those actions happen outside the AI agent itself. If every action an AI agent takes has to be authorized by an independent AI agent, then no single agent could be allowed to go rogue and independently engage in malicious activity. More simply, the best way to stop rogue artificial intelligence is to have AIs check and balance each other. BLOCKCHAIN AS AN AI GOVERNANCE SOLUTION Given the "black box" problem of AI diagnostics, keeping a strict ledger of who built an AI, what data was used to train it, and who has deployed the resulting agent is our best defence against AI failure and subversion. A protocol built on top of a blockchain could solve some of the problems outlined above. An AI-governing blockchain could provide a decentralized identity for AI agents that is independent of the underlying platform the AI runs on. Every major AI agent could register to be universally identified, giving a solution to AI identification similar to the way website certificates work today to validate website ownership. An AI-governing blockchain could also allow every AI agent to write regular hash functions of their activity to a blockchain ledger so that it is immutable and inspectable by those with the encryption keys. (Recent advances in AI interpretability could make such registries somewhat standardized.) A blockchain AI ledger proves what the AI did, and when it did it and makes sure bad actions can be discovered, analysed, and rectified.
Finally, the consensus mechanisms of blockchain can make sure any possible rogue AIs stay under control. By having a public record of tasks an agent can do, that must be verified by multiple blockchain nodes, we can make sure an AI doesn’t overstep its limits. Imagine five or more independent instances of the same agent, each verifying that the actions taken by any single agent match their own probability models. If any single agent starts to deviate wildly -- and thus the group of agents cannot reach consensus on proper behaviour -- the rogue AI agent would have its activity halted.
Properly utilized, blockchain software can empower AI agents to extend their capaDespite the concerns that AI may cause bilities while ensuring safety and damage in the future, emerging technologies like blockchain could transiperformance.
An AI-governing blockchain could provide a decentralized identity for AI agents that is independent of the underlying platform the AI runs on.
tion to an AI future with more confidence. The key to widespread AI adoption and innovation is ensuring the authenticity and compliance of AI agents. Blockchain would appear to be an ideal solution for many of these issues.
BOTCHAIN BotChain is the most promising project we have seen tackling this issue by providing the infrastructure for the trust of AI software systems with universal registry, identity validation and hashing to enable audit and compliance. BotChain is already joined in partnership by several leading AI and bot developers whose reach together spans more than 400 million end users. BotChain has a team that has built, scaled and sold multiple companies and is well positioned in the market to solve these problems. Overall, despite the looming issues in AI, technology is adapting to solve the expected problems. Maybe all this concern about a superintelligence is too much, and blockchain will allow us to live in constant beneficial collaboration with machines that may end up much smarter than us.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
SUMMARY Let’s start from the beginning.
“Leveraging on over 5 decades of experience in compliance amongst the founding team and advisors, TRACETO.io seeks to revolutionise the e-KYC process, bridging the gap between physical and virtual world KYC processes.”
What is KYC? “Know your customer” involves a set of identity processes’ where an organization demonby CYNOPSIS INTERCHAIN strates to reguSOLUTIONS VENTURES lators that they Token Symbol – T2T have assessed varTraceto is powWebsite - https://traceto.io/ ious risks. These ered by Cynopsis Whitepaper – risks include Solutions, which https://traceto.io/static/wp/traceto_ was established in money launderio_whitepaper_0902_v1_26.pdf ing, terrorism fi2014. Follow the Token type – ERC20 nancing, credlink below for a Hardcap – US$30 million for 30% of deep insight into it worthiness and token supply in crowd-sale product suitabilthis company. Conversion rate – ETH/USD lockity. These checks in TBA must be carried https://www.cyBonus structure – 5% Maximum to nopsis-solutions. prior and throughpre-investors out any business com/ Countries excluded - TBA relationship with ICO date - TBA the customer. Cynopsis specialToken distribution - 25% Team, ise in helping cli30% Company, 30% Token Sales, TRACETO.io is ents in the Finan15% Marketing Ops and Admin setting out to cial Services Secsolve the probtor and the Prolem we see with fessional ServicKYC and the crypes Sector better to-currency space. This is that current comply with ever-increasing regulato“real world” framework is not amalry requirements – Anti-Money Laungamating smoothly with the digital dering (AML), Know your Customer world. Regulators just can’t keep up (KYC) and Counter Terrorism Financwith the advancement of technology. ing (CTF). Traceto is creating an inclusive KYC Network and DApp solution for crypto-currency market participants. They aim to do this by fusing smart contracts and artificial intelligence through a Decentralised Application - built on the Ethereum Network.
OPERATING CONCEPT Over the last decade, AML and CTF measures have cost the banking and finance industry at least US$321billion annually since the Global Financial Crisis and the cost of compliance continues to rise.
Fuel this with the complexities brought on with the rise of digital technology and digital assets – there are some complicated inconsistencies that Traceto look to overcome for crypto-related companies and business’. These inconsistencies are as follows: 1. A false assumption that anonymity overrides the need to comply. 2. A low priority allocated to compliance due to its perception as being a cost centre. 3. A lack of budget and experienced compliance personnel handling this process. Traceto’s mission is to tackle these current problems. They aim to do this by creating a digital KYC network (DApp) that not only allows the decentralised ecosystem to comply with KYC standards prescribed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), but is decentralised, privacy preserving and self-sustaining. The network intends on providing incentives to users to organize themselves in a symbiotic relationship with each other that guarantees privacy yet complies with regulatory requirements. “Giving ownership, management and control of the KYC process back to the people.” TOKEN USE CASE The Traceto T2T token is used as a utility token within the ecosystem and has the following uses: - T2T activates smart contracts on the network - T2T payments are made by request59
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Network – Traceto network, utilises AI algorithms Lets use an example… A user wants to join an ICO that is utilizing the Traceto network. Such user will be redirected to the Tracetos They aim to do this by DApp to upload their documents. These doccreating a digital KYC uments are then encrypted and stored within the application.
network (DApp) that not only allows the decentralised ecosystem to comply with KYC standards prescribed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), but is decentralised, privacy preserving and self-sustaining.
Next a trusted verifier will conduct a background check on this user and score the data based on social profiles – these verifiers are trusted users that stake T2T. Verifiers must undergo a vigorous check and are also gatekeepers to this data. *I have a concern regarding this process currently – I have asked for conformation from the team regarding the “specific” role of a verifier, whether it’s just acting as a node operator or if they are trusted to check over the data. This question is still unanswered and until clarification, will bring down the operating concept score* Once verified this data is stored in a secure and encrypted vault and can only be decrypted by the user themselves or upon quorum from the verifier and requester for KYC purposes.
ers in for KYC services for their customers - T2T is staked by verifiers for rewards - T2T can be used to incentivise prospective clients and partners - T2T is used as a medium of exchange for participants on the network - Each time T2T is spent to procure KYC services, a small percentage is burned Why tokenise this? Current KYC systems are failing with the ever-evolving tech space. With this -regulators are being left behind. The constant threat of hackers exposes users to identity theft and identity fraud through false actors amongst many other compounding concerns. The whole KYC process can be secured and distributed through the blockchain by utilizing its reach, security, anonymity and decentralisation. Traceto can create a self-governing and a secure KYC system for every user. How does this all work?
How will these tokens provide value to the investor? T2T tokens create the economy that keeps the network afloat. The tokens are used for fee’s, rewards, staking and are even burnt reducing the circulating supply. As the network gains users and adoption, the circulating supply will diminish as the demand grows – basic economics, supply/demand. FUNDAMENTALS The Traceto network consists of: users -> verifiers -> corporate requesters -> DApp interface -> network Users – individuals on-board with Traceto Verifiers – trusted user auditing/staking to earn T2T Corporate requesters – Exchange, ICO, crypto-business’ DApp – easy to use decentralised application interface
THIS BRINGS ABOUT TRACETO AND AI. Traceto A.I uses existing algorithms determining facial recognition and similarities. They plan on improving and developing more algorithms through “open sourcing” development. “We attempt to open source as many of these algorithms as possible, allowing the community to audit and improve on the A.I tools involved in solving the KYC Problem.” Traceto plan to use A.I as a complement to the community and not an invasive tool. The solution Traceto propose is one that: - upgrades an out of date service - is self-governing - utilizes blockchain technology - has a token economy - is decentralised - is scalable - has large business connections for adoption ROADMAP Initially, Traceto will focus on AML and CTF problems but plan to expand their scope to address questions related to Product Sustainability and Credit Worthiness. PARTNERS Powered by Cynopsis Cynopsis’ partnerships include: Dow Jones, Amazon Web Service, RHT and more.
60
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Cynopsis’ cryptocurrency clients include: Icon, Kyber Network, Request Network, TenX, GBX, Quantstamp, Olympus Labs, Gifto and more. TEAM CEO, Co-founder – Chionh Chye Kit • Managing director and Co-Founder of Cynopsis Solutions • Director of CCK Solutions • Advisor to Kyber.Network • Advisor to RegPac Revolution CTO, Co-founder – Dias Lonappan • Head of Engineering Serv.sg • CTO of Quantified Assets Ltd • Fintech/Blockchain specialist CDSO, Co-founder – Ooi Gene Yan • Co-founder of Shentilium Technologies • Software Engineer at Cynopsis Solutions • Machine Learning specialist CMO, Co-founder- Dan Poh • Director of sales at Cynopsis Solutions • Advisor at FintruX • Advisor at FidentiaX • Compliance, regulatory and FICC Co-founder – Robin Lee • CXO at Inzsure • GRC Tech (Board) Silicon Valley exp • Wall Street exp • Compliance/RegTech ADVISORS Technical Advisor - Prof. Ooi Beng Chin -Chair Professor, NUS SOC Technical Advisor – Dr. Loi Luu -CEO of Kyber Regulatory Advisor - Nizam Ismail -Partner at RHT Law Business Advisor -Wont Lee Hong -Executive Advisor to Kyber Business Advisor – Simon Kim -CEO of Hashed PROS - KYC and identity is a real issue - There is a token economy - If adopted by ICO’s and Exchanges consumption will drive the demand for tokens - Cynopsis Solutions and their large umbrella of partnerships and clients - Strong team - Strong advisors CONCERNS - No testnet until Q3 2018 - Network launch is scheduled Q1 2019 - Already competitors in the market with working product - No Github - US$30million raise for 30% of total supply - Specific role of verifier is not clear at this stage
CONCLUSION A quick glance into Traceto would seem like they’ve got a big uphill battle to face, competing with the likes of CVC and Self-Key. Therefore, due diligence is very important in this space. After a deeper dig into Cynopsis – Traceto seems to be very strategically placed to take market-share. The potential for huge partnerships and inroads quickly seems very probable, IF Traceto can stay on track with their development of product. Cynopsis was formed in 2014, has partners including Dow Jones and holds a crypto-client list including ICON among many others.
ken metric seems a tad high for a DApp and network. A second concern is the grey area regarding verifiers- “In our current design, the verifiers will only have access to users publicly available information. They will not be operating nodes and will never see the information of the user.” – from team.
The whole KYC process can be secured and distributed through the blockchain by utilizing its reach, security, anonymity and decenSome could argue that this places Cynopsis at a “first mover ad- tralisation. Traceto vantage in this space,” over the can create a self-govcurrent competition. erning and a secure KYC system for every Traceto’s CEO Chionh Chye Kit is user. the co-founder of Cynopsis – let that sink in. This matched with the very clear connection with Kyber.Network among other high value crypto-connections and Simon Kim (CEO of the Hashed Fund) as Business Advisor.
I have heard from the team that there’s already an internal working product, as development seems to be the only thing standing in their way. Personally - I would like to see an active Github. My concern is that they value their company at US$100, with the US$30million raise for only 30% of tokens. I understand there’s a lot of development ahead for them, but this to-
After reaching out and the response above, I’m still a little unclear as to what their role is and how they fit into the system in conjunction to AI. I respect the projects timeline and understand they will need to fund the development in this. I like projects that are understated rather than hyped and rushed. Partnerships are a major hurdle and it seems that Traceto could have these locked down with the development to come – if they can nail this, I’m quite confident that Traceto is in poised for large partnerships and very good long-term action.
Note, once some questions are cleared up scores will be adjusted Operating concept – Medium Token use case – Medium Fundamentals – Medium (until some clarification) Partners – Strong Team – Strong Advisors – Strong Short term – Medium Long term – Strong 61
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Koinon
Bringing Payments Into the Crypto Age
by PAUL KIRKITELOS Ph.D.
It’s no secret that one of the primary factors slowing the growth of cryptocurrency is the fact that it has not yet caught on as a viable method of payment for everyday transactions. Until cryptocurrency is adopted by a sufficient number of both consumers and merchants as a payment mechanism, all the revolutionary blockchain technology in the world will not gain a seat at the table with fiat currency. It may be unpopular to say, but while blockchain technology looks like it’s here to stay, the future of cryptocurrency itself remains very much in doubt. In simplest terms, the slow growth in cryptocurrency payments is usually attributed to one or more of the following: (1) high volatility in crypto prices; (2) long confirmation times and high fees; (3) uncertainty over legal and regulatory status; and (4) the paucity of merchants who accept crypto payments. Koinon.io is an Asia-based payment infrastructure company that is working to tackle the last item on the list, making it seamless for both online and offline merchants to accept all types of payments without having to change the way they process transactions. Once
62
this barrier has been removed, it’s a solid bet that progress on the other three items will follow much faster than it has thus far. Once customers have plenty of places to spend their crypto, there will be an even greater impetus for the key players to work out the other issues.
Koinon’s OmniChannel “take-all” merchant acceptance platform solves this problem, providing a single solution enFOCUS ON ENABLING abling merchants to MERCHANTS seamlessly accept The number of people holding cryptocurrency has crypto, mobile, and grown dramatically since card payments – all the beginning of 2017. Re- with a single piece of alistically, these crypto hardware. owners won’t have the option of using their holdings for everyday purchases until it becomes standard for crypto to be accepted by supermarkets, restaurants, petrol stations, etc. As it stands, few if any of these types of offline merchants accept crypto. They don’t know how to do it and given that they are already bombarded with deciphering other new payment
methods like mobile eWallets (e.g., AliPay, WeChatPay, ApplePay), they have little appetite for adding something else to that list. It makes good sense if we consider things from the merchant’s point of view. On top of cards, the growth of mobile eWallet payments is forcing them to deal with greater complexity as they decide which mobile eWallets to accept, as well as how to handle the technology addons required, and how to manage yet another vendor relationship. The hassle can be a deal breaker. Adding crypto into the mix, which seems even more daunting because now there is a crypto-to-fiat conversion involved, can easily make it a non-starter. Koinon’s OmniChannel “take-all” merchant acceptance platform solves this problem, providing a single solution enabling mer-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
chants to seamlessly accept crypto, mobile, and card payments – all with a single piece of hardware. With Koinon’s platform, crypto payments are handled at point of sale (POS) in the same way as fiat payments, with a single piece of hardware, a single installation, and user-friendly software maintained via a single relationship with Koinon. Merchants are thus able to accept card, mobile, and crypto payments via a single scanning process, with the result that they receive local fiat currency in their bank accounts. This simplicity is critical in driving crypto adoption by merchants. Despite the exciting new landscape created by the emergence of cryptocurrency, it’s reasonable to assume that for the foreseeable future most merchants want things to remain the same as they have always been: they price goods and services in local fiat currency, and they receive the appropriate amount of fiat in their bank account at the end of the day. Especially for offline merchants, there hasn’t been a simple way to make this happen until Koinon. TARGETING DEVELOPING MARKETS WITH LARGE UNDERBANKED POPULATIONS Koinon sees the greatest opportunity for crypto payments around the Asia Pacific re-
gion and in other emerging markets with large swaths of the population still existing outside the traditional banking system. The small existing base of credit and debit card users in such regions provides a more direct path for the growth of mobile and crypto eWallet payments, as there is no need for these consumers to slow the process by first moving from being completely without financial services to adopting traditional bank accounts and credit/debit cards. Instead, they can leapfrog this step entirely, moving straight to mobile and cryptocurrency based financial services and gaining entrance to the global economy. China provides the model for this growth, owing largely to ubiquitous mobile internet infrastructure and a strong push by powerful mobile payments players like WeChatPay and AliPay. For many Chinese consumers, the mobile phone has replaced the wallet, with most merchants now ac-
cepting these two mobile payment methods.
The KNN tokens can be used for merchant transactions, person-to-person transfers such as cross-border remittances from overseas workers, and for fees incurred within the Koinon ecosystem.
Within a few years, Koinon envisions a similar evolution for crypto payments throughout other parts of Asia and the developing world, with its OmniChannel platform opening the door to allow merchants and consumers to connect however they choose – via card, mobile, or crypto – with no unnecessary barriers to commerce. This is the future that cryptocurrency has been promising since it emerged nearly a decade ago. Koinon makes it possible for this future to become a reality. Koinon is launching its own KNN cryptocurrency tokens via an ICO planned for Q2 2018. The KNN tokens can be used for merchant transactions, person-to-person transfers such as cross-border remittances from overseas workers, and for fees incurred within the Koinon ecosystem. For more information, see www.koinon.io 63
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Company Financing on the Blockchain CRWD Network – A decentralized network protocol for issuing and managing the tokenized equity offerings of SMEs, start-ups and real estate projects CONDA is concerned with streamlining and standardizing the full M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions) process so that everyone can invest in innovative companies, even if their initial investment is small. The blockchain allows us to optimize and normalize this process, by ICO CROWD which is why we are building a network to transform our working crowdinvesting model into a completely decentralized application. Soon you will be able to invest in companies globally, based on homogenized investment products.
interest/dividend payments to investors. In addition, these firms gain the ability to create their own governing bodies on the blockchain to maintain a self-managed investor registry. Finally, international crowdinvesting platforms can use the ecosystem to list their company offers on other platforms and to provide access to existing company offers to their investors.
TOKENIZED EQUITY OFFERINGS (AKA TOKEN) All money invested will be represented on the blockchain in the form of toIn short, we are developing a decentralized, regulatory-compliant crowdfi- kenized equity offerings created by nancing infrastructure network on the each individual company. 100% of a tokenized equity offering represents blockchain. 100% of the investment offer from the The CRWD Network provides all future company. The tokenized equity offering crowdinvesting shareholders access to a is an asset token, according to the FINtransparent ecosystem with distinct ad- MA (Swiss Financial Market Supervisovantages. Financiers can easily buy and ry Authority) classification. Simply put, if you own 10% of a firm’s tokenized transfer company stakes. For compaequity offering, you own 10% of the nies seeking funding, the CRWD Netfirm’s total investment offer. work provides them with a toolset for everything they need to securely launch their own ICO on the Ethereum blockTo standardize the process of creating chain, including the implementation of a token, a tokenized equity generator
64
(aka company token creator) is required. This is a small program running on the blockchain which allows everyone who has access to it to set up his/her own tokenized equity offering without programming. Initially, some specialized tools (aka the “crowdsale contract”) are required to create a tokenized equity offering. This “crowdsale contract” is permanently linked to a tokenized equity offering and defines the terms and conditions under which the token may be purchased for the first time. From a legal perspective, the tokenized equity offerings are securities. CONDA has worked diligently over the last few years to implement the processes and requirements necessary for issuing securities on the blockchain. THE INVESTOR KEY The security of the CRWD Network is enhanced via the investor key. European regulators mandate that everyone who buys securities must be identified; thus, the investor key is linked to a specific digital currency wallet only after the owner of the wallet’s private
MARCH / APRIL 2018
key has been identified. In addition, the company token’s transfer function, which is based on the Ethereum token standard (ERC20), will be embedded with an enhanced security check. When a new transfer of a company token takes place, the system first searches for the investor key of the receiver of the token (we have set up an identity service in the protocol to map investor keys to wallets). If the receiver has a valid investor key, the transfer will go through; otherwise, the transfer will revert to the original token holder. The investor key ensures companies fulfil their legal obligations to know who their investors are and how their money is being invested. Investors only need to identify themselves once within a given period; the investor key may be used for several investments. By using the ERC20 standard, all existing wallets can be accessed within the CRWD Network; so long as the investor key is valid, there is no change to be made in the wallet. THE CRWD TOKEN Bitcoin and Ethereum survive on the blockchain thanks to server power. Users buy servers, and then host & maintain the infrastructure necessary to preserve these digital. But these individuals do not participate out of purely altruistic motives: they require a reward token and receive bitcoins as a miner. The same is for the CONDA CRWD Token network. The CRWD Token serves as the gas for CONDA’s partners to keep its financial market ecosystem running. Any company looking for financing or any financier looking
to invest in the CRWD Network needs to buy CRWD Token from an exchange. The CRWD Token is the incentive for crowdinvesting platforms, who find innovative start up projects to support the company to prepare all the legal and regulatory documents. The CRWD Token is the reward for the community to give their feedback and make a due diligence of the company. Everyone who supports the ecosystem receives CRWD Token as a fee for their services.
Token is the lifeblood of building up our decentralized security token framework, the CRWD Network.
Soon you will be able to invest in companies globally, based on homogenized investment products.
The CRWD Token is the incentive for crowdinvesting platMoving forward, any entities that forms, who find innocreate their own company token vative start up proor invest in a project listed on jects to support the CONDA’s platform will now do company to prepare so via CRWD Token. Looking to fund ventures in numerous coun- all the legal and regulatory documents. tries? No sweat. CRWD Token is global, enabling every partner in the ecosystem to provide services independent of the company’s local currency. This means a platform in Germany can support companies in Switzerland, Poland, and the Czech Republic; companies that need to raise funds, whether they be in CHZ, PLN, or CZK, will always receive CRWD Token. The same goes for the online community providing feedback. Everyone acquires the same virtual currency in the form of CRWD Token. Clearly, CRWD
CONDA’s CRWD Network ICO CRWD Token is being sold as part of our private sale through to end of March. At the beginning of April, the whitelisting phase will begin to perform the necessary identification checks for all potential contributors. The pre-sale will launch at the beginning of June and only last for a couple of days. The crowd sale will begin immediately after the pre-sale in June. CONDA will create up to 45,000,000 CRWD Tokens. In total, 50% of the tokens will be distributed during the ICO (which includes both tokens sold, and bonus tokens distributed). Team and partner tokens will be locked for nine months. After the crowd sale, unsold tokens will be burned. Once all these elements are successfully in place, a completely decentralized and standardized crowdfinancing ecosystem is created, allowing easy and secure access to investors interested in supporting innovative start-ups and SMEs. Check out all our previous coverage of our ICO at ico.conda. online for additional information. 65
MARCH / APRIL 2018
10
Hacker-Proof Steps to Secure Your Crypto Assets The purpose of this post is to help you understand — in 10 steps — how you can reduce, to the minimum, the chances of an attacker gaining access to your private passwords. Furthermore, you will learn how to store your keys and never lose access to your wallet(s) reby RESEARCH gardless of the situation.
CENTER Cryptocurrency & ICO analysis group
According to a report by CNN, hundreds of millions of dollars (in Bitcoin) have been stolen by hackers from accounts of people from all over the world. Crypto wallets are getting hacked every day and assailants are making away with people's assets. Furthermore, another report, this time by The Genesis Block in 2015, claims that almost 35% of the 14 million+ Bitcoin mined at the time had not been spent or accessed since 2011. The assumption is: a large percentage of that figure (4.9 million BTC) had been lost due to carelessness on the part of the owner. The reasons why the two instances mentioned above are a present dan-
66
ger with regards to cryptocurrency is simple. If a hacker gains access to your wallet and sends out your coins, the transaction is non-reversible, and the identity of a hacker is hardly traceable. Additionally, crypto assets are secured in wallets whose IDs cannot be recovered from the parent company; once you lose it, it's lost for life. As a result, securing your crypto assets in the most extensive way possible is no longer optional, it is compulsory. Due to the cost of the services listed below, this guide is most suitable for individuals with $2000 or more worth of crypto assets. THE STEPS ARE: 1. Purchase two Ledger Nano S. 2. Install 1Password and subscribe to their "For Families" plan to automatically synchronize and store your passwords in the cloud (to remove the chance that you may
lose access to the database, provided that you remember your master password). 3. Install Authy on 2 devices (preferably a mobile phone and a laptop) and ensure that it synchronizes OTP and 2FA keys across both devices. 4. Create a master password for 1Password; the longer the password, the better. The hardest passwords to crack are long sentences and/or randomly-generated characters e.g. action-and-reaction-are-equal-andopposite-except-on-Wednesdays AW<VBHF%&(#@)19083T27{+?/[} BDWOKG5. 5. Create another master password for Authy (never use the same passwords for two websites or applications). 6. If you trade cryptos, create a dedicated email to use when trading and secure it with a strong 1Pass-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
word-generated password. Then secure it with OTP 2FA and store the seed key in Authy. Do not use Google Authenticator (unlike Authy, it will not back up your seeds for you, you must do it yourself). Never use 2FA recovery codes (you're vulnerable to social engineering). Disable SMS 2FA (they can be exploited)
2 Get 4 storage services that support 2FA. Good options include Google Drive, AWS S3, GitHub (BitBucket) private repo, and Dropbox. 2 Enable 2FA on all four of them and store the OTP 2FA seeds in Authy. 2 Put one part of the encrypted mnemonic in 2 of the storage services, and the other part in the remaining 2.
7. Register all your exchange accounts with 9. Erase and restore the ledger with your the email address created in step 6. Protect mnemonic before sending any assets there each account with a strong password and to verify that everything is working. store it in 1Password. Further protect each account with OTP 2FA and store the key in 10. Take your second ledger and restore it with Authy. the same mnemonic; it will serve as a mirror image of the first one in case you lose 8. Set up one of the Ledger Nano S purchased it. Put this ledger into cold storage, somefrom step 1 and protect your mnemonic as where you can access within a day. follows: And we're done. Phew! Quite extensive, no? 2 Split your 24-character mnemonic into 2 Well, that's the price you must pay to keep parts. your cryptocurrency assets away from lurking attackers. If you follow each step precisely 2 Encrypt both parts with any tool of your as stated, your assets are as safe, except if you choosing, then store the encryption give someone else access, only you will ever be keys in 1Password. able to reach them.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS 2 Always store your coins in your ledger, never on exchanges. 2 Do not use your mnemonic leisurely; access it only when you absolutely need to. 2 Remove the key man risk: if you get fatally hurt or suffer from amnesia, your assets shouldn't be lost forever. Choose a person you trust with your money and educate him/her on how to exchange crypto to fiat and withdraw your funds. 2 You can remove the third-party risk in the step above by putting the private info (e.g. your ledger's pin code) in the custody of a lawyer/escrow/safety deposit box under orders that the other person can only access it upon your demise. The cryptocurrency scene is starting to take off considerably, and the focus of the whole world is on it. This means that scammers will be stepping up their game to relieve people of their assets, and I'm sure you don't need to be told that this is the worst possible time to lose your crypto. Therefore, it is important that you also step your game up and shore up your account security extensively. 67
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Robotina ICO:
A Game-Changer in Energy Management Reached the Soft Cap Robotina, an innovation and control technology company, recently launched an ICO campaign aiming to raise Employees Years of Research and Status of Countries with $28,5M for further development and experience development teams Approved Institute our projects community growth of it's IoT platform. This platform is already helping to solve the issues of rising electrical energy pricby ICO CROWD es, growing electrical energy consumpRegistered International connected Offices (SLO, CRO, UK, India, tion and costly maintenance of electripatents Certificates points Dubai (UAE), Singapore) cal grid stability. Having already reached $10M soft cap, the project is set to expand Robotina’s wealth of experience tomation and control technology. All gence (AI) is the brains of the Robotifrom B2B to B2C energy sector. na’s platform which cracks the real time their products include their proprietary technology and the company has smart grid data into valuable informaRobotina has been one of the market its own in-house R&D and manufaction and provides the rewards to its leaders in smart grids, AI & IoT since members. Blockchain is a decentralized turing facility. Combined with exper1990 and has built many partnerships ledger which hosts a number of smart tise and ability to introduce new soluwith companies like Microsoft, SHARP, contracts triggered between different tions swiftly and economically, it repHitachi & Panasonic. The company departies and a definitive contract is pro- resents a solid base for every control cided to enter the B2C market with Rosolution and sets new standards for toduced that can’t be disputed. The indibotina IoT platform. Applying several day and for the future. Robotina’s busistate-of-the-art technologies, the Roboti- viduals involved are anonymous, but the contract is public on a decentralized ness models include the entire vertina platform reduces electric energy concal, from energy suppliers to grid opersumption, lowers electricity costs and op- ledger. Transactions are encrypted. ators. GOFLEX community and NEDO timizes the functioning of the entire elecSlovenia are comprehensive showcases tricity grid by monitoring and controlling Robotina ICO crowdsale is open from March 21 at 15.00 CET. During the first of this scope of cooperation. real-time electricity consumption and phase of the crowdsale, the investors distributed production. Thus it managwill be able to buy the Robotina plat“After implementing 1000+ successes the devices and collects and processes the data from platform users. This data is form utility token (ROX) with a 5% bo- ful projects in Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, South Africa and elsethen offered to the network operators or nus. The average ROX price will be set where, it was time to upgrade our game electric energy producers. Both can bene- at $0.05. Robotina warmly welcomes and give our clients a better, even safeverybody who wants to be a part of fit from substantial savings. the energy revolution to visit their ICO er decentralized solution. This developwebsite and fill out the KYC forms. ment is completely in line with our viRobotina platform connects three masion to become the leading provider jor technologies. The Internet of Things of smart connected solutions, compo(IoT) is a system of intelligent connect- Robotina platform enables payment nents and platforms which will contribed devices, digital machines, objects or with several other other tokens, coins ute to a new model of connected socieor fiat currencies, but only ROX transpeople that are provided with unique actions will bring special discounts. ty. We are looking forward to bringing identifiers and the ability to transfer the measurable benefits our ICO invesdata over a network without requiring Robotina is a EU company with over 50 tors will be seeing,”-Devid Palcic, CEO human-to-human or human-to-comexperts focused on innovation in auof Robotina. puter interaction. The artificial intelli-
50
07
28
02
05
01
1M
25
06
69
MARCH / APRIL 2018
BandZ: The Global Extranet! Dear developers, speculators, lawyers, governments, and technologists of all sorts and kinds, we made it. Blockchain technology is officially mainstream! Paying homage to the dot-com bubble is of the late 90s, the ICO craze is now in full force and every skeptic, nay-sayer, pessimist, expert and prophet is in the fray. Every participant is looking to restructure existing industries via new, decentralized business models by ICO CROWD with the hopes of getting hundred and even thousand-fold returns on their investment. The most exciting and likely prospects to receive these sorts of returns are those focusing on improving infrastructure: i.e. telecommunications and energy. The former, especially, is ready for the most direct, novice-friendly, and internationally applicable innovations in security and user experience. INTRANETS AND EXTRANETS Intranets are private networks accessible only to the members of said networks. Extranets are intranets that allow access to authorized sets of external users as determined by the mem70
bers of the intranet, without granting full access to the intranet itself. Multiple intranets can interact with each other over an extranet. Intranets and extranets are quite expensive to set up, and usually cater to the enterprise-software market. Individual users can rarely access the advantages of these products because of (i) limited financial resources and (ii) a lack of technical knowledge. This individual user market for intranets and extranets is not only untapped but has, until now, been completely unconsidered. VPNS Virtual Private Networks are infamous for their privacy. The ability to use different IP addresses instead of your own breeds all sort of speculation of illicit and unacceptable activities. The reality of the fact is that VPNs have much more broad and general applications. A Virtual Private Network is just a private network which allows its members to communicate to each other over public channels.
Corporations use them all the time. Corporate VPNs allow employees to access their companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intranet while they are outside of the office. Individuals can secure their communications with VPNs or circumvent internet geo-restriction and censorship in certain countries. The applications come with risks and benefits, but so does innovation and freedom. The worldwide VPN market is currently estimated to be $1.26 Billion USD. By 2022, it is expected to grow to $106 Billion USD [1]. If that growth rate sees to bullish, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s probably because the current valuation of the VPN market is wrong and heavily understated. The potential for VPN growth is like a powder keg, and blockchains are the spark. Decentralization cannot add more value to any other single industry more so than to secured P2P telecommunication. The VPN internet use case is even more powerful than money and currency. The internet is a bedrock for blockchain technology, redefining the internet with VPN properties is analogous to re-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
inforcing the foundations of the world’s blockchain temples. Decentralizing VPNs will not only make them censorship and back-door proof (RIP Tor), but also reduce the friction currently present to novices in accessing the technology.
BANDZ BandZ is the global extranet blockchain project. It was founded in Toronto, Canada and Daejeon, South Korea by four members.
BandZ is in deep talks with governments and corporations to create scholarship programs that incentivize further academic development of the project at KAIST. The project hopes to leverage the increased expectancy of cyberattacks, VPN fees, shared-tokenized economies, and unwarranted public surveillance to catalyze the development and commercial success of the BandZ Network.
The company’s legal home is, as of now, is in Canada. The technology is being spearheaded out of South Korea, at the Korean AdBLOCKCHAINS AND CRYPTOCURRENCIES vanced Institute of Science and Technology You know what these are, and you know why in Daejeon – ranked 6th in the world for patthey are valuable. They are digital-money-passents in technology innovation by Reuters. The factor most critical to the success of words and they live on your mobile devices. Your BandZ is the ease of use. BandZ will be a hardware is literally a digital bank now, and as a The BandZ Network goal is to be the grid downloadable app that turns your device result your data is so, so much more valuable to between domestic and global VPN connecinto a BandZ node. Once installed it allows cyber-thieves than it ever was before. tivity at first. Other technologies such as users to access and provide enterprise-grade mesh nets and cloud services are in the fuinternet services from and to someone else So, logically, secured, private (virtual?) netture road map. in a pre-configured manner, at a fraction of works become increasingly valuable. Prothe cost. You do not need any of the curportionately so with the increase in price of BandZ will be agnostic of operators and inrency to begin using it, you just need a data whichever crypto tokens you are holding. ternet service providers (ISPs), providing a plan. Once its on, you can start accruing web of hybrid products such as DNS-tweak- BandZ immediately and then use them to The cost of cybersecurity attacks by 2019 is esti- ing, IP-rotating, and further enhanced prienjoy the internet in any part of the world mated to be $2 Trillion (with a T) USD [2]. That’s vacy for data-rich, unsophisticated users. with peace of mind. next year, for those of us who are bad at math. The project will start as a network and grow to be a base-layer for multiprotocol develBandZ is the new standard for global teleThe use of VPNs has thus far been ineffective opment. communications. So let’s BandZ together because of back-door and malware threats. Inteand make it happen! gral blockchain factors such as trust, transparThe BandZ vision is creating an ultrafast, ency, and ease-of-use have a great deal to offer ubiquitous, “distributedly-managed” globREFERENCES: in terms of productive, meaningful, and profit- al extranet. All the peers will be their own 1 Market Research Future, (Apr 25, 2017). able progress in the basic standards of internet intranets and provide each other with enVirtual Private Network (VPN) Market connectivity and security as we know it. terprise grade VPN security as well as roExpected to Reach USD 106 Billion by bust internet connectivity. They will pay 2022 at a CAGR of 13% Blockchains change VPNs and proxies from each other with bandwidth denominated in 2 Morgan, S. (Jan 15, 2016). Cyber Crime murky, backwater darknets into the only acBandZ (the token) so that the system pays Costs Projected to Reach $2 Trillion by ceptable path for a truly peer-to-peer internet. everyone within it as the members use it. 2019, Forbes. 71
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Meet
BrainerZ This Blockchain Startup Targets Trivia Addicts and Crypto Enthusiasts with the World's First Knowledge-Based Playground
BrainerZ is the world’s first knowledgebased gaming platform operating on blockchain, allowing users around the world to compete in skills-based microgames and earn BRNZ tokens. We call the BrainerZ platform a “skills-based playground,” where winning depends on knowledge, skills, and curiosity.
by ICO CROWD
BrainerZ will create a new way for people to use their cryptocurrencies, letting crypto-gamers use their mental abilities to gain and expand their crypto-holdings in an online knowledge-based playground full of topnotch crypto-games. The BrainerZ platform uses an interactive feed with a range of social games designed for groups, individuals, and peer-to-peer competitors. It allows users to play high-level games involving skills, strategy, and knowledge and gives them the opportunity to gain BRNZ tokens – the cryptocurrency fueling the BrainerZ platform. First, we would like to tell you in our own words about the vision we have for this project, which has captivated us for the past eight months. As a team, we’ve worked together for the past four years in the Israeli tech ecosystem, developing apps, founding ventures, and reach-
72
ing millions of users with our work. Now it all comes down to BrainerZ, our most exciting project. Most blockchain projects aim to CHANGE the world, DISRUPT the market, or DECENTRALIZE power as we know it. That’s great, but we at BrainerZ have a different goal in mind, one that’s slightly more FUN, INTERACTIVE, and SOCIAL. We intend to launch a public crowdsale for the BrainerZ official token we call BRNZ. Some people may ask, “Why an ICO?” Launching the BrainerZ project with an ICO will give us the marketing advantages of an ICO (compared to traditional fundraising) and build a community that will join the BrainerZ journey. That way, we can position the BrainerZ platform in the long term as a leading crypto-game platform that it’s community enjoys designing, building, and sharing. On our platform – we call it a Playground – crypto-owners, social gaming
BrainerZ will create a new way for people to use their cryptocurrencies, letting crypto-gamers use their mental abilities to gain and expand their crypto-holdings in an online knowledge-based playground full of topnotch crypto-games.
addicts, and curious minds from all over the world will test their skills and knowledge and gain chances to win ERC20 tokens and BRNZ tokens, the premium currency of BrainerZ. You can expect fun, excitement, challenges, and more from our blockchain-gaming platform. Why? Because: • People love knowledge-based games: Trivia, quizzes, riddles, strategy, and brain-training – all these gaming concepts have existed for centuries. Today, these concepts have evolved into apps, and social and competitive components have made knowledge games even more sophisticated, exciting, and scalable. BrainerZ takes these games to the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. • The market is ready: Crypto-owners and gamers are our main segment. Incredible projects in the cryptocurrencies field will want (and already are wanting) our platform as a place to send their communities to play our crypto-games.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Most tokens are usable only when traded, but we will open the door for making them a valid playable currency (our first partnership will go live soon, and many more will join it). Content, content, and content: More games, more challenges, more users – all will expand the BrainerZ community. This growth will increase demand for the BRNZ token that unlocks ALL the experiences in the Playground – and most importantly – encourages the community to create its own crypto-game content.
social-games that by participating in them users can win the BrainerZ tokens called BRNZ. "A year from now, we plan on having more than ten gaming concepts in our online platform," says Daniel, "All of them fueled by the BRNZ tokens and by featured cryptocurrencies - creating a whole new way for crypto-owners to play, enjoy and hopefully win cryptocurrencies."
the BrainerZ community today, our users will be granted with early-access to our open-beta game launched in March 2018." The BrainerZ team’s core founders have been working together on B2C products in various fields, mostly in the Israeli market, for the past four years. We sold our main product, Israel’s first on-demand app for home services, in February 2017 to Zap Group, who renamed it Zap Ninja and continues to use it today.
As a first step, BrainerZ will launch two games called TreasureZ - an interactive social-quiz game and RiddleZ - Mega riddles The BRNZ Token is a soon-to-be-launched built by renowned riddler Dan cryptocurrency designed and developed by a Chamizer, who is the project's Besides our founders, we also new blockchain startup called BrainerZ, enachief riddler - and one of the most The BrainerZ conhave other individuals with provbling its users to play and compete in awesome famous riddlers in the world. By en track records in leading gamcept is quite simple social games to earn its coins. playing, users will be able to win ing and digital marketing corpora- offering the cryphighly valuable jackpots that will tions, covering all our operational to-community with "The BrainerZ platform can be described as a be distributed at the end of each and strategic needs. a wide selection of 'Knowledge-based casino' since it is fun and gaming session according to the social-games that exciting to play, while unlike a real casino, win- players' results. Our team won the Davivienby participating in ning in BrainerZ is not based on luck but rathda Hackathon held in Tel-Aviv in er on the user's knowledge and skills," says As a second step, BrainerZ will al- them users can win 2017 for Banco Davivienda, a fiDaniel Shoshani, the CEO & Co-Founder of low third parties to localize and nancial institution in Colomthe BrainerZ tokens BrainerZ - an Israeli startup company foundcontribute content to their platbia. We provided the bank with a called BRNZ. ed nearly a year ago, which is developing a new form - including new games, chalblockchain demo for inorganizagaming platform on the ethereum blockchain. lenges, and riddles that will be available for tion services and presented at the bank’s HQ the entire BrainerZ community around the in Bogota for further integrations. BrainerZ is positioned right in the middle beworld. tween two mega-industries: Crypto and OnNow, after recognizing the opportunity to line-Gaming – both make a market of more Yonatan Chelouche, the company's CPO & launch a top-notch blockchain gaming platthan 700 Billion Dollars and are tackled by a Co-Founder says: "We all know how hard it is form like BrainerZ, we aim to deliver a firstvariety of blockchain startups. to onboard new users to complicated blockof-its-kind product in the crypto-gaming field. chain platforms – that's exactly why we are fo- We have an experienced team and a strong adThe BrainerZ concept is quite simple - offering cusing on offering the best and most intuivisory board with vast experience in the finanthe crypto-community with a wide selection of tive gaming experience out there. By joining cial, gaming, crypto, and consumer industries. 73
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Blockchain and the "Innovation Nation"
The “Innovation Nation” is not resting on her laurels - LiDAR, nanotechnology, AR/VR, agritech, robotics, UAVs, optics, cybersecurity and digital health. And the next technological front to conquer is certainly blockchain. If you ask the avid entrepreneurs at the “Israeli Blockchain Tower” in Ramat Gan, they would tell you that Israel is about to become a world leader in the global blockchain ecosystem.
Major players within the Israeli blockchain scene include Sirin Labs and Saga Indeed, Israel, and particuled by Moshe Hogeg; Wave larly Tel Aviv, is positioned led by Gadi Ruschin; Bancor in an excellent starting line led by Guy Benartzi; Celsius to lead the blockchain race, If you ask the avid en- led by Alex Mashinsky; Colu both in terms of its creative trepreneurs at the “Is- led by Amos Meiri; Simhuman capital, large amount raeli Blockchain Tow- plex led by Nimrod Lehaof cryptography and cyvi; Stox led by Yossi Peretz; er” in Ramat Gan, bersecurity specialists and LeadCoin led by Shmulik startups, high percentage of they would tell you Grizim; and Coin Sciences that Israel is about to (MultiChain) led by Gideengineers and many blockbecome a world lead- on Greenspan. The most chain enthusiasts, as well er in the global block- prominent blockchain hub as the impressive fundraisCurrently, there are already severing that has been flowing is Alignment. At the same al dozens of various promising blockchain ecosystem. into the Israeli blockchain time, there is a constantchain and crypto projects in Israel, ecosystem so far (hunly growing interest in blockmainly in Tel Aviv, and new ones are dreds of millions of dollars chain among the traditionemerging every month. There is also al Israeli VC funds, such as a significant rising interest among the from ICOs and VC investors alike). Another aspect the largest Israeli VC PitanIsraeli highest governmental levels in by blockchain's potential financial and so- that makes Israel an excelgo; Aleph; and Magma VC. TAL lent place for blockchain In parallel to that, new dedSHECHTMAN cial implications: Finance Minister, thriving is the local fintech icated blockchain funds Moshe Kahlon, held a meeting with hub that attracts global fihave been emerging, such the Israeli "blockchain guru" Moshe nancial companies, corporaas Singulariteam, and iAnHogeg, and expressed his support for tions, and institutions (such gels. The vibrant Israeli the technology and willingness to coas PayPal, Visa, Barclays, and blockchain community inoperate; the Bank of Israel has been KPMG) to establish their cludes several large Facediscussing the issuance of a blockR&D centers in Israel which book and Meetup groups chain-based digital Shekel to replace create a fertile land for that hold regular meetings cash; and Prime Minister, Benjamin and conferences, includNetanyahu, has even expressed his be- blockchain sprouting.
74
lief that in the long term banks will disappear.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
ing collaborations with academic blockchain researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Technion, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Tel Aviv University. A segmentation of the Israeli blockchain sector suggests that around half of it has to do with financial services, around 20% enterprise and cloud, around 20% social and media, and the remaining projects deal with technological infrastructure and hardware.
believes, to a much wider adoption of blockchain technology by banks and financial institutions that do not want their transactions history to be completely exposed. A different innovative type of Israeli blockchain project in the field of govtech is CoaliChain. This platform encourages the creation of an open government and a direct link between the elector and the elected, aimed at improving parliamentary democracy and following the implementation of campaign promises (policies and budget proposals for instance) by utilizing smart contracts.
and are not controlled by a central entity - will not be deemed securities... The question of whether a cryptocurrency should be considered a security will be decided on the totality of the circumstances and features of each case in acBank Hapoalim launched its collabo- cordance with the purposes of the ration with Microsoft law. Generally, cryptocurrencies that confer rights like the rights on developing a blockconferred by traditional securities chain-based system A recent interesting initiative is a new collabsuch as shares, bonds, and particintended for manag- ipation units, will be deemed seoration between the Israeli Aerospace Indusing digital bank guar- curities. In contrast, cryptocurtries (IAI) and the largest bank in Israel, Bank antees and simpliHapoalim, on using blockchain technology to rencies that represent rights to improve cybersecurity for transmission of ina product or service and are acfying the process of formation between services and supply chains quired solely for consumption and signing up guaranand protecting important devices running use and not for investment purtors. This way Bank without human intervention. This has impliHapoalim will be able poses, will not be considered secations for other technological realms as well. In terms of regulation, there is a curities... If the token cannot be to send its customers It came after Bank Hapoalim launched its col- regulatory policy committee set used when it is issued or if it can security documents in be traded on a secondary market, laboration with Microsoft on developing a up by the Israeli Securities Aua digital, fast and se- these may be indications that its blockchain-based system intended for manthority (ISA) that will submit its cure way. aging digital bank guarantees and simplifying final report by the end of 2018. acquisition was made for investthe process of signing up guarantors. This way So far, the Israeli Tax Authority ment rather than for consumpBank Hapoalim will be able to send its custom- has declared that cryptocurrencies tion purposes." ers security documents in a digital, fast and will be regarded as an asset rather secure way. than money, and will be taxed acIt seems that the Israeli landscape cordingly, the same as any other for blockchain technology is beAnother notable Israeli project is the startinvestment. In its interim report, coming well respected and sought up QED-it led by Jonathan Rouach. This the ISA Committee noted that "... after. The projection is that this platform is taking advantage of blockas a general rule, cryptocurrencies process will accelerate and Israechain's virtue of enabling coordination bethat are designed to be used exli fast-moving blockchain protween all involved parties in the transacclusively as a medium of payment, jects will be key to developing the tion, but at the same time keeping the infor- clearing, or exchange and are not blockchain ecosystem around the mation non-public. Solving the privacy chal- limited to a specific venture; that world, much beyond the cyberselenge may contribute, as QED-it's founder do not confer additional rights; curity aspect alone. 75
MARCH / APRIL 2018
The RootProject In less than three weeks, a new nonprofit is set to crowdfund upwards of tens of millions of dollars to directly help underserved communities, tackle homelessness and confront the growing opioid crisis gripping communities across the country – through the power of by ROOTPROJECT cryptocurrency. While crowdfunding a few thousand dollars for social good projects is not a new concept, leveraging cryptocurrencies to drive millions of dollars towards the social issues with the greatest need stands to change the face of modern philanthropy. So how can cryptocurrencies, too often associated with nefarious deeds and the Dark Web, drive social impact and serve the most vulnerable among us? The communication breakdown starts with the name: “Cryptocurrencies” like Bitcoin – effectively unhackable due to a technology called blockchain – are simply not currencies. They are assets. Calling them currencies is an ideology, not economics. Like derivatives, it is important to ask what crypto assets do in the context of current institutions, not in some social vacuum. And this is where we get back to leveraging the power of crypto assets to drive social impact and change the face of modern philanthropy. The thing that will change the world isn’t crypto as76
sets itself – it’s crypto asset-issuing institutions. Traditionally, profits and markets go hand in hand. Markets only exist where there is a profit to be made. Derivatives-based financial innovation has tinkered with that relationship for many years. Shorting a stock, for instance, creates profit when the company’s stock goes down. Short sales are an example of a market that is profitable when the opposite of profit exists in the real-world activity. It, therefore, shouldn’t be hard to conceive of a market where the underlying activity is profit-neutral. Publications like Nonprofit Quarterly have long covered financial innovation in the nonprofit world. The real but limited progress they’ve made is incomplete for three reasons. First, exotic financial products violate investor and donor norms. A nonprofit must convince a group of investors of both the underlying idea and the complex legal structure of a new derivative. This dissuades investors and, second, makes the underlying product illiquid – other investors won’t buy it from the original investor – greatly decreasing its value from the investor’s perspective. Third, constructing that type of financial product is expensive. Usually, between the lawyers drafting and the lawyers reviewing it, in the six figures. This effec-
tively divorces financial innovation from the innovators: young, startup-like nonprofits. Crypto assets solve all three of these problems. A large, growing body of investors understand crypto assets. Anyone of them can take a huge risk on a worthwhile project and sell her position an hour later. And the cost of creation is a couple day’s wages for a developer or less. Sometimes, what feels like a small change in an arcane system is a change in how the world works. This is one of those times. When economists get serious about crypto assets and crypto asset-issuing institutions get serious about economics, here’s what will happen: The power of markets and investors gets brought to the world of nonprofits. That’s a fundamental change in the institutional economics of the modern world. If we shepherd that change correctly, it will balance the pursuit of profit and the pursuit of social good in our society – in our lifetimes. That requires establishing the right private market norms and public rules. If this is done, the bridge between ideas and reality will be far shorter; and markets – of all things – will let social good stop playing second fiddle to profit.
MARCH / APRIL 2018
77
MARCH / APRIL 2018
Welcome to Essentia The last two years have witnessed an explosion in the number of decentralized apps, platforms, and blockchains. These systems promise to restore the privacy, security, and control that is sorely missing from the web we use today. Individually, each of these applications addresses a very specific issue and solves a very particular problem. The trouble is, the web isn’t made up of standalone platforms that share nothing in common other than an internet connection. 78
The internet is designed to be interconnected so that moving from one website to another is as seamless as the click of a mouse or the swipe of a touchscreen. Right now, the decentralized web is scattered, fragmented, ineffective and far from realizing its incredby ESSENTIA ible potential. THAT’S WHERE ESSENTIA COMES IN Essentia makes the new internet – or Web 3.0 as it’s also known – accessible for everyone, regardless of their background or technical ability. The Essentia framework connects the dots and unites the platforms that make up the decentralized internet for the first time. Users can enjoy all the benefits of this new improved internet, such as greater privacy, a fully personalized online experience, and full control of their data, combined with all the features they know and love from the existing web such as a user-friendly, intuitive interface. Essentia gives users the best of both worlds.
WHY ESSENTIA IS NEEDED The Essentia framework is made up of two elements: Essences and Synergies. Essences are self-contained modules that hold the data of a particular web user. But not their entire identity: just enough data for them to be able to access a particular service. A user may own multiple Essences, and “own” is the key word here – because the individual retains full control of their data at all times. Every time they entrust their data to a particular application (decentralized or otherwise), they retain the right to withdraw that permission at any time. That way platforms can access the data they need, so as to provide their users with a customized service, but aren’t lumped with having to look after that information 24/7. It’s a win for the platform and it’s a big win for the user. The horror stories surrounding data breaches don’t even need to be retold: names like Equifax, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are enough. Hash-
MARCH / APRIL 2018
tag campaigns such as #DeleteFacebook are well-meaning but achieve nothing because there is nowhere else to go, and besides, people are creatures of habit who tend to stick with what they know. For a mass exodus to occur – or even for a gradual transition to take place from Web 2 to Web 3 – the learning curve needs to be flattened. dApps, wallets and platforms need to be interconnected and intuitive to use from the very get-go. Once again, that’s where Essentia comes in. No amount of decentralization or censorship resistance is going to coax web users to make the switch to Web 3.0. A small portion might, but the vast majority need something groundbreaking – an incentive to change from a platform they’ve used every day for the last five years to one they’ve never seen before in their life. Essentia is that something groundbreaking: it’s software that works exactly as it’s supposed to straight out the box. When the iPhone had its maiden launch in 2007, it wasn’t the first touchscreen smartphone, but it was the first one that worked exactly as it was supposed to, with no major
glitches, bugs or UX problems. As a result, the iPhone was credited with opening the mobile web up to the masses and ushering in the smartphone revolution that followed. Essentia will be to the decentralized web what the iPhone was to Web 2.0: the means by which users are rapidly onboarded and exposed to the many benefits that come with this new iteration of the web. HOW ESSENTIA WORKS We’ve already touched upon Essences – self-contained modules that store a specific digital life. Now let’s delve deeper into how they work, and examine their companion, Synergies. When you access a site on the centralized web, there’s certain information that the platform needs about you in order to function. This might include your timezone, IP address, username, and browser type. Then there’s
the additional information which the platform might want, so that it can target advertising or serve more relevant content, but which it doesn’t technically need.
When the iPhone had its maiden launch in 2007, it wasn’t the first touchscreen smartphone, but it was the first one that worked exactly as it was supposed to, with no major glitches, bugs or UX problems.
Essences empower web users to grant dApps access to the data they need and no more. Not only that, but the user retains the right to withdraw that privilege at any time. This incentivizes decentralized platforms to act responsibly and to earn the trust of their community. Compare that with a platform such as Facebook, which flagrantly gives out or resells the data of its users, and makes it extremely hard to close your account. It’s the users who turned Facebook into a multi-billion dollar platform, and yet it’s Facebook that calls the shots. The beauty of the decentralized web is that power is restored to the user once more, where it belongs. Essences sim79
ply make it easier to access the multitude of wallets, exchanges, messaging dApps and other platforms that make up Web 3.0. Having comprehensively covered Essences, let’s briefly consider their counterpart and complement, Synergies. Described as the “connective tissue” of the Essentia framework, Synergies are what enable Essences to interoperate. They’re a tool that developers can harness to build upon Essentia’s open source code and help make the decentralized web closer-knit and better connected. Want to connect a decentralized exchange or wallet to Essentia? You need to create a Synergy. Want to integrate a cryptocurrency blockchain with the Essentia framework? Once again, it’s done via Synergies. These interoperable pieces of code are what makes the decentralized web whole, and enable it to be browsed just like the current web, smoothly and securely. THE ESS TOKEN ESS is Essentia’s native token and it is designed to perform a range of functions within the Essentia ecosystem. As an ERC20 token which operates on the Ethereum network, it can be stored in any compatible wallet such as MetaMask or MyEtherWallet, ESS can be used to pay for a range of services and features. Any time you wish to pay for a particular service or upgrade, or acquire additional storage, it will be paid for using ESS. The token adds convenience, as it can also be used to pay for access to the many dApss that will be linked to Essentia. Instead of having to store multiple tokens for multiple services on the decentralized web, Essentia will simplify matters by making ESS compatible with all of the dApps it’s connected to. While payment is the most obvious use case for the ESS token, it’s by no means the only one. Paying for goods and services is only the beginning. Beyond that, the ESS token will serve a range of functions as Essentia evolves. These include governance and reputation management. Governance is simply about empowering token holders – i.e those with a vested interest in how the platform is run – to have a say in community matters including new integrations, developments, and strategy. This will be complemented by a reputation management system, whereby
users can prove that they’re trustworthy without needing to disclose personally identifiable data in the process. The actions you perform while responsibly using the Essentia framework attest to your trustworthiness, which in turn enhances your reputation. The reputation system is optional, and there’s no obligation to use it to access decentralized services that are incorporated into the Essentia framework. However, users who choose this facility will benefit from increased opportunities and the chance to earn ESS tokens for proving that they add value to the community and can be relied on. ESSENTIA MASTERNODES Another way the Essentia token will be used is to operate masternodes. For Essentia to form a part of the decentralized web, it’s vital that it’s completely decentralized. Otherwise, it would create a single point of failure, just like the Web 2.0 platforms it’s designed to supplant. Decentralization will be achieved by creating a network of masternodes to validate transactions. The aim is for up to 2,000 such nodes to be established, ensuring that no single entity can gain control of the Essentia network, and ensuring that it remains censorship-resistant and cannot be controlled by any one person. Masternode operators will need to stake a certain amount of ESS in order to join the network, as an incentive for good behavior, and will also be rewarded with ESS for confirming transactions. ESSENTIA FOR ENTERPRISES A key aspect of the Essentia framework is the way it will benefit enterprise users. Aside from the benefits to dApp and platform developers who elect to integrate with the Essentia framework, there’s an entire world, outside the cryptoverse, that stands to benefit from blockchain technology. While Essentia’s main focus, initially, is on developing integrations with other cryptocurrency dApps, the end goal is to onboard businesses from all corners of the globe and all sectors. Blockchain technology has the potential to benefit businesses in a multitude of ways, and many of these enterprises need education and enlightenment on the use cases for distributed ledger technology.
Any time you wish to pay for a particular service or upgrade, or acquire additional storage, it will be paid for using ESS. The token adds convenience, as it can also be used to pay for access to the many dApss that will be linked to Essentia.
The beauty of the decentralized web is that power is restored to the user once more, where it belongs. Essences simply make it easier to access the multitude of wallets, exchanges, messaging dApps and other platforms that make up Web 3.0.
Essentia has already begun work on pilot programs for a number of major organizations, including employment ministries and government agencies in Europe. Record keeping is just one of the many ways in which blockchain can be harnessed, and as part of its mission to drive adoption of decentralized technologies, Essentia will be constructing bespoke private chains to enterprises, based on the Essentia framework, and developing custom integrations that enable businesses to stake their claim in the new internet that is being created. WHO IS ESSENTIA? Essentia was formed by Matteo Gianpietro Zago, Mirco Mongiardino, and Vladimir Holubovych. Matteo and Mirco had already enjoyed entrepreneurial success after forming a digital marketing business that was soon attracting Fortune 500 companies. Upon discovering Bitcoin in 2013, Mirco and Matteo were transfixed, and instantly saw the potential its technology provided for building a decentralised web. Meanwhile, Vladimir, who had been making his name in viral advertising, was also quick to spot blockchain’s potential and began developing his own crypto projects. In 2016, the trio formed Essentia and committed themselves to connecting the building blocks of the decentralized web. Essentia operates out of offices in Amsterdam and two other countries, and comprises a talented and tightknit core team, complemented by specialist business advisors. These experts have already been instrumental in helping Essentia pitch and develop pilot programs for high profile European organizations, and their depth of knowledge and industry contacts will help onboard major partners in the months and years to come. In addition, Essentia has built up a strong and highly engaged community on Twitter, Medium and other social channels, with over 20,000 followers on Telegram alone. Many of these individuals will participate in the Essentia token sale, and well over 10,000 have already joined the whitelist. This will ensure that Essentia achieves the necessary network effects required to ensure that the project is a success from day one. In the next five years, the way in which we use and access the web will drastically change. Essentia will be at the forefront of this movement, helping to link these platforms and technologies together, making the web accessible to all, and granting millions the tools necessary to control their digital lives.