Bloom - Research into a decentralized Credit Scoring Blockchain
Bloom's whitepaper is long and details but until their recent updates in their newsletter had very few, if any, concrete dates for their road map. Its an interesting use-case for the blockchain that uses a combination of centralization and decentralization in the form of trusted 3rd parties (established credit rating companies) and your social network of friends and family (decentralized scoring whereby people vouch for each other though the use of the BLT token and “peer-to-peer staking”).
The Bloom Protocol consists of 3 parts:
Bloom ID: Establishes identity and creditworthiness.
Bloom Score: Calculates credit risk.
Bloom IQ: Manages credit history.
Bloom's Roadmap
Phase 1: Bloom Invitation System and Voting
Phase 2: Bloom Identity Matching (BloomID)
Phase 3: Credit Staking (Precursor to BloomScore)
Phase 4: Creditworthiness Assessment (BloomScore)
Phase 5: Bloom Credit Protocol Launch + BloomCard
Phase 6: Democratized Autonomous Credit Infrastructure
The roadmap is a little too vague to my taste and lacks detail and dates for completion; however, starting a decentralized protocol for Identity Verification and Credit Scoring is not the easiest of gaols - credit rating bureos are beheamoths and for Bloom to really take off it will need them as trusted and publicly known nodes on the Bloom network.
The BloomCard is a card that will be coming out in Phase 5 in order to help expedite adoption of Bloom and to get real-time data for creditworthiness on the network for those who may not have any credit or have not been vouched for by others yet.
From their site:
"To help expedite the adoption of the protocol, Bloom is launching the BloomCard. BloomCard is a blockchain credit card built on the Bloom protocol. BloomCard is intended to serve as a model for all future credit providers and simultaneously allow the Bloom protocol to be deployed and developed in a live environment."
The team, listed below, seems capable of pulling off the project, in my opinion. There are several computer scientists and 3 out of the team members are active in the community and familiar with the Blockchain technology on a deeper level than it seems most other ICO's are. The team consists of:
Jesse Leimgruber
Jesse studied computer science at Stanford University. Jesse is an advisor to The Alchemist Accelerator, a Thiel Fellow, and a mentor at the European Innovation Academy. He’s served as a guest lecturer at Stanford University, The University of Southern California, DePaul, among others. Prior to Bloom, Jesse founded enterprise analytics software, NeoReach. NeoReach provides analytics for Fortune 500 brands including Microsoft, Citrix, Walmart, among others.
Ryan Faber
Ryan Faber developed a behavioral recognition methodology designed to leverage online psychographic data for user acquisition. Using his research, Ryan launched Flatiron Collective. Flatiron now manages over $100M annually in digital marketing spend. His developments in user acquisition have allowed him to become a 3x Webby Award winner and his methodology has been attributed to the exponential growth of numerous billion dollar brands.
Daniel Maren
Daniel Maren studied computer science at Stanford University. He founded solar power electronics company, Dragonfly Systems, which was acquired by SunPower Corporation in 2014. Daniel remains an advisor to SunPower, guiding solar + storage product efforts and international business development. He has expertise in international infrastructure development, finance, and energy, where he is a recipient of a Forbes 30 under 30 award. Previously, he architected a biofuels program for Indonesian farmers, who struggle with seed and equipment financing.
Alain Meier
Alain Meier studied computer science at Stanford University and served as a research scientist for Stanford Bitcoin Group. Founded by 21 CEO, Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Stanford Bitcoin Group is Stanford University’s blockchain research organization. Alain developed a number of open source cryptography projects including CryptoNote.me, an open-source service allowing users to send encrypted, single-view messages in seconds. Following his work at Stanford, Alain is serving as the CEO of compliance and identity verification company, Cognito (formerly BlockScore).
John Backus
John is a founding research scientist at Stanford Bitcoin Group and studied computer science at Stanford University. He is a Thiel Fellow and cofounder and CTO of identity verification company, Cognito. John is an expert at identity infrastructure, previously engineering data preprocessing algorithms for large-scale entity extraction for deterministic and probabilistic record linkage. This is currently implemented into Cognito’s core identity resolution and record linkage infrastructure, now 14 processing identity and compliance for tens of millions of cryptocurrency users globally.
David Raphael (Adviser)
Infinity Media
Shannon Wu (Adviser)
Mr. Progress
Luis Cuende (Adviser)
Aragon
Joey Krug (Adviser)
Augur
Meg Nakumura (Adviser)
CEO of Shift Payments
Joseph Urgo (Adviser)
Co-Founder District0x
From the recent Forbes article at:
“Bloom does not intend to become a large-scale credit provider,” Maren said. “We hope the BloomCard will expedite the adoption of the protocol by providing a precedent for future credit providers.”
“John, Alain, and Jesse met as roommates while studying at Stanford,” Maren said. “John and Alain began working closely together on crypto projects when they both served as founding research scientists for the Stanford Bitcoin Group. Founded in 2012 by 21.co CEO Balaji S. Srinivasan, the group spent years focused on research for the advancement of blockchain applications.”
From there, John and Alain continued to work together, and their initial efforts reveal an early interest in blockchain applications that help streamline financial information.
“Following their work at the Stanford Bitcoin Group, John and Alain left Stanford to co-found Cognito in 2013,” Maren said. “Originally called BlockScore, the company launched with the vision to solve global compliance issues with cryptocurrency. Cognito now powers compliance and KYC services for the majority of US-based crypto exchanges.”
Here is some more information to get a better grasp on what Bloom is:
From the Bloom FAQ (at https://hellobloom.io/faq):
"Bloom has created https://cognitohq.com (formerly BlockScore) in 2013 in order to serve identity needs for blockchain companies." Cognito will assist the Bloom Protocol in helping different identity verification companies on the Bloom network integrade their records with the Bloom blockchain.
"Governance of the scoring protocol will be gradually turned over to BLT holders, granting them determination over:
- Which organizations will be able to update and provide information to a BloomScore
- The weights and factors considered in the BloomScore
- Development and scoring protocol updates"
Visit their slack at https://hellobloom.io/slack
Download their whitepaper at https://hellobloom.io/whitepaper.pdf
The token sale for BLT begins on Nov 30th. Do your own research before investing, I am simply making my research available for others in hopes that they may also benefit.
well post thanks for shearing