Team progress behind scaling of Humaniq community for global inclusion vision

Lee Baker
Humaniq
Published in
3 min readSep 26, 2017

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Humaniq’s development team outlines progress with Decentralised App at the Blockchain for Good startup’s London headquarters

The Humaniq development team gets together at Rise in London

Humaniq’s team of 10 developers and the management team has come together from across the world to discuss the latest updates on product development.

At the meeting in Humaniq’s headquarters in Barclay’s Rise incubator in London’s tech quarter, the team outlined progress in working on the Humaniq App. The developers identified achievements in building a powerful tool for financial inclusion, built on the blockchain and deploying biometric technology to verify users’ identities.

At the same time as we launch a pilot of the app, to give Ghanaians the opportunity to gain verified identities to access a range of financial services, the tech team discussed further work underway. Their projects will strengthen the app to allow the scaling of the community and to realise the Humaniq vision.

These included, crucially, the migration of the app to a new blockchain infrastructure led by our blockchain development team and our blockchain architect Aleksey Karpov.

Under their project, our services will be delivered on our new and enhanced blockchain platform that sits on the Ethereum blockchain, with the unique combination of sidechain solutions per each country. This solution will allow the Humaniq App to scale to support all possible users — from a potential market of 3.5bn people with no or little access to banking — while preserving the benefits of the current blockchain.

Under the new infrastructure, transactions will be confirmed in a decentralised and transparent way, necessary to overcoming the cost barriers to expanding financial services to the many regions that banks do not serve. Financial inclusion has been an objective for years, but providers such as mobile phone operators have struggled to scale past national borders with services based on a single fiat currency.

Humaniq’s developers also used the meeting to discuss another major project is the development of a ‘PRO’ version of the app, with additional functionality to the ‘Lite’ version that is aimed at people without banking. This new version will include an exchange market and discovery system, for people who want to invest in the Humaniq vision and offer services through our platform.

The exchange market will allow easy conversion between traditional or fiat currency and cryptocurrency, with users selling or buying HMQ exchanging their currency. The discovery system will allow geo-location of other Humaniq users in order to collaborate and do business with them.

Also on the agenda was an upgrade that is underway to the HMQ coin referral system to underpin the growth of the Humaniq user community, and the related exchange market. Led by Michail Grachev, part of the backend development team, the project will allow Humaniq users to be rewarded for referring contacts who register and become active users.

Under the system, Humaniq community members inviting friends who use the app to make payments will be reimbursed for transactions they make, the team heard.

New HMQ coins, meanwhile, will be emitted to users buying them — allowing the cryptocurrency to be a store of value, vital for the huge number of people without an account to save for the future.

We will keep you updated on the latest developments that our team is working on, to be completed over the autumn, as the Humaniq App community tests the app in a live setting.

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