By: Geeq  on Aug 13, 2020

It was quite a week for AMAs last week! BitMax hosted two AMAs for Geeq’s Head of Crypto, Hans Sundby, and Founder and Chief Development Officer, Stephanie So to introduce Geeq to their investment groups, so please be sure to check out the other recap for BitMax (CH) if you can’t get enough of Geeq. ?

This AMA for BitMax (EN) was organized and moderated by Shane Molidor (@MolidorShane), Global Head of Business Development @BitMax_Official, who was pivotal in Geeq’s exclusive primary listing with BitMax last Thursday.

The extended AMA was divided into two parts: moderator questions and then questions from the chat. Thank you for the questions!

? Here’s the recap! ?
The transcript has been lightly edited. You might also notice, Stephanie is the talkative one; she has had much more sleep this week than Hans.

Moderator: Shane Molidor
Guests: Stephanie So and Hans Sundby

Shane: Hey everyone! Let’s start the AMA with GEEQ, shall we? I am joined here today by Stephanie So, Founder and Chief Development Officer at GEEQ, and Hans Sundby, Head of Crypto at GEEQ. Great to have you here with us!

Stephanie: Hi @shanemolidor Great to be with you! Thanks for your excitement about Geeq!

Hans: Hey @shanemolidor and the whole BitMax community! Really excited to be here and been an awesome week for us. Finally we had the chance to announce our partnership with BitMax and our collab moving forward.

Shane: As per usual, I’ll start things off with a few questions before opening things up to the community. At the end of the AMA, we’ll select the best questions and give a nice little reward. ?

Q1：Can you start by giving a brief introduction to GEEQ and the team behind the project?

Stephanie: Geeq is a multi-chain blockchain platform with a proprietary protocol (Proof of Honesty) that offers unparalleled security and interoperability in the blockchain space, designed to bring truly decentralized solutions that allow flexibility at a publicly available application layer for both the community and enterprises to develop and adopt.

Geeq itself, is primarily responsible for providing validation services for blockchain that relieve the community from worrying about security and reward the validators who provide work for the networks automatically with payment through its ecosystem or utility token, the $GEEQ.

The team is made up a group of highly experienced entrepreneurs and experts that are pulled from all the core areas we need to turn Geeq into the next generation company to build both a hybrid platform for a decentralized “network of networks” (like the internet, except without decentralization). We have administrative, legal, software scale up specialists, blockchain specialists, telecomm expertise as well as our protocol and tokenomics teams, and an incredible team for finance and crypto that will allow us to combine the fintech worlds of crypto and finance.

Geeq’s Head of Crypto, Hans Sundby is with me here, who you know well, Shane. And we have a group working with him who is phenomenal.

Q2：Next question…GEEQ introduced a brand new consensus protocol called Proof of Honesty (“PoH”) (which is patent pending ?), can you elaborate a bit more on this and what is the uniqueness & advantage compared to others?

Stephanie: Proof of Honesty, for those of your audience who know blockchain and crypto (presumably all!) is truly a step away from the rest.

We approached blockchain first from worrying about the potential attack vectors on the existing protocols (such as PoW and PoS or dPoS or private blockchains). If an ordinary user can’t walk away from a blockchain and assume the results will not get taken over, hard forked, or their tokens changed in some way, it did not seem to us blockchain could be used for ordinary data processes, which we think will become very important as the world becomes more decentralized.

In a nutshell, we are worried about attacks and manipulation that would disadvantage the less powerful users, such as those without the expensive mining rigs or able to gain powerful stake.

PoH gets away from all of those concerns by creating a protocol that depends on holding individual nodes accountable (rather than depending on the consensus that comes out from a group of nodes determining the blocks) and then allowing any user to demand proof that that node has behaved honestly. We call it a no-consensus consensus. It’s one on one : the user to the node about whether the user should proceed or not. If the node is dishonest, the user is able to avoid that node and move to a node that can prove it has validated an honest ledger.

The result is level of security that is not only not manipulable (by Sybils, stake, etc.) but is even secure from nation state attacks, which concerns us for critical infrastructure and industrial espionage.

Q3：Who do you see as the direct competitors of GEEQ? Given we’ve also seen many public blockchain platform projects, how is GEEQ planning to differentiate and grow within the crowded industry?

Stephanie: Every blockchain platform that plans to offer blockchain services are, in some sense, imagine they are competing for the same space as Geeq. For example, there are several obvious competitors who are trying to concentrate on the fintech space.

One concern that we see about those is they ultimately can run into real difficulties with decentralization. They may end up succeeding only because they make arrangements with established intermediaries, for example. That is not Geeq’s vision. I’ve examined a lot of protocols and I’m also not convinced that most platforms have thought as deeply about the security and practical elements (such as the ability to scale or reduce costs) as Geeq.

Geeq is highly differentiated in the sense that Geeq’s unique strengths are in the properties that PoH enables us to offer to public blockchains. It has informed the way we have structured our application layer, to allow applications to be validated without incurring the overhead of other applications, or to be affected by governance decisions that don’t affect them.

Partly as a result, we are able to go after very high volumes of inexpensively delivered transactions, like IoT and micropayments, which other platforms will find too expensive. The sheer volume of those transactions is a way to build our own so-called moat while giving us time to build the tools to attract developers in more conventional ways. 🙂

Shane: Really appreciate the insights here! I know I’m personally excited with the very small initial circulating supply — the initial market cap is < $400k at listing! Seems crazy for a project with such great technology!!

Q4：What is the major utilities & token economics and vesting for GEEQ, how does it capture value and appreciate over the long run?

Hans: So, after being in the space for some years, I’ve experienced and witnessed different scenarios of failure and success.

After talking back and forth with the team for a long period of time between 2018-2019, I decided to join in as Head of Crypto.

I wanted to join in on this amazing project, and turn tokenomics back in time to the good old days.. How it looked like before the ICO boom.

We want the tokenomics to evolve with our adoption of the eco-system, instead of working against us. We believe in a healthy growth of tokenomics.

The tokenomics is designed to be good for the overall start phase, but also for longer term use when we finally will release our validator nodes for real token adoption.

Hans Sundby, Head of Crypto at Geeq

So in short: We start out small. There is no reason to release as a billion dollar marketcap token/coin, when real adoption is still needed.

Q5：One last question before we open up for the community, why did you choose BitMax as primary exchange listing partner, what collaboration do you foresee GEEQ and BitMax having in the near future?? ??

Hans: So to start off this question with a few things. I’ve been involved in many exchange listings before. BitMax is absolutely a highly ambitious company with a competent and hard working team with real long term goals.

One of the things we look at when joining forces like this, is the proactivity, professionalism and honesty. As a Proof of Honesty project, we find it important to join forces with honest and innovative companies.

Hans Sundby, Head of Crypto at Geeq

BitMax have extremely interesting products, userbase and outreach, which is why we have chosen and come to an agreement with Bitmax for the longer term.

We are really happy to join forces with this amazing, growing exchange along with their and our communities.

Shane: Ready for community questions?
Hans: Let’s go!
Stephanie: Yes, thank you! Go, go!

Questions from the Chat!

As DEFI is hottest topic in crypto word , so can you explain GEEQ view on DEFI!!!! What can Geeq do for DeFi?

Stephanie: I’d love to refer you to two pieces we’ve written on DeFi and Geeq. Geeq can offer many features to a community on DeFi without worrying about the bottlenecks and activities for a part of the platform that might be interested in blockchain services for IoT for example. I’d like to post two links, if possible!

Geeq™ Value Proposition – DeFi

Geeq™ Value Proposition – DeFi 2

We really encourage you to think about building DeFi on Geeq’s secure platform because not only will the final mainnet be interoperable, and the transactions costs will be low, but security seems paramount to me when you are thinking about a new financial structure. If DeFi gets in trouble, it will not be likely to get bailed out by government programs or central banks. So I think people should really think hard before they commit themselves to a platform.

Hans: We have designed a one-pager for exactly this. Worth a look.

Geeq are currently working with several different partners to bring DeFi solutions to Geeq. One of them is in final stages and will be dropped in our Telegram Announcement channel later.

Geeq’s Developlment has been at peak in this pandemic also, how has been the journey so far in this Pandemic? Can You talk about your weaknesses that You guys are dealing with?

Stephanie: We answered this exact question in another AMA and it is near and dear to my heart because the pandemic has raised so many issues that have accelerated the future and can be addressed by decentralized technology.

>An excerpt from Stephanie’s answer from an AMA with Eljaboom:
The pandemic has made me think very hard about the problems that are facing the world, not only the health implications and the supply chain implications for both health care supply and food and the speed with which we need to track and satisfy demands while so many people are locked down and working from home.

The only silver lining (although the losses have been tragic, but I will answer as a technologist), is that the world is recognizing that the world must be reorganized so it can work in a much more decentralized way than before. That means that I have been thinking about how urgently I want to develop particular applications on Geeq to address some of these. In the US, we also have tremendous distrust about the way government programs and officials are handling the budgets and pandemic issues.

Well, distrust between disparate actors is exactly one of the criteria to think about when applying appropriate blockchain solutions.

I’ve also met some very important people during the pandemic as our values have been more on display in the blockchain and crypto world and I think we are bringing groups together.

So, the pandemic has worked to hasten the speed and increase our motivation to deliver on Geeq and I feel that very keenly.

How are Geeq transactions very low? What’s the technicality behind it?

Stephanie: Very quickly, the workflow and networks are set up differently. If you are a technical person, you will know that PoW and PoS depend on gossip networks. Each blockchain on Geeq is validated by its own (permissionless) network of validators that are hub and spoke. We show that it is not necessary to have many validators in order to improve security when we use PoH. This architecture can lower costs substantially.

What if someone want to build its own supply chain, how is it efficient?

Stephanie: That’s a great economics question. Some supply chains may benefit, some may not, from blockchain. What we can say is that we have a very experienced team of entrepreneurs who can evaluate these projects, assess the pain points and – if there is significant distrust and misaligned incentives involved, these may be useful to address with Geeq’s blockchain because of its decentralized nature that provides coordinated information that each user on each side can find provably honest.

What is the main problem you see in blockchain industry? What real problem is Geeq seeking to solve with Blockchain?

Stephanie: The main problem is that blockchain projects tend not to focus on what users and adopters really want. Honestly, blockchain is too difficult to onboard, too difficult to understand, and causes security concerns (if people really understand what is going on with other protocols) that cybersecurity and enterprise people don’t want to deal with). Geeq is highly secure, modular, and concerned about making its solutions useful for mass adoption.

Once the product is developed, one of the main challenges seems to be adoption. What are some of the plans to stimulate adoption and build out the ecosystem around Geeq ?

Stephanie: I’d love to direct you to the White Paper, the section called Business Model, and some of the Value Proposition articles and YT videos we’ve made about this, @Smirnov_Mxm and @hackingmoneyph.

For example, Geeq™ Value Proposition – Smart Cities and Geeq™ Value Proposition – Insurance. Geeq’s YouTube channel is HERE.

Shane: Would you like another community questions round?
Stephanie: Ok, I think I’m ready for another batch!

I am glad to be part of this AMA and have learnt more independently about Geeq which is phenomenal. My question is, what strategic partnership aside BitMax have Geeq to aid accomplish its goal at the moment and which other strategic partnerships are we expecting in future?

Stephanie: Thank you for following us! We choose our strategic partners very carefully, partly for the reputation and shared vision, and many because they already have commercial connections where we can mutually benefit from each other because they like the benefits of our secure blockchain data services and we like they have access to customers and developers who know what would be useful.

One of my favorite strategic partners is Morpheus Labs in Singapore, I think we think similarly and are specializing in different areas. We are also partnered with a lot of IoT companies, with more kinds of commercial relationships discussions under NDA.

In Consensus like PoW/ PoS, they have Some Common Flaws like Big Shareholders / Miners can Manipulate the Voting or Governance / Blockchain ! So, are these problems that can be solved by PoH?

Stephanie: Yes! Please come into Geeq Telegram Chat, we can point you to places that make this case, I think, very convincingly. Having said that, education about the differences between protocols is a big part of what we do – and I don’t want to say that the other protocols don’t have their uses. As I think I’ve mentioned, the objectives behind different blockchain platforms are often geared toward other goals.

We are geared toward decentralized solutions that work for a wide variety of DApps to be used by ordinary non-tech people and businesses. Geeq is essentially DApp agnostic because we want to encourage a marketplace of DApps each with their own blockchain (on our multichain platform).

How will you explain Geeq project to non crypto users? What is the plan to get global adoption?

Stephanie: This was the first question and answer I gave for our CryptoDiffer AMA, the recap is on our website. GOOD QUESTION!

May I know some of the major partners of Geeq Blockchain Platform? Also, what’s your Future plans & Roadmap of Upcoming few Months?

Stephanie: The partners we have announced are on our home page, some have been with us even while we were doing research because they believed in us. Our roadmap is on our One-Pager on the orange button.

How does GEEQ grow? Can you describe in detail current development efforts, market expansion plans, expected applications and when they will be available in the market?

Stephanie: I think we don’t have enough time for that. What I can tell you is that we don’t believe in going one step at a time. Our CEO is experienced in bringing technology from research to market and we work in parallel teams, for example, forming customer relationships from day one. Before that, even, because so many of our team have been in business for so long.

What main problems Geeq is facing at the moment? What are you doing to tackle with it?

Stephanie: I used to think Geeq’s main problem was going to be getting attention. Hans and his Token team seem to have taken care of that, and BitMax on our side – well, everything looks really rosy!

The BitMax.io team is very impressed by the innovative, patent pending, Proof of Honesty (PoH) Protocol created by the GEEQ team. There is potential for the PoH Protocol to disrupt the existing digital asset ecosystem. Additionally, community excitement for GEEQ is evident in the significant oversubscription from the project’s private sale.

Shane Molidor, Global Head of Business Development at BitMax.io

For Geeq to attract users and developers of Ethereum, a difficult process was expected. Because Ethereum was already dominating the smart contract market a lot. do you see the current trend as sufficient to outpace platforms like Ethereum?

Stephanie: I’ve said before Geeq is a DApp agnostic platform, and you are right, there is so much that has been learned at Ethereum. We plan to provide an API for developers who have been working on Solidity so they can move to Geeq if they choose to take advantage of the properties Geeq can offer. The transactions will be powered by the $GEEQ token and we will provide some way to calculate the equivalent of gas in $GEEQ, but other than that, we think there are a lot of benefits for developers to consider both. My view is that the more information sharing that happens, the faster the entire industry improves!

Geeq is opening up the door to micropayments and microcommerce, is that also not opening up a door to attacks where hackers would try clog the system with transactions 1/100th of a penny. Similar to how DoS attacks are done on the normal internet?

Stephanie: That’s a really good question in theory, so I love the way you think because I’m always thinking about theory. DoS attacks are a real pain in the neck. For anyone and in any case.

The fact that each application blockchain is separate (if they haven’t chosen to be interoperable) is a big help here. One micropayment application getting DoS will not affect another’s function. It remains to be seen if it’s really worthwhile to DoS an application that’s dealing only with micropayments – at worst, though, the protocol stalls for a bit. It will not harm the essential integrity of the data.

Stephanie: Wow, I think I’m done with that round!
Shane: HAHAHAH @StephanieS. Feel free to answer one or two questions, but then I think we’ll wrap things up — your fingers must be hurting! I know you’ve done like 4 AMA’s in a row hahah.
Stephanie: I would love to take a couple more questions, though, because they’re important (of the ones that just came in).

If most transactions end up in small payments, then incentive wise how we make money, is it worth running a node?

Stephanie: We’re really aware of the cost-benefit that potential node runners will have to think about, and we’re working on every variable that will go into it. The main fixed cost to consider will be a Good Behavior Bond that will go into escrow (we’re working with a $200 assumption) that won’t be touched if you run an honest node. As for the costs to you for running a node with technology, we so far have it gotten down to a background process using less than 10% of your (computing power?) so it can run while 24/7 on a regular computer while you’re doing everything else.

So, the other side of the equation is that every honest node gets paid 2 x cost, or 100% profit. Of course, that depends on how much you do. If you look at the Business Model in the White Paper, we estimate a very conservative running 20tps and your node will still make over $800 a year, I think – and the GBB is a one time fee.

Of course, when we get to millions of nodes, the calculation will change. The basic idea is that Geeq opens up new markets that will increase the potential for decentralized transactions dramatically. Correction: That should have been, when we get to millions of commits, not millions of nodes.

Unfortunately, most crypto projects these days are made by young people who are not ready with any business equipment such as the know how, solid experience, branding, marketing, positioning etc. Hence, business can’t be built on pure luck. Now I want to know how competent Geeq team members are?

Stephanie: Good question from an investor – I invite you to look at our Team page. I stand behind our Team which is incredibly experienced and complementary in our special skills – AND we get along.

As for young people, well, we solve that problem too. (We’re young at heart)
Shane, I think I’m done, if that’s ok!

Shane: I think thats more than okay — thanks so much for joining us @StephanieS. We are very excited to list GEEQ tomorrow (8/6) at 10:00am EDT!!!

Stephanie: Thank you so much – it’s been a pleasure, I couldn’t be more delighted that Geeq is part of the BitMax family, and thank you all for your time. I hope we all see more of you!

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