COMIT: Vision and Mission

philipp

philipp

Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do.

— Steve Jobs

For quite some time I have been a personal advocate for using cryptocurrencies for e-commerce and peer-to-peer payments. I was a true believer that cryptocurrencies' true purpose was to become a global payment system: a payment system that is censorship-resistant, non-discriminatory and open for everyone.

While some cryptocurrencies may indeed serve as a global mean of payment in the future, the true potential of cryptocurrencies goes way beyond that.

When looking at how cryptocurrencies have been used over the past 10 years, one can see that payment has not been the main use case. Especially in 2017 we have seen clear evidence of this potential with the ICO (Initial Coin Offering/Token Offering) waves. This and other events in 2017 I've classified as get rich quick schemes or differently said: scams. While the real value of most of the tokens is questionable, I think it is incredibly exciting to have witnessed the movement of tokenizing real world assets. I am certain that in the foreseeable future tokens will represent various different real-world assets or securities with intrinsic value.

2017 was the start of a movement which was only possible because of cryptocurrencies. These allow to form a truly open, censorship-resistant, non-discriminatory financial system. While true peer-to-peer trustless trading is still way off, cryptocurrencies are the first real platform that lets anyone participate in a free and open market, regardless of their geographical location, nationality, education, gender etc.

However, one could argue that this movement came too fast, the technology is not mature enough or too many bad players got involved. Too often did we introduce unnecessary centralization, the need for trust and too often did we forget what cryptocurrencies and blockchain were all about in the first place:

Verify, don't trust.

This trust was misused more than once In fact, according to a report by CipherTrace, over $4.26 billion have been stolen from cryptocurrency exchanges, investors and users since January 2019.

Most of the losses were unnecessary and could have been avoided by simply embracing the autonomous and trustless nature of cryptocurrencies (ignoring UX challenges for now).

COMIT: Vision and Mission

The vision of CoBloX aims at unleashing the full potential of cryptocurrencies:

We believe in an open financial system - truly inclusive, censorship-resistant and non-discriminatory.

We believe that everyone should be able to participate in a global financial system. For that to become reality we need to remove the requirement of centralized trusted exchanges for trading: exchanging assets of any kind should be trustless, peer-to-peer and decentralised.
Our mission is to research and build the missing pieces for this open financial system: a unified protocol to connect all the blockchains to allow for true trustless peer-to-peer trading. Our mission is to:

Connect all the blockchains - without adding yet another one.

To achieve our vision, it is crucial to state our values. We pledge to follow them for all our protocols, tools we build and services we offer:

  • Transparency and openness: our protocols are well defined, open source, free and publicly available.
  • Truly trustless: we strive for building a non-custodial protocol. Neither the protocol nor our reference implementations will ask you for your private keys or assets.
  • Developer-centric with end-users in mind: our tools and protocol aim at developers in the first place so that they can build products serving their user's needs. It is always important to keep the end-user experience in mind during protocol design time as one cannot live without the other.

2020 Goals

To achieve our vision of a truly inclusive, censorship-resistant, non-discriminatory open financial system for everyone we need to achieve a few milestones in the near future:

  • Near-instant transactions: we are of the strong opinion that near-instant transactions are crucial for a financial system to work. However, instant transaction should not come at any cost, security, privacy and reliability have to be considered equally. While a lot of research is flowing into off-chain networks such as the Lightning Network, Raiden, Plasma, etc, COMIT will need to either be compatible with or provide a complimentary off-chain solution to enable near-instant trade transactions.
  • Private trades: censorship resistance and privacy are crucial for an open financial system to exist. While the former can be provided naturally by the underlying blockchain, the latter especially may get neglected during trades. In order to protect the market participants COMIT will need to support confidential transactions protecting the market participants' privacy.
  • COMIT community: to unleash the full potential of a trustless cross-blockchain protocol we need to build a community around COMIT. The goal is to educate, motivate and generally spread the word so that COMIT becomes a truly used protocol.

Support COMIT

The team behind COMIT consists of rockstars, superstars and 🦄. Every day we give 100% to achieve our goals and to make our vision become a reality. But without help this might be just a drop of water on the hot stone of our current boiling global financial situation. We appreciate any help or input on the protocol and tools we build: COMIT on GitHub . You can use COMIT today to start building the cornerstones for the future: Examples and getting started.

Getting Started - Build your first COMIT app

COMIT is written with ♥️ by developers for developers. The COMIT protocol is completely open-source so anyone is able to use the power of atomic swaps in their application.

The COMIT team is working hard on making getting started with COMIT a piece of cake. We recommend getting started by reading the Getting Started section of the COMIT documentation.

Cheers, Philipp and the COMIT Team 💪