AMA Recap: Gem Chasers & Uniris
Below is a full-recap of the AMA, for the gem chasers who couldn’t make it, or for anyone that’s interested. Feel free to have a read!
Telegram: https://t.me/GemChasers
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GemChaserz
Gem Radar 🌀:
Ok @gemchasers Welcome to another AMA series. Today we have with us UNIRIS. @nileshvp Welcome to our community, how are you doing today?
Nilesh Patankar:
Great, thanks for having us on the group
Gem Radar 🌀:
No problem! We will also be having @alb2001 joining us today to dive in deeper about your project 🙂
Akshay Kumar:
Hello Gem Chasers
Gem Radar 🌀:
Welcome Akshay
Could we please start with some brief introductions about yourselves 🙂
Nilesh Patankar:
Hi Gem Chasers, I have been in payments industry for last 20 years and worked for Mastercard and Barclays earlier. I started this venture with my friend Sebastien. We started talking about it in late 2015 and setup the company in Paris in 2017.
Akshay Kumar:
I am Akshay, currently Head of R&D @Uniris. I joined Uniris just after my University,
I got interested into blockchain in 2016 and I have pretty much sticked to it ever since.
Being an R&D and product guy, I have delved into the very forefront of blockchain and biometrics
Nilesh Patankar:
We have been involved in research for last 4 years related to biometrics and blockchain.
Gem Radar 🌀:
Okay great! Thank you, and what is Uniris all about in a nutshell and in your own words?
Akshay Kumar:
Uniris is the brain behind a highly decentralized (100%), scalable(>1M+), secure (capability to handle even 90% malicious nodes) blockchain and a truly next-generation biometric device. Uniris has a total of 12 Patents (US, China, Europe, India)
Combining blockchain with biometrics is a true revolution for the next generation of internet users. Uniris strikes the perfect balance!
Nilesh Patankar:
My friend Sebastien told me about his penchant for blockchain in 2015 and I was happy to hear that, since we both shared that sentiment. We both loved the idea of this cryptographic construct. Initially our idea was to work on the OpenBazaar concept to create a peer-to-peer marketplace. A truly decentralized two-sided platform but we soon realized that the blockchains available at that time had a major shortcoming. None of them were scalable and hence none of them were suitable for creating a marketplace platform where the transaction processing requirement would be way more than just 15–25 TPS (Transactions Per Second) that was possible on Ethereum. Sebastien also realized another shortcoming while speaking with his grandmother, which was simplicity of access. It was exceedingly difficult for folks to manage the private keys required for the access. The blockchain world then and even now is limited to the so called “nerd” domain. It is not easy to use for masses or what we would like to call — It is not grandma-proof :)
Gem Radar 🌀:
Ok perfect 🙂
How about the use case of UNIRIS. What are some of the use cases in laymans terms?
Nilesh Patankar:
Uniris smart contract framework is based on a functional language construct and it is quite possible to provide any kind of use-case. But the identity management use-cases come very naturally to Uniris since identity chains are intrinsic part of our blockchain. In simple terms, we can provide the required secure identity access/management where required even including other blockchains. Other than that, as mentioned earlier, we are working on a marketplace concept with a group of other companies. Initially it will be a two-sided marketplace meant for facilitation of agri-goods besides the usual virtual goods. We are also working on a B2B payments solution for a very large French firm. It is meant to facilitate their internal supply chain.
Akshay Kumar:
Uniris has been certified by the French Strategic Committee of the Security Industries Sector (CSF) with the aim to identify solutions that can contribute to the security of major events such as the Paris Olympics 2024. For the next 5 years, Uniris would have an opportunity to provide secure access for various global events in France. Our first pilot was supposed to be at this year’s French Open Tennis tournament (Rolland Garros). We were planning to provide bands that would provide access to Arena and other secure zones for spectators and players respectively.
Voting is another use-case where Uniris is the most secure and scalable.
Uniris’s native Transactions Chains (blockchain for Uniris) is able to consider even the origin signature, which is an additional verification in itself. With the help of Origin Key signature even no voting device can be hacked or no voting device can be faked.
Global event management means Uniris blockchain would potentially add a minimum of 10 Million users due to Olympics alone. Imagine the network effect !!!
Gem Radar 🌀:
Ok great! and how about the tokenomics ?
Nilesh Patankar:
We will use the wallet distribution to explain the tokenomics
hopefully the same is visible
At the heart of it is are two concepts — Control Supply and Create Demand. The two need to be managed through the fiscal lifecycle to provide the requisite growth and investor value creation.
The first wallet — UCO token sale, was meant to fund the development and the hard cap for the same was 25 Million, based on the initial value of UCO. Once we secure the hard cap of 25 Million, rest of the UCOs will be burnt, transferred to network pool and airdropped. These mechanisms are focused on increasing the value of UCO.
Deliverables: This part of UCO is delivered to developers after successful development of features meant for MainNet. It is to develop the developers community.
Network Pool: To fund the miners, storage nodes, oracle chains, beacon chains, all are intrinsic part of the Uniris network. The yellow paper provides a deeper insight into oracle and beacon chains.
Gem Radar 🌀:
“rest of the UCOs will be burnt, transferred to network pool and airdropped.”
If a token is burnt, how does it get airdropped?
Is this a new technology?
Nilesh Patankar:
Enhancement: This is a special pool meant for encouraging other companies to develop use-cases on Uniris. This is only delivered to developers when UCO value reaches 100X of initial value.
Nilesh Patankar:
My bad these are three different things that will be done with the UCOs — part of the excess would be burnt, some would be transferred to network pool for funding mining and storage nodes and remaining would be airdropped.
Hope that answers your question?
Gem Radar 🌀:
Oh right, so there is a % taken that gets divided into these 3 aspects?
Nilesh Patankar:
yes
The remaining wallets are primarily for marketing, exchanges and foundation.
Gem Radar 🌀:
Ok great, and can we talk about the security measures you have taken for investors investments to be safe?
Nilesh Patankar:
sure
I would use the control supply and create demand mechanism to explain the investor safety mechanism.
Nilesh Patankar:
Control supply: Limit the offer — 10 Billion UCOs ONLY. Control distribution — only private and public sale tokens available for trade initially. Programmed deflation — destroy part of UCOs resulting from transaction costs.
Create Demand: E2E integrated services platform powered by biometrics, scalability provides endless use-case possibilities, certified for secure access to international events like Olympics 2024 and Rugby World Cup 2023.
In summary, the demand/revenue model for Uniris is based on projects in the pipeline related to secure access to global events. Other than that, we are pitching for multiple EU wide initiatives that we will announce once signed. This is just one revenue stream, the other being biometric device sales. Once our PoC is industrialized, it can be used for personalized access across various smart city initiatives like mobility, buildings, vehicles, etc. Our roadmap is to build an IoT gateway to facilitate such interactions.
Gem Radar 🌀:
What about any external audits?
Akshay Kumar:
Yes, any investor should think of security.
As far as the price of UCO goes,
for example, considering an event such as the Paris Olympics 2024, which alone brings together 8 million people and knowing that the maximum number of UCO exchangeable on the market over this period will be 75% (7,5 billion UCOs), we thus obtain:
(10 million)1.5 = € 31.6 billion, i.e. a valuation per available UCO of €31.6 billion / 7,5 billion UCO ~ € 4.2/UCO
Nilesh Patankar:
We are a company registered in France, where the regulations and enforcement is quite strict. This space is regulated by AMF (Autorite Marche Financiers) in France. We have started a process to acquire something called AMF Visa. Other than that we use smart contracts framework that is already audited. Moreover, some upcoming token listings require a formal report to be submitted from certified third-party, so we will be doing that too.
Gem Radar 🌀:
Yes that seems great but have you had any blockchain audits done yet? Or are you in the process of it?
Nilesh Patankar:
We have used audited smart contract framework — OpenZepplin and we are talking to companies like Certik to get a formal third party audit report.
Gem Radar 🌀:
That sounds awesome! Seems like you guys are on track 🙂
Nilesh Patankar:
Thanks
Gem Radar 🌀:
Ok so @alb2001 would also like to ask you some questions 🙂
Alberto:
sure
Nilesh Patankar:
ok
Akshay Kumar:
Sure
Shoot!
Alberto:
can you tell us more about the biometric device you are building? How does it work, and what makes it unique compared to other biometric devices? What happens if the user cannot use the device for any reason?
Akshay Kumar:
Uniris biometric solution is not based on scoring biometrics, it is based on crypto biometrics. Scoring biometrics is about ensuring a match with the stored print. It is based on threshold and a match over 75–80% is enough. We do not store any print but generate private keys using a crypto processor on-the-fly. The private key is then used to unlock data locked by corresponding asymmetric public keys.
This is, in a way, ZKP or Zero Knowledge Proof. There is no way to hack since there is NO STORAGE of biometric information.
The device is grandma proof, that means anyone with a finger can just plug and play with the device.
Uniris Biometric Device
Nilesh Patankar:
Identity is embedded in a side chain within the Uniris blockchain. This inherently makes the identity decentralized since it is distributed across the P2P network. The biometric technology provided by Uniris allows anyone to identify themselves without difficulty and without storing any biometric data. This is an access control that is forgery-proof and without disclosure.
The biometric data from inside one of our fingers will generate several cryptographic keys that will never be disclosed and would be used to encrypt our digital identity. Only the person capable of regenerating one of these keys will be able to decipher their digital identity and hence prove their identity.
Nilesh Patankar:
Just to answer second part of your question about the device. The Uniris biometric solution and blockchain are two distinct roadmaps. One can use any other private key mechanism to access Uniris blockchain but the device provides next level of security. If one is using the device and it is lost then the origin key/pass phrase would help in generation of wallets history since we use a deterministic scheme.
Alberto:
ok, so it’s not a big issue if the user cannot bring the device with him/her, or if it’s broken for whatever reason
Nilesh Patankar:
yes
Alberto:
thank you
and what about the framework, programming language of Uniris? can you tell us more about the smart contract language? according to what I saw it’s a language based in “blueprints” or building blocks, could you tell us more about that?
Nilesh Patankar:
Sure
We use Erlang/Elixir. This is a language developed by the Telecom company Ericsson for messaging. It is extremely scalable and fault tolerant. Most of the world’s telecom switches utilize this language for programming and hence it is proven in the field. We had great benchmark results with this and hence we moved from GoLang to Erlang/Elixir. For smart contracts we are developing our own functional language that will be further abstracted by providing a Blockly/Scratch like interface.
Akshay Kumar:
Erlang/Elixir is a very powerful languages used for highly secure systems like aviation, nuclear, space, etc…
One of the most recent is that of Whatsapp, that uses Erlang/Elixir to support a Billion+ users
Alberto:
thank you, I will take a look at Erlang/Elixir :)
Gem Radar 🌀:
Ok i’d just also like to add is there any plans to add more liquidity to Uniswap in the near future?
Nilesh Patankar:
yes, it is in pipeline
Gem Radar 🌀:
Exciting stuff!
Akshay Kumar:
Yes, definitely
We are just getting started on Uniswap,
Our marketing plans and other activities are focused on improving the same
Gem Radar 🌀:
This is really good news!
Ok so we have 2 questions preselected from our community that we want to ask you now
Nilesh Patankar:
please go ahead
Akshay Kumar:
sure
Gem Radar 🌀:
@annaceo asks In your Medium Posts, you have also illustrated clear “accelerators” that help you. So, with the power of these accelerators, do you intend to invest in various start-ups like Uniris and maybe build your own Global Blockchain Acceleration Program for Security?
Nilesh Patankar:
If you recollect the wallets explained above — the enhancement pool wallet is exactly meant for that. It is a locked wallet whose worth would be open ONLY when the UCO reaches 100x launch price i.e. when UCO reaches EUR 0.7, so that wallet worth would then be EUR 630 Million. That would be the pool meant for funding and accelerator programs.
Gem Radar 🌀:
@tolgaozek, You know face recognition has become problematic nowadays because of masks. We can’t foresee future and if there comes any problem with finger recognition, what shall you do? Do you have alternative plans on this regard?
Nilesh Patankar:
For Uniris the concept at play is crypto-biometrics. It is an extremely powerful concept that does not require pattern storage/matching. So if we are able to generate keys using some repeatable and dependable biometric input then the device can be fabricated accordingly. We chose finger veins since they provide the most repeatable, dependable input that does not vary hugely with age. But at the same time we have been approached for other mechanisms where crypto-biometrics can be put to use like identity rings.
Akshay Kumar:
The biometric device, not only takes into account the finger print but also the Ultrasound of the venous network and spectrometric analysis of the finger,
If your fingerprint is burnt or scratched, with the help of other two biometric measurements you can still verify your identity. Also, any finger can validate/authenticate you!
That said, any other mode of verification is compatible with Uniris blockchain
Gem Radar 🌀:
What I like about this project is you guys provide a real world use case which is backed by some well known corporate companies.
This is our end of the AMA today but we’d like to thank you for spending your time with our community today and explaining what UNIRIS is all about 🙂
We appreciate it, & thank you again 🤝
Nilesh Patankar:
Thanks a lot for having us, we enjoyed the chat. Hopefully Uniris would become one of the gems you guys would like to chase 😊
Akshay Kumar:
Thank you for having us!
Yes, real world use cases are a proof that blockchain can definitely be taken seriously and as a global solution to the centralized internet.
