Hello again, Proton family!
We’re delighted to introduce the second project for this month’s campaign, Proton June #BetterBlockchain. Our goal is to introduce the incredibly talented developers behind the projects you know and love.
As part of the campaign, we will publish a ‘Meet The Builders’ interview, alongside their giveaway, so you can find out more about their project, the inspiration behind their vision, what’s next for them, and why they chose Proton.
Please meet the team from this innovative project, Freeos!
Meet The Builders – Freeos
To start, can you briefly introduce Freeos?
The Freeos Economic System is an easily accessible democratic crypto income for everyone.
It works by letting everyone vote in a collective monetary policy to earn crypto weekly.
This vote is important because the monetary policy is designed to support a healthy price of the FREEOS token—through many innovative features and systems that govern supply and demand dynamics.
What problem is Freeos trying to solve?
Freeos is solving the dilemma of accessibility vs. value in crypto. Highly accessible cryptocurrencies draw plenty of users, but often have little value—or aren’t yet tradable. Good Dollar and Pi Network are recent examples that drew tens of millions of users but either have a miniscule value or are not yet trading.
Valuable cryptocurrencies are often not very accessible in any meaningful way—typically high levels of investment, technical know-how—or being lucky enough to get in early—are required.
Freeos solves this by allowing anyone to mine through voting on a monetary policy that affects the token’s supply and demand dynamics.
Since supply and demand typically affect price, the community has a way to have some say and influence over being purely at the mercy of market forces, large financial institutions, and authorities. With democratic tools to affect the monetary policy, Freeos provides a fighting chance to mine a currency by the masses without it being a miniscule value.
Wisdom-of-the-crowd—iterated upon weekly—allows the community to improve their economic stewardship to direct the economy towards their own self-interest—while simultaneously being in the interest of others.
And since Freeos is on the Proton blockchain, it allows us to build a highly accessible, easy-to-use, and informative dApp that ensures each voter is a unique individual—to ensure maximum fairness.
How does Freeos make the blockchain experience more user friendly?
With Freeos, mining a crypto income has become as easy as using a smartphone app and voting in a DAO can be as easy as using sliders and checkboxes.
We’ve had people in their seventies and eighties using the Freeos dApp successfully to vote and earn a crypto income. This is the power of Proton—to help make crypto safe and accessible. Freeos adds to this by providing a way to access and earn crypto—not just simply purchase it.
Through the Freeos dApp, participants will have access to other easy-to-use goods and services—many of which will be accepting FREEOS tokens to get an easy place to start using crypto, dApps and how easy these are to use on a daily basis with Proton and the WebAuth wallet.
We showcased an early example of an NFT auction that allowed our participants to use their FREEOS tokens to bid on NFTs to show how a Marketplace can develop around the Freeos system and token.
Can you tell us a bit more about the Freeos management team and their background?
Jerome Kelsey
Founder – Systems Design Lead
20 years of systems, video games, and software design experience, proponent of direct democracy and free and open societies; Giving Culture ambassador. Dreamt up Freeos as a way to flip and democratize an economic model.
Jerome Hartigan
Co-Founder – Onboarding & Strategy Operations
Decades as an executive leader, entrepreneur, investor and coach. A former Olympic athlete with a passion for people driving the team towards the finish line.
Tom McCann
Senior Blockchain Architect & Lead Developer
Long time IT veteran involved in the emergence of networking, the PC revolution, Groupware and Internet. Developer of his own neural network, genetic algorithms, and smart contracts. Strategic, technical developer of everything.
Michael Jones
Internet Magician – Frontend Development
Master entrepreneur and wizard of bridging blockchain and the web interfaces—a difficult and arcane art known by few, and mastered by fewer.
DeShea Kennedy
Project Manager
20 years of management experience across different industries and educator of people big and small. Organizes tasks, teams and projects with a lighthearted touch.
Gavriel Shaw
Growth Advisor
Provides strategic frameworks for tech startups to minimize risk and accelerate product-market-fit from pre-revenue through to scale.
Wesley Thijsse
Legal Advisor
Student of history, law, economics, finance and philosophy. Focused on merging technology with law and helping projects navigate international tax and regulatory challenges.
Dan Kimball
Partner Relations and Evangelist
Serial entrepreneur connecting people from all over the world. Proponent of increased sustainability and freedom in governance structures. Aligns dreams with principles.
Can you tell us more about Freeos’s vision?
First and foremost, Freeos is designed to be a fair and democratic DAO representing one-person with one-vote; an entire economic system managed directly by democracy.
Freeos gives people a say in their own economy so that they are not simply at the mercy of top-down economic forces that they seldom have a say in.
In a way, Freeos exists, in part, to answer this question:
“What will a large group accomplish when ALL of their incentives are aligned through cooperative protocols?”
Our bet is that a system—designed to be hyper-cooperative—where what is good for the individual is also good for the group, can provide a foundation for real economic value. And then all other use cases for the currency add further layers of value.
Tell us about what led up to building Freeos. Why did you start this?
The idea came to me in April of 2018, as I was dabbling in Solidity development and thinking of ideas for crypto. The launch of EOS was on the horizon and I was thinking about how to flip the model of Free-to-Play games to be a Play-to-Earn model.
With the launch of EOS—the first programmable Layer 1 platform with no gas fees—it seemed that this architecture would be a better fit for a type of Play-to-Earn model.
Without gas fees and faster transactions, I realized the constraints that most existing dApps faced on Ethereum would allow a richer experience that would be more user-friendly.
The idea for a democratically run economy—as a way to mine currency through voting on an economic policy—came to me abruptly one day and I started to develop the idea with a few others—including Jerome Hartigan.
A couple of years later, with a proof-of-concept set of smart contracts written for EOSIO, both of us “Jeromes” decided to officially start this venture as a full-time endeavor.
Why did you choose the Proton Blockchain to build Freeos?
We needed a chain that was free for users, fast, scalable, and had global KYC. Proton ticks these boxes and many others. Proton is easy to use, has exchanges and lending, on-ramps and off-ramps, NFT markets and a vibrant development community. We’re continually impressed with initiatives that Proton is making and we’re grateful for the support we’re receiving from the Proton team.
The unique qualities of the Proton chain allow for an accessible and democratic system to exist—without such qualities it would be very difficult to deliver a fair, democratic system that is easy-to-use and friction-free.
What benefits do token holders have with Freeos? (Staking, Governance, etc)
With the Freeos DAO, token holding does not provide any additional benefits for the participants towards governance. Participation and proving uniqueness (through Proton’s KYC) allows the participants to have an equal say.
Staking is also not the model to earn more FREEOS tokens passively—instead participation is. Voting on the monetary policy earns the tokens for the participants.
It is important to the Freeos system that FREEOS tokens are not earned passively but are earned through the actions of the participants—providing a service to the system.
Future benefits to having FREEOS tokens will come through products and services that are designed to use FREEOS tokens. AirDrops, Yield Farms, NFTs Auctions, Games, Prediction Markets, and eventually real world opportunities. Some of these will use FREEOS in some very interesting and innovative ways.
With easy accessibility and the ability to earn a crypto income that each individual has a say in, the opportunity exists to concentrate a large number of Freeos participants in a single geographic location—and to onboard brick & mortar businesses willing to accept FREEOS tokens as both an income and a marketing opportunity.
Can you tell us a bit more about what’s coming next for Freeos?
Q3 2022 Freeos Governance Phase: The start of the true governance of the monetary policy integrated with earning FREEOS. Also introducing FREEBI, a walled-garden token for the internal Freeos Economy.
Q4 2022 Freeos Phase 3: FreeDAO for governance of the Foundation
Freeos Marketplace: Community and Digital use cases expanding
Freeos Phase 4.0: Mystery dApp prototype (to be revealed later)
Q1 2023 FreeDAO Developer Community: Digital Use Cases
Q2 2023: Freeos Phase 4.1: Mystery dApp MVP
Q3 2023 Freeos Phase 4.2: Mystery dApp on multiple chains
Q4 2023 Freeos Phase 2.1: Freeos Phase 2 dApp on multiple chains
Project Details
Main Website | https://freeos.io
Twitter | https://twitter.com/Freeos_dao
Telegram | https://t.me/freeos_talk
