Horizon State (HST) ICO is Live Now - The future of Voting

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OUR MOTIVATION

We live in a world where the smartphones in our pockets have more computing power than NASA had to get us to the moon, yet the way we govern our societies and organisations remains the equivalent of a pocket calculator.

Existing models for collaborative decision making once served our growing democracies well, yet today they are increasingly slow, expensive, and ineffectual. Public trust in their outcomes is eroding, resulting in voter apathy.

We need better shared decision making tools and processes in almost every facet of our community lives. We need them to be transparent and trusted, allowing deliberation and inclusion, removing barriers rather than stacking them up.

OUR VISION

Thanks to distributed ledger technology we can create systems that directly engage and empower constituencies, employing mechanisms enabling them to vote smartly and efficiently, giving them confidence that their voices will be heard, and allowing them to see, first hand, the results of their voting activities.

Horizon State has built a token-based blockchain voting and decision-making platform that delivers unprecedented trust through the integrity and post-unforgeable attributes of distributed ledger technology. Horizon State delivers a secure digital ballot box that cannot be hacked, wherein results can never be altered and voter identities are protected. Votes cast can be counted transparently, in real time, by anyone in the world. These counts can happen in perpetuity, as results are permanently retained on the blockchain and can never be changed. More than that - Horizon State allows voters to verify their own vote is accounted for, while maintaining their anonymity.

The platform promotes participation, facilitates deliberation and creates opportunity for informed decision making. It is a method to engage constituents on matters that affect them with immediacy. It is a framework where representatives can collaborate with their constituency with unprecedented efficiency. It is a method for families, communities, staff, and indeed entire citizenships to inclusively participate in the decision making processes that govern their lives.

Our product is already being used commercially by MiVote, an Australian political movement featured in the Financial Review , The Guardian , Fast Company , ABC , and on Triple J . Our early stage platform has facilitated the casting of thousands of votes to the blockchain since February 2017. Horizon State now intends to take this product to the world.

Building an Ecosystem

A truly great service enables synergy by being open and inclusive. Horizon State’s philosophy aligns with this by removing boundaries that hinder communication, interaction and cooperation. We are building an extensible platform that will allow us, as well as partner developers, to deploy a variety of products and services to the ecosystem that will further aid the processes of decision making and voting, all of which will use the Decision Tokens as the fuel for this ecosystem. Horizon State aims to provide an extensible, pluggable platform for decision making tools, processes and applications. There are a number of decision making systems used all around us, each of which has different requirements: general elections, postal votes, union elections, shareholders meetings to name a few. In addition to providing a suite of services and implementation types, Horizon State will be working with partners and service providers to build dApps (Decentralised Applications) on top of our platform. Those dApps will provide services for organisations using Horizon State to facilitate decision making processes, improve deliberation and participation, or provide customised registration and authentication modules.

Some possible examples of such dApps could be:
• Content delivery by population slices
• Smart contracts for unique voting mechanisms
• Statistical modelling tools
• Sophisticated simulators and what-if analysis
• Smart surveys
• Smart voting agents
• Power BI dashboard integration
• Prediction tools

Example of Usage Scenario

Poll: Should the Council Build a New Dam?

A local government’s water-works department wants to build a new dam to service the needs of the growing population and alleviate the pressure on the local infrastructure. The site identified for the dam borders on a nature reserve and some people are worried about the effect building a new dam might have on the native species.

The council may use Horizon State to poll their constituents. They would purchase the HST tokens from either the token exchanges or via a portal on the Horizon State product, where the price of the token is set by the free market. They then use those tokens to pay for the voting on the platform. The larger the number of people they want to poll, the more tokens they will need. As there is a finite number of tokens created during the ICO process, and no more will be created afterwards, the laws of supply and demand will dictate the token price.

HORIZON STATE TOKEN (HST)

Horizon State is a blockchain-based platform and ecosystem that enables efficient vote casting and decision making processes. The platform operates through the use of Decision Tokens (HST). These tokens are used to pay for the volume transactions and other services within the ecosystem.

Horizon State is currently engaging with governments, large corporations, blue-chip customers, local councils, unions, education facilities and non-profit organisations who will utilise Decision Tokens for polling and voting processes. New products and services across the ecosystem will require the use of HST, driving the token value and demand.

TOKEN SALE

Pre-sale: Late September (whitelisted select contributors only)
Public ICO start date: 16th October 2017
Public ICO finish date: 30th October 2017