Why We Are Switching Blockchains

After months of research, technical due-diligence and strategic analysis we have decided to launch GUARDIUM (Global Decentralized Emergency Response) on the NEO platform as an NEP-5 Token.

Why? Because all of our blockchain development will be easier and faster to develop on the NEO platform.

The NEO Team had this to say about our decision: “NEO Smart Economy welcomes projects that focus both on improving people’s lives and strengthening their personal safety. Using blockchain technology to contribute to the global community is a goal many of us share and we are happy to be joined by like-minded pioneers in this journey in building a community focused ecosystem.”

NEO’s technical merits have always been strong, and the more we considered what we could achieve with the NEO platform (as opposed to our original plan of using a bespoke fork of Litecoin), the more obvious it became that we should make the leap.

NEO stands out as a true ‘third generation coin’ — and VERY importantly, it’s here NOW. There are other promising platforms on the horizon, but the reality is that they are unknown quantities. Their networks are either vaporware or not yet battle-tested. Additionally, most are not even close to launching new tokens on their platforms — and we have no interest in being Guinea pigs whilst building a global emergency response infrastructure.

We’re frequently asked why we aren’t an ERC20 (Ethereum) token; we have publicly stated concerns about Ethereum that have not gone away — if anything, they’ve deepened. But the more we dug into NEO, the more we realized that they had really great answers to every one of our concerns with Ethereum and many additional benefits that are unique to the NEO ecosystem.

It’s important to note this switchover to NEO will not slow us down in the slightest. In fact, it accelerates our schedule. We actually have less work to do as a result of features that NEO supplies — and we will benefit from a greatly streamlined development process overall. As a result, initial token buyers and followers of our project needn’t worry about any delays.

Here are just some of the benefits of NEP-5:

It’s Fast and Scalable Right Now: Neo can handle 1000 transactions per second today. Block generation takes only 15–20 seconds. As a result an NEP-5 based token fully answers the fundamental objections we had with Ethereum and Bitcoin in regards to speed.

Intuitive Wallets: The NEON wallet, developed by City of Zion, is just excellent (scroll to FAQs for download links). It’s already exceptionally consumer friendly, frequently updated and has native support for token sales. In contrast, the QT Wallet derivative we were initially building Guardium on simply did not meet our own standards in terms of usability, design and overall user experience.

Here’s what the NEON wallet looks like:

See? Clean. Simple. Beautiful.

It supports NEP-5 tokens natively (much like MyEtherWallet supports ERC-20 tokens). You can see your tokens, viewable right there below your GAS (yes, this is where your Guardium Tokens will eventually appear).

Libraries For Integrated Wallet Development: We’re largely a Python shop, the City of Zion developers behind NEON are also big fans of Python. As a result, there are now actively developed open-source libraries that allow us to integrate an NEP-5 Guardium Token Wallet directly into Guardian Circle. This is a huge advantage over having to ‘roll our own’ from scratch (which we would have had to do with our old plan).

We don’t want to be in the custom wallet business. We want to focus on emergency response. We want to leverage the ‘big world effect’ of lots of development activity going on around a core platform. Litecoin-fork-island is a lonely place vs. NEOtropolis where we can easily collaborate with our new friends on the core NEO team as well as the fine people at City of Zion.

Identity Model: NEO has been built from the ground-up with the concept of identity as a core feature. Much like ourselves, the NEO team always has an eye on local-regulations, accountability and identity management. Those things all require strong certificate and identity management and verification tools. Through standards such as X.509 we can leverage the NEO infrastructure certificate/identity features rather than reinventing the wheel affording us once again to focus on emergency response.

Separation of GAS and NEO: The price of gas for Ethereum has become outrageous and is already completely out of reach for the developing world. The NEO development team specifically wanted to avoid this situation, so they separated the GAS from the NEO tokens to keep transactions reasonably priced.

This is great news for Guardium because we never want to see a situation where transactions for our NEP-5 Token are out of reach for the six billion people without access to government sponsored emergency services. NEO has solved for this right from the beginning and we believe this to be the likely standard for future blockchains.

In Closing: We hope you can see why this was such an obvious choice for us to make. We think Guardium and the world’s new emergency alert grid will be served best by letting the NEO team, City of Zion and other open source contributors solve the blockchain and wallet issues. This allows us to focus more deeply on the myriad alert devices and response services.

We look forward to future collaboration with the NEO team and the NEO community at large!

More info on GUARDIUM Global Decentralized Emergency Response: guardium.co

More info on Guardian Circle Apps (Available Now Worldwide on iOS, Android and Amazon ALEXA): guardiancircle.com

FAQ:

Q: What If I Already Bought Guardium Tokens?

Nothing has really changed except that your Guardium will now be delivered as NEP-5 Tokens. Delivery will still occur on schedule between April 20 and May 20.

Q: Will The Tokenomics Change?

Nope, not at all. We are still issuing only 100M GUARDIUM Tokens. We’re only selling 30M of them. All other details of the Token sale, including the % splits, remain exactly the same as they were before.

Q: What If I Already Downloaded The GUARDIUM Wallet? Do I still use that?

No. The original GUARDIUM Wallet we distributed on our website will no longer be used: simply delete it.

To receive your Guardium, download any NEO-compliant wallet. We highly recommend the NEON Wallet by City of Zion. Here are the links:

Download NEON Wallets For Mac and PC Here

Q: How Do I Get My Guardium NEP-5 Tokens?

You will need to download a NEO-compliant wallet (links provided above).

If you previously purchased Guardium in our pre-sale prior to March 2nd 2018, you will need to visit http://guardium.co/redeem/presale and fill out the form (including your NEO address). We will then issue your Guardium tokens.

As of March 2nd, all new sales must be completed via our pre-sale whitelist process at http://guardium.co/#presaleForm

All tokens will be delivered by May 20th 2018.