Behind the scenes at Polybius: three blockchains for all of life’s eventualities
On May 31st Polybius bank project launched its ICO. They are building modern European bank from scratch.
They have a goal to set up a bank which is running on up-to-date technologies. One of them is also blockchain. This also the reason they are trying to leverage existence of Ethereum. There is an article where Alex Batlin, blockchain lead at Bank of New York Mellon, said “that while the Ethereum alliance will focus on the development of private blockchains, the hope is that these will one day link up with the public Ethereum blockchain, which is open to all.” Source: http://fortune.com/2017/02/28/ethereum-jpmorgan-microsoft-alliance/
This gives polybius of course big opportunity to dominate this market, specially as they are publishing smart contract on Ethereum and have big goals to grow on this quick emerging market.
There is still a wrong impression in the world, what is bitcoin and how it is connected with blockchain technology. Let us again point out that Bitcoin is just one application that uses Blockchain technology for operation (transactions). At the moment biggest problem of existing blockchain networks is cost of a transaction (fee, network). From that reason we see existing Bitcoin network will never be used for quick transactions. Two weeks ago we bought coffee with Bitcoins. The bill was around 20$ and we payed 7$ fee on the network for the transaction to be quickly processed. This is 35% fee.
Example of “long” transaction between consumer and Merchant.
From above reasons we believe Polybius has the right vision as they are trying to leverage benefits for using public blockchain in the right way and building private blockchain network for transactions. Polybius will Within the infrastructure of Polybius bank project use three different blockchains, each with different functions: Ethereum for the work of the Polybius tokens, Emercoin for documentation and a closed private blockchain for carrying out transactions.
Tokens on Ethereum
Polybius tokens are in their essence is a product of a Smart Contract: 20% of Polybius bank project’s profits will be distributed annually among token-holders. Blockchain guarantees that the Smart Contract will be honoured and payments will be made. Since Ambisafe, the contractor which will release Polybius’ tokens, has experience of work with Ether, we decided that it was them we would choose to work with. Ethereum is not the only blockchain the Smart Contracts could be written on, but as it is the most popular and well-known it enjoys the greatest levels of trust.
A Dividends distribution smart contract is designed to distribute profit among the investors according to their stakes. All the payments will be made in ETH. Dividends will be sent to those addresses whose PLBT token ownership will be proved by Snapshot of Blockchain.
Documentation on Emercoin
The developers of Emercoin blockchain took on Namecoin’s good idea of saving information in blockchain and ran with it: if Name stayed only in domains and only in the domain zone .bit, then Emercoin lets you record anything you like, up to 20 kB. This record has all the properties of bitcoin: it is unique, it has the ability to make transfers, and it unambiguously identifies its ownership.
All important banking documentation which may be interesting to the public/regulators, and which has legal records, will be saved in Emercoin blockchain. European countries do not forbid the use of blockchain in financial institutions on the condition that the auditor verifies its operational security.
One of the companies from the “Big Four” of auditing, Deloitte, is already using Emercoin in the DocSensus project precisely for documentation.
Private blockchain for bank transactions
In contrast to the previous two cases, where dividend-tokens and Polybius bank project’s key documents will be saved in public blockchains, the fundamental activity of the bank — i.e. transactions — will be recorded on private blockchain. Disputes often arise among enthusiasts about whether private blockchain can really be considered as fully-fledged blockchain, given that the principles of distribution and decentralization do not apply to it. Ultimately there is overall control of all the purses. Nonetheless, even if we simply call it a database, it will be a database with blockchain features — and that means highly resilient to hacking and outside modification, which allows the expense of providing security to be reduced.
However, the main reason for choosing private blockchain in this case was the speed with which transactions can be processed. The high level of cohesion in the network allows blocks to be closed significantly faster, guaranteeing high speed transactions. Moreover, having a private blockchain allows it to be built with specific requirements in mind — for example, the exact record size we need for transactions etc. AtticLab is working on developing an internal blockchain for the upcoming Polybius Bank.
The private blockchain records will of course be accessible to regulatory bodies.
About Polybius Bank project
The Polybius crypto bank is a project established by the Polybius Foundation company. It will be an authorized payment institution, offering a classic banking service while working with the most up-to-date technologies, and complying with the strictest regulations of European legislation.
The money for the project launch will be collected over the ICO campaign, which began on May 31st and will complete on July 5th.
They have very strong team behind coming from HashCoins, AtticLab and AmbiSafe, who’ve learnt the ropes so well from developing blockchain technologies and smart contracts that even a sailor would be impressed. This is one which we see it will be longterm rule changer!
IBM is saying 15% of world banks will in next years implement Blockchain technologies. Will Polybius be one of the leaders?
Source: http://fortune.com/2016/09/28/blockchain-banks-2017/