AMA session with our CEO Alex Momot (Part 1)

Some time ago we set up an AMA session to keep our community members in a loop about latest REMME news and answer the most frequent questions. We chose 6 questions that took more upvotes on a Reddit. Today we’re publishing the transcript of it. We also added other questions that didn’t appear in the AMA session because of lack of time. They will be published soon. Enjoy!

Hello guys, my name is Alex Momot, CEO of REMME, and today we have our session. We want to share with you some insights about our updates, about our progress, about master nodes and other news. So let’s start with the first question:

1) “Last time Alex was in Telegram chat the suggestion of ‘Guardian Nodes’ for those ICO participants who have held / accumulated more REM tokens as opposed to masternodes as a reward for being loyal investors was put to Alex and he said he would consider it.

Could you please confirm if this will happen and if so will there be a limit per account holder and how will you choose who out of those ICO participants will be eligible?

I think the price REMME tokens were purchased at should play a factor. As some investors like myself had no fiat left to buy at the bottom.

As the price paid for masternodes during ICO phase was $10k compared to those who have been able to buy 250k rem since hitting dex for at most 3k.”

It’s a big question. Let’s start with nodes. Here is our source about nodes. Right now it is more than 500 token holders, who have more than 250k REM. A part of them would like to make a node, so we decided to analyze those token holders and make some sort of list. People who were the best holders will have a priority. For example, if you are holding since participating the token itself you will be able to start a masternode in the first flow. If you are holding and selling, you will be in the second phase. And if someone has a lot of tokens, this will not be a reason for them to be given priority to have a node before smallest participants.

The most important thing will be holding, and afterwards we will decide on the appropriate amount of nodes that should work. For example, it could be 250 nodes in the beginning and 250 nodes after all participants will start the node will be able to take part in the auction, after which each next node will cost more.

Few words about rewards of the nodes. As you know 90% of tokens go to the node, so 10% goes to REMME for development, support and maintenance of network, etc. And now we think the 90% that is going to the node will be divided into two parts. First 45% will be available after receiving and 45% will be frozen or it will be not available just after receiving and the process of unfreezing will be made step by step during one year, or the certificate working period.

For example you will be able to spend 10% of the stake each month, or 5% and it could be two other options that will help you to get these tokens faster, the first of these being reputation. After a few months of node work, if you have a very good reputation and very good uptime, your certificates are true, you have no fake certificates issued and nodes are fully compatible with consensus and work in the proper way you will be able to get this portion of tokens faster.

One more thing is an additional stake. For example, if someone has more than 250k of tokens and this token holder wants to make a node. You could add this to your additional stake to your node and this node will be able to use those frozen tokens faster so the frozen period will be smaller. How does this work? As of now we have a general idea based on mathematics and are working on its development.

First of all I want to say to you that the real consensus and the real proper work of the network should be based on effective work, but not on the stake, so reputation is much more possible than a stake. You know that traditional proof-of-stake was considered to be not so effective like proof-of-work, but of course we will not use proof-of-work in traditional meaning in mining, but we want to make some kind of virtual proof-of-work; it could be proof-of-service or another name, but the essence of it is our nodes will get additional bonuses if the node will work well for a long period of time.

But if you have additional bonuses with the stake, you will have a faster period of unfrozen tokens. You could have a maximum bonus of 80% of unfrozen tokens. Let’s make an example with figures: at the moment when you issue the certificate, you get for each 100 certificates — let’s imagine that it’s 100 tokens — so 45 tokens available just after receiving and 45 is frozen, but if you have a good reputation during two years with the maximum bonus of 80%, you will be able to spend 81 tokens and the remaining 9 tokens will be frozen in the same amounts each month during the year.

We will publish all these figures so you will be able to read and review them cause it could be hard to understand when I explain it, but I hope you will be able to understand the general idea of what we want to make and what we want to show.

One more important thing to add. If you have more than 250,000 tokens on a node your reward could be available earlier. For example, you have 500,000 tokens on one node, you will get a bonus, which means getting some part (e.g., 20%) of the frozen 45% tokens earlier. All these details will be introduced later.

So it is a general thing about nodes, and the second part of the question is about the limits, so as I said we will have 250 nodes available from the beginning and 250 will be available after the auction. And as for the price we think that the real holders should have benefits.

2) “Can you tell us anything about REMME’s major exchange application?”

I know that this is a very important thing, but there are several questions that I can’t talk about because of legal reasons. We know that you are waiting to hear from us, you are waiting for big exchanges, and we are preparing everything that is needed to make those exchanges. We are preparing applications, and I can tell you that all the names you want to see are there. We are in contact with the exchanges, but as you know, it usually takes time, so when we have any updates and news we will publish it. Be prepared for it, because sometimes exchanges could list the token without additional notice, even for founders, so we are not always able to make an announcement before it happens.

3) “I want to know your marketing strategy. Branding and target region (especially when go to Asian markets).”

First of all I think that the most effective way to make progress is building a very effective and well performing protocol. When we have a working protocol, integrators, developers etc all over the world will be able to use our protocol through their own DApps and sell it to their clients. So the best strategy is to move like Ethereum: from the very beginning to build a strong developers’ community.

When you have strong developers we have strong advocates of the brand and we have already received such requests from companies all over the world, who develop such DApps and who will sell it to their existing clients. This process is much faster when it goes from developers and from existing clients, because when you talk about the selling process it usually takes much time and it is not very effective when you talk about spending resources.

When we have further developed our protocol, DApps will be created much faster than if we do it in a centralized way. This will create a huge distributor network, because you have all the world as your partners and they will be able to spread the word about our solution, our protocol and the development will be much faster.

Talking about Asian markets, we have requests from Asian companies including three very big companies. I can’t tell you names right now, but you can read the details in our Medium posts, and I will say a few words about this later. So the Asian market is very interesting, we know that it is growing very fast and we think that our messages and our strategies and technology should be adopted to each market. But even when we have big sales offices all over the world, from our point of view, much more effective work will come from the local integrators, because they know the local markets much better than our team.

4) “Tell us more about in terms of incentives for people for holding the tokens, other than masternodes of course. And another thing, the ability to use REMME to create DApps — please go into these more in depth.”

We have started to discuss the specifics before, but I can add to that. So if you’re not talking about the nodes, then you want to know how our economy will work?

Let’s imagine the company, that wants to issue, for example, one million certificates, and certificates should be issued by our network. How will this work? They will go to the market, they will buy tokens or it could be a contract with us and we as a company will go to market and buy tokens for them. The result is a large amount of money will come to exchange and tokens will be bought for issuing certificates for this specific client. After that, masternodes will take part in issuing the certificates, and another thing is that local developers, local integrators, could use the REM tokens to develop dApps and it will work with the same system as the Ethereum has.

For every action you need Ethers. The same with us. For every action in our blockchain you will need REM tokens so it’s hard to divide masternode from this economy — masternodes of course play a very big role. But just for your understanding, we have utility tokens used for issuing certificates, not only for adding masternodes.

And as for the procedure for using REMME to create DApps, after you have the protocol each integrator just needs to take all the documentation, review it, understand how to implement it, and they will be able of course to contact us as the core team and ask questions. We will prepare a standard FAQ, and documentation for integrators for each specific area of development: libraries, SDK and so on.

5) “Can you summarise key results from pilot projects: what are the main challenges identified and how are lessons learned being applied moving forward?”

Firstly, I just want to remind you of some facts from our Medium post. The total number of applications is 289, and classified as leads are 105. The largest companies, based on the number of customers: a fintech firm (online payments) with more than 500m users and a telecom company with a combined mobile subscriber base of 640m. The smallest company, based on the nubmer of users, is a US tech startup seeking to protect the access of 5 website admins.

I’d like to share a few insights about my personal experience from communicating with those companies. After we received their requests, we started to talk via Skype or other messengers, and we got a lot of feedback about what we need to do, where we need to move in terms of development. It could be a different situation with each request, for example when talking about big companies, with a lot of users, with complicated, sophisticated internal processes, there could be a lot of technologies involved.

They could be using completely different technologies from different years, from different platforms and it could be hard to make a proper integration in just one month, but this means that it’ll just take more time and we’ve got the necessary experience for it, it’ll take 1–3 months maybe, and after that period of time we will be able to make our solution much more effective with the next request we receive from a similar company with multiple systems.

And if you’re talking about small companies, of course it is much easier to make solutions for these from the very beginning when those companies don’t have such complicated systems on-site. Our system will be the first system for identity access management so it will be much more easier and much faster. So of course we will try to make it as fast as possible, but you need to understand that for big companies it could take a lot of time, even if you’re talking about some legal processes, not mentioning the technical integration.

But I can assure you that I’m quite impressed by the number of requests we’ve received from businesses wanting to use our identity access management solution. I think in the next few months we will experience very good results and will start real implementations with a lot of big companies.

6) “Can you clarify how REMME is unique and has the advantage over competitors like SelfKey and others? Which competitors are really competing with REMME vs perceived as competing?”

First of all we are not an identity solution. You know that sometimes people try to start to build an identity a solution from the point of view of the end user and I know that it doesn’t work here. I’ve reviewed a lot of projects that started at the process for the user and if you’re talking about external users, it is always hard to encourage them to protect their accounts. If you’re talking about internal users, for example a big company that has internal policies about security, it is much easier to integrate such a solution inside of the company and, right now thousands of companies, maybe ten thousand companies throughout the world, use internal solutions instead of using more effective systems like REMME.

They use logins and passwords, 2FA authentication, certificates and other things, and I can tell you that they want to change this because we have a lot of requests, we understand their needs, we understand that they want to change things, and I can tell you that the most proper way to work with those markets is to start integration from the business end. It should be B2B solutions, not B2C, but of course we’d like to make REMME available for regular users of crypto exchanges and suchlike. This will take time and of course not everybody will use it.

We are working on WebAuth, one of our first dApps, and every exchange, every service in the crypto space and in other parts of the internet, will be able to integrate the solution for their users. With WebAuth you will be able to login in one click and this is a very good improvement to the user experience and we hope that other companies will use this. The services should start to integrate it from their side to enable it for their users. When some crypto exchange integrates our solution you will see “Login with REMME” on their website, you will be able to use it. The process is fast, especially in comparison to other similar solutions. For example, if you’re talking about SelfKey and other providers of identity, usually you should create your account using that identity provider and wait years for somebody to integrate a solution.

We want to be a standard for corporate business and that’s our main market, so we will start from that market as a sales department. If you are talking about dApps, you can understand that everyone can start the integration from any point they wish to do so. We just provide the protocol and help to make the dApps, and you will see a lot of businesses that integrate the solution from their side. As for competitors, I can tell you that the main competitors, if you’re talking about the enterprise market, are not from crypto.

Competitors from traditional markets right now are selling their AIM solutions to companies such as very big banks, financial companies, enterprises all over the world — it could be some sort of password manager, it could be some sort of UTM devices and there’s a huge amount of solutions that are hard to use, and not very effective. Users or employees don’t like the process of login and I can tell you that the companies that use the solutions want to change this.

It’s hard to list the names of these competitors, because there are several markets: identity solutions, access management, SSL certificates and certification authorities. We could say that our competitors are traditional certification authorities, but I think the most interesting market is access management and our competitors are the companies that are providing access management for enterprise users. If you’re talking about identity in the crypto space, usually it is a big problem for them, they typically use ineffective blockchains. They try to use other solutions that are not easily integrated. That is the reason we want to use SSL/TLS certificates, because this is a virtual technology that’s used all over the world in a lot of companies.

Right now, when we’re talking with enterprise, during our pilot programme communication, we understand that the applicants very much like our solution that is based on this technology, because their technical staff always understand how to deal with it and we only describe the blockchain part, not the part of integration. When you’re talking about blockchain competitors, usually it’s hard to make a bridge between the blockchain based solution and the real enterprise landscape, technical landscape.

One more important thing I would share about the solution we would like to integrate into our internal blockchain migration mechanism when it is an ERC20 token becomes REMME token. We want to make it through atomic swap. It will solve the problem of a central point of attack that appears when we are talking about some centralized server for migration — like for example right now working in Waves, or in other projects. We think that atomic swap will help to solve that problem. We are working on other ideas to make our blockchain very fast and very interesting for enterprise users and for smaller companies.

Thank you for being with us! Stay tuned and hodl!

You can find the video record of this AMA here