Factom : Decentralising Enterprise Data for Corporate Convenience
Paul Snow, an IT veteran with decades of network building and probabilistic rule defining experience, started Factom. The cryptocurrency that aims to share documents and store data behind the security, decentralisation and finality of the blockchain.
“We started Factom to build a more honest and transparent world. We take a pretty simple approach: create software that make it impossible to change the past and point that software at places where it solves valuable business problems. – Peter Kirby, CEO of Factom,
What is Factom Trying To Do?
Factom is a company utilising blockchain solutions to move and store data. Big data is massive and companies invest small fortunes into better managing documents. A blockchain solution offers numerous advantages over traditional data storage, and Factom are optimising these innate properties of cryptography for enterprise clients and big business. Factom is targeting Fortune 1000 companies. They can save time coordinating compliance audits and consolidating data across multiple external and internal sources. Harmony is a tool built by Factom that allows companies user friendly access to this information. If what Jason Nadeau and Jay Smith, the sales and marketing executive team for Factom, are saying is true, then Harmony is functional and usable by clients. In an AMA, Jason Nadeau announced that features like Audit Entries, Milestone Entries, Decision Entries and interlinking Data Provenance Entries are all being added to Harmony. He went on to comment that earlier versions of Harmony were so similar to regular document and data management software that client’s didn’t understand that it was blockchain. There aren’t many cryptocurrencies on the market that can actually claim to have a working product. I know that I won’t be able to say that for much longer, but Factom has a massive first movers advantage in this space. In the same AMA, the marketing team revealed that they demonstrated Harmony in over 25 meetings at the annual Mortgage Bankers Conference. The Factom network is built by two groups of servers or network actors. Federated servers are the full nodes in the network. They can record and add transactions to the chain. They can also send receipt messages to the nodes that sent them entries to publish.
There is no mining involved in this process, and consequently very little computational work is required by these nodes. Federated servers are rewarded in FCT tokens for their contribution to the network. The network is instead secured by audit servers. These nodes aren’t rewarded for auditing, but they check the network for malicious intent. If a Federated Server misbehaves and is voted out, the highest ranking Audit Server takes its place becoming a Federated Server. Factum users submit data by paying with Entry Credits. These are a secondary t oken on the platform. The process that creates entry credits also burns Factom. A single Entry Credit is equivalent to 1kb of data on the chain. Once a minute, a federated server adds the chain IDs together and enters those blocks into a Directory Block. This pairs it with a hash that links it to the next entry block. The Factom network is also periodically checked against the Bitcoin network. Every 10th Directory Block is hashed and added as a definitive anchor to the Bitcoin blockchain.How Does The FCT Token Fit Into All Of This?Using Merkal trees and chain IDs, the Factom network can compress and store a large amount of information in a single block. This make the network affordable at scale. The Factom platform was designed so that higher transaction volumes increase token prices.
To pay the federated nodes 73,000 tokens are generated each month. If the currency is inflationary or deflationary, depends entirely on if more or less that 73,000 tokens are burnt in a month. This is an easy to understand, clear cut , economic process. More tokens are created and the value goes down. Less tokens are created and the value goes up.
Why Now Is The Time to Invest In Factom?
In the later half of 2017, the board of Factom saw some major changes. Tina Laurence, Factom CMO, left the company, and the previous CEO of Factom, was replaced by Paul Snow himself. Paul Snow developed the Factom Protocol, and he has past experience running successful companies. The most significant changes to come out of all this in the first half of 2018 and end of 2017, were an increased social presence and the birth of a movement to better explain what they are doing and keep investors updated. 2017 was a big year for Factom. They completed their closing of a series A funding round raising $9 millions. New and experienced marketing staff were added. Jason Nadeau is very active on Reddit and has experience leading startups in the enterprise space. There isn’t much information on this, but Factom always claims to be working on partnership or pitching Harmony to one large enterprise client or another behind the scenes. The team is reluctant to report on their ongoing negotiations, which is understandable, but as these backroom deals come to light and transactions pick up on the network Factom’s FCT token will quickly become a sort after commodity. Another interesting angle to consider, when speculating on Factom’s long term value, is that Factom have started targeting ICOs. They don’t want to be an ICO platform, like Lisk or Ethereum, Factom are just aware that ICOs are companies that need to keep track of a lot of data, and because they are in the crypto space they believe in the blockchain.
Factom Team
Factom HQ is based out of Austin, Texas. To clear things up Factom.inc is a company developing and actively finding clients for the Factom blockchain. The technology is an open source project. All of their repositories are on GitHub, so in theory anyone can contribute to them. Most of the core developers are in Factom’s inner circle, because that is just how these things go. I think, after extensive research and a few months of being invested in the project, that the Factom team are capable bunch, who are going to see this project through to completion. 
Peter Kirby and Paul Snow cofounded Factom. If you check out their Linkedin pages they both have the kind of long corporate careers and connections that you want in you blockchain company CEOs and upper management. Paul Snow has been coding blockchainish programs and networks for decades, and he was a founding figure in the Texas Bitcoin conference.
How To Invest In Factom?
Interested in hodling Factom. This coin isn’t listed on Binance and other major exchanges. It is on Bittrex and Poloniex, so you might need to send your crypto around to trade Factom. Read the complete Cointext.me guide to investing in Factom to learn more.