Yesterday we had a Slack AMA with the Ark.io community. It was an intense 1-hour chat and some of the questions asked can be found below.

Q1: Is Persona gonna run on new Ark engine v2 or you gonna run on current v1? And do you have any plans to collaborate with Ark team on development front?

A1: We aim to have it run in v2.

Q2: What makes your project different from something like Civic? What is your ICO price and total supply?

A2: From our point of view Civic doesn’t give you a real identity. The scope of Persona is to actually prove your identity (legal) in the real world. This goes from a visit to the bank to opening a new utility contract & etc. The ICO token price is $0.2 and the initial supply is 100 million tokens.

Q3: What are your plans to penetrate the South East Asian Markets?

A3: we will start with European companies but having the EU focused on high standards in data protection we plan to go global with our verification services through a system of ambassadors in major cities.

Q4: How big is this issue of verification and what are some applications and examples?

A4: The issue is pretty clear. If you want to use 4 cryptocurrency exchanges, you need to do KYC individually for all of them. With Persona, you can use the same KYC/AML and share it between services. You can find applications and examples in the whitepaper (financial, utilities, parcel services, etc)

Q5: What exactly do you mean that we have control over our own personal data? In the form of something akin to keepass or lastpass but on your blockchain?

A5: The user data is stored on the blockchain, so the user becomes the true owner of his data. You own your data, and you just give access to 3rd parties to access your data. We are not looking into a digital-only service like LastPass, since we want to see Persona used in the real-world.

Q6: What happens if not all tokens get sold? Are you gonna keep or burn? Is there any minimum to start the project?

A6: The unsold tokens will not be issued.

Q7: What was the reasoning for picking Ark as the foundational blockchain?

A7: Because Persona is also aimed towards corporations that want to share customer data between them (at the will of the customer), we need a *DPOS* blockchain.

Q8: Can you elaborate on your inflation model, why did you chose 8 Persona Tokens / Block in the first two years?

A8: We did the computation based on ark’s model. Basically we believe that having this amount of tokens released will not “flood” the market with tokens neither encourage pump and dumps.

Q9: Does this mean that the token would be used for transferring or tx fees of your persona data?

A9: The token will be used to get your identity verified. In order to increase your verification level (like a Tier), you need to get verified by more individuals/companies. Each transaction will carry a tx fee in Persona Tokens (PRS).

Q10: And can you explain how you plan to verify individuals? I’ve heard its face to face within a meeting? Is that the only way you go?

A10: During the beginning there will be face to face checks. We will look into remote checks as well, but due to the ease of forgery (like when using AI to fake images) it will take a bit longer to get that going.

Q11: Is voting staying same as with ark and 51 delegates or you thinking of less / more delegates?

A11: We will have 51 delegates, same as Ark. We want to keep a fast block validation.

Q12: Are there any companies that already shown interest in this kind of service?

A12: We already did a Proof-of-Concept for Societe Generale (a big banking in France) and we have had about 5 requests for integrating Persona with build-in systems of existing companies.

Q13: Can Persona be used as 2FA for smart phones and IoT devices?

A13: Persona can be used to prove your identity on a multiple range of devices. For example, you can secure your IoT device by enrolling it into Persona, and configuring it to only accept commands from your digital identity.

Q14: What happens if someone steals your identity (private key). How will you be able to purge old one (blockchain and all) ? Smart contract?

A14: If you lose your private key, you can generate a new key (identity wallet) and start retrieving your identity by getting verified. It’s the same method as someone would report a fake account. Users can get verified, but they can also lose verifications if notaries reject them.

Q15: How exactly are PRS used? (Can you guys give an example, I have read the white paper now but i still do not understand the process flow for use.)

A15: the PRS tokens will be used for paying the verification fees. Based on the complexity of verifications we will have different fees, adjusted periodically.

Q16: In regards to Civic, it sounds like they are already targeting legal identity through a variety of user submitted documentation and org. verifications. I’m not so sure it’s just a Facebook type login. Can you elaborate on that?

A16: There are 3 main approaches:

User-verified identity, in the form of a trust system. You get verified and get trusted by the community, so more individuals/companies want to do business with you. Persona will be used to share identity (KYC) between companies. So instead of providing your identity to 4 banks, you can just share the identity verified by one of the bank with the other 3. This means we will create a *Single View of User* between companies, services, etc. These 2 implications have nothing to do with a legal identity. The 3rd approach is to have a legal framework in which users can use Persona as a national identity system.

Q17: the fact that it’s progressing so well on the Ark platform is amazing… how is your experience so far building on and working with it?

A17: We’ve been following Ark development since it’s inception (as Stefan is a co-founder of Ark). Ark blockchain provides a unique landscape for developing trustless applications by applying the DPOS consensus. We’ve been working on integrating Ark with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) in order to bring smart-contracts on the Ark blockchain for some time. As we mentioned, we will do a fork of Ark, so we will have our own implementation of the protocol with our own public blockchain.