On March 2nd, 2018, Guardian Circle announced that they will be switching to the NEO platform and are distributing their Guardium token as a NEP-5 token. Guardium aims to provide decentralized emergency response services to create a ‘flash-mob’ of help.
Guardian Circle already has an exisiting application available on the App Store and Google Play, which allows users to invite friends, family and neighbors to be Guardians. In the event of an emergency, the user sends an immediate alert notification to their Guardians. The Guardians then enter an ‘Alert room’ with a map sharing everyone’s location and a chat feature which enables users to formulate a plan to send help.
The application is intended for use in cases such as personal injury, harassment, or medical emergency.
The vision for Guardium is to integrate cryptocurrency with Guardian Circle to create a marketplace of personal protection and 911-style services. In addition to friends and family, users will be able to purchase protection from semi-pro and professional responders as Guardians for different types of situations, such as EMT’s, security guards, translators etc.
Guardian Circle believes the current centralized 911 model is out of date, citing reasons such as –
- Proximity of help – Services dispatched through a local switchboard, may have a long distance to travel
- Location of Emergency – Responders need a detailed explanation of location
- Scalability – Centralization reduces scalability
- Distribution – Four billion people do not have access to a 911 service
- Knowledge of responder – First responders are entering into situations where knowledge may be limited
- User Interface – Emergency response is handled through phone calls and in many cases the caller cannot speak (such as in cases of stroke)
Through decentralization and the application of the Guardian Circle functionality, the company believes they can create a new class of Global Public Utility and a new class of Protocol-Based Decentralized Organization to govern, facilitate and update this service.
Guardian Circle is especially interested in providing these services to the four billion unbanked people world wide who do not have access to a 911-style service. In their white paper, Guardian Circle notes that in Africa, for instance, the largest employer on the continent is private security – a luxury that is not available to the poor. They also cite a TED Talk by Gary Haughan in which he states that the number one cause of poverty is not lack of food or water, but lawlessness. Guardian Circle hopes to remedy this through the Guardian Circle platform.
The integration of Guardium will also enable Geofencing capabilities where users can subscribe to regional protection. This would be applicable for situations such as travel where a user’s local network is not likely to be available. Users will be able to subscribe to ‘roaming’ services that will activate within certain locations and terminate when they leave the area.
Guardian Circle had previously planned to launch its platform on a bespoke Litecoin fork, citing congestion and slow transactions on existing networks, such as Ethereum, as too large a risk for an emergency response application. Guardian Circle said in its Medium announcement that ‘..the more we dug into NEO, the more we realized that they had really great answers to every one of our concerns with Ethereum and many additional benefits that are unique to the NEO ecosystem.’
Some of those additional benefits include the intuitive wallets available (such as Neon from City of Zion), available libraries for integrated wallet development, Python support, NEO’s identity model, the separation of NEO and GAS to keep transactions reasonably priced and the ability to accelerate development using the features provided by NEO.
Guardian Circle was founded by Mark Jeffrey and Chris Hayes. Mark is a serial entrepreneur and author who has co-founded five internet companies (for three exits) and published nine books. An early pioneer of cryptocurrency, two of Mark’s first books were BITCOIN EXPLAINED SIMPLY (2012) and THE CASE FOR BITCOIN (2015).
Chris is a former developer for the aerospace industry who also led the architecture in web applications for Davita Healthcare and Glossi.com. He built one of the payment industry’s first HRIPSP platforms in 2007 generating over $35,000 daily within two months of launch.
Chris also created the ‘The Smoking Tire’ podcast (140,000 listeners per week) and The Hooniverse podcast (50,000 listeners per week), and founded ShoutEngine.com, the first highly scalable podcast publishing platform serving over 2 million uniques a month and 4.5 million episode downloads amonth.
Some of Guardian Circles achievements to date include –
Winner: CoinAgenda (Jan 2018), d10e: Gibralter (Nov 2017), LAUNCH Festival (2016).
Partner: Women’s Safety XPRIZE; The Bee Token
Featured: Apple’s PLANET OF THE APPS (2017), Alex Winter’s upcoming Crypto Documentary (Spring 2018)
The Guardium pre sale is currently open and closes on March 19th with a price of $0.333 per token and a $5,000 minimum purchase. The pre sale is open to non US individuals and accredited US investors. The crowd sale opens on March 20th. 100,000,000 tokens will be minted, with 30% available in total through the token sale.
For more information on Guardian Circle you can visit their website, token sale page, Medium, Twitter and Telegram.
About The Author: Dean Jeffs
Dean is a digital project manager who has worked extensively with start ups and agencies in the marketing space. Fascinated by the potential applications of blockchain technology, Dean has a passion for realising the new smart economy.
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