The REMME project is engaged in the development of solutions in the field of computer security, in particular, password-less authentication of users and devices on blockchain. In February, the startup team managed to raise $ 18 million within ICO through the sale of tokens. It is known that the funds raised will be spent on the development of software that identifies devices or users through security certificates, as well as opening offices and recruiting staff for REMME.

How and when did the idea of password-less authentication technology development appear?

In 2015, the founder of REMME Oleksandr Momot had an idea, but there was no experience in this area since since he had economic education. Therefore, he decided to find out from the people who were dealing with this issue: whether the development will work, how to do everything right and whether there is a need for this among business at all. Looking for help with the expertise, Momot went to the TOP-10 Ukrainian funds. But they didn’t grasp the concept and in principle couldn’t figure out what he wanted from them. It was the first indication that the Ukrainian venture capital funds are very far from what would have to deal with. He decided to check it with the people he was sure of.

They were Vitalik Buterin and one American accelerator. At that time, Ethereum had just appeared, and it was easy to communicate with Vitalik by e-mail. He advised people who could help with financing. But Oleksandr didn’t write them, since he doubted whether REMME would use Ethereum as a platform. And the project still didn’t use it, because Ethereum had some drawbacks for such a solution.

Then Momot wrote another accelerator, told how the team is going to earn and what problems to solve. They offered to apply to them on the site. But the team didn’t plan to leave Ukraine at that time, so CEO REMME didn’t see the point in doing that. Fedback confirmed that the startup was moving in the right direction and there was a demand for development.

1.5 years, Momot himself has funded the project for the money earned from the sale of equipment and investing in other ICO (including Ethereum). But in the summer of 2017, the expense began to increase, so money was attracted within the cryptocurrency environment.

I was very surprised, because our ««friends and family round»» market is not well developed. But it turned out that my reputation and the expertise of people from the community allowed to do so. Therefore, the attraction of the necessary funds at that time took literally a couple of minutes. A few weeks later I started preparing for the pre-sale. We organized the pre-sale of the tokens as early as December 2017.

Why did the idea of developing a blockchain-based password-less authentication solution arise?

REMME makes the foundation, and on its basis, other developers around the world will be able to make their own decisions. This is a bit like the Ethereum platform running. For example, Vitalik Buterin made Ethereum, and Vadym Grusha, in his company BlockSoftLab, — — which provides services for creating smart contracts — — can make something own on the basis of Ethereum blockchain. REMME makes a protocol so that the password-less authentication could be done. And people will integrate the technology into a particular company on the basis of the protocol.

In order not to waste resources, not to create new solutions, it is enough to make such a protocol, and a local partner anywhere in the world can adapt it to their existing or new clients. It helps in scaling the product and there’s no need to spend a lot of effort on selling a solution. REMME plans to have the sales offices around the world in the most promising regions: USA, Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The first version of the product was based on Emercoin blockchain, and the second on Bitcoin blockchain. But there were difficulties: both have the drawbacks with a block’s closure time. It is important for the client to understand how much the implementation of such a development company will cost. It is impossible to predict this for the next 3 years in cryptocurrencies. Everything changes very fast, even the cost of transactions in blockchain. And this leads to unexpected changes to the company's budget. That’s why REMME decided to build their own blockchain, which would have fast transactions and fast blocks and a low transaction price.

How the development will work

It is worth mentioning that REMME doesn’t have any passwords at all. The company does not store any data. This is very important, because whatever REMME stored, if it is centralized — — it can be hacked. Here only the status of your certificate in the blockchain is stored, not even the certificate itself, because it's in your possession.

Imagine that you come to the airport, give the passport at the control — — and you are checked through the database of wanted persons. REMME went the same way. You come to a site and show the generated certificate there. It functions as a passport — — and in order to show it, you need to click the login button. Then the server goes to the blockchain to check if it is active. If everything’s okay, then it lets you go further.

If you need to make changes, you can create a new certificate. It is no trouble and will cost quite cheap for business. The target audience of REMME is large-scale organizations with a huge amount of cyberattacks. The main task’s removing the opportunity to do some of them. REMME does not protect against them, but simply makes them impossible. It conditionally «concrete»«concrete» the door for the thief — — and he has no way to get «i«into the apartment».

Why did you choose Ethereum for token-sale?

Around the end of January there was a great hype. REMME has been added by thousands of people on Telegram. At the time of the start of the token-sale, there were about 26 thousand of them. And in order to hold the ICO, it was necessary to protect against potential attacks. They firstly planned to make sales through their personal office, but realized that with a large degree of probability, it would be hacked (or at least the site will be tried to bring down).

At first, they wanted to take Bitcoin, Ethereum, KuCoin Shares and Binance Coin, and then decided to transfer the potential load to the Ethereum blockchain. This allowed to remove the load from the personal cabinet and from the site. Another reason was that the community asked to allow investing first only those people who were initially interested in the project.

With the rapid growth of the community, potential investors were worried that not everyone would be able to take part in the ICO. It was necessary to make a personal limit (for example, 15 ETH per person). REMME restricted the ability to register to those who were in the Telegram group and secured the three-phase authentication via the bot. As a result, 10 thousand people passed through it. On the first day, only those who were in the «w«white list»t» with the maximum private assets of 15 ETH could invest. On the second day — — only those who were in the ««white list»» without limits. And on the third day everybody had to invest, also the other cryptocurrencies have been added.

On the first day we received over 90 %0 % of the required amount (attended by almost 5 thousand people). When the second day was opened, it took 59 seconds to get another 10 %0 %.

How did REMME overcome the attacks?

The first defense was a transition to a smart contract. The second one was carried out directly with the help of several teams that checked for errors and bugs so that there was no chance to hack the site. They managed to find mistakes and cleverly correct them.

We pretended we did not know about them. Then the attackers who followed us observed that everything was Ok for them and hoped that it would be possible to attack us like this. In fact, we were hiding those mistakes and correcting them. We also created a second version of the site. If the first version had been brought down, we would have shown the next one in another IP. The point was to pretend that we weren’t very well versed and that we wee doing everything literally at the last moment.

The hackers’ logic was to bring our site down, then launch the ICO advertisement and replace the address of the smart contract, because the REMME site would be unavailable and as well as checking. But the team was ready for such a result and recorded a video on YouTube, which contained the first and the last four symbols of the smart contract. Accordingly, the hackers wouldn’t be able to bring YouTube down.

REMME was one of the few token-sales in the past few months who didn’t lose a large sum of money because of scammers. If someone stole something, then it was just writing of the personal message.

REMME’s plans for the nearest future

After token-sale the company began to build the structure and develop solutions. Now they started working with the companies with big names. By the end of summer, the first version of the solution will be ready. Currently REMME work on creating of the product as soon as possible and starting to sell it. The main office is situated in Kyiv, there are also local ones in Odessa, plus several partners around the world.

Katya Buyalska