HashnStore : Q2-Q3 2020 Intermediary Update

[Matthias Fortin]

-----------------------------------
ORIGINAL PLEDGES START
-----------------------------------
-LEGAL STRUCTURE
--Create a for-profit company (SAS structure) responsible for running the servers, collecting the Factoids and using the resulting revenues to promote the Factom protocol. It will also funds the HashnStore Foundation.

--Create a non-profit organisation, a francophone association (HashnStore Foundation), used as an interface for interested parties.

- FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

-- An initial funding of 8000 euros provided to the for-profit organisation.

-- A minimum salary of 1000 euros/member for each full time position.

-- Factoids sold to cover expenses and then 15% of the remaining factoids sold in euros to provide some hedging

-MAINNET
--Three mainnet nodes

-TESTNET
--Four Testnet nodes

-MARKETING
--Lobby the Factom Protocol straight away to influent and interested deputies

--Organise dedicated meetings with target companies in favoured sectors (Supply chain, Luxury, Banks, Insurance, Wine, Data security) and startups to promote blockchain technology and the Factom protocol

--Translate Factom material in French and make it available through a website

--Provide technical support for any interested party willing to implement the Factom Protocol

--Educate future elites through conferences, dedicated courses on the Factom Protocol and workshops

--Leverage French schooling relationships in engineering, business and Alumni networks

--Subsidising the development of proof of concepts by students

--Relay Factom related news to top newspapers (LeFigaro, LeMonde, TechCrunch, bitcoin.fr, etc) through paid marketing and existing relationships

-OTHER
--Publish transparency reports on a monthly basis

--Report every sale of factoids, investment, partnership or expenses on the website

--Define a roadmap for goals and report achievements

- PLEDGED EFFICIENCY
2 nodes: 50%
1 node: 40%
-----------------------------------
ORIGINAL PLEDGES END
-----------------------------------

[Matthias Fortin]

-LEGAL STRUCTURE
--Create a for-profit company (SAS structure) responsible for running the servers, collecting the Factoids and using the resulting revenues to promote the Factom protocol. It will also funds the HashnStore Foundation.

HNS: The process of the creation of the SAS structure has been launched as soon as results of the round 1 have been known. The SAS has formally been matriculated since the 9th of July 2018 with a beginning of its activities registered on the 30th of May 2018.

--Create a non-profit organisation, a francophone association (HashnStore Foundation), used as an interface for interested parties.

HNS: the non-profit organization has not been created. For now, we have used the for-profit structure to communicate with interested parties (for free). We question ourselves about the value of such an association for now as the awareness around the protocol is limited in France. We do think we need more exposure through the for-profit to start such an association which is really simple to create (much more than a for-profit). But with limited potential members in the short-run, there is no necessity to create it. On the long-run, the for-profit could be even sufficient to organize Hackaton for example once we have enough resources.

- FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

-- An initial funding of 8000 euros provided to the for-profit organisation.

HNS: we have deposited 7,500 euros at the bank in May. 8,000 euors was not possible to get the exact same number of shares between the 3 associates. We have chosen to deposit a bit less as we spend much more than 500 euros to start set up the infrastructure before the SAS Company existed due to administrative process delays (Renting Cloud dedicated Servers in April and May, Purchase of one server, Administrative costs to set up the company…). The total excesses largely the 8,000 euros.

-- A minimum salary of 1000 euros/member for each full time position.

HNS: As of 16 November 2018, no salary or similar remuneration has been paid to the members.

-- Factoids sold to cover expenses and then 15% of the remaining factoids sold in euros to provide some hedging.

HNS: We do not want to communicate too much on any sells to avoid any juridical issue but the coinbase address and the factoid value speak for ourselves.

-MAINNET
--Three mainnet nodes

HNS: We have dedicated 4 Mainnet nodes to the protocol.


-TESTNET
--Four Testnet nodes

HNS: We have set up and declared 4 Testnet nodes in September 2018.

-MARKETING
--Lobby the Factom Protocol straight away to influent and interested deputies

HNS: We have contacted 3 deputies. One answered and asked us to participate to a consultation about Blockchain Technology through a written contribution. Another accepted to give us institutional contacts to explain the benefits of the protocol in certain areas.

--Organize dedicated meetings with target companies in favoured sectors (Supply chain, Luxury, Banks, Insurance, Wine, Data security) and startups to promote blockchain technology and the Factom protocol

HNS: We have organized such meetings with big companies and start-up. One company is a public listed energy utility, another one is a consulting group with Blockchain skills and others are more start-ups (3 of them). The goal was to explain the benefits of the Factom technology. Other companies or institutions will be approached on an opportunistic basis. We are also participating in different conference and events: we will participate in a meeting in Vienna in November to present our approach for the smart grid project using Blockchain (see https://www.thedistributedenergyresources.com/ - our logo is on the website). Many participants are representatives of big utilities. We also have participated in many events in Paris (http://innogeneration.bpifrance.fr/, https://theblockchainday.com/, and several regular meetings : CryptoMondays, Blockchain Café, Les lundis du legal crypto).

--Translate Factom material in French and make it available through a website

HNS: We have translated the White Paper in French. It is available on our Website and Factom Inc’s Github. For now, we do not plan to translate more documentation as our resources are limited and we dedicate them to the development of solutions and use case research (e.g. the Smart Grid project). However, we plan to write a short French technical tutorial about how to use Factom APIs.

--Provide technical support for any interested party willing to implement the Factom Protocol
--Educate future elites through conferences, dedicated courses on the Factom Protocol and workshops.

HNS: We have explained the Factom technology benefits to a research institute we are working with now through a student project of a French engineering school (EIFER and a team of 5 students from the ECE school ). We have presented the Factom protocol and its use cases in a French business school to an audience of students, professors and professionals on the 23rd of October (Event Link).

--Leverage French schooling relationships in engineering, business and Alumni networks

HNS: All the previous contacts have been gotten through business and Alumni networks.

--Subsidising the development of proof of concepts by students

HNS: One PoC is being developed as mentioned earlier in the energy field.

--Relay Factom related news to top newspapers (LeFigaro, LeMonde, TechCrunch, bitcoin.fr, etc) through paid marketing and existing relationships.

HNS: we have published an article on bitcoin.fr (a famous French Blockchain Website). We have contacted several other newspapers and websites but did not get favorable answers except from one only accepting a paid article. Due to the very limited resources we have for now, we refused this proposal.

-OTHER
--Publish transparency reports on a monthly basis

HNS: we did provide a monthly report and since our last release in September we decided to publish Quaterly reports. It is released on Discord and available on our website.

--Report every sale of factoids, investment, partnership or expenses on the website

HNS: We do communicate on partnerships in our report. Communication about sale of Factoids or expenses has been quite a hazardous proposition with the benefit of hindsight due to potential juridical issue. These are strategic information no ANOs should share.

--Define a roadmap for goals and report achievements.

HNS: Achievements are reported in our reports. Again, some steps forward can be shared with the community in a safe manner but with the benefit of hindsight the whole roadmap will be only shared between the associates due to strategic reasons.

- PLEDGED EFFICIENCY
2 nodes: 50%
1 node: 40%

HNS: this pledged efficiency is fulfilled from our onboarding date.

NON-PLEDGE WORK
Outside of this pledge scope, we are working on more stuff...

[Elie Bonin]

Hey folks,

You can read our Q1 2019 Update here.

[Matthias Fortin]

All,


You can read our Q2 2019 Update here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is our Update for Q2 2019.

Infrastructure Contributions
HashnStore continues to be responsive on Mainnet in case of alerts or updates. HashnStore continues to dedicate 4 Testnet Nodes. We also pledge to participate to the PegNet Mainnet as soon as it is launched.

Local electricity market platform PoC
Following our PoC on a Local electricity market platform, with the cooperation of a team of students from ECE Paris, we have convinced our partner EIFER to co-finance alongside HashnStore an intership to further this exploratory work. You can find this offer here. If you know any students potentially interested in this position, please feel free to contact us directly on Discord and by email (see attached file).
EIFER_HashnStore_Blockchain_Sutdent_OfferDownload

ECE Courses S1 2020
The project mentioned above was conducted while being overseen by the ECE (a French Computer Science School) Energy section manager; as a result of this project, he has invited us to give an introduction course to Blockchain technology in front of ~100 students. This course will include a theoretical part and even more important a practical part to implement an energy use case. Overall, this course should last 15h.

We have proposed to use both Ethereum and Factom protocols in order to provide the students with the opportunity to work with two different approaches. This course should give the students easy-to-use tools to help them build on top of a blockchain. We would be happy to collaborate with the FAT team to create such an illustrative use case. @Julian Fletcher-Taylor @Paul Bernier @Matt York

Depending on the courses topics, there could be an opportunity to a collaboration with MaxCollab team. @TroyWiipongwii @damo

Raising Awareness

Institutional contacts
Thanks to a French Deputy, we managed to get an introduction with the manager of a leading European Cyber-Security Forum. We will leverage this opportunity as soon as we can.

Enterprise contacts
We are still in contact with several companies and we want to demonstrate them in the coming weeks the capability of our solution (see below) developed on top of Factom.


HashnStore X Factom : Development and announcement of Validity

As mentioned in our previous newsletters we have been working for the past 10 months to develop an end-to-end solution with dedicated APIs for one partner company . The more time we spent developing this project, the broader its application became clear to us. We are happy to announce our solution Validity to the Factom community.

More information we will be published in the coming weeks alongside the release of the website. We will keep you informed on our solution, its progress and our vision.

[Matthias Fortin]

The HashnStore team is glad to reveal its project “Validity” and the website validity.eu! Validity is a service that protects your digital creations and secures your documents.

We started to work on a first implementation of our digital signature solution almost one year ago from now and have been working on the current version (MVP) for the last 6 months. A first trial version is already planned for mid-November. We also have a backlog for the following months.

We have designed our solution to make it as flexible as possible. The next step is to focus on the most promising use cases through testing and feedback with potential customers. And to stack all the odds in our favour, Frédéric will be leaving its current position soon enough to be exclusively dedicated to the development of Validity. We are then entering an even more intense development phase.

That is why we intend to decrease our efficiency from 50% to 30% to give a boost to our production power. Being the sole entity in France building on Factom, we strongly believe this project will benefit the entire community.

We are very excited by this project and are more than happy to discuss this efficiency decrease with you guys.

[Matthias Fortin]

All,

You can read our Q4 2019 Update here (link to be updated).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is our Update for Q4 2019.

Infrastructure Contributions
HashnStore continues to be responsive on Mainnet in case of alerts or updates and continues to dedicate 4 nodes. HashnStore dedicates 3 Nodes to the Tesnet.

Local electricity market platform PoC
Following our PoC on a Local electricity market platform, with the cooperation of a team of students from ECE Paris, we are still partnering with EIFER on this. But progress has been slow recently on this. We still maintain this collaboration topic and consider the courses given in this computer science school (see below) as an opportunity to involve students.

ECE Courses S1 2020
As mentioned in our previous update, we have been invited by the ECE (a French Computer Science School) to give an introduction course of 15 hrs to Blockchain technology in front of ~100 students (one French section and one international section). This course will include a theoretical part (6 hrs) and even more important a practical part (9 hrs) to implement an energy use case.
We have planned to implement the practical part using the Factom Protocol. We will mention the TFA project among others as examples of what is possible to realize with blockchain technology in the energy sector. This course should give the students easy-to-use tools to help them build on top of a blockchain and to give them a first idea of how to use this technology in their field.

First courses will be given from this week till march.

Raising Awareness

Institutional contacts
Thanks to a French Deputy, we managed to get an introduction with the manager of a leading European Cyber-Security Forum. We did not yet try to leverage this opportunity.

Academic contacts

We have started discussing with a researcher from a French reasearch institute working on Verifiable Credential to look after a potential collaboration. They have been working on the topic for several years. Nothing tangible at this stage. We will let know the interested parties within our ecosystem. A second meeting with the whole group of researcher and with Valentin from Factomatic should be held in the coming weeks.

HashnStore project: Validity

Technical aspect

We have been releasing a test version of our solution to a set of interested parties. We got some very positive feedback. As a reminder, this version has been developed last year. We are ready to implement the new identity format once the full release of the grant is done. Moreover, we are ready to change our signature scheme if possible, to comply with a common Factom standard.

To be noticed, our dev pushed one PR to the Factom identity lib of Luap.

Commercial aspect

We have started presenting our solution and got very good feedback from one potential customer. A second meeting will be held with this company to work on an already identified use case and to brainstorm on others.

Law aspect

We are still in contact with a (top) lawyer specialized in blockchain technology and GDPR. We currently maintain this relationship in the context of our project Validity. We are ready to leverage this contact for the Factom ecosystem if needed.

PegNet

We have been one of the early participants of Orax. We have realized some meetups in Paris last year for presenting PegNet. We are now trying to develop the French community by answering questions on the French social networks (FR Telegram and FR PegNet channel). We will certainly be organizing new meetups and present the project during some events in Paris in the coming months.

Efficiency

We are now at an efficiency of 30% since mid of October 2019. We plan to maintain at this level for the next months.

We will start to convert part of our reward to pFCT (10%) and increase gradually along the evolution of the project.

We would like to remind that while the token was much higher in value and while many parties decreased their efficiency during these days, we maintained our efficiency at 50% from our onboarding till October 2019.
Now that the impact of an efficiency decrease is much less important in dollar terms and as we observe some interest for our solution, we do consider this is the best move for ourselves and the protocol with a limited impact.

Governance

We are actively participating in the Governance discussions always giving our own point of view. We have been challenging some overdue grants. We do think we need a healthy ecosystem to make our protocol successful. Being frustrating about some situations does not help if you do not react accordingly. Being afraid of possible consequences has never (NEVER) been a winning situation.

Working Groups

We participated last year to the Testnet Working group. Thank you Mike for leading this.
We do not plan to participate in the new Marketing Committee.
Based on our bandwidth and our skills, we may consider participating to other working groups.

[Matthias Fortin]

All,

You can read our Q1 2020 Update below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before starting our update, the HashnStore’s team hope that you are safe during this pandemic period.

Here is our Update for Q1 2020.

ECE Courses S1 2020

We have given an introduction course of 15 hrs to 3 groups of 30 students each these last months. The course was split between a theoretical part (6 hrs) and a practical part (9 hrs). During this practical session, we have used Factom technology for 2 groups and Ethereum for 1 group. For the students using Factom we have introduced the use of FAT. We have concluded last week this course with a test.

Overall, this first teaching experience of the blockchain technology and more specifically Factom has been very positive. We have already been solicited to teach once more next year and to think about extending our courses. This will (could?) be a good opportunity to test in real life the FAT technology and to help create pedagogical material to promote it.

Moreover, this course has been given (for the Ethereum) with our research partner in the energy field EIFER.

To be noticed, we managed to conclude our courses in spite of the covid19 crisis which has strongly impacted France for 2 months now.

FAT test contribution

In order to prepare this practical part, Frédéric has been testing several features of FAT. He has been regularly in contact with the FAT team. Together, they have been able to stress FATD quite extensively. As a result, some minor flaws have been found and fixes were quickly pushed. We are still looking forward to work with the extensive contract publishing API available in the CLI. A special thank for Adam who did a very good job, almost entirely on its own.

Academic contacts

As mentioned in our previous update, we started discussing with a researcher from a French reasearch institute working on Verifiable Credential to look after a potential collaboration. They have been working on the topic for several years. A second meeting with the whole group of researcher and with Valentin from Factomatic should have been held beginning of March but we got no news from them recently. The covid19 pandemic has certainly not helped here. We are going to try to contact them again after the end of the lockdown in May.

HashnStore project: Validity

We have started presenting our solution and got very good feedback especially from one potential customer. We hold three meetings with them and started to adapt our solution to their needs. Unfortunately, the recent crisis changed their priority and has stopped the project for now. They are still interested to brainstorm with us later this year.

Lawyer collaboration

We are still in contact with a (top) lawyer specialized in blockchain technology and GDPR. We currently maintain this relationship in the context of our project Validity. We are ready to leverage this contact for the Factom ecosystem if needed.

Efficiency

We are now at an efficiency of 30% since mid of October 2019. We plan to maintain at this level for the next months.
We would like to remind that while the token was much higher in value and while many parties decreased their efficiency during these days, we maintained our efficiency at 50% from our onboarding till October 2019. Now that the impact of an efficiency decrease is much less important in dollar terms and as we observe some interest for our solution, we do consider this is the best move for ourselves and the protocol with a limited impact.

Infrastructure Contributions

HashnStore continues to be responsive on Mainnet in case of alerts or updates and continues to dedicate 4 nodes. HashnStore dedicates 3 Nodes to the Tesnet and also 1 FATD node.

Standing system

We have put in place an internal procedure to assess every 2 months the standing of each ANO. We publish here our score grid. We base our scores on 4 different categories: Operations, Governance, Efficiency and Contribution (outside grant work). Each category has a weight of 25 points. You need 40 to get our support.

[Matthias Fortin]

Here is our Update for Q2 2020.


ECE Courses S1 2020

As a reminder, we gave an introduction course of 15 hrs to 100 students in a computer science engineering school the first quarter. The course was split between a theoretical part and a practical part. During this practical session, we have used Factom technology for 2 groups and Ethereum for 1 group. For the students using Factom we have introduced the use of FAT, token emission, off chain smart contract publishing and execution.

Overall, this first teaching experience of the blockchain technology and more specifically Factom has been very positive. We have already been solicited to teach an extra year for 2021 and we think about extending our courses. This will be a good opportunity to test in real life the FAT technology and to help create pedagogical material to promote it.

Moreover, this course has been given (for the Ethereum part) with our research partner in the energy field EIFER.


HashnStore project: Validity

We have kept on developing our platform these lasts months. We have structured our platform around 3 main services: one for signatures, another one for the intellectual property and the last one for the supply chain.

We want to make this platform available online this summer. We are finalizing the last details. Only the 2 first services will be available through this web app at first.

On the marketing side, we were forced to stop the prospect of customers these last months due to the COVID19 crisis but we have started again very recently. We have managed to enter into contact with a quite large smart home company. We will discuss with them the use of our solution for protecting their intellectual property.

We firmly believe in the success of our platform along with the Factom protocol which perfectly fits our needs (see Governance for more info).


Lawyer collaboration

We are still in contact with a (top) lawyer specialized in blockchain technology and GDPR. We currently maintain this relationship in the context of our project Validity. We are ready to leverage this contact for the Factom ecosystem if needed.


Efficiency

We are at an efficiency of 30% since mid of October 2019. We plan to maintain at this level for the next months.


Infrastructure Contributions

HashnStore continues to be responsive on Mainnet in case of alerts or updates and continues to dedicate 4 nodes. HashnStore dedicates 3 Nodes to the Tesnet and also 1 FATD node.


Standing system

We will update our scoring sheet later this month.
As a reminder, we have put in place our own score grid. We base our scores on 4 different categories: Operations, Governance, Efficiency and Contribution (outside grant work). Each category has a weight of 25 points. You need 40 to get our support.


Governance

Lasts weeks we have observed some very negative reactions from actors who used to enjoy a prominent position in the ecosystem. We think this is very unfortunate and this makes their opinion and their actions very difficult to understand.

The more we progress in the development and the marketing of our Validity solution the more we feel the need to stabilize and develop the Factom protocol. We need to react positively to this challenge and not to flee away. We still have the opportunity to benefit from a well thought protocol which has many advantages. Moreover, we have very talented developers in our ecosystem. Fortunately, these talented and productive developers are not necessary the ones who have left.

In order to keep this advantage, we will need to focus the next grant rounds on these resources. We should not underestimate what has been realized by them these last years.

Many grants in the past have been dedicated to finance what appears now like non-essential works. Due to the current scarcity of the ecosystem HashnStore will mainly vote for core and infrastructure grants with the following priorities that we consider crucial for the future of our ecosystem:

• Decentralized and automated restart system – a proposal by Alex from Factoshi has already been made
• Decentralizing FCT/EC Oracle
• Decentralizing the BTC/ETH anchoring
• Automating the ANO demotion through on chain vote
• Introduction of staking

We are ready to actively participate in the establishment of a comprehensive roadmap which would include these elements and to dedicate the whole resources of the ecosystem on these priorities. We will look forward to reading the new proposal of the GWG.

[Matthias Fortin]

(Here is a quick intermediary update before our Q3 Update next month)

We are pleased to announce that we have put online the commercial version of our platform, Validity.

The Validity platform hosts 3 services for now . The commercial launch and announcement will take place in the next weeks. Meanwhile we are in the process of selling these services to companies. We have started last week (as announced in our previous update) with a multi-billion dollar company. Our goal is to multiply these kind of contacts in the following weeks. You can already have a look on validity.eu. The webapp is only available in French for now as it's the primary market we are targeting.

As a reminder, through our Validity platform, we want to make the access to data securing solutions easy and affordable whether for intellectual property, signatures or traceability purposes. Our goal is to help people protect their data and their corresponding rights.

To be continued.

 

[Niels Klomp]

Congrats on the work.

Very interested on your views on IP protection as well as the diploma use case you mention, especially with regards to several different groups working on digital diploma's internationally

Do you have any expectations on usage with regards to entries and chains? I get that is hard to predict, I am just trying to get a feel for the efficiency change for a commercial product last year and the long term benefits for the protocol.