By: Geeq  on Nov 30, 2021

As we enter the last weeks of a very busy year, we would like to give a Geeq roadmap update on development and strategic direction in greater detail than in previous announcements and newsletters.

This longer narrative format will provide relief, reassurance and, most of all, clarity to our community. Toward that end, we would especially like to answer some frequently asked questions about the Geeq token. We will re-post the answers regarding the token swap as an update in Token Announcements and Token FAQs as well.

In recent discussions across our channels, we have noticed a great deal of interest as to how Geeq’s development and growth trajectory may affect the timing of the issuance of a Geeq native coin. This uncertainty is indicative of the lack of standard practice in this space, so we thought it would be helpful to communicate a few of the core ideas and responsibilities that the Geeq team takes very seriously.

Overview

Geeq’s protocol, Proof of Honesty (PoH), enables Geeq chains to scale while keeping costs low, and allows honest users to protect their tokens and validated information in a reliable and time-consistent way. It produces ledgers that are provably and dependably honest. This gives Geeq a compelling advantage: the ability to provide neutral validation and a consistent reference data set over time – a source of data consistency that enterprises and individual users can rely on.

Strategic refocus on private blockchain

As Geeq has matured over the course of 2021, we have had a large increase in interest from enterprise customers who wish to adopt Geeq’s technology. These customers are interested in using Geeq for a wide array of real-life applications, such as data visibility, microdonations, gaming and fintech applications, to name some of the more advanced discussions. We are also working with a number of enterprise customers who are planning to roll out functional Geeq products for their businesses in 2022.

We have been enormously pleased with this momentum. After careful consideration of the ways in which we could best meet demand, we have the following update to report.

Firstly, we have been asked to prioritize development of our notary service. Geeq’s notary service is a versatile Geeq-native application that is extremely easy to customize: the template includes five fields for metadata that the client can specify. For example, different businesses may wish to create attestations of different types of data, such as payments to vendors, inventories, buy orders, or IoT telemetry. Although these customers may each have different uses in mind, they are functionally equivalent from the point of view of Geeq’s notary application.

An important selling point is that the Geeq notary service allows enterprise clients to keep existing data systems exactly as they are. Put another way, it is not disruptive, because it is designed to bolt onto any existing system without perturbing the data or established business process. It is modular.

Finally, it is inexpensive because notary transactions are validated by a notary application network, with no spillover in costs from other applications. The notary application creates value at every stage of completion and can be added to or modified at will as needs change or it becomes evident that other sorts of data are relevant. Given the notary service’s modular nature and Geeq’s multi-chain architecture, these applications scale easily.

Secondly, having consulted throughout 2021 with key decision makers at enterprise organizations, it is apparent that many are not yet willing to embrace a public blockchain solution. As a result, we have decided to focus on serving and impressing enterprise clients and prospects with cloud-based, private blockchain instances that will enable early adopters to rapidly adopt Geeq native applications, such as the notary service. By starting with private blockchain projects, we will gain invaluable client knowledge, technical resources and industry connections.

This represents the fastest route to wider adoption of the Geeq platform. Commercial traction will assist in the growth of the Geeq ecosystem. These projects can contribute and complement the expansion of our developer and quality control teams across the board as we prepare for a rapid phase of growth in the coming months and years.

These decisions will affect our roadmap in several ways. Firstly, we are putting the cloud version of our micropayments on hold as we adapt and pivot towards these enterprise applications. We will revisit the micropayments deployments in the cloud in Q1 of 2022.

Although community members will be able to test our framework in a sandbox environment, they will not be able to run their own nodes just yet. This will be possible after the Geeq token swap and launch of public blockchain instances, which will be complete by the end of 2022 (see below).

In light of this overview of our current position, let’s take a closer look at the milestones achieved in 2021 and some features and developments we can expect over the course of 2022.

Geeq’s innovations and development path in 2021

Earlier in the year, Geeq announced its patent-pending method of implementing uniquely secure coin transfers, called hash-locked coin transfers. This innovation led to a method for pre-generating micro-coin accounts that can be spent and settled instantly on chain.

At the end of Q2, we reported that Geeq was putting an increased emphasis on micropayments. Since then, we have released the browser-based Micropayments Testing Frameworks v0.2.1 and v0.2.2. Each version shows different uses for micropayments that are widely adoptable and user-friendly. The current version may be found at gomicro.geeq.io.

Throughout Q3, we explored commercial applications for micropayments and outlined an internal roadmap for developing a blockchain-based payment system called Geeq Pay. A conservative estimate indicates that Geeq Pay can reduce transaction fees on online purchases tenfold — from 2.5% to 0.25%.

Work on Geeq Pay continues and a Micropayments Testing Framework will be deployed in the cloud in Q1 of 2022, as stated above. When it is launched, it will be available for the public to create accounts in a sandbox environment. Afterwards, the stress testing, debugging, and auditing of the code will begin, as we continue to implement applications with private clients.

While we were highlighting micropayments publicly, the development team continued to work on the code for the base layer of payments. We realized the mechanism for secure hash-locked transfers could be used to transfer ownership of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) without smart contracts. The development team revised the essential record structures and logic required to support secure, multi-user and/or sequential transfers of tokens or coins.

Geeq’s micropayments functionality, which may be used for both private and public blockchains, will be key in enabling the broader public to mint and transfer NFTs. We expect to demonstrate this functionality throughout 2022.

A token of our appreciation

The two pools in Web-Staking Round 4, Geeq Staking 5 and Geeq Liquidity 3, reach full maturity on December 13 at 16:00 UTC, at which point contributors can withdraw their funds and get the full rewards. Due to the high demand, we are excited to announce we will open two new pools for Web-Staking Round 5. The new pools will open for contributions at the same time as Round 4 pools reach full maturity. This timing allows our community members to withdraw and re-stake your Geeq into the new pools in one session. Thank you for your continuing support of our web staking!

Geeq token swap

Over the summer, our Tokenomics Update underscored the commitment of our founders and advisors to the project by stating that their tokens would not be unlocked until the Geeq platform was deemed secure enough to make the swap from the ERC-20 version of the Geeq token to the Geeq native coin.

The conditions for the token swap will be met when the code for the base layer of payments, a wallet solution, and a node client have been tested, debugged, audited, and meet our security requirements. It is important that we take the time to get this right as once the native coin exists, there will be no way for Geeq to adjust its behavior. We are and must remain committed to that. As things stand, we fully expect the Geeq Token Swap to occur by Q3-Q4 2022 after we have confirmed the network is fully secure and passes all legal requirements.

Conclusion

We are excited by the growing commercial interest in Geeq among enterprise clients, and we are confident that taking this opportunity to achieve real-world adoption will greatly benefit our community and clients. Geeq is now in a position to show those outside the blockchain space how transformative this technology can be.

While we acknowledge that this approach may well push the token-to-coin transformation into the second half of 2022, we expect it to drastically improve near-term adoption, overall project visibility and transparency, including technology development. In the meantime, we are constantly exploring ways to effect that transformation at the earliest moment, again, when it is safe to do so.

Having built momentum to carry us forward, we will broaden the range of activities to be more inclusive for those who already understand decentralized blockchains. In addition to our NFT technology, we are working to extend the concept of convenient, permissionless, and decentralized activities in a range of Geeq-native applications. We will continue to release our testing frameworks, and we especially look forward to inviting serious review and feedback to strengthen the code and improve ease of use before enabling public blockchain instances.

The entire team is working tirelessly to expand Geeq’s functionality and drive adoption within a short timeline. We remain firmly committed to the vision of a multi-chain, highly secure, public Geeq network and we firmly believe that the combination of real-world commercial adoption along with an expanded feature set will form an ideal basis to achieve it in 2022.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for being a Geeq!

Forward-looking statements

Statements in this article, including statements relating to Geeq’s future plans and objectives or expected results, may include forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on numerous assumptions and are subject to all of the risks and uncertainties inherent in technology development and commercialization. As a result, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.