Yo les cocos,

These last three months have been very rich and interesting for Factom. Multiple events occurred, and in the case you missed them, here is a summary, trying to connect dots together.

If you are new to Factom, feel free to learn more about the Factom protocol, how it was ingeniously designed, don’t hesitate to have a glimpse a the current users, then finally enjoy the read below.

Governance Shift

The board of Factom was radically modified in the second part of 2017. All began with the departure of Tiana Laurence, who had successfully taken the role of CMO since the creation of Factom. She has created lots of awareness in the mortgage sector. She was later replaced by Jay Smith.

In the meantime, Peter Kirby, the previous CEO of Factom, was replaced by Paul Snow himself, The Architect of the Factom Protocol. Paul Snow has a long experience of running companies, as displayed on his LinkedIn page. His technical and management skills are more than welcome at the helm of the Factom. Also, Paul Snow is quite active on the Community Slack, and hence easily has a glimpse of the factoids holders sentiment.

On top of that, the Factom team is constantly growing bigger, reaching new talents!

Ask Me Anything – AMA summary

Few weeks after the governance shift happened, it was decided by the Factom board that an AMA (Ask Me Anything) would be realized on Reddit. The goal of an AMA is to extract substantial information from the project team. Reddit users leave questions and the team members reply to it, when they can legally do it. It is the occasion to debunk myths, or to announce great deals, but also to go deeper in technical details.

This AMA was realized at a critical time. BTC was climbing higher every day, suppressing most of the alts, and especially FCT whose price fell drastically to a mere 0.001 BTC on the 8th of December. Dire situation! Then the AMA was released, giving back hope to the FCT long term holders. I invite everybody to read this AMA – which provides a good way to meet Jason and Jay, both working at Factom. For the lazy ones, here is a summary of my own.

NDA – Non-Disclosure Agreement

Lots of debates occurred around these NDA. Were they even real? Some were guessing that they were pure invention for the team to save time. Time for what? We learn precious things from this AMA, such as:

20 to 30 NDA were signed with different counter parties

These NDA cover deals from simple interest in the technology to concrete contracts

The counter parties are overall from Fortune 1000, but most of them are among Fortune 100

The three mains sectors of these companies are Banking, Insurance and Healthcare

The names of these companies shall be revealed in Q1/Q2 2018, from Jason’s words

Hold your breath, Factom has clients. Contracts are signed. And these clients are among the biggest companies in the world. That’s awesome. Factom marketing team did a damn good job. It also confirms what Tiana said during a podcast, that was mostly ignored by people, when she says Fortune 500 companies were among Factom clients.

Harmony – Update on the mortgage industry

We all know by now that Harmony is the leading product of Factom. It enables companies to monitor mortgages related files and updates them using the block chain features – immutability, trustless – while reducing running and audit costs. During this AMA, some clarifications were given on the approximative Factoid consumption of a mortgage. Here are the answers from Jay:

Just to give you an idea of the magnitudes we are dealing with. An average mortgage lender does between 300K and 500K loans a year with 100 documents per loan and something like a 1000 points of data. If you do the math, it gets rather impressive, or as we think of it, exciting […] That is a really hard question to answer. It depends upon how they implement Factom. But if they implement it how we recommend, they will use tens of thousands of entries. Also loans can last 30 years with most lasting 7-10 years AND the lender will need to continually update the chain of data with payments, taxes, escrows etc, for years… So the numbers gets really big

Mortgages lenders would have to continue to update millions of mortgages on probably a monthly basis, when interests are paid or the capital is redeemed. Every possible event in the life of the mortgage would require the use of Entry Credit, and thus for Factoids to be burned. Don’t hesitate to read my article on the dual token system used by the Factom protocol. The more Factoids are burned, the higher the demand for them, hence an increase in the price.

Also, it seems that the interest in the mortgage sector is very high. As Jason stated, while on their Mortgage Bankers Conference, back in October, Factom was requested 25 times to demo their products in only two days, which is a performance in itself. A special mention is given about the user-friendly aspect of Harmony. From Jason answer, Harmony is so user-friendly that the dev team had to add more techy/block-chainy stuff on top of it to give people the feeling that were actually experiencing a block-chain based solution. A feet in the future.

Here is a great quote from Jason:

Harmony has moved out of Pilot stage and is continuing to expand. Based upon client feedback we have a number of new features coming in Q1 that greatly enhance enterprise client’s ability to utilize Factom in their business. This includes support for decisioning tools, workflow systems, audit log tracking, decision and milestone entries and interlinking data provenance.

Again, a new confirmation that Harmony is set up and running with several clients.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Project

One of the most interesting side projects of Factom is the one they lead with the B&M Gates Foundation, the goal being to enable the secure transfer of medical information. Factom received a grant of $500k to run this project. No real news leaked to the market about this project, luckily the AMA solved this, and according to Jay:

For the second grant which just started in the last two months, we are working with another company that is responsible for the front end work and for on the ground roll-out, user training and support In South Africa. Factom is providing it’s API layer customized to the needs of the project. Factom is the decentralized back-end instead of a centralized data center running an Oracle or SQL database. South African clinics will run a private Factom network that will make about 5 million blood test results available to the patients and their providers. The project is slated to last 1 year in development and implementation stage, leading up to user testing and general roll-out. We had a kick off meeting with stake holders including NHLS in Johannesburg mid November to launch this project.

Factom will secure the first real application of block chain in the medical industry. That’s awesome. Once this is proved successful in South Africa, nothing will stand between a world wide application and Factom.

Securing tokenization-related ICO

It was vaguely mentioned on the Slack that Factom might go after new market, and especially the ICO market. But not every ICO, mainly ICO related to tokenization process. The first of this kind I have in mind is LAToken, which aims at making tokenizable every physical asset. Linking those real world assets and the digital world is not a easy task, and it requires lots of paperwork, like mortgages do. Factom is working on an Harmony-like project to secure data about these tokenization agreements.

It is introduced this way in the AMA:

It is an interesting market to chase, as ICO might become the prominent way to rise money. Having a trusted setup made by a high-reputation company will help the industry to ensure a high degree of transparence.

dLoc partnership – broader than we thought

Do you remember dLoc? It is one of the first application of the Factom protocol, used to secure physical assets. One of the example is the sticker produced by Smartrac with an RFID/NFC tag embedded that makes easy to track items. The thing is we though that the implication of Factom would me limited to these tiny stickers supposed to be sticked to government documents. Hell no. dLoc chips can be placed in every item, electronic parts, motors, supply chain in general, but also clothes. Smartrac made a demo of how these clothes embedded chips will probably changed the way we interact with them.

Factom will be used to secure a whole bunch of different tracking solutions. These solutions form Smartrac Cosmos.

Digging a bit on the website of Linxens/Smartrac, we learn that they are heavily present in the e-government sector. They are already leaders in the e-passport commerce. The biometric part of your e-passport has certainly be made by these company. And soon enough, your birth certificate too will embeds a dLoc sticker. Private data secured through a decentralized block chains. What a charming idea! And it’s a lot of data to secure… Burning FCT in the process.

Miscellaneous news from the AMA

The AMA is rich and many aspect are quickly mentioned. Here is a selection of the quote I find the most interesting:

A summary of 2017, by Jay:

2017 was a Huge year for Factom. We completed the closing of our Series A round of funding for just over $9MM in funding, we added Jason (Me!) with over 20 years experience and success leading startups to success added Laurie Pyle with over 15 years experience leading startups and enterprise software companies, deployed several versions of Harmony for mortgage and insurance. We expanded DHS and Gates, added enterprise clients, completed and expanded our infrastructure allows us to significantly increase our volume support, capacities and throughput. We have established our selves as a thought leader in the mortgage industry and in 2018 there will be series of announcements demonstrating our penetration to the market.

An affirmation about Factom chasing the financial sector:

An update on the status of M2. The Factom protocol is clearly stable and running. The next step is to distribute the Federated and Audit servers among eligible counter parties:

I also like the fact that Jay admits the struggle Factom is having regarding their marketing strategy toward token holders. They are aware of it, but have to keep a fragile balance. It is one of the best argument used by Factom detractors: no news = shitcoin. Well, no, in fact, that’s the opposite. No vain announcement with Factom, that is.

Price projections – New markets

On Reddit, a Factom believer needed to be reassured about the price mechanism of the dual token structure. The author was trying to figure the equilibrium price of FCT according to some assumptions.

Paul Snow, CEO of Factom and Chief Architect of the Factom protocol replied in person to this question. He used the first potential applications that came on top of his head and apply to it a reasonable usage with instant full adoption. Paul has done a spread sheet to sum up the results.

Among the applications, let’s list:

Mortgage – already implemented with Harmony Insurance – a simple tweak in Harmony is enough to manage that Birth and Death certificates – already implemented with dLoc stickers Digital Identities – Factom already allows that (here and there) Asset Trading – already implemented (here and there) Supply Chain Tracking – already implemented with dLoc chips

Funny enough, all the potential markets mentioned by Paul are already covered in some ways. And using is simple model, the equilibrium price of Factoids would easily be over 300 USD. This is by only using what Factom Inc has developped around the Factom protocol, and with no speculation. This price is the mechanical floor price. Should be added to it speculation and the projects developed by third parties (example here and there) on the Factom protocol. Interesting enough.

Also, please read these comments made by Paul Snow on the community Slack and kindly gathered by D-lux. It is very encouraging. I like that!

Conclusion

Factom has clients with signed contracts whose names should be shortly released. Factom is chasing new markets as they are already the best in the mortgage industry. Factoids’ price projection are realist and very exciting.