Ask Me Anything Part 1

1. What is really holding up the release of Emblem Vault to the public and what is your plan to gain real adoption/awareness of your project? Please be as specific as you can on both questions.

Original Post: April 29th, 2020

Transitioning from a cowboy crypto project to a business is hard. It’s a long process, fraught with all kinds of danger along the way, especially this early in a startup’s life. Developing a product that is fully hardened, self-healing, scalable, robust, and enterprise-grade is complex and often takes many years. Perhaps we have been too optimistic and naive. That said, here are a few specifics: When the EV IP transferred to UNspecified, it was now driven by an entire team of people, with differing experiences and skill sets. This meant that Shannon was no longer wholly in control of its direction and pathway. Gaining consensus amongst a whole group is not easy and often takes a long time. Further, UN did have employees and needed to be able to make payroll — payroll came from a combination of the Codes personal investment, some crypto investment, and UN providing software services to multiple clients. As it turned out, it was more difficult than we expected to juggle clients and move the product forward. Late last year, we decided to stop payroll and focus 100% on the product, after feeling frustrated that it wasn’t moving forward fast enough, despite several attempts to drive focus. There was one more issue that I will not go into deep details on, but I will summarize by saying that we experienced some growth opportunities through dealing with some developers who were unable to deliver, period. We spent hundreds of hours collectively trying to figure out how to meet internal milestones with developers that we were ultimately unable to figure out how to work with.

Over the past year, we have worked hard to create a clear and concise description of what EV is and where it fits into business. We learned that we couldn’t convince businesses to pay for it by saying it could do pretty much anything they needed (“Hold and transfer ANY digital asset!” “What’s a digital asset?” “Well, ANYTHING you can store on your computer. Or any cryptocurrency.” “Oh, nevermind. We don’t plan on using any cryptocurrency. Thanks for your time.” — I could probably give you 250 examples of conversations we ACTUALLY had that went something like that.) Here is where we are now: We have a very specific, very focused project that has just started and goes on for the next 6 weeks: Mission-R by RioT. See the announcement here: https://riot.org/mission-r-projects-announced/ As a part of that project, Emblem will be the underlying technology that secures tracking of medical assets on the blockchain, becoming the source of truth for that information. It will start with durable medical equipment (DME), and then focus on consumables, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and test kits. We have a clear focus, a deadline, and an initial customer already defined for this project. Riot (https://riot.org/) has a strong local and regional presence and network, and we intend to fully utilize the doors this will open for us. We are specifically working on a marketing plan and earmarking funding (whether in the form of revenue or investment) explicitly for marketing and business development.

2. When will the economics (pricing for services, staking, discounts, supplies, etc.) of Coval and Embit be made available?

Shannon has always had a pretty clear picture of these economics. We have hoped to be able to prove them out as we gain customer traction to be sure our theories are correct. Expect to see descriptions of our plans rolling out on the http://emblem.pro web site in the coming weeks.

3. Can we have an honest answer to when Emblem is to be released

Of course. And you deserve an honest answer. Please see #1.

Also, I forgot to mention up there that CyberFM is currently using Emblem services in their production Android application to generate Ethereum addresses for all of their users. Expect to see a PR about this soon

4. I know there is talk about a new exchange is it just the one? are others in the works?

Currently, the Coval ERC20 token is traded on STEX (https://stex.com/) and Lukki (https://lukki.io/). We have ongoing conversations with other exchanges. The biggest barrier is listing fees. We continue to negotiate listing fees and discuss new opportunities as they come up.

5. When i first bought Coval there were information on Bitcointalk that 200.000.000 coval were the devs and branded for marketing etc. But last year you started a fundraising to be able to get in to more exchanges. The information is no longer available on the first page on Bitcointalk.So do you have 200.000.000 covals that will be used for marketing etc?

A couple of things here:

1- Nobody in our company, including Shannon, has removed any information on Bitcointalk. None of us has the ability to do that, and we simply have not.

2- In business, a line-item description of exactly where a privately held company is spending money is unheard of. We are no exception. We are using funds for development costs, for marketing and business development, for cloud hosting costs, and for exchange listing fees. Almost 3 years have passed since the original 200,000,000 coval were defined as being used for development and marketing, and that is exactly what the funds continue to be used for.

6. I have a suggestion the coval website is very technical I like the information but maybe if it was displayed in smaller chunks less information but keep the good stuff and if someone wants more they can find that on the site but one page with important bits. I am asking if we can change the website around.

We are transitioning all information about Emblem (including Emblem Vault, CircuitBuilder, and Coval) to the http://emblem.pro web site. That site is intended to address the needs of consumers and possible partners and customers, all in one, with easy-to-read language at the highest level, and the opportunity to get more technical if desired.

7. I want to know how things are going with cyberfm.. any new partnerships…how beta testing is going with ckt builder any release date…marketing..

CyberFM has released their Android app which now creates an Ethereum address for all users via Emblem Services API. We will be releasing a PR and other social media information about this shortly.

Please see question 1 for information about Mission-R, which is a partnership between Emblem, Trilliott, and Alfred Williams and Co.

We do have other partnerships that we are working on, but that we cannot disclose yet because of NDA.

Beta testing with CB has been a HUGE success. The number of downloads has absolutely blown us away and we continue to get more new signups and downloads. Our roadmap for this year includes releasing the CB CloudRunner, where circuits can run continually after they are initially designed. We have proven the concept out as we worked on COVID-19 specific initiatives with CB to support our local community during quickly changing times. Please see our blog post here and here about this.

8. any conferences in the near future

Almost all conferences globally are currently on hold. I can say that we had planned on attending the DC Blockchain Summit before it was postponed due to COVID-19. Conferences are on our radar, and we will keep an eye out for these types of events opening up, whenever the current crisis begins to lift.

9. talk about donations for new exchange?

We have previously solicited donations toward exchange fees. We are not currently soliciting donations for that purpose. Much of what was donated was paid to STEX for their listing fee. UN is holding the rest as BTC in a company wallet address.

10. How can the community help Coval ?

Funny … this is literally on my task list for this week. We will be spending time finding specific ways to harness the energy in this community to help Coval and EV. This will likely include things like making short graphics or videos, writing up blog posts that we re-publish, finding and vetting crypto content that we can post, and other things that we and the community all come up with together.

Other possibilities exist if anyone in the community knows of any other project that might benefit from working with EV (partnering with, being a customer of, etc), then please feel free to make connections via any social media, or email emblem@unspecified.me.

11. How is the team doing? are they working from home now? can they work from home and are things affected by the virus situation

Yes! Everyone is working from home now. The office space we were working out of did closse for a week as local counties and NC state put a stay-in-place order down. We have decided to keep ourselves, and our families, as safe as we can by remaining at home, only going out when essential. We continue to have meetings remotely using technologies like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Some critical things are definitely impacted by the virus! UN had contracts that got canceled and partnerships that got put on hold. We were also evaluating investor fundraising, and those plans have also been paused because of lack of investor appetite. Some of our team members have had to pursue other opportunities as a result of these changes. It has been a wild and crazy ride.

Shannon, Eric and I remain fully committed to moving this forward and are spending our full time efforts on the current targets, such as Mission-R.

12. Do they plan on hiring more developers

When the time is right, sure. You do understand that developers cost money, though, right? We will hire when we have the scaling need AND when we have the revenue to support developers’ salary. We are focusing right now on releasing elements of the ecosystem in small bites (for example, Mission-R first, CloudRunner shortly, and we are working on other partnerships that we cannot yet specify). Our NUMBER ONE GOAL is to get to real revenue. That will be a milestone. Once we have revenue coming in, we will be able to begin to appropriate funds over marketing, business development, and future roadmap features.

13. after ckt builder is completed who will maintain it? who will be part of ckt builder support for new users? is there another project for the team to jump to or will it just be project expansion

CircuitBuilder is part of the Emblem ecosystem (some may call it “suite”). CircuitBuilder complements Emblem Vault and Emblem Platform Services, and they complement it. We built it so that our business users could experiment quickly with blockchain, and specifically Emblem Platform Services, and deploy their circuits once they were designed and shown to work as expected. CircuitBuilder offers our customers a really easy way to harness the power of Emblem Vault. The same team that works on EV and EPS also works on CB, and we prioritize features on all of our projects through a single stream.

We intend to support CircuitBuilder and the CloudRunner, and as our customer base expands and support staff become needed, we will plan for them in our hiring roadmap.

14. will ckt builder have its own token? does it need one or just use coval and mbts

CircuitBuilder is a friendly front-end way to interface with Emblem Platform Services. CB can be used to create circuits that utilize Emblem Vault and other Emblem services. Coval and Fuel (mbts) economics are tied to EV and EPS.

15. any idea on cost of ckt builder pro

We have spent a nontrivial amount of time researching pricing models, comparing to similar services, understanding our revenue model and the intended value to customers, and socializing some ideas with trusted advisors. We are not yet 100% certain about the pricing, but it will look something like 2 standard tiers: $xx/month to deploy to our cloud up to a certain bandwidth (we have not yet determined the critical factors here (max number of: circuits, components, api calls, megabytes passed, users, etc), and $xxxx/month to deploy up to a higher level bandwidth plus support and SLA guarantees. Enterprise level and on-prem only installations will likely have a yearly license fee and paid support model.

Again, we have not settled yet on the specifics, and these are likely to change.

16. Training for ckt builder to get more people involved?

Most definitely yes! We have talked to several businesses about this and have plans on offering something like a half day or one day tutorial, on client site or at our offices (plus remotely then). We did hold one of these locally, and it went really well. We have also discussed recording a webinar and making it available.

17. Any dates on community testing of emblem?

The Emblem Alpha services are up now, and have been for some time. The community is free to use these as a test bed only. The best way to play with these is using CircuitBuilder. In there, you can create an Emblem Identity and create an Emblem Vault, and then do things like email yourself a backup and see all of the addresses contained within that Emblem Vault.

Emblem services are also currently being used by the CyberFM app, which is referenced above.

As we settle more of the Emblem Vault related features, they will likely be available first through CircuitBuilder.

Finally, we do have the Emblem app in development as a way to interface with Emblem Vaults. Application development was interrupted late last year when we began discussions with universal wallet software companies we could integrate with. We are currently evaluating some third-party projects that can provide some of the features we wanted in that app, but which would take us a long time to build ourselves. Why re-invent the wheel, right? We hope to make more progress on that in the coming months.

18. Will the team disclose their holdings of COVAL

Will you show me your bank account information?

19. some larger exchanges require a white paper will we have a white paper soon

We have many pieces of a white-paper written up, scattered over several forms. When and if we need to organize those into a white-paper, we will. As of writing of this, we have not yet had that bubble up as the highest priority.

20. is the thing about bittrex and unswapped tokens over if not when will it end

Tokens can still be swapped manually by our team. If you still need to do this, please send an email to emblem@unspecified.me

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