INDIGEN — Blockchain for the Indigenous — Whitepaper

Larrimar Tia

Published in

indigen

11 min readJan 2, 2019

Technical Whitepaper v1.0
Last updated: 12 April 2019

2019 © Indigen Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved.
Author: Larrimar Tia

About Indigen

The Indigen blockchain was designed with primary purpose of protecting the rights and property of the indigenous people who are usually the unintended victims of industrialisation and globalization.

We are a group of developers, marketers, business people, artists, legal experts, and social activists from across the planet who recognize a sincere case for applying blockchain technology in preserving the indigenous culture through:

Applying blockchain technology to promote sustainability and growth for underfunded — and in many cases — unacknowledged communities by solving an inherent problem prominent across the planet;
Promoting ethics and good practice throughout the Indigen Ecosphere (economic sphere);
Building positive relationships between indigenous people and government.

Our Mission

Our goals are not limited to the scope of this document — the future is unbounded. But in simple and general terms, our immediate purpose is:

To preserve the heritage of indigenous cultures by creating an immutable storage of indigenous historical data on the blockchain;
To encourage indigenous groups, charitable institutions, historians, anthropologists, universities, legal professionals, and cultural preservationists to donate their historical documentation for permanent record keeping on the blockchain;
To create indices which are easily accessible to be studied and used as reference points for students and researchers;
To promote constructive relationships between local governments and indigenous communities by offering a decentralized alternative to the current system of record keeping;
To settle disputes over land ownership through an unbiased third party;
To integrate blockchain into industries that will benefit from using our technology;
To celebrate mankind’s diversity and to allow no culture to be forgotten.
To uplift the lives of many poor indigenous people who are seldom — if not never — reached by government assistance.

The Problem

Tribal people (first people, natives, indigenous) or the original inhabitants have many names; they have over 4,000 languages and comprise approximately 5% of the world’s population. These people are the usual victims of human rights issues such as lack of protection of their indigenous lands, unsolved killings because of property disputes, and many other inherent problems including lack of communications due to very remote locations, environmental destruction and natural resource extraction due to industrialized global developments, lack of education and access to modern medical information, healthcare, and so on. But one of the most evident and compelling problems of all is the slowly dying interest of the younger generation in our indigenous culture and history because of fast-paced modernization.

Value Proposition

Our proposed solution is to bring convergence to history and modern technology in a unique and innovative approach. Protection of indigenous properties, preservation of historical data, works of art, language and religion, and many more unique and integral aspects constituting the indigenous culture and traditions, are just few of our many objectives for using blockchain technology as permanent and immutable method of preservation.

Majority of the indigenous population belongs to the poor and they account to around 15% of the world’s poorest, with the highest percentage coming from Southeast Asia. The goal of Indigen as a cryptoasset is not entirely as medium of payment in a decentralized platform, but also as a means to uplift the lives of the poor indigenous population. With the rise of Bitcoin and other popular altcoins, Indigen will ultimately function as a donation cryptoasset where portion of the purchases and rewards will be used to help the poor indigenous people in areas like education, medicine, human rights, property and environmental protection.

Project: Indigen ONE

T he prime objective of the Indigen ONE Project is to become a single, unified platform for both Indigen merchants, their customers and Indigen cryptoasset holders to conduct their day to day activities.

Secondly, in order to purse the Indigen vision of preserving the indigenous culture using blockchain technology, Indigen ONE will serve as our staging platform for all our blockchain-related projects and community services, including:

Web Wallet
Desktop Wallet
Mobile App
Indigen Affiliate Program
Indigen i.Pay will enable merchants to accept payments in Indigen tokens
Indigen i.Mall will allow sellers to showcase their products which can be bought with Indigen tokens
Indigen Foundation will pursue charity projects to help indigenous groups worldwide wherein portion of the purchases of our tokens goes to various outreach programs.
Indigen Events Management will conduct various exhibits, trade shows, conventions and seminars pertaining to education and promotions of the indigenous people and their native products. Payments to participate in these events must be made in our native currency or tokens and the revenue that will be generated from these events will be shared among token holders.
Merchant Connect Program

One of the main challenges of startup companies and small businesses especially among the low income indigenous population, is the ability to adapt to modern technologies that they can utilize to boost their business growth. Most of them have limited knowledge to many technological tools that can assist them in their business operations, and a lot of them can’t even afford to pay for expensive software or to setup their online presence. That is why one of the services that we are offering for merchants in general is to provide them with the basic and necessary tools to simplify their adaption to modern technologies. We have developed a number of tools that are the primary needs of SMEs which they can take advantage of immediately with the least cost for them.

Our Merchant Connect program will provide merchants and business owners useful online tools at very affordable monthly subscription fees (paid in our native tokens) to help them in their business operations in exchange for promoting our advocacy, utilization of the Indigen tokens and giving various privileges to the indigenous people, especially those among the poor, such as discounts, giveaways, and other provisions that will benefit them in many ways. Some of the online business tools readily available for merchants are as follow:

Customer Loyalty Rewards Program (credit and redeem cash or reward points to and by Indigen users)
Customer Management System (i.CMS)
Online POS for Product Ordering System (i.POS)
Stocks and Inventory Management System (i.SIM)
Employee Management, Timekeeping and Payroll
Job Order Management for Accounts Receivables
and more to come in the future…

These online tools will greatly increase the demand for the tokens as IDGX will be their only means to subscribe to these services.

Project: Indigen BUILD

The United Nations (UN) declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL2019) to raise awareness and “appreciate the important contribution they make to our world’s rich cultural diversity.”

We at Indigen believe that in order to preserve native cultures and traditions, we must first preserve their languages. That is why this 2019, to coincide with the declaration by the UN as International Year of Indigenous Languages, we have started working on a project, commencing in the Philippines, which involves research and collection of indigenous languages to help revive and preserve various native dialects.

The project is called B.U.I.L.D. which is an acronym for Blockchain Unabridged Indigenous Language Database since we are using distributed ledger technology (DLT) as the repository of data due to the immutable nature of blockchain and the ability to time stamp information and to keep track of historical records.

Furthermore, once the data have been recorded on the blockchain, we will apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) or machine learning technologies to allow real time translations between native languages or tribal dialects. This way, we hope to bridge the gap between various tribes and eliminate the thought of cultural differences and language barriers.

Native languages are slowly being forgotten by younger generations due to fast paced modernization. Once we start forgetting our native tongue, we will also start to forget our traditions, arts and history. Through BUILD, we hope to gain back the interest of the younger generation and help preserve their unique identity.

One of the key features of BUILD is the ability to reward users with IDG who contribute to our project such as adding entries into the database, upvoting entries, and so on.

Continue reading about BUILD in this article.

Other Projects

There are other blockchain projects in our pipeline, among which are:

Digital Identity System
Supply Chain Management of Indigenous Products
Governance
Healthcare
Education
and more…

Each of these projects require separate documentations so we will tackle them one by one in separate articles.

Indigen (IDG) and Indigen XT (IDGX) Cryptoassets

In order to properly implement all our proposed solutions and projects, we decided to come up with two types of cryptoassets since both of these assets have their own set of advantages and limitations.

For example, most of our blockchain projects will be most efficient and cost-effective if we run and manage our own blockchain network, instead of relying on third-party or existing blockchain networks in the market. Since all of these existing blockchains have their own native tokens to read and write into their ledgers, it will be cumbersome for our users to acquire and receive these tokens. Likewise, it will be very costly for us to reward our users with third party tokens.

For this reason, we developed our own distributed ledger based on masternode protocol with a native cyptoasset called Indigen (IDG) which will be used primarily as rewards for users who participate and contribute to our projects, and at the same time can be used by our merchants as reward tokens when they implement their own Customer Loyalty and Rewards System (see Indigen ONE Project). These tokens can then be used by their customers to purchase products or services from them.

IDG was launched in December of 2017 without initial coin offering (ICO).

On the other hand, in January of 2019, and in order for us to raise additional funding to develop our upcoming blockchain projects (starting with BUILD), we decided to create a separate ERC-20 token called Indigen XT (IDGX) — XT stands for Extended Token — and launched an ICO because a masternode blockchain does not have support for smart contracts. In other areas of the Indigen ecosystem is the need to deploy smart contracts because we have designed a reward system for our token holders in order to encourage them to keep their tokens and to prevent excessive dumping on the exchange. We are going to set aside a portion of the profits that the company generates from the Indigen ONE platform and distribute the said profit to all IDGX stakers — when they keep their tokens in their private wallets outside the exchanges for a specific period of time — and paid out either in ETH or in our native token.

However, we can not consider it as a security token because the profit we distribute is not in anyway a form of shareholders dividends, but simply a reward for staking the tokens. Likewise, the IDGX will be used primarily as mode of payment on our platform in a controlled environment using smart contracts running on Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).

Part of the proceeds in the ICO will be used in our various charity programs and to coordinate with various indigenous groups for us to be able to establish partnerships with them in order to secure their support in the development of our projects. Since without their full support, we will not be able to properly execute our objectives.

One of the key uses of IDGX is for transfer of assets. For example in the blockchain-based property registry that we will develop in order to protect the properties of the indigenous people, it will be possible to assign existing assets to another person by means of an electronic deed of sale. This transfer of properties will be controlled by smart contracts and settled using the IDGX token.

Another use of the IDGX token is that, once we are able to complete the Digital Identity Management System of indigenous people, and we are able to accumulate enough data, other service providers who may want promote their services to the users, without breaching privacy and with the users consent, these service providers will need to pay using our token, and the users who subscribe to receive promotional offers will receive a portion of the payments coming from these providers in exchange for using our platform.

There will be a lot more uses for IDGX as we continually develop and enhance all our projects.

To participate in our ICO and help us reach out to more poor indigenous groups, please visit https://idgx.asia

IDG Technical Brief

Indigen is an ecosystem with a mission not just to uplift lives and preserve cultures, but also to protect mother earth. We are one of those projects that dissent traditional PoW cryptocurrencies which consume so much energy and posing threat to the environment.

Indigen is based on masternode concept which is very sustainable and does not rely on specialized miners, therefore helps save energy. Using what we call SPEnD (Swift, Private, Energy-efficient, Decentralized) technology for low energy usage, super fast transaction confirmation; and PosS (Proof of shared Staking) protocol which gives fair opportunity for all our coin holders to earn portion of block rewards.

Indigen Core was modeled after PIVX SwiftX technology, Zerocoin and Bitcoin Green protocols.

IDG Key Features

Indigen is an open source, anonymous, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency brought forth from the same philosophy that drives the principles of a secure, private and energy-efficient mineable cryptocurrency.

Fast and Low Fee Transactions

Indigen transactions are confirmed and made spendable in matter of seconds, using masternodes to guarantee validity of transactions — very advantageous to merchants. Unlike PoW which needs long and several confirmations before funds are validated and made available. Starting at 0.0001 IDG, our transaction fees are extremely low compared to popular cryptocurrencies today.

Private and Secure

Private, peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies have become more popular in the past few years due to privacy issues in some cryptos such as Bitcoin. Indigen offers full privacy by eliminating traces of transactions to hide the source of incoming funds. And in using masternodes to secure the network, it is far more efficient and scalable than the original PoW mining protocol.

Energy Efficient PoS

Bitcoin mining may soon consume more energy than all the countries in the world combined, making the outdated PoW SHA-256 algorithm not sustainable. Indigen eliminates this problem of massive energy consumption using PoS to validate transactions which can be operated on regular computers. And with our proposed PosS protocol, getting block rewards is even more simpler.

IDG Specifications

Here’s a quick summary of the technical details of Indigen (IDG):

Protocol: Proof-of-shared-Staking (PosS)
Ticker Symbol: IDG
Maximum Supply: 17,000,000 IDG
Block Time: 60 seconds
Block Rewards: 17 IDG
Masternode Collateral: 17,000 IDG
Rewards Breakdown: 80% masternodes, 20% stakers
Approximate transactions per second: 150 Tx/s

IDGX Token Specifications

Here’s a quick summary of the technical details of Indigen XT (IDGX):

Token Name: Indigen XT
Token Symbol: IDGX
Token Standards: ERC-20
Token Address: 0xaEb8337d5BD9a94BBFA016B0a1dC26224D560A05
Maximum Mintable Supply: 100,000,000 IDGX
Initial Minted Supply: 40,000,000 IDGX
Date Minted: 27 January 2019
ICO Price: 0.0001 ETH ($0.02)

For complete details of our token sale and to participate, visit the https://idgx.asia

References

International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs
iwgia.org

2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages
iyil2019.org

PIVX
pivx.org

Bitcoin Green
savebitcoin.io

Zerocoin
zerocoin.org

OpenZeppelin
openzeppelin.org