When discussing the Legacy Project with other people there is one natural question that arises all the time. Whether they are high-skilled engineers or laypersons, they always ask us: “How on earth do you expect to deliver a project that must operate for decades?”.

Actually, that simple question underlines the scale of the Legacy Project, and is in fact one the aspects our team is most interested in and drives us to build Legacy.

The main challenge is creating the product itself to last such a long time. What you cannot do, of course, is design a specific piece of technology and expect it to last decades. 50 years ago, it was possible to store 125 gigabytes of data… if you could dedicate a whole room to storage, and afford a pneumatic robot to move the film strips used as substrate. Today, this amount of storage is found in any decent laptop.

On the business side, even 5-year startup business plans are known to be completely unrealistic (at best). Growth (or lack thereof) will always lead to new decisions. Human factor is both key and unpredictable.

The next question people tend to ask us is: “How does the proof of life engine work, how you determine someone is dead?”. And that is a crucial part of the 100 year plan, since stability is a must-have.

The answer is that we don’t plan on doing the long-term work. Instead, we plan to write ourselves out of the equation. In fact, this solution was in front of our noses from the very beginning and is just one of the many advantages that can be provided by decentralized shared economies.

True to its blockchain core, Legacy will thus have a built-in incentivisation scheme powered by the Legacy token. On the Legacy platform, developers and lawyers will be able to submit their work, and be rewarded in proportion to its usage. When a new technology, or new contract possibilities, begin to gain traction, having the most useful/polished/market-appealing Legacy plugin will have more value every passing day. To implement this vision, Legacy is planned from day 1 with an open architecture in mind, and an incentive mechanism that will reward contributors.

On a simpler “cash-flow” calculation, our potential market increases every day. Net population increase is estimated at 200.000 person per day, and wider technological reach means that a continuously increasing fraction of those persons will take part of Legacy’s market potential.

As our current plans stand, community contributions will begin after the release of Legacy version 3 (tentatively scheduled for 2022). But until then, there is a lot of work to do. We cannot expect community interest without having a complete, working, profitable product with a wide user base. Our shorter-term target is to have the first commercial release of Legacy in 2018, followed by a second version in 2020.

What we need to achieve is creating a core product whose value will not fade with time, and an open platform so that anyone can contribute, and wants to contribute.

The transmission of memories and belongings on the Legacy platform will hit that mark.