Thanks to the more than 10,000 people who purchased Pillar tokens in our token sale last July, we are now set up in London and hard at work building wallets. We are also hiring back-office generalists and programmers. This update will explain our plans for the next six months and includes an exciting announcement about 20|30.
I don’t really like road maps. I’ve said we won’t publish any road maps. Still, I think people interested in Pillar will find it useful, and the term road map seems appropriate. We’re all in agreement about Phase 1 and 2. Phase 3 and 4 are probably going to be concurrent, so they aren’t really in order. It’s a target to shoot for — we’ll see where we end up. I’m not committing to delivery dates because testing is hard and takes longer than you think. We’re only going to release wallets that have been very thoroughly tested.
Wallet 1: The Token Wallet
Our first wallet will let anyone install the iOS or Android app and do the following things (tell me if I’ve missed anything):
Registration This wallet will be a normal “self storage” wallet with email address and 12-words seed. Have to require that they back up their seed.
Recovery If the app is lost, they can give their email address and reinstate the wallet using the 12-word seed.
Receive ether Give their address and QR code. Show that ether has been received.
Send ether Paste or scan a QR code to send ether to. May want to limit volume at the beginning?
Move in Pillar tokens People can get their wallet address and QR code sent to them in an email, then they can send their Pillar tokens to their wallet.
Dashboard See assets and market value (market value not a strict requirement at this point but would be nice).
See history See previous transactions (would be easier if our blockchain explorer project were ready (does anyone want to join us and be the product owner of our blockchain explorer?), but this is not too difficult with the Etherscan API).
Fill out your profile. This will be handy for other things, later. The information will be stored in off-chain encrypted storage (you’ll have several to choose from eventually).
Get help in the app Contact form that sends a support email. Keep in mind that support is done by third parties, not by Pillar.
About Pillar Something about our culture and ethos.
After this is working, make it possible to see and store all ERC20 tokens. Note that the tokens aren’t tradable on this wallet. No exchange.
Wallet 2: The ICO Wallet
Our goal is to create the go-to ICO wallet. It starts by registering and identifying anyone who buys an ICO token using the wallet. This is a joint venture with 20|30, who will manage the ICO onboarding process. We believe most ICOs will benefit from having customers registered and identified before they purchase.
There are four levels of registration. In all cases, you own your own data, and we don’t have it. We couldn’t give it to the FBI if they required us to — we never have it and never will.
Anonymous registration You enter your email in and create a password.
Simple registration Put whatever info you want into your profile, it’s up to you. You don’t have to fill out the profile to use the wallet.
White-Star registration — personal KYC If you want to buy an ICO using our wallet, you will need to register your details. This is the KYC (Know Your Customer) process banks need to be compliant with regulations. It’s similar to the process you have probably already gone through to register with a big exchange, except that you’ll build your own KYC profile and own it — we don’t have access to it. The best part is that once you do it, you can use that same info for all your ICOs and many other things later. This costs a bit of money — you will see the price from a third-party provider and pay in Pillars to register. Remember — this registration is yours to use or not, as you see fit.
Gold-Star registration — accredited investor An accredited investor is a wealthy person or investment group who is deemed “sophisticated” by regulators and can therefore buy “risky” securities that the public can’t. The rules are slightly different in each country. Again, these people will pay for onboarding, or the individual ICO will pay. An accredited investor will have a gold star or some other icon on her dashboard to show that the accredited status is on.
This is the beginning of your personal data locker. We want people to start by creating their own digital identity and paying a bit of money (using pillars) each month to store it. You own this data. Not drug companies or Facebook or Google.
What if you want to be anonymous? No problem. Eventually you’ll be able to set up personas and have any degree of identification, or multiple types, plus you’ll selectively give your identity information to others, and you’ll be able to revoke it if you want to — there will be different ways to do this.
For each ICO, you will see the total number of tokens offered, the total already sold, the number remaining, the price in ether, the sale dates, and a button to purchase. If the button is red, the sale is not open. When the button is green, you enter the amount of ether you want to spend or the number of tokens you want to buy, and push the “Buy” button. That’s it. We will bake the smart contract address into the wallet, so you don’t have to cut and paste and you can’t make a mistake. You don’t need to send any test ether — you can just buy with confidence. This is only for ICOs we list. There could be presales, discount windows, and other logic built into the offer, and you’ll see that information in your wallet.
Here’s the exciting announcement: The very first ICO will be an equity offering of 20|30 stock tokens for accredited (gold star) investors only. We will give more details about this ICO soon. We hope it leads the way for many startups to contact us and offer their stock to our accredited investor community.
The second token, we hope, will be the CryptX index token, which we have been working on for almost a year.
Once the wallet is well tested, we will onboard select ICOs to the wallet. Those with accredited status (gold stars) will see securities. This way, we hope to offer startups a chance to tokenize and issue their stock on our platform to our accredited investors. This is what Token Factory will do — tokenize securities and select projects to present on our platform. Every ICO we offer will be KYCed, so we know who is buying. Other ICOs will be offered to the public.
Automatically Comply with Rules Different countries have different rules. For example, in the US, an accredited investor who purchases an unregistered security must hold that security for one year before selling. Our wallet will apply all the rules for each token and each jurisdiction.
Later, we will offer exchange functionality. Again, the wallet will enforce the rules dictated by various government bodies.
We will onboard select ICOs that we feel are legitimate and add value to our wallet holders. Not just any ICO can go into the wallet. ALL ICOs we accept will be available only to people who have a white star or better.
Why? Why would we want the ICO tokens sold on our wallet only to be sold to people who have KYC data? Why not just sell to anyone? Because an ICO is a fundraising event, and groups issuing tokens and getting ether are finding it extremely difficult to set up bank accounts, so they can pay their people, landlords, buy equipment, etc. This is such a serious problem that we want our ICO clients to have a smooth transition from fundraising to fund spending.
I don’t have dates for these wallets. I believe we can get the token wallet ready by end of November and potentially the ICO wallet by mid-December, but testing takes time, and I don’t want to rush testing, so I’m not committing to any dates other than Q1 2018. We’ll get people more information as we see the how the testing goes.
The Token Listing Business
20|30 will charge companies to onboard them and list them in our ecosystem. We will have KYC information for at least the initial buyers. We’ll be able to give client projects and companies a fairly full-service offering, which may eventually involve liquidity, market making, helping them set up bank accounts, diversification, audits, and more.
Wallet 3: The Consumer Wallet
This is the real basis for the wallet that we hope will become the personal data locker. It’s the “grandma” wallet. We’ll take our experience building the first two wallets and wrap them into a much easier user experience. We expect this wallet will use multisig to protect our users. It will have an address book, so you can send people cryptocurrencies by name (we’ll do as much as we can to hide addresses). It will likely have messaging. Eventually, we will add an exchange. Exchanges are hard to build. We will publish a separate update on exchanges as we get into this.
Wallet 4: The Business Wallet
In the past, I have called this the OEM wallet. We also call it the GDPR wallet. The goal is to give companies a way to replace accounts with wallets and be GDPR compliant as a byproduct. We have a team working on this and will report on it separately.
Appendix 1: ICO Purchase Modes
Wallet holders can purchase ICOs in the following ways:
Normal: Send ether to a smart contract on the blockchain, same as you would today with MyEtherWallet. Get tokens back when they are issued. No restrictions. We may want to institute a black list to help prevent people from sending to scam addresses, but it’s impossible to keep a black list up to date at all times.
White Star: An ICO on our wallet for KYCed investors. This is open to the public, as long as they KYC. The good news is, once you KYC yourself, your white star lasts two years until you have to renew. Note that since these are standard tokens, you can then send them to an exchange and sell them to someone else.
Restricted White Star: An ICO on our wallet for KYCed investors who can only sell their tokens to other KYCed investors on our platform. This will come when we have an exchange. This option provides full, 100% knowledge of all token holders at all times.
Gold Star: An ICO for a security token only available to accredited investors in that jurisdiction. The gold star must be renewed every three months in the US.
Appendix 2: Security Considerations
Once we issue an ICO wallet, there will be tremendous incentive to hack, spoof, and phish it. We will need legal protection, good license agreements, and a community of people helping us spot the bad guys. Here is a partial list of potential vulnerabilities:
Putting identical wallets into the App store/Google play.
Trying to send a different address.
Trying to hijack the way we send the address or flags.
Putting up web sites claiming to be ours.
Twitter imitation.
Sending a signal to our wallet that the sale is on.
Changing the hard-coded address.
Sending messages that our wallet has been hacked and here is the fix.
Others?
Appendix 3: Customer Support
We are an open-source software foundation. We don’t plan to offer services directly, except for integration and consulting services. We will set up a FAQ and an online community for the wallets, and we encourage others to set up for-profit customer support services. Users will pay for support with Pillar tokens.
Appendix 4: Pillar Tokens
Pillar tokens should be available in the wallet itself. However, we won’t have an exchange at the beginning. So we can do a workaround: we could (or another third party could) purchase Pillar tokens and then sell them in the ICO wallet as if they were another ICO. There’s an inventory and a fixed price, so you can buy them and get them in your wallet. We may have to keep adjusting the price, because we won’t have a bid/ask system, just a fixed price. This is effectively a “cashier” function, because as people use their pillars for services, whoever gets those pillars would come back to us and sell them back for ether. The paid services imagined at the beginning are:
Tech support — paid by the minute?
KYC — we believe this will be free until May 2018 and then will be charged in pillars thereafter.
Storage of KYC documents, paid in pillars.
Accredited investor check, also paid in pillars.
Appendix 5: Exchanges
There are many kinds of exchanges. Several wallets just use ShapeShift to handle the exchange functions, but we want to do something much bigger. We want to use an open exchange protocol like Swap or 0x to expose Pillar wallet orders to all exchanges, creating a web-wide order book and matching capability. This piece on open exchange protocols is a good start. We have a working group exploring this and welcome your involvement.