The Veris Foundation whitepaper is now publicly available. Why we delayed the release.

Our journey building Veris began in February 2017 with a discussion of if blockchain and smart contracts could make a significant impact on the efficiency of the American healthcare system. We found the answer to this question was a resounding yes, and along the way also determined specific use cases where blockchain could begin reducing the inefficiency of the system.

This led us to begin designing a blockchain to address one of those use case’s — the claims process. The specificity of our solution also created a tricky business situation as to what we release publicly, and when to release the information. Three specific factors kept us from releasing our whitepaper when we completed it in the Fall of 2017. These are:

Creation of the Veris Foundation Business Entity. This was perhaps the most difficult portion of the process. Surprisingly difficult. We are building a platform that will be used by many different payers and providers — groups that traditionally do not trust one another. A scenario that is ideal for blockchain. Though the environment may be ideal for the application of blockchain, we needed to form our business in a way that allows each stakeholder the maximum confidence they could have in moving their claims to our platform while sharing the platform with their competitors.

To do this we wanted two things:

1. Firstly, to have the Veris Foundation to be held to the highest levels of transparency required of a business entity in the United States today.
2. Secondly, the firm should have no equity. The lack of equity is critical. If you are Aetna, why would you move your claims to our platform if there is a reasonable chance that United Health may just purchase Veris? The Veris Foundation was formed as a non-profit as it is the only business entity in the US that satisfies these two conditions. Many foreign business entities would allow for this in some way (note all of the blockchain firms registering overseas yet designing for the US market). We quickly ruled out incorporating in a foreign country as we felt this would decrease confidence in Veris from the users of the platform. It would also pass up an opportunity to show that blockchain based crowd sales may be game change in allowing mission based non-profits in the US to design technology solutions which have until now been the sole domain of venture capital backed private entities.

The Veris Foundation Endowment and Platform Guarantee. Our biggest hurdle to success is not creating the technology (though the smart contracts powering our platform are far from trivial)— rather it is the incumbents in the healthcare system who profit from inefficiency who are the biggest hurdle. These incumbents are extremely well funded, and will not just walk away from their profits. Their best strategy is to delay adoption of the Veris platform, waiting until we run out of funding. This is why, of the $40 Million USD crowd sale, $37 Million will be placed into an endowment.

This endowment will be able to fund operations for many years. Much longer than incumbents will be able to delay the implementation of our platform. The concept of using a crowd sale, or in our case selling software licenses to the platform, to create a new well funded, mission driven entity is a concept that we feel is new and can change the face of business in the US. This is not something we wanted to give away until we were certain we are ready to launch. Additionally, the endowment comes with a guarantee.

If Veris does not meet specific growth rates outlined in our whitepaper, the endowment will be liquidated and returned to those who participated in the crowd sale. No ICO has ever done this. While this guarantee is not in the form of a smart contract, one Veris deliverable for 2018 is to create this contract (using other chains to facilitate this) and release it to the community for use by other entities.

Intellectual Property / First Mover Concerns. Public blockchains and the smart contracts associated with them can not be made a firms intellectual property in any easy way. Therefore, being a smaller firm what would keep a better funded rival from just copying our work? Or more so, just attacking the claims process as well? There are approximately 60 different ICO’s going on right now addressing healthcare, and of those 60 approximately six may possibly overlap with the market for our product. The vast majority of these competitors are well funded, though the design of their blockchain does not seem to address any specific use cases.

These three things prompted us to keep our whitepaper close. Our blockchain has been functional since October, our prototype smart contracts are in development in our Github, and we are in discussions with firms looking to deploy our technology. Now is the time to share our best thinking with the world.