Hi everyone!

GRAFT is sponsoring a graphics design contest here on Steemit!

GRAFT BLOCKCHAIN FOUNDATION

Graft Blockchain is built on the idea that the payment industry can benefit tremendously from the democratization brought forward by the blockchain technology, but only when the right technologies are chosen and combined with the accepted industry workflows and systems.

When done correctly, this transition to blockchain-based payments will lead to radically improved credit/debit payment system through the combination of lower transaction fees, tight privacy controls, low rates on credit balances, and connected extra services.
Graft Blockchain is a socially responsible organization, introduces a decentralized, real-time payment processor and services platform into the global market covering a wide variety of credit and debit payment use cases. It allows merchants to accept small payments and avoid dealing with big banking and government institutions, prevents fears of recourse coming from corrupt societies; it frees consumers from the usurious interest rates on the credit card balances. Finally, it opens up global commerce where the governments are making cross-border transacting difficult.

Graft software that is not subjecto to shared intellectual property (IP) or under an NDA is under an open source license. Graft Foundation is a non-for-profit entity, and we intend to operate as such unless we’re forced to change status by the governing laws of the land.

Impact

We believe a Blockchain like Graft can have a far reaching impact, removing friction from the systems and enabling new use cases. To provide a few examples:

• Consumers benefiting from lower prices due to merchants fees going down
• Merchants offering more products and services
• Consumers and providers benefiting from significantly lowered administrative and transaction processing overhead
• Drop in physical and electronic crime due to shift to cashless and secure crypto-currency
• Consumers benefitting from lower credit card borrowing costs resulting from peer lending

CORE SET OF PRINCIPLES FOR GRAFT

Real Time Authorizations

Real time authorizations are the crux of the modern payment processing. Accomplishing real-time authorizations requires a flexible and scalable architecture and an end-to-end solution

Transaction Privacy and Untraceability as the Basis for Payment Blockchain

We believe that complete transaction privacy and untraceability should be at the basis of the payment blockchain. The private network then implements facilities that allow both parties to select the levels of disclosures that are appropriate for any given transaction

PoW / PoS / PoI working together

We believe that proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, and proof-of-id each have their place in an application specific blockchain implementation like payments. We believe in implementing and using all these various approaches gradually and selectively to accomplish the ultimate security of the network as well as speed and reliability of the transactions. ​

Open Platform for Service Brokers

It is difficult to completely automate or/and decentralize some services such as identity verification, credit card processing, or instant currency exchange. While some core features such as real time authorization and untraceability are provided and implemented by the network itself, many important services will be delivered by third party service brokers. It is difficult to completely automate or/and decentralize some services such as identity verification, credit card processing, or instant currency exchange.

Specialized Blockchains

Complex systems are not stable. We believe in specialization of blockchains vs having bloated one-size-fits all approach that other smart contract based blockchains implement. We will add smart contract features that are relevant to the application, with an eye towards integrity and reliability of the network

ORGANIZATION

We intend to keep the core organization as small as possible (in the order of 15-20 people), mostly engineers. GRAFT Foundation team will not be engaging in the build-out of the network or any other administrative controls of the network. Our part is software design – we leave the commercial efforts to other parties who want to become part of the network.
While it will be core organization’s mission to build the software that will power GRAFT Network, it will be up to the eco-system of partners who will enable the commercial success of the project. We anticipate both function specific involvement from individuals and/or firms dealing with the specific aspect of the solution, to regional organizations who will act as market oracles in observance with local regulations, needs, and customs

Thanks for @mediaworks.