A quick update on our main activities to date. The Healid project is making progress in all areas. We have set up our web and social media presence: healid.io and @HealCoin.

Our current main focus is on the HealCoin economic model, the Healid technology platform, technology integration aspects, building the community, and continuing to establish the corporate infrastructure.

Economic Model.

When we say “economic model” we mean how to best use the HealCoin to provide a solution that is (A) self-sustaining since it facilitates the value created through Healid – while (B) being equitable in that Healid activities benefit as large a community as possible.

One key principle is spreading the ownership of HealCoins to every person contributing genome data, and to everybody supporting this process. This leads to a continuous earning of Coins, and creating of wide-spread buy-in. Supply of as much relevant genome data, and easy and meaningful access to it, are key to our success.

For us this means that even though the Healid core team, its advisors and early supporters will initially own the majority of the shares, overall counting in the millions, in the long term their share of ownership will be negligible since overall billions of coins will be in circulation.

Technology Platform

We are very encouraged by Filecoin’s current ICO (filecoin.io), which is scheduled to start today. Our excitement originates mostly in the positive message this sends about distributed data storage technologies. Our focus at Healid is on the solution aspects, not the underlying protocol and file storage platform. We currently see IPFS as a critical component on that level. Filecoin adds a whole new layer of practical usability to it.

One of the main areas we are working on is how to best solve the most obvious technical challenge – scalability. This goes beyond the pure data volume and includes the transaction volume also. As of today, none of the traditional blockchains would enable dealing with billions of transactions that need to be recorded. IOTA (iota.io) with their Tangle concept seems to be a prime candidate to solve this issue, although other options like Ethereum (ethereum.org), Tezos (tezos.com), or EOS (eos.io) are not out of the question yet either. Until we formally start our Pilot, we will stay open and keep diving into the details of this architectural component.

Community.

Diversity and numbers will be key to our success. To be able to collect diverse data sets in large numbers, this requires being active in all regions of the world, not just in advanced economies. We keep therefore reaching out to advisors and ambassadors from around the globe, with expertise in all aspects related to our solution. We want and need to consider local, regional, and cultural factors.

The technical areas and professional fields are:

• medical (genomics and bio-informatics),
• gene sequencing devices and processes,
• technology platform (crypto-technologies, distributed databases, integration),
• data encryption, security and biometrics,
• database design and scalability,
• mobile and web interfaces (iOS, Android, Web, API),
• artificial intelligence (big data and deep learning),
• regulatory aspects,
• social and political impact of our work,
• ethical and patient considerations,
• financing and funding, and
• general business.

Beyond the advisory function, we are establishing an Ambassador program with the goal to generate local, country-level, and regional awareness of the important contribution that Healid is about to make to the physical well being of all humans.

Corporate Infrastructure

We continue putting an advisory board together.

Uwe Meyer from Germany joined the team. He has been entrepreneurially involved in technology aspects in the medical field for a long time. Uwe has applicable senior-level and executive experience in most key technical and functional areas relevant to Healid’s vision. He will increase the quality of our solution and our ability to execute.

With Angus Scott-Knight and Shane Mitchell we managed to get on board two senior enterprise-level technology solution designers and implementers. They will provide real-life feedback and guidance from the perspective of enterprise level systems, database and overall solution design, and thus contribute to strengthening the Healid platform.

One of our next steps will be to validate our funding strategy, establish a relationship with a key corporate advisor, and to expand our representation into more geographical areas.