PILLAR PROJECT
For those who want the details, please read the Pillar Gray Paper. Here is a short version:
The European Commission’s Fire Study of Next Generation Internet recently concluded that ...
1. Internet should ensure citizens' sovereignty over their own data and protect privacy;
2. Internet should ensure diversity, pluralism and a right to choose; and
3. Internet should avoid the concentration of data in a few proprietary platforms.
4. Personal Data Spaces was seen as a very important technology area for all the above top ranked values.
These are the problems the Pillar project will address. We want to give people a better, safer dashboard to their digital world, starting with an open-source wallet. We have two main objectives:
Replace accounts with atomic ownership. We all have dozens of accounts. With accounts, you log in and all your valuable data is trapped inside the app or the service. This presents huge concentration risk. By switching from accounts to wallets, each person owns his/her own assets and can switch vendors freely.
Replace apps with services. Apps on our phones are miniature desktop apps. This harkens back to the days of paper-based processes, showing once again that humans always adopt the old ways of working to new technology. Now that we all have superconnected computers in our pockets, we believe the personal data locker will replace iOS and Android to become the operating system for all your devices.
The decentralization movement and technologies like blockchain will lead to a fundamental reversal of power, putting people in control of their digital lives.
The Pillar Wallet
Having waited patiently for 15 years, we believe the moment is here now. We will start by building the world’s best cryptocurrency and token wallet. We will focus on the user experience - to make it as easy as possible to set up and use a wallet. There are a few excellent wallets - we have our work cut out for us. But since our target is to build a dashboard for your digital life, our wallet will be different. Our wallet will be mobile first. It will include a browser, and we hope to include one or more exchanges. We want the experience to be as easy as possible. We’ll be targeting specific use cases and personas and working to make their experience as familiar and powerful as possible. Almost everyone is a beginner. Almost everyone finds managing private keys challenging. Almost everyone doesn’t appreciate the complexity behind wallets and exchanges and smart contracts. This is our mission - to simplify, build a strong foundation, and keep adding what our customers want next.
The Pillar Ecosystem
Pillar is far more than a wallet, a browser, and an exchange. Pillar brings to life the concepts in David Siegel’s book, Pull. As David explains, apps are a huge waste of resources and prevent innovation. Apps have to be maintained on half a dozen platforms - more than 50% of every app is just infrastructure related to presenting content and offers. What really matters are content, connections, and commerce, and being able to mix them as you like. The Pillar wallet will let you sort, filter, compare, mix, and match these things to suit your needs. This represents the convergence of the semantic web and the web of value.
As an example, think of attending a conference in a city far away. To do this on your phone you’ll need a dozen apps that don’t talk to each other, and you’ll sign contracts for air, rail, car, hotel, tours, shows, excursions, currency exchange, babysitting, restaurants, conference registration, scheduling, events, meetings, and more. At best, each of these has its own app, and probably its own reward point system. Now try to manage all the expenses and record keeping - more apps. Do the apps talk to each other? In general, they don’t.
The pillar ecosystem will create a new ecosystem of data, content, and commerce. We’re almost there - we have the standards, formats, and APIs to do much of what we want. It’s our job to bring these together to create a customer experience that is many times more compelling than using apps. In general, you’ll ask a question or say what you’re looking for, and the content, data, and transactions will come to you. We believe the wallet will be the center of your digital life, and it will pull everything you want when you want it, in a way that's more natural than apps.
The Personal Data Locker
The concept of the personal data locker comes from David's book, Pull. We have seen many such projects come and go. Much of it comes down to trust - people don’t trust institutions, advertisers, or third parties to manage their data. This is why Microsoft and Google projects have failed.
We understand that consumers don’t want to manage their own data. There’s a detailed section of the gray paper that goes into consumer reluctance and how to find our early adopters. Right now, we have a chance - to create the world’s best wallet, integrate it into many systems, and let it lead to the personal assistant that “magically” helps you manage your life. See this early video from 2010 that shows the use cases for the project:
The Pillar Token
While the wallet and platform are open-source and free, users will pay for the various PDL services with pillar tokens as they use them. The token will power (provide micropayments for) the entire ecosystem, giving an instant business model to many projects that can tie in. This is the beauty of the token: you may need a service exactly once and you won’t need to sign up for it, you’ll just pay for it with a Pillar token and you’re done.
Here’s an example: you go see your doctor, she does some tests and gives you a prescription for some pills. All the data from that visit, and the prescription, will be copied to your wallet. You can then manage the prescription any way you like, including asking for bids from pharmacies for the lowest price, or fastest delivery, etc. In this case, pharmacies compete for your order, and their software can be aware what the bid/ask is, and they may give you special offers to choose their service or even pay you to watch an ad for a particular drug. This is all under your control - you decide how you want it, and you pay a small number of pillars each time you use the system for storing your records and letting you manage your relationship with the health-care system. Your data can even go to a study being done - with your permission - and even though you’re anonymous in the study, if they want to send you a message, you’ll have a choice of receiving it or not.
The pillar is a meta-token. For example, Brave has a native token for seeing customized ads and monetizing your browsing experience. Augur has a token for betting. Akasha has one for messaging. You'll encounter dozens or hundreds of tokens as you go about your day. All these tokens will be native in our system one level below the Pillar token. Users may only ever see pillars, or they may see the various utility tokens for the services they use.
The Pillar token sale starts on July 15th at 08:00 Greenwich Mean Time and ends 60 hours later on July 17th at 20:00 GMT. Of the 800 million tokens issued, 560 million will be for sale to the public. The price in ether will be the same throughout the sale and will be announced on July 14th.
Our Token sale smart contract is available on both Ropsten and Kovan testnets. The address of the contract is:
Ropsten - 0xc1a6c4f19ad01e96111acf66ca8f1b6b47fecd6e
Kovan - 0x571a6216e9ddb3f4979851d4e9f58454750ad721
Our GitHub link is:
https://github.com/twentythirty/PillarToken/blob/master/contracts/PillarToken.sol
The Pillarists
You are welcome to join and contribute what you do best!
David Siegel, founder (Switzerland). David built a web-design and strategy agency in San Francisco in the 1990s and sold it to KPMG. He has been at the forefront of technology and venture investing for 30 years. He has written five books about technology and business. His first book remains Amazon.com's longest-running #1 bestseller. He has been a mentor to many startups and sat on many boards. In 2016, he was a candidate to be the dean of Stanford business school. He is an expert on blockchain, future technologies, angel investing, and startups. This is his 22nd company. You can see his work at dsiegel.com
Tomer Sofinzon, founder (Israel). Tomer is a serial entrepreneur living in Tel Aviv. He is an entrepreneur and business development executive. He founded ClearCi, a company focused on delivering Enterprise Intelligence solutions. He has worked in venture capital with a focus on strategic partnerships. This is his 8th company.
Vitor Py, founder (Brazil). Vitor is a senior software developer, has led cross functional teams in areas as diverse as aerospace, energy, and law enforcement. Former founder of SIM, a Brazilian computational materials science startup. Vitor is our chief architect and will lead the development of the Pillar wallet. This is his fifth company.
Yogesh Gaikwad, founder (India). Yogesh is a young Indian entrepreneur with a technology marketing background who started India's first growth hacking company and is contributing to tech startups around the world.
Execution Plan
We are market driven. We do experiments and look for opportunities. We pattern our company on Google (except for the interviewing part) - we plan to make a lot of small mistakes and let experiments take us into new markets. The wallet market is heating up. We need the resources to go after several different market segments:
* Crypto-enthusiasts
* Early-adopter tech enthusiasts
* Partners
* OEMs
We are already strong in business development and will get stronger. Eventually, we want our wallet not to be another app on your phone, but to be the software that runs your phone. We will need partners, industry veterans, strong marketers, excellent communications team, and more.
And we’ll need a great product. We are starting from scratch. We’re planning to hire in August and September, and we want you to be part of it. People who understand our mission and support us by buying our tokens, even if only a few, are the people we want to hire. We already have a strong team of technology people, but we’ll need many more. We expect to start in London and open a second office within six months.
We are very open. We know that people coming to our web site are excellent potential hires, consultants, and partners. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter - we'll soon set up our online community and invite you to join us. And please consider coming to our hiring event in Slovakia.
We have laid out our financial plans and forecasts in the Gray Paper. Everything we do will be agile and responsive to our markets as they change. We also will use some of our proceeds to support projects that will later become part of our system.
After the Token sale, we will have a grass-roots unconference at AquaCity in Poprad, Slovakia, to socialize, learn, teach, plan, and hire. Anyone who comes to Poprad in early August is probably a person we want to hire. Every morning, we will have blockchain learning and Pillar planning sessions. We will have tracks for central services, communications, product, and marketing. If you are reading this, you are welcome to join us (we're not paying expenses, sorry, but we are paying for the meeting rooms and a big dinner on Friday night).
We will have the following tracks for discussion and hiring:
1.Product
1.Frameworks
2.Methodology
3.Languages
4.Tools
5.Open source
2.Marketing
1.Communications
2.Partnerships
3.OEMs
4.Consumer research
3.Central services
1.Key management
2.Asset management
3.Bookkeeping
4.Payroll
5.Accounting
6.Tax
7.Facilities
8.Events
9.Support
10.Legal
We are looking for generalists who have certain strong skills and are flexible team players. We will never have an HR department - if you work in central services, you will do everything. Keep in mind our office will be in London. If you want to join us, please come to Poprad and show your commitment to the project!
The event will take place from 29 July to 6 August. Direct flights from London are available. We have reserved 19 rooms, but they are going fast and people are finding roommates. There are also hotel rooms not far away. We’ll be working in the mornings and trying not to work in the afternoons. It’s a family event - bring your kids. To reserve your room, contact [email protected]. Don’t wait for our Token sale - rooms are going fast. Contact Tomer now to get one.
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