Finding The Rhythm
In 2017 two things drove a decision that would change our lives. Rakesh (Raj), my business partner of two decades, lives in Hong Kong, and I was planning my relocation to Belgium at the time. We had been devising a new venture aimed at disrupting banking and financial services, based on Blockchain and cloud technology. It was mapped out, and although speculative, rooted in deep experience and the outstanding proficiency of our technical team.
Our earliest backer, and equity partner in the venture, Benny Pang, has a tremendous business network in China due to his activities (listing companies on stock exchanges in the region) and prior role as chief counsel to Tencent Holdings. He came to us with a proposal, and an offer by a giant in the Chinese business sphere to back our venture. The wave of excitement around Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) was just starting, and enormous non-dilutive fund raising was being demonstrated on a regular basis by startups who had only a fraction of our capabilities.
Faced with the prospect of taking this non-traditional, and largely unmapped, financing path, we were also forced to re-evaluate our strategies. Considering the risks associated with public solicitation outside an established regulatory regime, we felt the focus on banking would have to shift to obviate the backlash to ICO’s that would surely follow from the entire financial ecosystem.
Our prior experience in telecommunications allowed us to intuitively associate Blockchain and mesh networking as similar distributed architectures. The end user requirements, and associated philosophies for last mile connectivity was also a very similar to those that surround the financial underpinnings of Blockchain. This was a recognition that existing institutions (banks and telecoms companies) had failed to deliver solutions to many consumers for many of the same reasons — reach and below par return on investment for example. From our perspective the shift to mesh networking and telecommunications was both suitable and feasible. The concept of the Autonomous Modular Mesh Router (AMMBR) was born.
We prepared for the ICO by drafting a whitepaper, and we started recruiting domain specialists to assist in our project. Noteworthy additions to the team were:
· Dr. Arjuna Sathiaseelan, who directed the Networking for Development (N4D Lab) at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He is one of the most prolific academics in the mesh networking domain.
· Pr. Jean-Jacques Quisquater, a cryptographer and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. He received, with Claus P. Schnorr, the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2013, and the ESORICS Outstanding Research Award 2013. His was also one of only eight citations in Satoshi Nakamotos seminal white paper on Bitcoin.
In August 2017 we launched the Ammbr campaign, with an ambitious target date of 1 September 2017 for the ICO. Before the ICO could launch we were approached by a team of Ethereum co-founders, led by Shidan Gouran and Jeff Pulver, who convinced us our ICO was fatally flawed. We therefore postponed the ICO to November, while we worked to address some of the identified problems.
As it turned out, this was serendipitous, because before the ICO could be launched we achieved the purpose of the ICO — immense, non-dilutive funding — by other means. Before the ICO could be launched, we announced it was cancelled. This satisfied our nagging concerns about compliance and the immaturity of regulations in this space. The subsequent ban of ICO’s in several jurisdictions, including China, justified this decision.
We also decided to go dark on our development, primarily because of the tendency for plagiarism by startups keen on participating in the ICO feeding frenzy.
Fast forward to May of 2018. Our decision in November of 2017 to cancel our ICO, and the subsequent decision to go dark with our developments, has allowed us to substantially refine and mature our solution set, operational capabilities, and go-to-market strategy.
The extensive team we had attracted into the Ammbr Project have largely on-boarded as full time employees of our commercial group of companies, AmmbrTech. Further employees have joined, such as Dr. David Johnson. AmmbrTech Group has, as of the writing of this article, 38 full time staff, 4 part-time, 7 full time contractors, and 26 outsourced staff. We have established a holding company in Luxembourg, have 5 operational entities in the USA, Ireland, Belgium, UK and Hong Kong, 2 development companies in the USA and Singapore, and our research entity Ammbr Research Labs in the UK and South Africa. Several more entities are being established to further flesh out our ecosystem strategy.
The Ammbr Foundation remains of great importance since it remains the independent and central governance body, controlling IP and licensing for the Ammbr Network. Over time the functions of the Ammbr Foundation will be devolved to the Ammbr Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), but for the moment the technological underpinnings of a DAO are not sufficiently mature to entrust it with more than tests and trials.
The Ammbr Foundation has licensed AmmbrTech, as it can license any party, to develop and deploy technology that benefits the goals of the Ammbr Foundation. These goals are primarily the connection and inclusion of the roughly 4 billion individuals around the world who have not, to date, been able to fully participate in the digital economy.
AmmbrTech Group has made great progress in developing some of the components for the Ammbr Network and Ecosystem.
Consensus
Proof of Velocity (POV) is currently being built and tested using FPGA. Our plan is to complete this during a series of proofs of concept during the rest of 2018, leading to a first shuttle run in November, and tape-out in February 2019.
(POV works hand-in-hand with Proof of Elapsed Time)
Blackbird Hardware Wallet
The Blackbird is ready for early adopters, and will be released at the end of May. Customer feedback will allow us to apply refinements and full commercial release later in the year. Blackbird is the first of a new genre of hardware wallets that applies strong air-gapped security, protecting private keys for applications such as cryptocurrency wallets and self-sovereign digital identity.
Ammbr Mesh Router
This device involves many components, which are being developed by dedicated resources. We have some of the top wireless technologists on the team, building protocols, new radio technologies, and mesh network logic. This is being integrated with Blockchain to enable the economic and analytic subsystems. At the same time our AI specialists are developing governance and price discovery systems to help automate the complexity.
Prototype Ammbr routers are being iteratively improved upon, and proofs of concept on parts of several existing European testbeds and community mesh networks are planned for the second half of 2018. A commercial proof of concept is planned, in conjunction with a bank, in South Africa for the October time frame.
The first series Ammbr Mesh Router will go into production in the beginning of 2019.
SendX Remittance and P2P Payment
Our acquisition of SendX accelerates our entry into the Fintech arena. Several remittance licenses are in place, and full commercial release of this Blockchain driven platform is slated for August 2018. Tighter integration with other Ammbr components will follow.
More Technology
Several other plays are in the mix, and they will be announced at the appropriate time.
Business
Additional operational capabilities to complement the core AmmbrTech Group are being added through either acquisitions or strategic partnerships. These are important in the scope of our overall strategy in building our the Ammbr ecosystem.
One example of these is a minority stake in the US Federal Government and defense contractor, BWCS. This gives AmmbrTech access to the highly specialized and lucrative US government market, without having to lose focus or navigate their highly complex procurement processes.
Several industry partnerships, most notably banks, Fintech companies, telecommunications software and equipment manufacturers, are in place and progressing well. These are important in the long term to sustain our technology with strong business channels.
To achieve rapid consumer adoption we are working with community organizations in Africa, Europe and Asia. These include Guifi.net, Ninux, TunaPanda, and Ubuntu Power.
Our relationship with academia is being driven by Ammbr Research Labs in Cambridge, UK, led by Dr. Arjuna Sathiaseelan. Our relationship with the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) remains strong, and more institutions will join in our research efforts this year.
As we approach our first anniversary of the Ammbr Project, we reflect on how we have benefited from the explosive dynamics of the Blockchain industry, combined with a mission that inspires and invigorates everyone we speak to. Raj and I have seen our fledgeling startup comprising a handful of starry-eyed Blockchain enthusiasts turn into a behemoth, moving ahead with purpose and exceptional capability. Over the next year it will transform further, into a company delivering truly disruptive solutions to very significant problems.
The issues of inclusion and empowerment of people, communities, and entire countries, cannot be ignored or dealt with by applying the salve of charity and aid. Lasting and meaningful change can only be brought about at the scales we are talking about — half of the humans on the planet—through a combination of visionary policies, significant capital, entrepreneurs and technology (our belief and efforts are specifically centered on distributed technologies). AmmbrTech is following a path that addresses policy through government and supra-government engagements, financial partnerships, the stimulation of entrepreneurialism, and the delivery and support of technologies in truly inclusive business models.