By: Geeq  on Jan 11, 2022

After listing $Geeq on KuCoin in time for the holidays, KuCoin’s Zed hosted Geeq’s Co-founder and Chief Development Officer Stephanie So for Geeq’s longest AMA yet. Thank you to our host and to all the participants.

As usual, we are providing the entire transcript. The AMA was over an hour and a half long. Please settle in and enjoy!

Moderator: Zed @Yasuo_KuCoin
Geeq: Stephanie So

Channel Muted for GEEQ AMA session

Zed: Today, we will have an important guest for our AMA session. Let us all give a warm virtual welcome to…GEEQ Co-Founder Stephanie So!

Stephanie: Thank you, Zed! So happy to be here!

Zed: Welcome @StephanieS! Please say hi to our AMA participants.

Stephanie: Hi Everyone, this is a tremendous opportunity for Geeq to be presented on such a large stage. I hope I’m able to give you a great overview and please do send any questions you like at the end.

Zed: Stephanie So is an economist, policy analyst and co-founder of Geeq, a blockchain security company. Throughout her career, she has applied technology within her specialist disciplines. In 2001, she was the first to use machine learning on social science data at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. More recently, she researched the use of distributed networking processes in healthcare and patient safety in her role as a senior lecturer at Vanderbilt University. Stephanie is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Rochester.

Let’s keep going so you can share as much information about your content today.

Stephanie: I’m ready!

Zed: 1. Can you describe Geeq, and the problems you are aiming to solve?

Stephanie: Yes, definitely.

Geeq is a company committed to providing easily accessible, efficient, and reliable blockchain-based technology, for everyone.

At a very high level, the problem we see already unfolding is that the demand for secure digital payments and other forms of digital interactions is already overwhelming the capacity for our existing infrastructure to handle them.

We see payment systems and databases hacked for personal information. It is hard to know what is a scam and what isn’t. And more and more, the software and security measures we thought we could count on are being breached, whether it’s by injecting malicious code or depending on security that has single points of failure.

It is already hard to know what sources of information and services you can trust. If we don’t do something, it will be nearly impossible.

What will happen if we don’t have the tools to protect ourselves? Either (1) the growing complexity of systems is going to produce so much friction that most of us will be overwhelmed, the economy will lose efficiency (like supply chains) that have a lot of difficulty rebounding which creates situations where the greediest of market actors will prevail, or (2) the economy will have to double down on existing tech, in hopes they will figure a way out without using new methods like harnessing decentralized networks and blockchain.

The first option sounds grinding and oppressive and horrible and you’re a Geeq at heart if your gut reaction is that we can’t let that happen. The second option is simply unworkable. The existing tools have contributed to the source of these problems. The ways we currently communicate and exchange information are too vulnerable and these legacy systems are not built to scale to the next level.

What the present and all future economies need are Geeq’s solutions. Geeq addresses the essential problem that, no matter who you are, you will need access to a new kind of technology that produces reliable, time-consistent, and dependably neutral databases that protect you from the dangers of depending on centralized systems.

So, in summary, Geeq is building a new open platform blockchain infrastructure to solve information problems. We provide a low-cost, highly secure way to find the signal amidst the noise. These problems have been intractable because they always had to resort to a trusted party.

Now, thanks to the widespread availability of computers and connectivity and some very clever network and economic mechanism design, we can tackle information and coordination costs, and those problems are everywhere.

Zed: Awesome!

2. Could you share the development status and progress of the project thus far?

Stephanie: Yes!

I’m very proud of the development and progress we’ve made, especially as we are coming into this new year.

I could talk about this for hours, so I wrote out two chunks for reference. I’d be glad to spend time here or wait to see if there are questions later.

A. Protocol

Geeq is typically referred to as a Layer 1 project, and correctly so, in the sense that we introduce a new validation protocol for distributed ledgers called Proof of Honesty (PoH) as opposed to variations on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake.

Here’s the link to a Testing Framework for the pure protocol development:
https://simulator.geeq.io/.

You can see how the network automatically self-audits nodes and then is able to identify which nodes are the honest nodes that users can target.

So, rather than develop a beacon chain or some other way to meld protocol elements, the watching-auditing system is already built into the basic protocol.

Do you see the two nodes that passed the Proof of Honesty test above (the 2^nd and 4^th lines)?

That’s how the information and coordination problem that I mentioned earlier is solved.

=> What the code says is that each of those honest nodes has a record of the identical, time-consistent, neutrally validated database.

For example, when you run the simulator, you can enter allowed and disallowed transactions, and when you try to overspend (for example), you will see

In other words, an ordinary consumer will know not to trust the ledger held by the dishonest node in the middle.

This scales. So the development on the pure protocol has been pretty exciting.

Here is the second category of development (that is probably of most interest to those new to Geeq):

B. Basic Transactions (e.g. Coins or pure data)

Layer 1s are usually oriented toward crypto use cases, like validating coin transfers. Geeq’s development status in that regard is very advanced.

As you all know, most L1s run into limitations early on. The kinds of transactions they support are limited and they have problems scaling.

So most try to build scaling solutions by adding L2s and add features through smart contracts or trying to move data off-chain and then back on again (in some form).

⭐ Geeq has developed an architecture that is very different, almost the opposite philosophy.

The dev team had a great year last year, not only in protocol but also in determining the essential set of transaction types we wanted to support.

For this set of transactions, all of them are executed and settled directly on the => base layer. <=

There is no need to move off chain. It’s very efficient and secure and versatile, and Geeq has a multi-chain architecture, so we scale by launching more chains.

The devs were taking advantage of the ability to scale by working on the components that are necessary to build GeeqPay, which is something like a decentralized PayPal: it is a blockchain payment system, that can process micropayments at radically low costs.

GeeqPay brings together new two-sided markets, so it has tremendous potential. We have a new video that shows both the consumer and merchant benefits here:

Zed: I think it’s very clear!

3. Who will the users/clients be on your projects?

Stephanie: Well, other than the types of base layer payments, which will be able to be used by the public at large – even if you are sent a payment through GeeqPay and do not already have an account at Geeq, one will be created for you I believe,

Geeq is building Geeq-native applications as well.

So, the easy way to think about where we see users needing this dependable ledger technology are in payments, which has a wide range of applications :

Micropayments are an untapped pricing mechanism that we can make convenient, not only for people, but for machine-to-machine payments, such as in the field of smart mobility.

So clients here could be car manufacturers, or game developers, or publishers looking for an alternative to subscription revenue, or content creators connecting directly with their audience… The user base really is wide open.

And then there are the data services that we can provide, which can use the same structure, so they also can process data transactions to blockchain for these tiny fees.

Our first enterprise application falls under this idea, which makes up the product line of GeeqData.

With GeeqData offering a time-consistent, dependable and inexpensive blockchain-based database, we can address the problem of enterprise data integration – so our users here are large organizations that need to establish consistent data across multiple departments, with full control over access rights, and without disrupting their existing workflow.

That is a vast potential market, and we are getting a lot of interest from clients who are excited about the chance to reap an immediate benefit at low cost.

Zed: So coool~

Stephanie: Thanks!

Zed: And next one:

4. What is your strategy regarding attracting more users to Geeq?

Stephanie: Thanks for that question, Zed.

Here, I really have to give credit to a lot of our team who have been working hard behind the scenes.

Through their efforts, we are having great success in reaching enterprise clients through networking, and especially through leveraging partnerships that connect us to a wider client base.

For instance, we are working with a leading consultancy in the field of digital transformation.

They are able to introduce Geeq to major corporations that are interested in blockchain but face the usual challenges of large-scale systems change.

That is a powerful starting point for us to demonstrate the advantages of our modular, scalable and secure technology.

We are also part of the Launchpad Service from Morpheus Labs and HUAWEI Cloud Services, which guides enterprise customers to the right blockchain solutions.

They are particularly active in Singapore, which is a very promising market for us.

Geeq and Morpheus Labs share the dedication to helping clients identify and implement blockchain solutions for their particular problems.

That involves being able to automate deployment on different clouds, of course.

In recent months we have seen a strong increase in interest from enterprise clients and really feel the momentum building.

In particular, we are in talks with companies in the fintech and gaming sectors, and with a major international charity about an online microdonations facility. These discussions have helped us to narrow our focus for 2022 to serve these clients with the products they are specifically asking for (such as our GeeqData Notary Service, and private blockchain instances). Besides contributing to commercial traction and revenue, this will help us to build technical and client knowledge, as well as expand our industry connections, and form a strong foundation for wider adoption of the Geeq platform.

Zed: I like this strategy, I believe everyone is like me!

Stephanie: I think it would be smart of them! 😎

5. What separates the technology Geeq is building from others?

Stephanie: Oh my, I love talking about this.

First, and I think this is a key innovation, we should talk about economic power.

Other blockchains, based on PoW, PoS or PoA allow those with power – in terms of hash rate, financial muscle, or institutional standing – to produce blocks.

A user has two choices: either try to acquire power (or get close to it in dPoS) or accept whatever the powerful say (e.g. miners, whales, VC).

Those protocols set up conditions where the powerful can manipulate the data we see: they can declare something is true when we don’t agree. (see Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic) In other words, those with power get to determine “truth”.

At Geeq, we believe the future would be best if only those who are truthful should be powerful.

Of course, it is one thing to set that goal, and it is another to ensure we get as close to that as possible in practice.

This is where Geeq has a truly unique advantage. Geeq’s protocol, Proof of Honesty, is based on economic mechanism design and game theory to implement the relationship that only honest nodes are able to provide services.

Even economic mechanism design and game theory is not enough to bring a system to life, however.

So the magic of the development team is that they have gone extremely deep to uncover the basics of network and information theory, coding and so forth, to build the platform that provides these kind of frictionless, worry free data services that honest consumers and businesses will want to use.

I should have made the section divisions more clear. I have two more!

The second distinguishing feature of Geeq is that it is a multi-chain environment from the beginning.

An advantage is that Geeq is able to customize a blockchain for bespoke applications, while retaining its essential advantages.

That is, settling on chain and writing simple, direct code instead of using smart contracts with embedded dependencies means:

• the system is easy to use and understand, modular, and transparent,
• computation is fast and efficient, and finally,
• it radically reduces the costs of all of these data and payment processing services.

Last section coming !

Finally, it’s worth noting that Geeq’s structure provides a natural and non-disruptive upgrade path that avoids politics and committees.

If you would like to update your application, simply launch another chain. That’s why Geeq is a multi-chain platform.

If you would like to offer different features in a wallet or upgrade a user client, that’s also fine, as long as you provision it for Proof of Honesty.

As someone who hates meetings, knowing I have the freedom to launch a better solution, while at the same time not forcing anyone to live by my rules is a major philosophical guideline for Geeq’s design. It gives everyone a lot of space to operate.

It’s also one of the reasons Geeq is so well built for enterprise adoption. Different branches in different cities can keep their own work processes, while still knowing that the underlying data has been validated by Proof of Honesty.

Zed: Very advanced technology~~

Stephanie: I’m afraid I’m writing too much.

Zed: Haha, too detailed, it is very user-friendly.

Stephanie: That’s very kind of you to say.

6. You have gone the route of applying for patents, could you briefly summarize why and what they are about?

Stephanie: Yes, thanks a lot for that question. There are a few reasons we have filed patents for our inventions.

As my Co-founder John Conley points out:

1. IBM, Google, other American and especially Chinese tech companies have filed for hundreds of patents in blockchain. Filing our own is defensive. It means we won’t have IP we developed patented by some other company and then be forced to shut down the company.

2. Geeq’s IP also has application outside of the blockchain platform. Some can be applied to other blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, and some to fintech and payments in general. Having the patents is a source of value to the company licensing and building new things for customers.

Also, because we’re providing business solutions, use of Geeq code + the patent protection also enables Geeq to charge clients, which is important to our revenue model.

Very quickly, the patents cover:

• the core protocol and network architecture,
• the user-client that provides Edge Security to the user which allows the user to identify the honest nodes and ledgers,
• our hash-locked technology for secure coin transactions, including atomic swaps without smart contracts and our NFT technology,
• certain wallet features such as ones that make micropayments more convenient to transact online, and
• the novel ways we implement multi-user capabilities and permissioning – the most recognizable example is probably multi-sig.

7. How does that fit with your overall statement of providing decentralized technology?

Stephanie: When you examine the technology, it becomes apparent that the goals of protecting Geeq’s intellectual property and providing decentralized technology are not in conflict.

In fact, one of my worries at the beginning was that someone would try to steal our IP and then not understand how to use it to achieve maximum decentralization.

That would really be the worst of all worlds.

Every element of Geeq works together to achieve a fully decentralized ecosystem: in the networks, in the base transactions, in the applications, in an open platform.

Geeq is both a blockchain platform as a service (BpaaS) and blockchain as a service (BaaS) company. Once a blockchain is launched as a completely decentralized blockchain, there is nothing Geeq can do about it. And that’s what we are striving for. We believe setting everyone’s creativity free is how we’ll find the next generation of solutions.

Zed: Awesome!

Stephanie: High Five!

8. How does the Geeq token function within the platform and why is it needed?

The token is an ecosystem token to pay nodes for honest work.

I should have said: Proof of Honesty protocols automatically pay nodes if they can prove the correctness of their ledger and of their work.

Fees are proportional to the cost of that work.

Fees aren’t determined by an auction, so the prices don’t inflate from bidding wars or vary with congestion.

If there’s congestion, you can launch another chain.

At the application level, when a user submits a transaction, most applications will also require fees to paid in the token.

The token also can be adopted as a native token for applications that don’t want to bother with one themselves.

Zed: That wraps up the first part of the AMA session. Thank you our guest for a very informative session! Let’s now proceed to the free-ask section. I will put on a 5-minute slow mode as there will be a lot of questions coming through.

KuCoin and Geeq sponsored prizes to be awarded during the AMA. The instructions for these have been omitted from the transcript.

Stephanie: Thanks for all the questions, everyone! (Note: There were hundreds of questions.)

Wow, I thought I’d be able to go through and choose the questions quickly. Your community is impressive. While I look for specific questions, please let me direct you to some of our resources.

Here are our social links:

To learn more about Geeq™ follow us:

Website ~ Grab a Coffee ~ https://geeq.io/category/news/

Telegram ~ Join us for a chat ~ https://t.me/GeeqOfficial

Twitter ~ Keep up to date ~ https://twitter.com/GeeqOfficial

YouTube ~ Feast your eyes ~ https://www.youtube.com/c/GeeqOfficial

Yes, we have staking, both web-staking and staking on Ascendex. All of the announcements about Staking and our Token is here:

https://geeq.io/category/token/

We’re extremely friendly over in Telegram group so if I missed any other general question, please go there and ask the Community – many of them are really hard core and know everything about Geeq.

9. From Garfield Hutson: On your website you don’t mention that you have done any internal or external audit of your smart contract, so can you give us details if you have done any audit before? And in case you haven’t, would you plan to perform any review of your smart contract in the near future?

Stephanie: The ERC-20 contract had to be audited in order to be listed on KuCoin. 🙂

10. From Vicente Matney: Regarding the safety and security of your platform what are the security measures adopted and have you done any audit of smart contracts?

Stephanie: I’d like to stay on this point of security and testing and auditing.

We have very experienced software and blockchain developers on the team, and prominent leaders of business and entrepreneurs as well. We’re allowing time to go through these security testing phases because the purpose of Geeq’s technology is to be able to provide blockchain you can count on once it is decentralized.

That means, we will only open the platform to the public when we know we can stand behind it, because once it is decentralized, the blockchains are out of our control.

I’m not a developer, but I hear about “safety harnesses” and audits and other kinds of stress testing.

One principle that the development team is using is that the code for all the operations should be consistent. For example, in defining a function for a certain coin transaction, if that code can be used or improved for another kind of transaction, then everything is rewritten to use the same best version.

The benefit of front loading that kind of really difficult, detailed work is that, when it is time to get the code audited, there actually won’t be that much. And if something needs to be changed, it won’t be hard to find all the places it needs to be changed.

11. From Earlean Foy: Do you have any plan for burning tokens in the future to reduce the supply of the token and increase its investment attractiveness?

Stephanie: No, Geeq’s tokenomics do not include any plan for burning tokens.

The scale and usefulness of the kinds of applications we’re talking about: secure payments for fees that are a fraction of a cent, automated m2m payments, receiving data at scale (e.g. telemetry from devices) – what we see is that these are services which, once they become available, will be met with large demand.

We are working from the point of view of driving the future toward an economy of abundance, not scarcity.

There are two ways to increase attractiveness. One is to try to make items scarce by having limited supply and large demand. The other is for consumers to find so much value greater than the costs, and we are keeping costs very low, and introducing value that hasn’t been available before.

12. From Pickens: Current NFT is a hot topic, but are NFT not just for art. Does your project think that more real world use cases will emerge for NFTs as time goes on, why should we take NFTs seriously?

Stephanie: This is a great one. Yes.

I like this question a lot because you’re right, NFTs are NOT just for art.

As an economics person, I read NFTs literally. They are for non-fungible tokens, which can extend to different kinds of contracts, stocks, and even perhaps titles and deeds. For any of these to be exchanged on blockchain, that blockchain foundation had better be secure.

You’d better be sure the database can’t be rolled back or forked and reversed, or otherwise manipulated by malicious actors. These were once considered acceptable incidents or par for the course for blockchain, or edge cases.

Because Geeq is really driving toward a new economy, everything we do includes building ways for transactions to occur securely! If we can’t offer security, people will continue to use centralized databases until they break.

I’d like to go on about this because we have patent-pending technology for NFTs, but I should answer a few more questions. Please join the Geeq community for more!

13. From LML yrtie Hamel: PARTNERS are the most important that strengthen the ecosystems of all projects. Could you tell us about your project partners and the partnership strategy it has adopted?

Stephanie: Hi, you are absolutely right and yes, I’d be glad to.

The first thing we do is look for project partners who have integrity, are very serious about the technology and anticipate similar kinds of problems and are solving other pieces of the decentralized puzzle.

We also select partners who are highly experienced with enterprise or specific vertical’s needs. For the most part, we expect to have very long term relationships with partners.

14. From Tét loa Rust: How do you plan to promote your project in different countries, wherein English is not spoken well? Do you have a local communities for them to better understand your project?

Stephanie: Thanks for this question. This is going to be an ongoing effort and the best organizations are local.

As for being able to communicate in other languages, we have this on our radar, of course. It takes resources to add capabilities in other languages, so we are prioritizing core development, but ultimately, I want and expect and will not rest until Geeq is accessible (or looks like it will be) to everyone.

That is a problem with blockchain technology in general. It’s simply been too hard to understand or use.

I have done research in chronic health problems and disability policy. Please believe me, we are going to make Geeq as easy to use as possible.

15. From Dwight Speed: Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?

Stephanie: We have working code in testing frameworks for you to see already. I posted the protocol site earlier, which gives you a huge amount of visibility into how Geeq’s messages and network communications work, how the transactions are processed and how the blocks are written.

Here it is again: simulator.geeq.io and we also have a lot of video explainers for it on our YouTube channel @GeeqOfficial.

We also have delivered on versions of a testing framework for micropayments, which requires you to use the Chrome browser and install a Geeq Chrome wallet. If you’d like to do that, go here: gomicro.geeq.io.

Geeq is not an empty promises kind of project. We are solid as a rock.

Stephanie: I think that’s all I can handle in one session. Thank you so much for your time!

Zed: That’s it for our AMA guest. Let’s give a round of applause for @StephanieS 👏👏👏

Stephanie: Thanks very much for hosting this AMA, Zed.

Zed: It has been a great experience to have you as our guest for this second KuCoin AMA session in this second Telegram group of KuCoin. Thank you for gracing this event.

Stephanie: Please check out more on geeq.io!

To learn more about Geeq™ follow us:

Website ~ Grab a Coffee ~ http://www.geeq.io/news/

Telegram ~ Join us for a chat ~ https://t.me/GeeqOfficial

Twitter ~ Keep up to date ~ https://twitter.com/GeeqOfficial

YouTube ~ Feast your eyes ~ https://www.youtube.com/c/GeeqOfficial