I have written numerous times about the “Federated Blockchains” project by Europecoin Team. Now they have been advancing their work and have presented their first prototype. Its a device for your home network. The collaborative development works in five teams together with the Internet-of-Coins / Coinstorm team, B1-Systems (Openstack and Nextcloud integration company) and three more developers.
“Our Hardware Manager, Olaf is the ‘Makers Award’ winner 2017 and currently works at IBM Watson Lab in Germany. The prototype has been developed, to explain the idea to our potential investors. Now having convinced them, development is accelerating. Given, that the “demo model” was based on a Rasperry PI, we have just finished the layout for our own mainboard, with our own hardware encryption chip inside.”, states Matthias Klees.
The problem
Think of all those great innovations around us, like, for example, cross-chain transactions and smart contracts. You will see, that none of them has managed to transform into a mainstream product, to convince non crypto users. The situation is even worse. New users are challenged to understand things, that are basic and easy for an experienced crypto user, like exchanges, payment processes or how to power a shop and to earn cryptocurrencies as a payment. Even if there are some solutions around, he has to find them and to know about them. All in all a fresh user will have a long learning curve of finding, understanding, installing and investigating numerous services, websites and wallets. This makes it difficult to explain him, why this is a great revolution.
The solution for users
A device for his home network, with a pre-configured, hardware encrypted interface with an APP-Store. Users can plug it into their Router, choose coins, exchanges and services from his App-Store and can use all these innovations via one unified interface, without having to know about the technology behind it. You will be able to switch from “user mode” to “professional-mode” to do advanced operations.
The solution for merchants and traders
The device will come with a pre-configured online-shop to enable to accept over hundred cryptocurrencies with an own payment gateway to conventional fiat currencies and vice versa. Traders will find most of the exchanges under one single interface and can choose them via the App-Store. A trading-bot service is in planning state.
The solution for developers
The appstore works in an hardware encrypted container inside of a cloud network of user devices. It provides an App-Wizzard, that generates an HTML5-App-Skeleton from any given service API, wallet API, or ElectrumX server with a single push of a button. A version-control with GitHub integration helps him managing his software.
The solution for experts
The Finance Cloud API is connecting any Altcoin and Bitcoin to the Ethereum Smart-contract network via Internet-of-Coins (Coinstorm) hybrid network. Adding your service or coin as an APP, will be a snap via the App-Stores developer access. Europecoin will provide its “Soft-Cold-Storage” Blockchain capabilities to the network for any form of value. Other data can be freely chosen stored into locations, clouds or blockchains like SIA cloud and will be hardware encrypted on the fly by your Financecloud device. An anonymity gateway (Tor, Mixer and others) can be optional used from the App-Store.
The solution for the industries
The API comes with a Java and a Python interface, that can connect to point-of-sales systems and other business software interfaces. A cloud-to-cloud federation protocol enables businesses, to connect and to do financial collaboration in a peer-to-peer manner.
Status
After having completed the App-Store, the Federation Protocol, the Blockchain integration concept, a test integration using SIA blockchain, a premature version of the payment gateway and the hardware layout, the first funding round has been progressing and the time-line has been completed. The Goal is to have a running final hardware and software solution till the end of the year. First talks with production facilities in China have been established to get the device into the market around July 2018.
From our Developer Meeting Yesterday:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=901605.msg19801987#msg19801987