 everyone. Thanks for joining us today. It's Jessica here with Cointelegraph and today I'm hosting a special AMA with not one, but two companies, Occamdow and HumanNode. Occamdow and HumanNode have partnered to bring democratic voting and civil resistance to the community. Today I'm joined by Victor, co-founder of HumanNode, a crypto biometric authentication network built on the principles of one human, one node, one vote. And Christina, contributor of Occamdow, a leading Dow government incubator with a suite of D5 products which benefits from the strategic partnerships across the ever-expanding crypto landscape. Hi, Christina. Hi, Victor. Thanks for joining us today. How are you this afternoon? Really good. Thank you. And thank you so much for having us. Hey, hello. The evening is great. Or morning to those who are in the US. And thank you. That's a great opportunity for us. We're going to tell you everything we know. Absolutely. Well, before we get started, I just want to remind our audience to please send us your questions in the chat and make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel. I'm really excited to be here with Victor and Christina and learn more about their partnership. But first, here's a quick intro video of HumanNode and Occamdow. You know, we just saw a quick intro on HumanNode and Occamdow. Christina, can you share a little bit more on Occamdow and your background? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Jessica. Thanks, guys, for preparing that lovely intro to Occamdow. So, as the video mentioned, Occamdow is a leading Dow-governed incubator, and we offer a variety of DeFi products. So, we actually started off about one and a half years ago growing a community of early-stage investors and DeFi enthusiasts. So, probably one of our best-known products is the Occam Razor, which is a launchpad. And the launchpad initially was Cardano-centric, but has since moved into chain, and we're now working with projects from really a large spectrum of networks. Since the launchpad, we have come a long way, and we have established ourselves as a Dow-governed incubator, through which we onboard projects at various stages of development, basically helping them develop and launch and making sure that we benefit the crypto and DeFi ecosystem as a whole. Amazing. And Victor, can you share a little bit more about HumanNode and the inspiration behind its unique crypto-biometric network? I'm sure. The inspiration was pretty easy. Back in 2017, when we were researching crypto, we clearly understood that the technology is indeed decentralized. You can fork it, anybody can use it, but the power, meaning who holds the infrastructure, who has the major vote in decisions of the network, including Treasury or the consensus participation, they are all pretty much concentrated in the hands of the biggest stakers or miners. And the more the network grows, the more centralized it gets, usually. And crypto has become an elite club, I would say, where small users just played games on BNB chain, things like that. And we always wanted to change that. We had no idea how, but while we were looking through different sciences, my founder actually proposed how about combining biometrics, privacy and blockchain. And that's how more than two years ago, HumanNode was born. Now we made it to the main net, the first blockchain where you don't need stake, you don't need mining equipment in order to become a validator, you just need a small server like $20 maximum per month. And you need to privately verify through facial recognition your real and your unique human being. So that's how you can become part of the network. And if you look by how many nodes it takes in order to change the rules of the blockchain or deciding the voting, we're already the most decentralized blockchain if you compare it to other proof of stake networks, I would say. Absolutely. Thank you for that, Victor. And just to draw on what you mentioned regarding partnership in the ecosystem, I wanted to ask you both, how did Alcom and HumanNode come together to form this unique partnership and incorporate HumanNode into the Alcom DAO? Victor, do you want to ask about that? Yeah, sure. I participated a lot in this process, frankly speaking, because it was before our main net launch. So it was pretty much the decision of the team. Well, actually, the Alcom DAO contributors found myself themselves in different resource chats in crypto, namely named LobsterDAO. And that's how we started talking together. And yeah, the value proposition was pretty exact. We are pretty agile, like a small team. We do build our protocol. We do build the core infrastructure. But there are so many projects who want to use HumanNode tech, either to deploy on our chain, or to use our private biometrics in order to fight like bots, multi-accounts, and basically make sure you have one person behind one account that it's pretty much impossible for us to help them all. And it all started with us formulating an on-chain, just a forum, first a description of our proposal of why we want to be in the Alcom DAO. And then it went to on-chain voting after we got enough attention from the discord of Alcom, which is pretty active. One of the best TMA we had was in there with a lot of in-depth questions. Like two hours non-stop, and I was just typing and typing. And then we had an on-chain voting in Alcom DAO based on stake of the Alcom DAO like early backers, anybody who holds the Tokyo. And yeah, that's how it went through. And we're now officially incubated, getting new partners almost every week, which is great. New projects building on us. Amazing. And Christina, is there anything you'd like to add? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd actually like to add to that, maybe like take it one step back a little bit. So to talk about our governance system, how it is that we work, and why human node had to go through this whole process of the AMAs and putting in a proposal before we were actually able to announce our partnership. So we implemented a new governance system. And basically the reason that we wanted to do that is to make sure that our community is able to participate as much as possible in the governance system. So we wanted to incentivize participation. We wanted to make sure that the people and the stakers who are participating are also being rewarded for their efforts. We wanted to make sure that everyone's vote counted as well. And we wanted to stimulate our DAO members to really get together, put forward proposals. And we wanted to make sure that we're putting forward for them projects that they would be interested in, and that would benefit them and us as a DAO in general. So this new governance system was then voted on by our stakers. It went through. And off the back of this governance system, we developed a structured process through which projects that wanted to either be incubated with us or wanted to work with us would have to go through. And human node is actually the first project that ended up going through this whole process. So thank you so much to Victor and his team in general for bearing with us and being the first ones to test out this process and being such good sports, being so open to every step of the way. And really the first thing that needed to happen and that we need to make sure every new project that wants to work with us does is being introduced to the AUKUM ambassadors and to some of the core contributors. And we do this via our Discord channel. We have a special AMA channel that's called the soapbox, where essentially projects that want to work with us get up on stage and answer the questions that are put forward by our ambassadors. Anybody can watch, but only the ambassadors can ask questions and really probe the projects to understand in depth what it is that they can bring to the AUKUM DAO and how we can help them in turn as well. So what's the win-win situation here? If that goes well, which it did with human node, then the projects would put forward a proposal, something that we call the OIP, AUKUM Improvement Proposal, where this happens on the AUKUM forum. It then needs to pass a certain threshold before going on to stake-based voting, at which point our stakers then vote. And if it goes through, which again, it did with human node, obviously, we can then officially partner. And in this way, we basically make sure that there's a certain due diligence that happens before we partner with somebody and that our community is fully behind the people that we partner with and work with together. So I took up so much time. Sorry. I hope that made it a little bit the process that we went through and huge thanks once again to human node and to Victor for going through all of those steps because they were so important. And now, you know, our community knows human nodes so well and can really get involved with all the projects that they bring forward as well. Amazing. And Victor, what did the integration of human node to AUKUM Dell look like on your end? What steps were required from you and your community? Well, as I told, actually, there was not a lot required from our community because we were not on yet on mainnet. So basically, the steps were, as Christina described, all the things were passed through forum proposal, then official and open AMA talking to a lot of people who are really good feel that they're AUKUM Dell contributors because they're pretty experienced and have pretty good due diligence. And eventually, it was an on-chain voting that passed. And later on, as we are like a new chain, we're getting integrated into AUKUM launchpad. And later on, hopefully, after another on-chain proposal into AUKUM DAX, the integration is really smooth because all we need to give is just our documentation and AUKUM team just integrates it. It's pretty easy on our end without nothing to do for us later on. So what else we did together is that we started working with a project who won in our hackathon, which was like four months ago. So we finally picked up the projects. We created groups with AUKUM where they could work together to formulate all the necessary things for project to start at least, not as a demo or MVP, but as a real company. And they're still working so far in a pretty precise fashion through all the steps that the project has to go to get from just MVP and demo to the real company through their acceleration. That was pretty much all our cooperation was about and even more because AUKUM are great at marketing. There's nothing to say here. Sounds like a partnership made in crypto heaven. Well, I would just like to remind the audience that this is an interactive show. So if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them in the chat and we will ask Victor and Christina to answer your questions directly. Victor, modern decentralized governance verification systems rely primarily on proof of stake and proof of work. Can you share why human node has chosen a different approach and any potential risks or benefits for this? Well, we have chosen a different approach because we believe in original ethos of crypto and decentralization where people participate in these networks from their home when they don't have to build a billion dollar companies to become part of the crypto infrastructure. And of course, they don't have to have a few million dollars to be heard in terms of on chain voting. That's what happens right now. I recently was presenting it at DEF CON DAO East, the latest statistics of on chain governance. And they are pretty well terrifying. The governance is really centralized. Sometimes it takes just one person. It's usually the founder or a group of founders to overcome the rest of the votes. It happens on layer ones. It happens in protocols like maker DAO, which is considered the most decentralized stable coin in terms of the assets it holds, but in fact, not at all. And we have seen a lot of attacks on the governance, which led to not hacks, but it's exploit, which is written in the rules of the protocol where an attacker could take tens of millions of dollars out of the protocol. The most recent attack was mango markets, where he took like 60 million dollars. If I remember it correctly, what he did, he just not even purchased the tokens to participate in governance. He borrowed the tokens to participate in governance. He voted to transfer part of the treasury to his own wallet. And that's it. As easy as that. It can happen to any protocol. It just didn't happen a lot, but it will happen more when the market prices are back to the highs. And of course, there will be exploits like that. So that's why we started building Humano to solve the problems both on the infrastructure level on the layer one blockchain level. The thing that we already launched, which is working with 270 validators at the moment. And we're going to solve it for other protocols as well, so that decentralized organizations, grant programs like Gitcoin or universal basic income protocols could use our civil resistance to basically make sure that there is one person behind one account. And you could, well, knowing that you could actually limit the power of the whales who right now control the protocols or can attack them. Absolutely. You know, one of the unique things that I was reading in one of your documents and white papers was your integration and use of liveliness detection algorithm. I was just wondering if you can explain why that is so important in this ecosystem. Oh, okay. Well, frankly speaking, biometrics don't work without liveness. One part in biometrics, it helps us compare like data privately from people's faces between one another. But lambs detection, it started its development only in 2017. That's why it was not possible what we're doing now five years ago. And what it does, it tells us like 50 different methods to neural networks or other methods as well to tell us whether there's a real human being in front of the camera, or it's a photo, or it's a really precise 3d mask printed for 10k USD, or it's a hacker trying to bypass the camera feed and inject the deep fake. So it is all necessary so that even if we have our kind of photos all over the internet, this is not actual biometric data, because you have to have real person in front of the camera at the moment for it to be biometric data. And if you have just a photo or something else, it doesn't matter. So you can still easily post on your Instagram without fearing that somebody will use your photos to steal your access or money. And well, it has become pretty accurate, especially in the world of deep fakes, you understand that it is necessary. Otherwise, anyone could come and create a lot of non-existing identities and create a Sibyl attack again. So that's all to defend against Sibyl attacks, which are the attacks where one person pretends to be many people and he basically subverts the rules of the decentralized system. Amazing. Yeah, so basically someone can't just go in and make 10 different accounts and vote 10 times to change the outcome of OccamDAO or any of the the voting. So how important was that for you, Christina? I mean, the technology in general is so important and I think one of the things that we really liked about humanoid is their innovative approach and it's something that you know, their ethos and making sure that we don't have that elite within the crypto space that Victor has mentioned previously as well is so important. And that's something that we're trying to achieve with the DAO governed approach as well. So I think there's a lot of synergy there. Yeah, actually, frankly speaking, like OccamDAO is helping our chain develop its ecosystem. But OccamDAO is a very special example of the structure where they can fight Sibyl without even using biometrics because in their pretty complicated governance system, it is not in your interest to hide that you're a whale. So that's how they fight it in the core with the latest upgrade, which I really liked, which works for the Occam case perfectly, but it doesn't work for many other cases in crypto. As Victor mentioned, we do have quite a complicated kind of guilt system that anybody interested can definitely go on our forum or on our medium and read a little bit more about it. We have quite extensive documentation about it, but essentially, our stakers, and this is something that we're working on at the moment, will receive an NFT based on their stake. And then they are then able to delegate their vote to a guild. And that's how the voting system happens. This is something that we haven't yet integrated just because we are still working on the technology behind it at the moment. But it's something that will be coming soon. So something really exciting to look forward for in the new year. Amazing. Now, Victor, who and how can someone become a human node? What is this process like and what are the benefits of becoming one? Well, it's not very hard actually for people who know the technical, we developed a desktop application so that you could launch it. So the easiest way is to download the desktop application then either locally on your PC, if you're ready to keep it 24 seven online, which is really hard, or in the cloud server, you launch the server that synchronizes with our blockchain with all the blocks that have been before. And once it's done, you got to go through private biometric verification. You just scan the QR code with any mobile device that has three megapixel camera or more. And five 15 second facial recognition session, where we scan your face during the video session. We don't actually take your photos, we just retrieve the biometric data, which is anonymized. And after that, we encrypt it on your device and well, you basically send it to the biometric nodes. And that's it. In about four hours time in the next epoch, you become part of the consensus. You start as many layer one proposing blocks, finalizing blocks. And well, what you can benefit number one with the time you will gain more power in the decentralized organization, completely democratic where money means nothing, stake means nothing. And well, finally, normal people can participate in layer one governance. And mainly all the fees, like collected transaction fees, smart contract and biometric verification fees, they are once a week distributed to human nodes equally. So in the end, you're becoming part of the completely new financial system where nobody can bite out with money, but only through human coordination. It works. So yeah, that's that's pretty easy. The server costs from 10 to $20. And, well, you can actually earn more. But I would say it's not your lifetime earnings. It's more like universal basic income that can buy you, well, some food for students especially. But mainly it gives you power to participate in a new decentralized network. Amazing. Well, let's take questions from the audience audience. Just a reminder, if you have any questions, please make sure to send them in the chat and we'll ask Christina and Victor. So we have a question here, who owns the biometric data and is it secure? Okay, here we go a little bit technically. So as I told you, there are human nodes, right? These are people who launch these small servers and participate in the consensus. Then these human nodes vote for those people among them who will actually hold the biometric nodes. Because biometric nodes are pretty heavyweight servers. They will have to have a lot of memory because we want to eventually scale and give these biometric identities to millions of crypto and even non-crypto users. But these servers themselves are with secure enclaves, meaning that nobody can actually get inside the memory and see the biometric data inside. So how do we secure it? First, the biometric servers are decentralized. They're not controlled by any company and they're controlled by multiple people in our decentralized organization. Next, the biometric data that is sent to the servers are anonymized. So even if you somehow break into these servers, breaking Intel or AMD technology, you will get anonymized data and you won't be able to do anything with it. And third, even this anonymized data, we still encrypt it on hardware level. That's what we have for now. But we've done extensive R&D to make it even more secure and to create the biometric neural network, which is cryptographically secure, not just on hardware level. But this is a really long-term project for us, version 2, I would say. And Christina, how can foundations and ecosystems benefit from ACUM services, specifically incubation services? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's three main parts to this question, really. And one is they can benefit through our expertise. The second thing is our network of contacts. And the third is our community. And just to go a little bit more in depth into each. In terms of our expertise, we can help with everything from concept formulation to technology consulting, your utility tokenomics to help from our developers as well. So we have a strong team that has a lot of expertise in building projects, developing projects. So from start to finish, this is something that we can help with. Then, of course, it's so important to know people within the industry. And sometimes that one contact can be life changing for a project. So we help projects by sharing our vast network of contacts and making introductions. This pertains to not only the technology side of things, or investor side of things, but also to PR and marketing. And then, of course, community. We can help with your community building. And we have the ACUM DAO members who are there to help with your diligence, to share your project, to learn more about it. And yeah, these are kind of some of the main ways that we can help. And in terms of incubation, there are two approaches that we have. So one is where we act as a consultant, and we can tell you kind of what we recommend. And then there is another approach where we kind of handhold and our team gets involved with your team as well to make sure that you get the best possible outcome. I hope that answers the question. Absolutely. And if anyone wants to get involved with ACUM or reach out and learn more about incubation services, how can they do that? So on our website, there's a contact us form. That's probably one of the easiest ways to get in touch. It's ACUM.fi. That's our website. Alternatively, you can reach out to us on our Twitter, on Telegram as well, or on Discord. We're active across all of those mediums. So feel free to reach out. We will make sure to get back to you. Perfect. Victor is biometric verification a new trend. Will all DAOs have biometric verification systems in the future? And how do you see civil resistance evolving in Web 3? I know that's a lot of questions all in one, but hopefully we can kind of touch points. So will all DAOs have biometrics? I don't know yet. But I think, well, as I told you, there is one way to attack the protocol when one person just masses enough tokens to have any vote he wants to and make all the decisions. This is why it is important. And in proof of stake protocols, well, we don't even know how many people stand behind each node, or maybe it's just one person controlling all the major nodes already in one of those proof of stake protocols. So here biometric verification might help as well. I mean, right now, DAOs are really, they do need it to protect themselves number one and to get more decentralized number two. And if it's really hard to rebuild the whole governance system from token-based voting to something else, they could at least have the signaling voting by the community to understand that the direction of the company direction of the company is the same as the direction of the broader community, not just those who hold most of the tokens. Will biometric verification be the future of crypto? Well, that's what we're working on because you can make crypto more human-centric. It can bring more power to regular people, not just the Elite Club that controls the crypto right now. And well, people will understand that it makes sense to participate in it, not just to speculate on it. So that's how we can bring into life universal basic income protocols, more inclusive decentralized organizations, and even more inclusive decentralized finance protocols. Because right now, well, how it was before, especially in 2020, if you're a founder, you're launching a new protocol, Alameda comes, it puts a lot of money into your pool, it reaps all the rewards and goes away in one month. And you're left as a project without liquidity and without reward pooling your tokens. This is something you can stop by limiting the number of rewards per one identity. So identity space, it's not yet here in crypto. Why? Because identity is useless without sable resistance. You can just have 10 identities, one for my passport, one for my identity card, another one for my driving license, another one for my Twitter account. This is stupid unless you have the real physical verification of unique human being, which is only possible through biometrics. And yeah, I think we will see more of it adopted because biometrics were not private, biometrics were not accurate. But what we have now is both private and accurate. And now it finally makes reason to adopt it. Will it be a new trend? Well, let's set it up and it will be a new trend. Absolutely. Let's see. Well, I guess, let me just check if there's any questions from the audience. You know, before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't cover that you just like to state or mention to the viewers? I mean, from our side or Victor, do you want to go first? What I want to state is that I think we should a little bit rethink what we were doing in crypto over the last two or three years, especially during the previous bull market. Crypto became really financialized. And the token models that were created led to huge inflation, constant inflation of tokens. That's why you can see many especially defying game five projects falling down a lot. And sometimes we have to think in another direction. And what I mean by that is that before that, it was all positive loop cycles. Like you use, take more tokens, you get more tokens, and then you put them in a liquidity pool, you get more and other tokens on top. And when it all falls down, it falls down, well, 10 times harder than it could, because the positive loop cycle went too far. And we now have to think more about more stable systems, systems with negative loops, because all we have now in crypto is the same stuff we have right now in the financial world. It's equity based, it's token based, it's boom and bust cycle and in crypto, it's even like worse than traditional finance. So I think that we should we should go a little bit in another more stable direction. It will be less speculative, and maybe it will have less returns in the short term. But it can lead to a real long term change. Christina, would you like to add anything? Yeah, I just want to say thanks for for that point, Victor, and kind of going back to your idea of being more human centric. I really like that. And this is something that I would encourage people to do is not just be involved with a project for the mere rewards that you can get off the back of them, but to really try and contribute. And especially when it comes to DAOs, things like becoming ambassadors, promoting a project, putting forward proposals, all of these things are going to help the whole ecosystem get better and have better performing projects as well, and have more quality rather than just quantity. And a huge shout out to our ambassadors from the Occamdale because they're doing such an amazing job and just wanted to say we really appreciate them. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it from our side for for any foundations or projects that would like to find out more about us or how we can help them move forward. As I mentioned, our website is there, get in touch with us, and we'd be really happy to help. Awesome. And we did have a couple questions come in. So just wanted to ask some questions from the audience. One of the questions was to Chris, can you update on the chakra pool and will human node contribute to this? Yeah, absolutely. So the chakra pool is our tokenized liquidity pool. So essentially the projects that we incubate and some of the projects that launch on our Launchpad Occam razor, we kind of request them to contribute some of their tokens to this chakra pool. And basically they it acts as like a weighted basket of the different project tokens that get deposited in there. And human node is one of the projects that has deposited. So thank you so much human node. That's another one of the ways that we try and reward our stakers and our contributors and make sure that we give back to them. And the way that the chakra tokens are distributed is something called a double root fashion. So essentially, even though the largest stakers and the stakers that have been sticking for the longest time, they get the most rewards. New members or basically, yeah, members that would start staking now, they get higher APR percentages. So we're kind of trying to balance things out between the really high tiered and the smaller tiered members of the DAO. Amazing. Well, thank you, Christina and Victor so much. I know we're running behind on time. So just wanted to thank you both so much for connecting with us today. Today we've learned how Occam's integration with human node leverages the capabilities of crypto biometric authentication network to produce a fair, accessible, egalitarian and truly decentralized autonomous organization. I just want to say thank you again for joining us today for the AMA and thank you to our audience for being interactive and sending along your questions. I also want to remind everyone to please subscribe to Cointelegraph's YouTube channel. We do AMAs like this quite frequently. Thank you again, Christina, Victor and thanks again to our audience. We'll see you next time. Thank you, Jessica. Thanks everybody for watching us. Thanks everyone and thank you, Jessica, for hosting us. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.