Editor’s Note: Republic Crypto’s world-class team of strategists helps accelerate the growth of web3 by supporting ambitious projects like Humanode. While Humanode is not an active investment offering on Republic, this series of overview articles offer an exciting look into the unique dynamics of the entire crypto ecosystem.
Blockchain technology has proven to be incredibly disruptive, but also somewhat inaccessible and difficult to understand—largely due to the complexity of becoming a network participant and interacting with decentralized applications.
Humanode looks to shake up this paradigm by producing a cutting edge human-based blockchain network. By leveraging its unique crypto-biometric network and powerful underlying blockchain technology, Humanode is poised to create a stable financial network that relies on the existence of human life itself.
About Humanode
Humanode is a powerful new-age financial system that leverages the capabilities of the Substrate framework, and a network of cryptographically secure bio-authorized nodes to produce a fair, accessible, and egalitarian platform for decentralized applications and collaborative organizations.
By using solutions that provide private biometric search and matching operations and liveness detection algorithms, Humanode enables a decentralized and auditable, but still private consensus mechanism that allows any real, live person to take part and earn rewards for securing the network.
By achieving true inclusivity, Humanode provides a powerful Sybil resistant, sustainable, and value preserving network for financial applications, and introduces a new standard in decentralized governance through its 1 node = 1 vote system.
Team, Advisors, and Investors
Humanode was originally conceptualized by Dato Kavazi and Victor Smirnov, the 2 co-founders of Paradigm, a well-known deep tech research institute. Both Victor and Dato are veterans of the blockchain space and have heavy experience working with decentralized systems thanks to a decade of experience and their previous roles at various projects such as Citadel.one — a popular non-custodial staking dashboard.
In development since September 2020, the Humanode team has expanded considerably in the last 1.5 years, and it is now formed of 23 members from 14 countries. Some of its most notable team members include its lead developer and co-founders MOZGIII (an accomplished multidisciplinary engineer), senior cryptographer Rafael Gedler (experienced in Multi-party Computation, Homomorphic encryption, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs), and Dmitry Lavrenov, a core developer at Humanode with significant blockchain development expertise.
Republic Crypto acts as a strategic and technical advisor for Humanode, and provides support in a number of verticals, ranging from technology and use cases to partnerships, marketing, and fundraising.
Humanode recently closed their 3rd strategic private funding round led by Republic’s private investment arm Republic Capital. Some of the most prominent names backing Humanode include Shima Capital, BigBrain Holdings, Blizzard's Avalanche ecosystem fund, Wintermute, Genblock, Gravity X, Spacecap, Cogitent ventures, Tribe Capital, Paradigm, Baryon, Piconbello and Polygon Founders Jaynti Kanani and Sandeep Nailwal.
How Does Humanode Work?
Humanode is being built on Parity’s Substrate framework, which allows for the creation and deployment of general purpose or highly specialized blockchains with hugely variable operating parameters and capabilities.
Nonetheless, all Substrate-based chains benefit from several features, which include interoperability within the Polkadot ecosystem, high throughput and scalability, and support for both WebAssembly and solidity smart contracts (thanks to an EVM pallet). This means it can be used with existing Ethereum development tools and supports smart contract development into multiple popular languages.
Likewise, Humanode can provide private biometric processing and Sybil-resistance to DApps and protocols based on other EVM-compatible chains.
“Human nodes are created through encryption of the user’s biometric data. Thus, the user’s biometric identity becomes the stake that gives access to the creation of a node that verifies transactions” — an excerpt from the Humanode whitepaper.
Humanode’s token HMND issuance is built around the principles of ‘Fath’, which is a monetary system that grows proportional to the amount value added to the system.The monetary system uses a reactive monetary algorithm that assesses the difference the value network offers between two time periods to determine the growth of the token supply. For example, if the total network transaction fees increases by 5%, so too does the money supply, which is then distributed proportionally to all current holders — such that holders already retain the same proportion of the total supply before and after distribution (similar to many rebase coins). The formula for this is given below:
It does this to help ensure that growth is aligned with the production of value, rather than allowing for an imbalance in the supply of value vs cryptocurrency units that could lead to the same problem currently plaguing all fiat currencies: inflation.
Humanode ensures that anybody can become a node in the network — regardless of their race, wealth, religion, status, etc. Once a user passes biometric authentication they become a Humanode and help to keep the platform running securely. The biometric data used to prove their uniqueness is established in a completely decentralized fashion, ensuring there are real human beings behind these nodes while still retaining their privacy since this data is encrypted and never exposed to third parties.
There are three types of stakeholders in the Humanode ecosystem:
Humanodes: Those who have passed biometric authentication and receive a fraction of the network transaction fees
Delegators: Nodes that opt to delegate their voting power to Governors
Governors: The type of node that participates in network governance (must meet certain governing requirements.
Each of these node types form an important part of ‘Vortex’ — Humanode’s governance DAO.
Unlike other platforms, which allow nodes to accumulate voting power based on how much capital they have (or are delegated), Humanode ensures that all nodes are equal and have equal validation and voting power. It leverages a new security system that combines Proof-of-Uniqueness with Proof-of-Existence to defend against attacks, achieve Sybil resistance, and ensure the integrity of the network.
What Problems Does Humanode Solve?
Humanode looks to address a common problem faced by most decentralized networks — the tendency towards plutocracy.
In most modern blockchain platforms, Sybil attacks are prevented by leveraging either a large decentralized network of either decision-making nodes (Proof-of-Stake networks) or the combined work of a mining array (Proof-of-Work networks).
However, both of these tend to favor the wealthy, in that those who simply have more capital can directly increase their share of the network, either through purchasing additional hash rate (PoW) or by operating more validator nodes (PoS). This eventually leads to a position where the wealthy control much of the network and hence the rewards it brings.
Humanode aims to ensure that the network stays completely decentralized, preventing the centralization of voting power and the allocation of rewards. By using biometric nodes, Humanode simplifies the process of creating and operating a node, creating an intuitive experience that requires no technical expertise or capital to take part in. This, it hopes, will provide the framework for the most inclusive blockchain system.
Humanode also enables a range of new use cases, while solving problems with existing ones, some of these include:
Biometric airdrops: Ensuring airdrops are fairly distributed, cannot be monopolized, or fraudulently obtained by ensuring that each biometrically identified participant can only receive 1 airdrop allocation.
Biometric DID: Current decentralized identity solutions rely on manual human review and can be easily manipulated and spoofed. Humanode eliminates this challenge using zero-knowledge based DID that provides auditable privacy without relying on centralized intermediaries.
Biometric credit score: Humanode's biometric identification solution can be used for on-chain credit scoring, helping users access credit without needing to reveal their identities and avoid the high collateralization requirements typical of DeFi lending platforms today.
Plug-and-play democratic DAOs: For DAOs and organizations that struggle with plutocracy and manipulation, Humanode provides a chain agnostic plug-and-play solution that ensures 1 person always equals 1 vote, eliminating the influences of mining cartels and validator oligopolies.
Intuitive transaction fee pricing: Volatile transaction fees limit the predictability and accessibility of transacting on most popular blockchain platforms. Humanode solves this challenge by using a cost-based fee system that is tied to the actual costs based in USD.
Sybil-resistant games and online economies. The MMO genre has been trying to create stable virtual economies since the dawn of online gaming only to be crippled by hyperinflation as a lot of malicious actors spawned bots to grind rewards and thus inflate any game currency out there. With Humanode’s help future games will be able to create sybil-resistant environments with stable economies.
By enabling the auditable pseudonymous biometric DIDs to be tied to dApps and/or various online services, the blockchain industry as a whole stands to benefit. From insurance, financial services that involve credit score, trading, marketplaces, yield farming, fair launch/airdrops, healthcare, NFT ownership, etc., Humanode could evolve into a solution for the decentralized private ownership of essentially anything.
The Humanode Token
As a layer-1 blockchain, Humanode includes its own native gas coin, known as HMND. This will be primarily used for paying gas fees, biometric authentication and smart contract operations on the Humanode blockchain, and will inflate based on the aforementioned Fath hypothesis — which sees the HMND token emission directly tied to the platform’s activity.
Because of this system, HMND will feature a fluctuating total supply but will operate on a 100% reserve system at all times — meaning all tokens in existence are allocated to users. If the activity of the network decreases, then the HMND supply will be rebalanced, burning excess HMND across all wallets.
Thanks to Humanode's unique Proof-of-Uniqueness and Proof-of-Existence solutions, it doesn't require users to hold or stake HMND to participate in the network as a validator node. This eliminates the chicken-and-the-egg scenario faced by other blockchains, which see users need to acquire enough tokens for a stake or mining equipment before they can start using the platform.
Nonetheless, those that operate a node will gradually earn rewards derived from transaction fees, with the total absolute value of these rewards growing alongside the network.
Unique Features
As a solution designed to provide a fair, secure, and accessible platform for digital assets and decentralized applications, Humanode will include a number of unique features that help it accomplish its goals and distinguish itself from the competition, including:
Biometric Sybil resistance: Biometric processing with liveness detection and periodic verification of identities ensures that the network is owned, operated, and secured by real users. Since a single user can only create one biometric identity, this means that each user can only launch one node in the Humanode network, and hence has a single vote. This means truly equal co-ownership of the network with equal distribution of fees among users.
Self-sovereignty: Humanode leverages self-sovereign identity to give users full control over their digital identities. There is no need for centralized KYC providers or data custodians, everything is kept fully on-chain and decentralized.
Privacy-preserving: Humanode utilizes cryptobiometrics to protect the video and biometric data used to create each user’s encrypted 3D face mapping vector. This is automatically processed by a powerful neural network and the data never leaves the user's PC or device.
Pseudonymity: Since all Humanode biometric identities are auditable, users can freely interact with the network pseudoanonymously without having to reveal their identity in the process.
Inalienable: Humanode binds a digital identity to each user’s biology, not their legal documentation, status, location, or otherwise. As a result, users can be sure that their information (including medical records and legal documents) and assets cannot be dissociated from their identity without their expressed consent.
Easy integration: Any existing protocol can easily integrate Humanode’s 1 human = 1 vote decentralized autonomous organization infrastructure, helping to improve their fairness and decentralization.
True availability: Being a Substrate-based platform, Humanode benefits from a custom EVM pallet (a version of SputnikVM), which allows it to run native Solidity smart contracts. This makes it interoperable with the broader Ethereum and EVM chain landscape while ensuring it’s immediately accessible to developers. Block explorers, solidity-based smart contracts, bridges, protocols, and more can be easily ported to Humanode to help bootstrap is DApp ecosystem from day 1.
Cost-based fees: Humanode introduces a cost-based fee system that denominates transaction fees in USD terms based on the actual usage of resources. Pegging the value in USD not only ensures that the volatility of HMND doesn’t have an impact on resource costs but also makes for a more intuitive user experience.
Democratic access: Unlike many other blockchains, HMND tokens have no role in achieving consensus, since users are not required to put their tokens at stake to prevent Sybil attacks. Instead, it uses biometric consensus, which is arguably the most efficient way to achieve consensus and ensure the fair distribution of resources.
A Look Ahead
The Humanode team has been working non-stop for the last year and a half to deliver on their vision of a truly accessible, democratic blockchain future.
Humanode has also signed an agreement with FaceTec to integrate FaceTec’s face biometrics and liveness detection into Humanode’s ‘cryptobiometrics’ platform. Its first proof of concept alpha testnet was launched in January of 2021 and the official testnet 1 using liveness detection with a fully updated technical stack and structure was launched in September 2021. Since then there were two additional testnets deployed with 10k people becoming human nodes.
A week ago Humanode deployed its whitelisting campaign and is heading to its subsequent Public Sale on Tokensoft in August.
https://twitter.com/humanode_io/status/1552039911318061060
The Humanode mainnet is scheduled to launch in Q4 2022.
Although Humanode is working on solidifying its first version of cryptobiometric identification solution, which utilizes secure enclaves for some portions of the process, it is already deep into research and development of the second version, which uses crypto primitives, search and matching, liveness detection, and a neural network to process and secure user data.
This means that Humanode’s biometric authentication process will not require third parties nor specific processors to implement, and will not require users to trust anything that is outside of the system's control.
“The main goal of Humanode is to create a stable and just financial network that relies on the existence of human life itself. We aim to alleviate all the intermediaries that stand between a person and his ability to become a validator of transactions. Humanode strives to deliver easy node creation flows and make it natural for any human to verify their unique existence privately in any digital service.” — Humanode Co-Founder Dato Kavazi.
To find out more about Humanode and stay up to date with its latest developments, follow the platform on the official links below:
Website: https://humanode.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/humanode_io
Blog: https://blog.humanode.io/
Fee Disclaimer
This notice should not be construed as an offering of securities or as investment advice or any recommendation as to an investment or other strategy by Republic Crypto LLC d/b/a Republic Advisory Services (“Republic Advisory Services”) or any of their affiliates. Republic Advisory Services is being compensated cash and tokens for strategic advisory and technical services. Neither Republic Advisory Services nor any of their affiliates has independently verified any of the information provided or makes any assurances as to the completeness, accuracy or reliability of any such information provided by Humanode Advent LLC or its affiliates. Neither Republic Advisory Services nor any of its affiliates makes any representations whatsoever regarding any third-party content/sites that may be accessible directly or indirectly from this post. Linking to any such third-party sites in no way implies or constitutes an endorsement or affiliation of any kind between Republic Advisory Services (or any of its affiliates) and any third-party. Republic Advisory Services is a subsidiary within a family of companies owned by OpenDeal Inc. (together sometimes referred to as "Republic"). Republic and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting or legal advice — all recipients are advised to consult with their own advisers.
3 comments