Transcript of this morning's dynamic AMA with Peer Mountain CEO, Jed Grant

Earlier today we had an interesting AMA with Peer Mountain CEO Jed Grant. Here is a transcript of questions and answers. Please visit our Telegram for more information (https://t.me/peermountain) or post comments below.

Q: Hi Jed, Can you explain about how the Smartcap works?

Jed:
Sure. The purpose of Smartcap is to create a fairer and more transparent token sale.

The way it works is that there is no hidden pre-sale. There is a pre-order phase for whitelisted buyers. The Smartcap sale works with a price discovery algo that is fairly simple. Batches of tokens are released for sale as orders are accepted. The initial batch is discounted (25% for PMT), the first batch of PMT is 2,000,000 tokens.

Once the batch has been fully ordered, the orders in the batch are organized from biggest to smallest and filled that way.

Once the batch is complete, the next batch of tokens is released at a slightly lower discount. The batches get bigger and the price moves upwards with each batch. As soon as there is a batch that doesn't sell out in a fixed amount of time (30 days) then that's the Smartcap. All those orders get filled at the price of the previous batch.

Everyone gets in at a price that works for them, tokens are sold until demand is exhausted via price discovery.

Q: Hi Jed, the ID protection and privacy that Peer Mountain delivers sounds great! What happens if there are some people who you don’t want to have your current data? Do individuals have control to update or withhold their information to whomever they want?

Jed:
You own your data. And you are in control of it at all times. You decide whom to share your information with and can revoke those shares at any time. However, if you revoke access to a service provider that needs that info to deliver service, you may end up getting the service suspended.

There are also some legal requirements for service providers to "take copies" of information. This can be supported, but is archaic, so the Peer Mountain team will lobby governments to update their regulations to meet the possibilities of technology.

Q: Hello Jed. It's fascinating watching Peer Mountain awareness grow, I think you are doing a fantastic job. For those interested, how do you get whitelisted to reorder in the first batch? If I understand correctly, the ICO could run for 4-8 months?

Jed:
Hi and thanks! The whitelisting is by supplying your e-mail on the site. We'll email out directions later towards the sale date. The sale could run for several months, but I don't really expect that to happen. I think we'll see several rounds of Smartcap happen very quickly and then the final round for 30 days. Unless there is a bump in sales that moves to the next round, the round that doesn't close in a week or two will probably be the final round.

Another interesting aspect of the Smartcap is the handling of large orders. Since they get priority, there are some pooling contracts, such as Primablock (I am not affiliated or endorsing) that will let many smaller investors group together to get better placement in round.

Q: OK that makes sense. In terms of Peer Mountain, how easy will it be to "port" it to an alternative blockchain? Will the Peer Mountain team have to do the work, or is anyone able to create integrations for other blockchain platforms?

Jed:
Peer Mountain is a micro service architecture. To port to another chain or storage tech, the micro services that handle R/W to those mediums need to be replaced with their equivalents for the new chain and store. At the moment, the PM team would do the work as that's the enterprise side, but we could provide an enterprise with the ability to do their own micro services.

Q: Hi Jed, this looks like an interesting project. Do you need a specific wallet to hold PMT?

Jed:
Any ERC-20 compatible wallet will work. I recommend using a hardware solution, like the Nano S.

Regarding the components, we intend to open source the mobile client SDK and the Attestation Engine SDK, but will keep a hand on the enterprise core for the time being.

Q: What are the most interesting business cases you see emerging around the Peer Mountain ecosystem, and do you see a big opportunity for new actors to enter the scene?

Jed:
There are some really cool business cases. Peer Mountain clearly makes it easier for regulated financial providers to offer service. They can promote service offerings via any channel (QR code, links, etc) and consumers can acquire those services quickly with Peer Mountain. But there are lots of more interesting cases to think about.

For example, personal transportation. With Peer Mountain you could rent a car simply by scanning a QR code on the dashboard, you then swipe in your driver license, insurance and payment info to share them with the vehicle owner. Then you take a selfie and a video walking around the vehicle to confirm the state and exact vehicle.

This is all checked in real-time by attestation engines. If everything checks out, you get a keyless entry in your phone and can get in and drive away.

Successful rentals can build reputation... Also Peer Mountain can and will replace credit ratings after it has been in use for a while. You will become your own credit file.

Q: What kinds of personal data will Peer Mountain protect exactly? You say your data but can you give more detail.

Jed:
Thanks! Peer Mountain can protect any digital object - pictures, videos, data structures. Whatever you need to store, you can. We will provide templates for common data, such as identity documents, personal contracts (vCard), and so on. This will maximize the reuse of these data elements across services and service providers.

Also, we are working on some very interesting personal data that can be stored and protected in Peer Mountain. We have developed a really good facial recognition algorithm and are looking at creating a one-way "face hash" function so that you could validate your identity to a third party without giving them any personal information - just the hash result. The most important things to remember are that with Peer Mountain: You own yourself; And you control the consent to share your data.

Peer Mountain provides atomic attestation of data elements. So, the obvious things like proving age to buy alcohol can be done without giving any other information to the seller. Using zero-knowledge proofs, we can prove the age of the buyer in a manner that completely maintains anonymity and privacy. And this means we can, and will, have robot bartenders...

Peer Mountain also works for hotels. How many photocopies of passports are floating around in hotels? All of this will disappear with a simple QR code on the hotel counter for their service and you can share your passport with them for the minimum required duration only. No photocopies anymore!

If you think about the massive sea of littered personal information that today's business creates with photocopies, emails, faxes, etc... the Peer Mountain use cases begin to become clear and abundant.

Q: I'm really curious about your patented tech.

Jed:
That's the Peerchain protocol and architecture. Peer Mountain works in "instances." Each instance is a full chain instance and can be run by a service provider and their stakeholders (auditor, regulator, etc) The Peerchain protocol allows you to share and reuse digital certificates and objects across Peer Mountain instances.

This is also a fundamental difference with many other solutions out there. Most self-sovereign identity solutions propose a platform that will host all the identity chain info. We allow each enterprise to have their own Peer Mountain (if you can own yourself, why shouldn't they) and consumers and attestation engines can connect to these transparently, much like your browser connects to different web sites.

Having an own Peer Mountain instance satisfies many compliance and legal requirements that regulated institutions must meet. They have a hard time putting their business on a public network. It's also how we manage to have a public chain, that doesn't give anything away.

The Peerchain protocol includes specific methods for salting/blinding the hashes that are stored on chain, so that they can be shared among secret holders and validated at any time in the future, without exposing everything to everyone. I hope that makes sense! The other thing that is really important is that Peer Mountain is a peer-to-peer architecture.

This means that every client can be one or more of the 3 roles: service provider, consumer, attestation provider.
A simple use case is that you and I can cross attest to each other with signed selfies... in this case we are both attestation providers.

Q: For me, it looks like the biggest challenge will be to get all the stakeholders on board? As this can only work satisfactorily with many parties involved?

Jed:
Yes, getting the stakeholders on board is the big challenge. We have to "get big fast" in order to become the choice technology for this space. Our position is really good and we're convinced that we're the best tech out there. In terms of commitment, we have signed an LOI with the Swiss partner who will deploy to 1mm then 3mm users in Switzerland. We believe that we have a very good chance to become the Swiss standard as the government has said that they will leave this to industry and will NOT develop a federal Swiss eID.

We also have signed terms with the German partner and they have 3 mobile apps which are expected to have 9mm users by end 2019. These two are just the beginning. We are already in talks with two more large banks that would also bring millions of users on board each in France.

Smooth regulatory uptake is also important. In this regard, I have already met the AMF and briefed them on Peer Mountain. FINMA's position is open and I will brief the CSSF on PM next week.

Finally, a vibrant community of Attestation Engine providers is key to get good service provider uptake as well. In this regard, I'm talking to the major providers, such as Jumio, Mitek, AriadNext, RDC, and so forth (I know most of them, having been in the due diligence and regulatory compliance space for over a decade) and they are all interested in providing service on Peer Mountain.

Q: Great to hear that you have a meeting with CSSF!

Jed:
Yes, they are moving slowly at last.

On the two signed partners, they insist on their NDA until after the token sale. This has to do with their shareholders and regulated structure. At first, I wished that they would be more public in their support of the token sale, but now I see this as a great opportunity. When they are revealed post-ICO, the news should be quite positive for the market.