Totem Live #101: What is decentralized, peer-to-peer accounting?
Totem Live is built on the idea that accounting ledgers should be fraud resistant, independently verifiable and able to communicate directly with each other, anywhere in the world, in real-time.
The result is an easy-to-use app for taking accounting off your ‘to-do’ list.
Totem’s peer-to-peer accounting protocol does the accounting and bookkeeping live in-app, with no accounting knowledge required by a user. It’s the first accounting system to operate dynamically, in real-time, without any manual entries or processing.
In practical terms, imagine sharing your Totem Identity with Uber. When you grab a ride, the invoice is created and automatically appears in your Totem Live Accounting app. It appears in the correct expense account and is already flagged as settled with the appropriate entries from your payment card made in banking. This seems obvious and yet it doesn’t exist.
Peer-to-peer accounting is what makes Totem Live the first-of-its-kind.
Our goal is to introduce a world where you share your Totem Identity with another party, be it a retailer in the consumer context, or a customer or vendor in a business context, and all the accounting is taken care of silently in the background without an accountant or bookkeeper in sight.
👉 Try out the Totem Live app — no blockchain or accounting expertise required
The “tl;dr” on Totem Live and peer-to-peer accounting is:
- No software installation or licence fees
- Two-step sign-up and you are good to go.
- Invisible, yet sophisticated accounting from expenses to invoicing are done automagically so you don’t have to do anything.
- Connection to (and do business) with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
- You own all your own data. (Hint: Cloud based accounting software owns and sells your data.).
- Available to all — completely independent of accounting software vendors, and will continue to operate, peer-to-peer, at all times, forever.
How does Totem Live work?
Totem Live connects the broken communication flow in accounting, book-keeping and finance. Today, most people can’t or don’t want to deal with accounting whether for personal or professional finances. It requires extensive manual workflows to gather and send transactional information to and from clients, partners and accountants. All of this information then has to be re-encoded again to reconcile documents with business activities, payments, and bank statements. Freelancers and people in businesses large and small suffer equally with the same heavy administrative burdens.
Currently, no common protocol exists to standardize the exchange of accounting data that would simplify the process. This lack of a common accounting protocol exacerbates the communication flow problem. This is no accident. The multi-billion accounting software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) industries have built successful business models in the absence of a standardized, universal accounting protocol.
This is where blockchain is the game changer. It made it possible to develop a real-time network, where transactions operate publicly in a peer-to-peer fashion, whilst data and Identities remain secure and private. The challenge was to build a peer-to-peer accounting protocol and an easy-to-use application. Totem did just that. It is the first full-fledged universal, decentralized, peer-to-peer accounting protocol with an application on top. The breakdown of Totem’s three layers are:
- Totem Blockchain Network: built with Polkadot’s Substrate.
- Totem Live Accounting: the customized protocol enables verifiable, fraud resistant communication of accurate verifiable information.
- Totem Live app: the user-facing application that can be a template for anyone.
Like the idea of peer-to-peer accounting and want to change the status quo? Join the Totem Live community!
