By: Geeq  on Sep 1, 2020

The AMA Room, hosted and moderated by CEO of Exnetwork Eric Su (@ericzoo), was the channel for Geeq’s last AMA for August. Questions from Eric’s community were submitted and some lucky winners were chosen for prizes in $USDT. Originality and difficulty were among the criteria, so Geeqs Stephanie So and Hans Sundby were treated to an hour of answering a wide variety of questions.

Without further ado, here’s the recap.
(The transcript has been edited and condensed, and links have been added.)

Host: Eric Su
Guests: Stephanie So and Hans Sundby

Eric: Glad to have you guys here! So coming off a VERY successful token launch, congrats on that @StephanieS @hansdallass. How are you guys feeling after the listings and all?

Hans:
Thanks Eric! It was a great launch. Although launching Geeq on market is only the start of an interesting and awesome road moving forward.

Stephanie:
It’s been very satisfying for me and a worry off my shoulders. Hans and his team did a fantastic job, it went so smoothly. I hope anyone who didn’t watch it will go back and take a look at how professionally it was done. 🙂

Eric: So please introduce yourselves to the AMA Room please.

Stephanie:
Hi, I’m Stephanie So, and I’m a Co-founder of Geeq and a co-creator of Geeq’s new protocol, Proof of Honesty, which turns blockchain on its head to be very useful for businesses and risk averse people who have been waiting for blockchain use cases.

Hans:
I’m Hans Sundby, Head of Crypto for Geeq, I am a crypto maximalist with 6 years of experience in the crypto market as a Key Investor, CEO, Consultant, Advisor and expert in investments & crypto business development. My main expertise is market strategies and exchanges. Joined in on Geeq for about 1 year ago, and have been building up a marketing and business development team for Geeq.

Eric: So explain to us, what is GEEQ. What is so unique about it?

Stephanie:
Geeq is a new platform entrant in blockchain and it is unique because it brings security to the next level. It’s designed so that concentrations of power or hash power or stake cannot take it over.

We’ve done a lot of work on the technical side (that isn’t visible yet), to prove that PoH is more secure than what exists. When we figured out that with PoH, we could provide security with small networks, we realized that we could lower the cost of transactions a lot and avoid bottlenecks or interdependencies that might intrude from one application to another.

That’s what has gotten us excited, the ability to do something that hasn’t been done before. There’s a niche in the market where Geeq can fulfill those needs where we think others will not be able to do.

For those who would like to build on blockchain, Geeq is also unique because it is a multi-chain platform. That does a few things. One, there is no main chain and so there is no congestion because each application is validated by its own network (by Proof of Honesty). Two, it’s DApp agnostic and can handle permissionless-ness and decentralization at any level.

Geeq’s team is unique also. It’s extremely strong, and we are very aware of economic incentives, how to write software so that it scales up, and we think of Geeq mainly as the next kind of data service (only decentralized).

Eric: Can you explain how “validated by its own network” can be secure? It seems counter intuitive.

Stephanie:
The network is permissionless, so nodes can join or exit the network for a specific DApp, and the Proof of Honesty (PoH) protocol keeps track of who is there.

PoH as the validation protocol for Geeq is completely deterministic. There are no smart contracts, nothing to game, and so we are able to avoid the problems where a lot of blockchain protocols have sought refuge in assuming that lots of nodes will bring more security.

There are a lot of reasons I could name why that is a highly suspect assumption, although they vary by protocol.

Eric: Please do.

Stephanie:
Some protocols believe that increasing the number of nodes increases the probability that 2/3 will be honest. Actually, unless they provide the incentives, it is quite likely that assumptions they will all be live and contributing work in the correct way are highly unlikely, especially as they get to thousands of nodes. There are free-riding problems, strategy issues where it may be more beneficial to collude rather than provide the correct services, etc.

Big is not better unless you have the right incentives.

Eric: So what is the role of the token here?

Stephanie:
The Geeq token is a utility token that is used throughout the ecosystem to pay for validation services. Part of PoH is that it automatically pays nodes for honest work – this is one way we incentivize nodes to participate. (There are many other layers of security than simply the economic incentive, but it helps). The Geeq token also can be used as a native token for people who want to write DApps for business but don’t particularly want to issue a token of their own.

It is also possible, at Geeq’s low costs and with its design, to use the Geeq token for streaming micropayments, which has been talked about but it has not been done with a token that is able to work throughout an ecosystem to provide other services as well. It’s great that people experiment with social mining and streaming and tipping. Our vision is that we can provide these services and the token should be fungible in some sense without having to go through the transaction costs of an exchange before you use it again.

Eric: So tell us about the team!

Stephanie:
That’s a wonderful question! You’re probably most familiar with our token team. This team is one that I work with a lot and to a person, they have been in crypto and absolutely know their way around bringing the best of the crypto space (and avoiding the worst) to Geeq and vice versa. I can’t say enough good things about them. Well, I’m proud of all of our team but they may be the most visible.

Our Lead Dev and his choice in devs is also a perfect fit. John Conley and I are the technical originators of PoH, but no matter how good the theory is, it has to be represented in code. Ian Smith is AS PICKY and as security conscious and as experienced as one could ask for – he has worked in the blockchain space for quite awhile also, and he knows bugs you don’t want to know about. More than half his resume is under NDA also.

I have to mention our CEO, Ric Asselstine. He is a multiple time entrepreneur who has taken research through patenting through commercialization through scale up multiple times. He knows all the tricks of growing a corporation to scale and he is up to the task, along with his team of advisors with whom he has worked with for decades, to take on the really, really hard but incredibly new idea of forming a new kind of company that does both infrastructure and services at scale, with compliance on each end of the business worlds in equity and crypto.

I should give more credit to John Conley, who is my better half. He’s the brainiac, but I type faster.

And finally, two people in Silicon Valley to quickly describe, as well as a Board of trusted Advisors from around the world that I won’t have time to mention. Lun Yuen is our Chief Architect and he has been in SV for – well – decades also – and has headed up successful software scale ups, including QuickBooks International. He loves this process and believes in Geeq and will step in when we start developing DApps.

And Eric Ball is our Treasurer, or the mirror for Hans. Eric used to be the Treasurer of Oracle and I think of him as our Head of Fiat, while Hans is the Head of Crypto. Eric is a fintech mastermind.

Eric: Nice. So is this mainnet already? Any interesting Dapps being built on it?

Stephanie:
No, no mainnet yet. 2020 is a building year. Yes, interesting DApps will come out of Geeq to kick us off, and our team is used to prototyping and there is a back and forth discussion between the requirements of the validation layer and the application layer, so it’s not as though we will build sequentially, that is, we will not wait to finish the mainnet before we start on DApps.

Eric: Ok. I’ll open the floor for the community. Please wait 4-5 minutes. and then answer 10-12 good ones.

Community Questions

Q1. As of now there have been many blockchain related projects come and gone, what are the special and unique characteristics of #GEEQ that make it different from the others, that make investors and users decide to invest into it?

Stephanie:
First, Geeq’s protocol is truly unique in the security it offers. That was our first goal and it was to reach a threshold that if we couldn’t offer security, there was no use entering the space. The only interest we had was providing solutions to people who care about the integrity of the records that are on the blockchain because that is truly the promise and uniqueness of blockchain.

We were asked to speak at DARPA about our protocol, and it was well received. (If you go to our general chat, they’d be glad to take out the whole list of places we’ve been). Suffice to say, we achieved the security by rethinking what security meant, which is that no user wants to depend on a black box, be defrauded, get subjected to changing rules if you’re not paying attention, or have to learn the kind of technological underpinnings that blockchain involves.

What users want is new value, low costs, and easy. That’s what Geeq does. We set out to be secure enough to think about moving fintech and critical infrastructure over and we think we have that on as secure a decentralized system as it is possible to be.

So how do we do this? We have a very simple, very elegant, (but very hard to derive) validation layer that is proprietary, with no smart contracts, nothing to mess it up. All it does is validate every blockchain on the platform, which expands by launching new independent (or ultimately interoperable) blockchains.

Q2. How will the integration of the Chainlink oracle solution benefit users and Dapp builders on the Geeq platform ?

Stephanie:
The reason to explain the benefits of Geeq’s validation layer is because that’s our unique value proposition. Security, low costs, independence for developers, new types of market opportunities, and a stable digital economy. We will make some cool DApps ourselves, but the DApp layer is an agnostic DApp layer.

Regarding DApps, we KNOW there are people who already have ideas that they have been testing out. DeFi is one example. Fintech that depends on oracles is another. Betting, gaming, and so on. These are not functions that we are building and we’re very practical. I especially believe in the economic principle of comparative advantage. Chainlink was the provider of oracle services that we wanted a relationship with first, so builders can already think about what is possible.

Q3. What actually led to this collaboration and what solution will both parties jointly provide from this collaboration in the future?

Stephanie:
The trick was getting Chainlink to believe in our platform and our validation system and what it can offer. Security is key, ease is key for adoption. Chainlink believes it. Geeq is the first non-PoW non-PoS project to integrate Chainlink. So together we think it’s a very powerful combination for the platform DApp level to grow.

Q4. The only way the blockchain industry will expand and grow is if we have users that will be able to use products with ease. What are some of the unique features GEEQ that attract more users?

Stephanie:
This is a good question for how the blockchain industry has to grow: it has to provide security the way I’ve defined it above, value, ease of use, and modularity for businesses to adopt (which we do by allowing separable multi-chain applications) And low costs.

Q5. Trust is very important in business, what makes investors, customers and users feel safe when working with GEEQ?

Stephanie:
I think this is true and our CEO believes this as well. We will start showing parts of it soon, the first being where people can stress test the system, and ultimately the entire code will be open source, otherwise it is not transparent and blockchain. So the technical people can understand. But more than that, our brand is honesty! We have a team that I invite you all to check out. Our token team’s behavior is another example.

Q6. How many developers are currently working on Geeq?

Stephanie:
I think there are 5 working on the core code headed by Ian and a few others, including Lun and our Director of Adoption in Waterloo, Andres Navarre who are already doing preliminary work on Geeq DApps.

Q7. Among some technology key points such as: Sidechain, Privacy, Shardchain, how far are GEEQ going in each aspects at the moment? What are your main focus in terms of technology at the moment?

Stephanie:
Sharding in many projects – well, it depends if you’re talking about keys or chains. But, as far as chains, sharding is often a way to try to get around doing computational work on chain, achieve more throughput. However, if you have a mainchain architecture, there are issues with having to get back to the mainchain. Let’s say that process is secure. You still run into a bottleneck which, for example, in Ethereum lately drove up the gas prices.

Geeq solves the problems sharding was meant to do by having a multi-chain platform where there is flexibility and there does not necessarily have to be things done off chain (out of our secure ecosystem) depending on the kind of application you want.

Cross-chain solutions – again, this is partly to encourage diversity for an ecosystem which we can handle in terms of allowing devs and businesses to spin up their own chains, and partly to simply increase the size of the ecosystem. The main problem I see there is it makes the ecosystem really complex, and we’ve done some deep dives into some of them. The validation protocol for every blockchain on Geeq happens also to guarantee any ledger on Geeq (that is provably honest, which is another technical problem we’ve solved) uniformly reliable. Which means someone in the Geeq ecosystem can transfer across chain without worrying about many of the issues that are introduced in other cross-chain ecosystems.

Q8. How is “freedom and flexibility” shown in the Geeq ecosystem? What mechanism helps you to build a successful “Everyone Wins” model?

Stephanie:
I answered this in an AMA not too long ago, if you stick around, I’ll give you a link. This is a wonderful, wonderful question, thank you and it means a lot to me to be able to explain how to build a successful Everyone Wins model. What I’ll say that I haven’t said before is that, from an economics point of view, you have to be able to create surplus (an economic term) and then create preferred pathways for distribution. Geeq is constructed, again, to avoid concentrations of power taking over the system in many ways that others don’t (e.g. rich stakers). So we really have thought this through. And I love that part of it.

(“Everyone Wins” was the answer to Question 2 in the AMA with Mandy B.)

Q9. DeFi is the hottest topic in the crypto industry in 2020! How does Geeq view DeFi’s future? What does GEEQ mean for DeFi?

DeFi is indeed a hot topic this year.

We have already experienced DeFi problems on ethereum: hacks, lack of security, transaction costs, transaction queue and more.

Geeq recently designed a One pager that explains easily what Geeq can do for DeFi. Chainlink was a very important brick for us to nail down within the Proof of Honesty eco-system to allow usecases like this.

Q10. Obviously adoption is crucial to the success and momentum of Geeq. What does Geeq Network do to the mass adoption of Proof of Honesty protocol (PoH)? What advanced activities Geeq want to create?

Stephanie:
I mentioned micropayments, I believe Hans just mentioned DeFi – both are areas that have not really begun to be established. Micropayments are possible because of Geeq’s uniform validation throughout the system and super low transaction costs, less than 1/100th of 1 penny. At that cost, you can tip 3 cents. DeFi needs that level of security on the bottom and flexibility on the top. And finally, the micropayments plus multichain (and no bottlenecks) supports a blockchain backend for IoT from billions of devices.

Q11. I go through your website and I saw lots of partnerships you work with. How did you work your major partnerships? As we all know, it’s not that easy to gain the trust to be part of each team. It takes a good reputation to build it. What’s your secret for that?

Stephanie:
That’s true. And having experienced entrepreneurs who are trusted in their circles (Waterloo, Ontario, Silicon Valley, and Dr. Yeap and Morpheus Labs in Singapore, as well as our base in Europe) is key. So is having a track record of producing product that consumers want to adopt in the traditional world. We’re confident we can repeat that again when we provide decentralized data services to the crypto/blockchain world AND the traditional world.

Q12. How much $GEEQ is needed to become a validator node and are there any ongoing incentivized testnets?

Hans:
We are currently looking at around 200 $GEEQ. Exact amount can be higher or lower. Our goal is to let most people be able to become a validator. Exact details is yet to be released.

There will be incentives on our public testnet and we plan to do pre-staking through exchanges and so on as well VERY soon.

Q13. Does Geeq provides data services to private companies? How secure you keep our data from attackers? What are the roles of Proof of Honesty (PoH) to Geeq Ecosytem? like your consensus name, can you tell us “Honestly” the Cons & Lacks of Geeq?

Stephanie:
The answer to the first question is yes, Geeq will provide data services to private companies at varying levels of permissions depending on what they want. Geeq is built to prove its security in the least “traditionally” secure way possible which is completely permissionless at the validation AND application layer. Obviously, there will be companies that don’t want to go all that way, although we have some nice explainers about why we think they should in some cases. 🙂

As for attackers, we assume everyone will attack, given the opportunity. If you can’t stand up to the worst case, then we don’t think you can claim security. What we do is allow the end user to find the globally honest and provably canonical ledger which is a lot to say technically (see the Technical Paper) but actually we’ll make it very easy by developing a nice UI/UX client for the user to check the same proof of the validation as the protocol does.

An attacker will generally try to warp those results, but if the node cannot provide the proof, a user simply ignores it. And again, PoH is not game-able in the ways that PoW and PoS can be attacked by coordination or even multiple parties happening to do the same strategy or an individual powerful entity.

To answer your last question, which is very important. What some people who are used to being able to change the blockchain through forking and so on – that is not possible on Geeq. We give you the opportunity to start a new blockchain, but we believe you can’t abandon or change the rules on someone who has adopted a previous blockchain. Now, there are going to be some people who do not prefer that. However, we think customers and most people will.

What this does, however, is shift responsibility to the blockchain developers to be very careful in the DApps they put out, because they have to honor those terms. I think the quality control will be a great addition to the industry, actually, and as a company it is our job to help make that easy for developers.

Q14. GEEQ is built on ETH blockchain which is slow & cannot scale, why have you chosen ETH blockchain over other faster & Scalable chains & do you have plans for mainnet to Migrate your own Chain

Hans:
Ethereum is currently the industry standard for projects to launch on. We would have not chosen ethereum as our platform if we were supposed to build a dApp or use the blockchain for a product.

We will be swapping over to our own mainnet. Geeq?

Q15. What is your long-term vision of the industry where the Geeq works? Are you afraid that one day there will be another project with more innovative technology that can replace Geeq?

Stephanie:
Despite the fact that we are building something unique, with a DApp agnostic layer, we are not trying to be everything to every person. There’s a role for other platforms, definitely. However, in being able to provide the level of reliability of information (and there’s a lot of use cases and cool economic problems we can solve that I don’t have time to explain), we don’t think there will be another project that will be able to do it. For the nerds, the protocol provides a provably unique, coalition proof equilibrium in a non-cooperative environment. That’s the most robust you can make it. As for more innovative technology otherwise, in terms of upgrades, we have an upgrade path and have already thought about what happens when there are quantum computers. So research is ongoing and we are not too proud (at all) to call in more experts if there are questions that we need to answer in order to keep this infrastructure working at its best.

Ultimately, we are a consumer-oriented company. And I personally am a builder who has a lot of ideas about what I want to provide for the future. So we’re not going to let the grass grow under our feet, so to speak.

Eric: 🙂 ok So i guess that wraps up our AMA with Geeq! @StephanieS Please invite people where to follow the project.

Stephanie:
We’d love for you to join us in Telegram https://t.me/GeeqOfficial since you’re all Telegram users, and follow our Announcement Channel on Telegram as well, and on Twitter we’re @GeeqOfficial and the website is geeq.io

Please be aware there are scammers out there, so the only official announcements will only come from a GeeqOfficial account (not a “Geeq” account).

Eric: Alright! Thanks for the time @StephanieS and @hansdallass. New approaches are very intriguing to me and I’ll be sure to follow it.

Stephanie:
Thank you very much for hosting this AMA, Eric. I really am grateful for all of the questions. For those who would like more technical explanations about Proof of Honesty and how we have changed the definition of security to be what consumers want, please visit our website or come ask questions in Telegram. 🙂

And we also want everyone to think about how they will use Geeq!

Hans: Thanks alot for the AMA Eric!

We are also looking forward to bring Geeq to other big exchanges and get pre-staking started for our believers! ?

Eric: Thanks man!