Blockchain Democracy: Long overdue advances in sight? slow progress…
The promise of blockchain solving the various problems of electoral corruption has been talked about by many, ICOs have been floated and funded, so where is the progress?
I have been watching this segment of the “Blockchain” world looking for viable emerging tech and so far one seems to stand out among the rest.
A Swiss company named Agora, has some real world field experience deploying blockchain to manage the vote, at least partially in the developing world, and is partnering with incumbent facial recognition , ID Card verification tech developer Onfido, a global company with 240+ employees located around the world.
I started this post last September, with the hope of discovering government legislated reform into the voting space (anywhere), which quite frankly has been more like listening to the crickets at night, based on country specific searches I made using QWANT.. and this string “ Evoting on the Blockchain”\.
A short sampling of the search results by supposed advanced democracies, I used the “Canada” filter on QWANT to see who the SEO “first Fold Champ” would be, that is a company which floats to the top of the first page of “Canadian” search results…
Kudos, at first glance to followmyvote Inc. for providing a bit a of basic awareness and education about the differences in “blockchain” technology and how it applies to voting.
A little deeper dig into this company revealed the following:
Crunchbase: Four years old in terms of funding via convertible note of a small amount..
Nathan Hourt the CEO on Linkedin Status : MIA “missing in Action” and has appeared to have disappeared completely, I hope he is ok.. the other founder listed in crunchbase:
Adam Kaleb Ernest , a joint founder, isnow the CEO and has the linkedin Status: Active for followmevote(.com) Inc.
OK, I am glad to see the project is still alive (they do good SEO), now what? Given Mr. Ernest has another day job, it’s reasonable to come to the conclusion it’s been really tough for “follow my vote Inc.” to get any traction, especially not a good sign for evoting generally, when you consider the proximity of the first CEO to Washington DC’s ocean of NGO “Beltway” cash, and now the current CEO living in Colorado.
And this from the SEO champ on QWANT.
This is not a criticism of this startup, more an observation, given the site data comments on the home page are 4 years old, not a good sign or first impression, yet the information on the site is quite good.
As of the publish date of this Medium post, AGORA does have real traction, despite the fact they didn’t get their SEO effort to hit the “first fold” , on heading back to their site, I found out the following,
AGORA is now trading their token in the secondary market, where the token itslef is used to buy AGORA services to set up your vote. An interesting and novel business model for sure, at first glance, yet I am uncertain how their tokenomics work after a short dig on their site, where my spidey sense their business model is more complex and requires a deep dive into their whitepaper.
I will save that AGORA Whitepaper “deep dive” for later (on Publish0x)
If you like these type of quick updates, please visit my publish0x blog “ThunderboltKid”, as I am now focusing my Medium effort for deep technical posts I will make in the future, posting once or twice a quarter here.
TK over and Out.. ;)
