Neyma Jahan, the founder of Unification, was a serial entrepreneur in the IoT and Internet sectors. In 2017, Neyma got involved in blockchain. Last year, Unification obtained investment and incubation from Yellow capital and Gems capital, two well-known overseas funds. Compared with many public-chains which are still in the conceptual stage, Unification has cooperated with many enterprises and governments in Europe and Latin America to develop applications.
What pain points does blockchain solve for overseas companies and governments? How the Hybrid Public/Private Blockchain Model drives Massive Enterprise Adoption?
On the evening of March 12, Neyma Jahan joined in PANews AMA Session to talk about The Right Way to Develop Enterprises’ Blockchain Use Cases.
Speaker：
Neyma Jahan, Founer & CEO of Unification
With a lucrative background in direct response marketing, Neyma Jahan moved into the IoT space in 2013. In 2017 he stepped down as CEO and made the full transition to the blockchain space, launching the Unification Foundation.
AMA Recap：
l know that you are a serial entrepreneur, and has extensive experience in the IoT. then what makes you starting your business in blockchain sector? What inspired you to do so?
Neyma：We began the project with the vision for data interoperability- meaning that in governments and enterprises, there are so many different data silos that cannot communicate with each other- So for instance your government records are kept in a separate location than your health records and each of these data points is owned by the holder- and not by the end consumer- we originally developed out Unification to be a 2nd layer for data- interoperability- which is the true strength of the blockchain/ As we developed this out further - we understood there was a main problem that all 1st layer native blockchain solutions had the same problem -that was they all operated on a speculative coin. So say you have your identity on the Blockchain - but depending on which KOL spoke about the project today maybe the price of the coin went up and then this made it cost twice as much to access your data/ identity.
This was not acceptable so from there we expanded further to offer a 1st layer public/private blockchain that is not dependant on speculation coin price.
PANews：Chinese investors are always interested in projects which having real-life use cases, In addition, even JP Morgan has made some movements, planning to get a slice of cake from blockchain industry. Expect to the JPM case in financial sector, in what other areas do you think the blockchain technology could be applied? Could you please share some overseas Unification cases of blockchain application with us?
Neyma：Blockchain is always useful to bring Trust to an inhernetly trustless enviroment. Simply put - it is to force people to be honest with each other. For instance one case we are developing in Latin America is to combat insurance fraud. in this country there is a major issue with patients and doctors double billing multiple insurance companies for the same treatment and collecting the money. We are getting all the major insurance companies to come together and maintain a Workchain together where each patient/doctor is assigned a unique identity and their billing and conditions are tracked. in this way all of the trustless entities have a way to trust each other through distributed ledger technology.
Another use case we are developing is in competitve motorsports. So in this industry - technical compliance checks pre and post race for the vehicles is very important to combat against cheating. by having each team maintain a node on the semi-private blockchain - then mechanical ratings are forever stored and cannot be covertly altered. there are many more use cases, but these are the first two that come to mind.
PANews：We've learnt that enterprises are building applications on the Workchain. We already know that unification brings two concept: Mainchain and Workchain, but what's the difference between them? And how do you tell the difference among Workchain, Sidechain, and Protocol?
Neyma：good question - Mainchain is a fully public blockchain that uses DSG (distributed stake governance) it is 100% public and immutable and validated by the community. We maintain no special ownership of Mainchain.
Workchain is a version of a sidechain that allows semi-private deployment amoung a community. for instance in the earlier example for the motorsports - say there are 12 teams in a racing circuit - we would for instance create a workchain with 13 nodes- one for each team and one for the governing body of the sport. Then this Workchain will produce blocks in this semi-private environment and send the headers of these blocks to the PUBLIC Mainchain. once recorded on the mainchain - this promises that they cannot be altered by anybody and it goes on the public permanent record
(i should note that depending on the configuration -that actual data can remain private and sometimes it is just an encrypted hash of data that is passed to mainchain)
PANews：We know that many enterprises choose to do Dapps when they decide to adopting blockchain technology, but they have met many problems such as token speculation, congestion of the public chain and so on. How does Unification solve such kind of problems?
Neyma：We think the blockchain industry has an illness because many companies are so focused on the value of the coin price , that they actually forget practical usefulness. Very clearly the customer of Unification is the enterprise or government and not the coin speculator.
Because of this instead of building a “DAPP” on a public network -a developer will deploy a Workchain - this is mostly private and allows users of the workchain to transact without fees. For example we have a Electronic health records Workchain in Brazil which has 2 million users. Imagine how impossible this will be if 2 million users in brazil had to HOLD Ethereum and use it to access their health records. It just wouldn't work.
instead we make it so that the end users don’t have fees and instead the masters of the Workchain pay a small fee in UND everytime they send a finished block to public Mainchain. This makes it so that enterprises can operate in a fixed fee and predictable way that allows for unlimited horizontal scaling
PANews：What is the Governance model of Unification? What kind of reward will the nodes of the mainchain get, and will there be a “node vote” in the future?
Neyma：We use a system for Mainchain called DSG or Distributed Stake Governance. It is designed in a way that users of the system are inherently vested in its success. Simply put, every 72 hours a “vote” is held and the top 96 wallets that place UND in stake will receive a medallion that allows them to validate blocks.
Being a validator allows them to collect network tax and also to receive block rewards. You can check the white paper- but I think in the first year there is 8 % inflation and then it reduces to smaller amounts year by year as the token circulates into utility. This system was designed with the help of numerous economics experts to ensure proper vesting within the system.
The 96 Validators operate on PBFT consensus which requires ⅔ of agreement to make a decision.
PANews：I notice that there are some government-relevant projects by Unification. And we know that more and more governments are trying to adopt blockchain technology into their governance, but as we know when a government select a partner, seems the standards will be stricter than enterprises. Do you have any tips on how to attract or convince government organizations to cooperate?
Neyma：The advice I give always is to understand the needs of your customer and why they would need your product. In governments case- it is 2 reasons - 1 is to de-silo data- so to get it in a single place 2 - and more importantly is to combat fraud and corruption. for instance we are in a bid for a government bank to issue a stable coin on a Workchain - this will be used to pay government contractors and redeemable at the bank. This way all of the money can be tracked everywhere that it goes. This is an obvious solution. So again my best answer is to understand the needs of your customer.
For now, education and outreach is the key - we have to show that blockchain is not just about "coins" but really about technology.
PANews：Unification is truly a practical project. I really keen to know what kind of plan do you have in 2019 in terms of technology and application? Do you think that a large number of companies will choose to embrace blockchain technology this year?
Neyma：I think it is obvious that blockchain is the future- but we have some healing to do because when many hear about blockchain - they think about coins. Blockchain can use coins, but it is not needed for all usecases. AS we continue our outreach and education we think that blockchain will literally expand to EVERYWHERE - but the reality is that the world will be using blockchain daily within a few years but likely not know it. We consider ourselves the operating system for the world- like Apple or Microsoft. It is just there and a part of our life, but no particular big deal to point out.
PANews：Have you ever counted how many years since you first started your own business? Are there any differences between being a blockchain entrepreneur and other industries? Does blockchain brings in more challenges? Lastly, do you have any advice or would love to share any experience to those freshman startups?
Neyma：Again you must always ask yourself who is your customer? And truly ask that beyond easy talking points. When I say customer I mean the person who will be giving you money. Is it the investor, the speculator? or is it the end user? I can tell you most projects - the “customer” is the investor or speculator - If this is your customer then that is ok - but know that. If you actually want to build something useable and useful then you need to ask yourself- how will it be built and how will you get people to use it? Just having a good idea and finished product isn't’ good enough and most blockchain startups forget that Biz Dev is everything!
Questions from the audience
Q: Have you ever counted how many years since you first started your own business?
A：Hmm - - I have failed alot and succeed a few times. When I succeed it is when I have clear vision from beginning to end.
Q: You have 2 million users? How many transactions in that per day? Where can i see your live transactions?
A: if you mean for the Workchains - they are happening on Private chains and on our private mainnet- - public mainnet is coming later this year in Q3
Q: Do you prefer companies to build private chains along the workchain? What are the benefits?
A: Ideal situation, companies take our code base and deploy on their own without our help. But the Mainchain/Workchain is like Linux. so some its hard to deploy on their own - so we consider ourselves like RedHat- there to help to deploy and to make positive revenue for doing so
Q: What institution investment does unification get？when to prepare to get list on exchange?
A：We were funded privately by a few "real world" companies - Gems Captial and Yellow Capital (former GSR partners) are a few to name. The mandate for Unification is not to have a "quick coin" but rather to become instituional and have UND be the functioning long term backbone of blockchain. We are on one exchange now already - Digifinex under the UND symbol.
Q: How do you define success for yourself and your venture? What’s the end game?
A：We have Foundation side - which success is defined by enterprises deploying the Workchains - - and then these Workchains using the Mainchain. We want to have 100 new Workchains per month active is inital goal for the Consulting side- we like the end goal of RedHat where they just sold for 36 Billion Dollars to IBM - we think that is a good end goal for our consulting company. .But of course this means that blockchain must be adopted like Linux
Q: Do you have a report on the kind of volumes you're processing on the private chains?
A: No official report is prepared yet. However the private chains belong to the deployers - We do not own these so we can only report what they choose to make public. This is why blockchain is beautiful, things can be public or private!
Q: Do we really need private blockchains while traditional databases can do the job most of the time?
A: Let's use the example that we have a racing league with 10 teams. Maybe these teams don't trust each other and need mecaniacs to trust. In this case they make a distributed ledger with 10 nodes so it forces them to trust.
Even thou it is private, it is still forced to be immutable because everybody must get along as friends because of internal transparency
Q: Do you have any development plans in China?
A: We would love to depending on the correct partnership. If someone wanted to introduce us to an enterprise or goverment that can use our technology we can present to them - For now- we are very strong in Europe and Latin America.
Q: Could you please share with us the whitepaper?
A: For English version:http://go.unification.com/whitepaper
A short Chinese site: https://unification.com/foundation/chinese
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