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Concept |
Humaniq is a simple and secure 4th generation mobile bank. We are developing a completely new banking experience by dissolving all the barriers of archaic banks such as the need to come to a branch, doing endless paperwork, dealing with hard-to-use, buggy mobile apps, and protecting data with hard-to-remember, complex passwords. We have created a safe, strong financial tool, specifically designed to be used by people who are undereducated or who don’t possess identification. Most of them live in emerging economies on less than two dollars a day. We believe we can change that. Learn more about Humaniq… |
Team Connections
Jochen Heussner, is Founder at Planet Compliance and Dimo Alexander Perkins, is Associate at Deep Knowledge Life Sciences.
Jochen Heussner
Chief Financial Officer
Alexander Perkins
Vice President of Operations
Georges Al Medawar
Business Development Officer / investment relations
Derin Cag
Chief Digital Officer
Dickson Nsofor
Head of Global International Development
Alakanani Itireleng
Lead AmbassadorWhitepaper
Abstract
The Humaniq team is building a next generation model for financial
services (Banking 4.0) which is based on Blockchain technology,
mobile devices and biometric identification systems. We will use
cryptofinancing (Initial Coin Offering) for growth capital rather than
traditional venture capital and shareholders.
Our aim is to empower a market of 2 billion people who currently
don’t have access to banking across the world. Almost half the
world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.
At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. More than
80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income
differentials are widening.
We believe Humaniq can help reverse these trends and help
bring people out of poverty by giving them banking tools that can
provide liquidity for entrepreneurial ventures via loans, investment,
online work and cryptofinancing as well as create new opportunities in
the digital economy, locally, nationally and internationally. Humaniq
can also help mitigate the refugee crises occurring in many countries
in the West due to economic disparity and lack of opportunities in
emerging economies.
Our unique selling proposition (USP) in the digital banking
market is our use of Blockchain technology combined with biometrics
and a focus on mobile technology. We plan to not only provide a
software solution but also bring mobile hardware (phones) into the
markets we are aiming for in Africa, Asia and South America.
Mission
You may notice: there are unbanked regions on Earth. As a matter of fact, nearly 2.5 billion people live in regions where no banking infrastructure exist. The only form of payment available in those regions is manually giving banknotes (and/or coins) to a counterparty. What makes it worse, even in banked regions, there are millions of people without passports or any other forms of identity or documentation, thus they are cut off from modern banking facilities. According to a recent World Bank estimate, the total number of people who did not have identification documents amounted to 1.5 billion by 2016. We at Humaniq, will provide a new financial infrastructure for everyone who has a smartphone with a camera. The smartphone is necessary to make and receive payments, and the camera is needed to earn the first coins. The price of smartphones is falling every year and they are currently priced at between $10-$20 on the low end.
What makes Humaniq special?
It is natural to ask why the problem of banking for the unbanked cannot
be solved by Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. And the questions can also
be asked: «What makes Humaniq special?», «Are you just another startup
offering yet another mobile wallet app?
At first glance, it looks like any Bitcoin mobile wallet could be used in
unbanked regions. But if you think deeper about this, you will discover the
following issues:
✘ The problem: the number of satoshis in circulation (or any other
small units of crypto) is insufficient for some regions. E.g., in Indonesia
(250 million people), there’s just not enough digital currency to have
substantial daily turnover (volume). Bitcoin is scarce, and if you don’t
have bitcoins, you are inclined not so to be interested in the network.
For regions poorly integrated into the international financial system,
it would take a lot of time for sufficient liquidity to appear in the
local market. But there’s no doubt that such regions have their own
domestic economy today. It’s just they are almost exclusively cashbased.
✔ Our solution: unlike other cryptocurrencies, Humaniq provides an
egalitarian emission mechanism. The amount of coins that one person
can mint is limited, and this is what makes Humaniq so special. This
mechanism has nothing to do with competing in specialized hardware,
having access to specialized hardware, wasting electricity, or owning
the coins preliminarily. It may be called proof-of-face, and nothing is
more fair than that.
✘ The problem: the lack of local exchanges. Even now in 2017, there
are lots of countries where no infrastructure to buy or sell cryptocurrency
exists. This is the issue even for some European countries, which
have no problems with Internet adoption and where virtually the entire
population is using smartphones. We’d like to stress that it has been
more than 8 years since the first cryptocurrency launched, and more
than 7 years since the first cryptocurrency exchange ever appeared.
✔ Our solution: since our platform provides infrastructure for people to
earn Humaniq coins from home, we understand that people would eventually
like to exchange cryptocurrency for local currency. Of course,
we provide such infrastructure in our app. (And still, we are in talks
with some national and international shopping franchises in various
countries we are targeting — and engaging them to add Humaniq as a
payment option.)
✘ The problem: some states are concerned with pseudo-anonymity of
cryptocurrencies, which causes recurring legal issues associated with
them.
✔ Our solution: since app users have to pass bio-identification, there
is no anonymity in Humaniq. That is good news for transparency
advocates, and that makes Humaniq unviable for financing terrorism,
trading drugs and all the other deadly sins Bitcoin is accused of. Another
point is, Humaniq provides the ability to earn while working from
countries abroad. This enables an export-driven economy in depressed
regions, improves living standards of depressed regions, and reduces
the impetus for migration, which is great for all governments both in
developed and in developing countries.
✘ The problem: the network effect of Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies)
is relatively small because of relative usage complexity. According
to the report from Juniper Research, the number of active Bitcoin users
around the world could reach 4.7 million people by the end of 2019.
Even now the network has reached the capacity limit of 250 thousand
transactions. Eight years of the Bitcoin era have passed; compared to
PayPal, after 8 years it had 100 million active accounts, despite the
fact that it appeared with less developed online infrastructure and can
require passport details for use.
✔ Our solution: we discarded the private and public key approach,
which confuses newcomers; we also had to reject using fractional amounts
of coins, since decimal fractions may be uneasy for people with little
or no education. It’s very simple. Coins are whole numbers (integers),
faces are used as passwords — if you think it gets any easier than that,
please tell us what could be simpler.
✘ The problem: complexity of reputation accounting in anonymous
communities, needed for various p2p-solutions (p2p-insurance, p2pbanking).
✔ Our solution: we handle this problem with our bio-identification procedure.
By the beginning of 2017, elegant solutions for biometric authentication
already exist. If we take a combination of authentication
✘ The problem: the lack of crypto evangelists in undeveloped regions,
which contributes to people’s unawareness of innovative payment systems.
✔ Our solution: the reasons why people don’t promote cryptocurrencies
in undeveloped regions are understandable: technical complexity
of the subject, language difficulties, no financial incentive etc. But
we’ve targeted our project directly at such regions. Working on the
problem, we have studied nearly everything about the current state of
developing countries. We talked to ∼100 prominent bitcoiners who live
in developing countries such as Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Botswana,
Pakistan and Indonesia. Dozens of them decided to enter our Humaniq
Ambassador Program: they will teach people about how to use
Humaniq and earn cryptocurrency for that.
This is why Bitcoin or any other crypto isn’t used in unbanked regions.
And won’t be used. The currency of unbanked regions (the dark ones on
Figure 1) is called Humaniq.
Vision
In Humaniq, the amount of coins that one person can mint is limited,
and that is what makes Humaniq truly special.
This may sound really strange for an experienced crypto-community
member. How did we achieve this?
We did it with the help of bio-identification. Our bio-identification has
to be passed only once, taking less than 20 seconds and does not require to
have any e-mail or passport. And modern face recognition algorithms for
neural networks can check one’s identity with incredible accuracy
Briefly, bio-identification is obligatory to create a wallet; every user is
given coins for passing bio-identification; the process consists of taking series
of photos, recording videos of the user making facial gestures, and recording
the user’s speech. For details, move to subsection 9.3.
To prevent theft of coins, every time a user signs in into the app, he or
she must pass the authentication procedure. The authentication is similar
to bio-identification, but much shorter: the user has to repeat just one of
the recorded gestures in the front of the camera. It is as easy as unlocking a
smartphone.
The software we have developed works with the cheapest hardware solutions
on Android 5.0: with smartphones that cost $10-$15. Such affordable
devices are usually fitted with a front-facing camera and microphone, and
thus are sufficient to install a mobile wallet and to authenticate the user.
After passing the bio-identification, everyone is invited to earn additional
coins by inviting friends and making transactions. Moreover, we enable the
possibility for everyone to earn a living with their mobile phones, and that’s
what is truly impressive.
You may ask — how? Well, we work with local companies and brands to
achieve this. Our cherished will is to make Humaniq the de facto currency
of the world where over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day.
Humaniq can give these people the opportunity to break free from poverty,
improving the lives of their families and themselves by entering and helping
create a new mobile digital economy. Imagine now... over two billion users
improving capitalization of popular services by getting used to them — isn’t
that what brands dream of? Isn’t that why Facebook is making a play with
internet.org?
Our user may purchase a smartphone perhaps even with a loan — and after
the purchase, cover his or her expenses within several weeks, by executing
simple actions.
We feel honored to repeat it once more: Humaniq provides an egalitarian
emission mechanism. The amount of coins that one person can mint
is limited, and that is what makes Humaniq so special.
This mechanism has nothing to do with competing in specialized hardware,
having access to specialized hardware, wasting electricity, or owning
the coins preliminarily. It may be called proof-of-face, as we’ve mentioned,
and there’s nothing more fair than that.
In this section, we are about to present the details of the emission model
we chose. Developing it, we pursued the following objectives:
1) The early adopters should receive more money than the later ones.
2) The total amount of coins that will ever be issued must be five times
bigger than the amount of coins issued via Pre-ICO + ICO.
3) Emission proceeds until kmax people are registered. kmax should be
relatively big.
4) In average, one user is granted with 500 coins.
5) Tokens are issued by the smart contract upon request.
6) Emission per one person is carried out not by one-time payment2
, but
in accordance with a scoring function which depends on the person’s
activity: passing through bio-identification, inviting friends, making
transactions.
Let E(k) be the amount of HMQ coins that may be granted to the
person who was k-th to pass the bioidentification in the Humaniq app (the
user number k). The objective number 1 tells that the function E(k)
should be decreasing one. We chose the simplest decreasing function — the
linear one:
10 Conclusions
The Humaniq project was launched to create a financial infrastructure for
people who were previously isolated from it. We are using the most advanced
and mass technologies: the blockchain with the possibility to connect thirdparty
projects, a mobile application, along with bio-identification. Humaniq
will also add to the science of cryptoeconomics, the well-being of developing
countries, and can even benefit the European economy.
For cryptoeconomy:
• expanding the amount of cryptoeconomy users will result in a positive
development in this industry
• original inherently friendly and open source architecture of Banking
4.0 will help start-ups to get instant access to customers around the
world and obtain financial support from the Humaniq project
• bio-identification will allow testing reputation systems and personalized
interaction programs, introducing this realm to charitable organisations,
NGOs and United Nation services.
For developing countries:
• poverty level reduction
• remote work and economic growth: greater opportunities for savings
will increase the lending capacity of the population; collection of customer
financial data will reduce lending risks
• innovation and infrastructure: electronic finances will allow the creation
of new business models and products
• reduction in class inequality: financial services can provide new opportunities
for billions people living on less than $2.50 a day and bring
them to the middle class, greatly improving their lives
• establishing gender equality: engaging the female population in the
electronic finance system will raise incomes of health care and education
systems; a barrier for women in financial account registration
will dissolve, and women will have more control over their funds and
business
• improving the quality of education through remote access and payment
capabilities.
For the EU:
• improving the economic situation in third world countries will reduce
the current immigration challenges faced by advanced economies, particularly
in the European Union where the influx is creating huge
strains on the social welfare systems and high costs associated with
the problem.
Humaniq is not welfare or charity, we are more about empowering people
to change their lives and pull themselves out of economic disparity by
participating in a new digital economy that they can help build.