[ANN][HER]Herdius - A Decentralized Exchange Network For Crypto Assets

[herdius]

Herdius - A Decentralized Exchange Network

Why Herdius?

The future of the decentralized web is dependent on the next generation of decentralized financial infrastructure. In order to sustain future growth and facilitate the influx of new members to the blockchain ecosystem, it’s important to create a financial base layer that is capable of handling such influx. For the ecosystem to thrive, the use of cryptocurrencies and tokens must become more user-friendly by a considerable margin. Present day financial blockchain architectures still suffer from several shortcomings that hold back a broad mainstream adoption, most notably long transaction confirmation times, little scalability, and a lack of decentralization and liquidity.

Herdius vision is to considerably lower the barrier of entry to the token economy by offering a superior experience to institutional and end users alike.

To that end, we aim to introduce an innovative and robust blockchain architecture that addresses the above issues. Our goal is to design a highly performant and scalable transaction and exchange infrastructure which enables seamless interoperability between different blockchains. These are critical conditions for adoption by many service providers and present a significant user experience improvement.

The possibilities that arise from this are endless. We envision a world where you can instantly take a loan, sign up for an insurance, or access the entire dApp world services - all with just your identity on the Herdius chain. And since the Herdius core technology is intended as an open-source platform, we believe that many developers will consider building the next generation of decentralized apps on top of the Herdius chain.

What is Herdius?

Herdius is a decentralized exchange network. The best way to think about Herdius is as a new transaction layer in the cryptocurrency space: Herdius will sit between the users and the root blockchains of all relevant cryptocurrencies (or tokens). In blockchain terminology, Herdius is essentially a sidechain. A highly performant and scalable sidechain, that is. This way, Herdius can enable fast and seamless cryptocurrency transactions and peer-to-peer trading — even if the original chain is subject to long confirmation times. By establishing Herdius as the transaction layer for crypto assets, the underlying root chains could approach development at their own pace while Herdius would take care of the user experience.

How does it work?

As we explain in our technical paper (PDF), Herdius will be powered by a native proof-of-stake blockchain with several innovative features. Most notably, we are looking to introduce a new block architecture which we dubbed Blocks-of-Blocks (BoB). Without getting too technical here: BoB blocks are “stretchable” as they can contain so-called child blocks. This enables parallelized block validation — which goes a long way when high transaction volumes need to be handled. But that’s only one of many interesting features under Herdius’ hood. As outlined in our technical paper, Herdius introduces hallmark storage and payment highways to its chain in order to further increase scalability.

The HER Token

Utility
The HER token will be the staking currency on the Herdius blockchain. Hence, it allows any holder of HER to become a validator (similar to miners in Bitcoin) in the Herdius network. For their services, validators earn a share of the transaction fees and block rewards. Also, users will be able to pay transaction fees in HER at a lower rate in comparison to fees paid in other cryptocurrencies.

Value
HER is designed to be economically relative to transaction volume inside the Herdius network. All staked validator nodes will be entitled to a share of total transaction fees (proportional to their stake's size). Therefore, owning HER becomes more desirable the higher the transaction activity is within the Herdius network.

Network Governance
HER token holders are the key participants in the Herdius network. As such, we want them to play a central role in the governance and development of the network. To that end, we will give HER token holders several options to become involved in the future development of the Herdius network, for instance by hosting regular smart-contract based suggestion sessions and votings on important ecosystem matters.

A German ICO

Herdius is a project by the German Herdius GmbH, located in Berlin. Unlike many other ICOs with German involvement, Herdius is not relying on a Swiss foundation or subsidiaries in other jurisdictions. Instead, HER tokens will be sold directly by the German company. The Herdius team has disclosed its entire business plan and ICO model to German financial regulatory body, BaFin. The legal consulting was performed by a team of recognized blockchain experts, led by lawyer Nina-Luisa Siedler from the law firm DWF.

Token Allocation

Total Supply: 45.000.000 HER
Sold during pre-sale & ICO: 90%
Allocated to Herdius team: 10%

Token Sale Details

The Herdius ICO will be held in Q1 2018. Details will be announced here and on our official channels.
Our pre-sale currently is underway. Anybody who meets the minimum ticket size can participate in the pre-sale at the following discount structure:

15% - €50,000 (≈78.5 ETH as of 12/14/2017)
20% - €150,000 (≈236 ETH as of 12/14/2017)
25% - €300,000 (≈472 ETH as of 12/14/2017)
(thresholds in Euro due to ETH fluctuation)
  
All the details can be requested at ir@herdius.com.
We will, of course, disclose the pre-sale results before the ICO's launch.

More Information

Visit our website
Our white paper
Our technical paper
Our blog

Our Team
Balazs Deme, Founder & CEO
Jorgen Brandt, Senior Software Engineer
Thomas Euler, Ecosystem & Strategy
Soja Subhagar, Marketing Analyst
Albert Callarisa Roca, Senior Software Engineer
Rokas Budrauskas, Business Analyst
Carolin Beer, Software Engineer

Our Advisers
Dr. Nina-Luisa Siedler
Dr. Stefan Dittmer
Hans-Christian Fuchs

Connect with us
Twitter
Telegram
Reddit
Facebook
Github

Herdius in the Media
Analysis in Chains Podcast
BTC-ECHO (GER)
Wirtschaftswoche (GER)
Global Investor (GER)
Computerwelt (GER)

Become a Herdius Ambassador!

Are you interested in Herdius? Do you have a trusted voice in the blockchain & cryptocurrency community? Are you willing to support our mission by using said voice to assist our cause?
Then the Herdius Ambassador program might be for you! Herdius Ambassadors are trusted members of the blockchain and cryptocurrency community who want to help us spreading the word about Herdius. All of our ambassadors will be hand-picked by us. We look at our ambassadors as a direct extension of the Herdius team. We want to work with them, involve them and have fun while doing it.

Find all the information on our blog and apply.

This post will be updated with more information soon

Update History:
12/15/17 - added new media articles

[Colorblind]

Love your wording

"Herdius is essentially a sidechain. A highly performant and scalable sidechain, that is"

Going to read your wp to check what do you mean by that. Brb.

[andrealandia]

Contact me, if you need an italian translation

[herdius]

@asusx thanks, good luck is always appreciated!

@coloblind: thanks and happy to hear your feedback and answer your questions!

- Thomas

[Colorblind]

Too bad that your whitepaper have not a single answer about tech behind your proposition it only says things like "stuff will be built on top of our superspecial blockchain and it will be secure and decentralized". It's if today I decided to announce new coin:

"Hey guys, here I propose a new blockchain-based coin called supercoin. It will have small blocks, support millions of transactions per second, won't consume electricity will be bulletproof secure and anonymous. All I need to develop it - a couple of millions of dollars. GIEF."

Sorry but that's not going to work. We need detailed explanation of tech behind your proposition.

Also - empty GitHub is never a good thing.

[bigcancer]

Interesting, sustained attention

[herdius]

Too bad that your whitepaper have not a single answer about tech behind your proposition it only says things like "stuff will be built on top of our superspecial blockchain and it will be secure and decentralized". It's if today I decided to announce new coin:

"Hey guys, here I propose a new blockchain-based coin called supercoin. It will have small blocks, support millions of transactions per second, won't consume electricity will be bulletproof secure and anonymous. All I need to develop it - a couple of millions of dollars. GIEF."

Sorry but that's not going to work. We need detailed explanation of tech behind your proposition.

Also - empty GitHub is never a good thing.

We actually have a rather detailed technical explanation in our technical paper. We decided to put the technical details into a separate document (which is referenced at multiple occasions in the white paper) because some audiences aren't that technical minded.

In general, we obviously agree that a project like this takes a technical paper. Also, we are working on a first demo that will presumably be released in January.

I hope that answers your questions but don't hesitate to come back to us if it doesn't!

- Thomas

[Colorblind]

Too bad that your whitepaper have not a single answer about tech behind your proposition it only says things like "stuff will be built on top of our superspecial blockchain and it will be secure and decentralized". It's if today I decided to announce new coin:

"Hey guys, here I propose a new blockchain-based coin called supercoin. It will have small blocks, support millions of transactions per second, won't consume electricity will be bulletproof secure and anonymous. All I need to develop it - a couple of millions of dollars. GIEF."

Sorry but that's not going to work. We need detailed explanation of tech behind your proposition.

Also - empty GitHub is never a good thing.

We actually have a rather detailed technical explanation in our technical paper. We decided to put the technical details into a separate document (which is referenced at multiple occasions in the white paper) because some audiences aren't that technical minded.

In general, we obviously agree that a project like this takes a technical paper. Also, we are working on a first demo that will presumably be released in January.

I hope that answers your questions but don't hesitate to come back to us if it doesn't!

- Thomas

Sorry, missed that.

BRB - reading tech paper.

[herdius]

Sorry, missed that.

BRB - reading tech paper.

No worries! We realize that there are actually quite a few links in the post

[Colorblind]

Back from reading.

Can you explain how is your network ANY different from lightning network? I mean seriously - your technical paper is not answering this at all. All it says "It's better then lightning".
Also cross chain interactions are not clear.


And this will never work:

5.2 The order book
The order book at the core of the decentralized
exchange differs a lot from traditional
decentralized exchange approaches. The
Herdius order book should be imagined like a
central hub that matches orders from all the
makers as they come in. Thus, it is a collection
of order information and has the purpose of
order settlement and peer matching rather
than anything else. The order book is most
similar to an order-matching-party that
instructs users about which other users to
query regarding a specific order.
15
Matching up different nodes as well as their
t r a d e o r d e r s w i l l b e d o n e u s i n g a
communication system that provides bidirectional
sender and receiver anonymity as
well as outside unobservability. As low-latency
is key, our proposed peer-order-matching
mechanism will be based on the Loopix
anonymity system (Danezis), a mix networkbased
architecture that uses Poisson mixing
which is capable of independently delaying
messages to further prevent third party
linkability.

because consensus algorithm will require time to reach consensus, rendering real-time trading impossible in decentralized environment.

Also what's the deal with empty GitHub?
Where is your prototype?

[herdius]

Back from reading.

Can you explain how is your network ANY different from lightning network? I mean seriously - your technical paper is not answering this at all. All it says "It's better then lightning".
Also cross chain interactions are not clear.


And this will never work:

5.2 The order book
The order book at the core of the decentralized
exchange differs a lot from traditional
decentralized exchange approaches. The
Herdius order book should be imagined like a
central hub that matches orders from all the
makers as they come in. Thus, it is a collection
of order information and has the purpose of
order settlement and peer matching rather
than anything else. The order book is most
similar to an order-matching-party that
instructs users about which other users to
query regarding a specific order.
15
Matching up different nodes as well as their
t r a d e o r d e r s w i l l b e d o n e u s i n g a
communication system that provides bidirectional
sender and receiver anonymity as
well as outside unobservability. As low-latency
is key, our proposed peer-order-matching
mechanism will be based on the Loopix
anonymity system (Danezis), a mix networkbased
architecture that uses Poisson mixing
which is capable of independently delaying
messages to further prevent third party
linkability.

because consensus algorithm will require time to reach consensus, rendering real-time trading impossible in decentralized environment.

Also what's the deal with empty GitHub?
Where is your prototype?

Thank you for reading through the technical paper, will be happy to answer the points you brought up.

First of all we never say that we are better than Lightning Network, I actually credited Lightning for advancing Bitcoin and propelling innovation in the space that was so slow at the time. The only place we make use of anything similar to Lighning's architecture is in the Entity Highways, other than that we do not rely on smart contracts or payment channels.

An easy way to think of Herdius is to imagine a transaction layer on top of all existing blockchains and future ones. The one thing that is common in all chains is the private key you use to access your assets, even if it the blockchain is graph based - which I am sure we will see more of in the future. Herdius is going to solve everything on the wallet / private key level without relying on setting up communication channels with individual blockchains. For example in our case the Bitcoin dev team does not have to do anything in the future to make the Bitcoin chain compatible with ours, and we don't have to do anything either as once again we solve everything on the private key level and we just transmit the signed transaction back to the root chain as any wallet would. I think this also touches on the cross-chain interaction point, all you need is a wallet that is compatible with the Herdius network and then you are good to go. There is no need for the developers of the blockchain to implement an additional communication channel to Herdius.

You are right on the consensus part and that it takes time, what we outline, however, is a bi-directional exchange. Example: If Alice wants to buy BTC with ETH and BOB is selling ETH for BTC then they both submit their orders to the network and the central book matchmaking system matches them and the exchange happens. I do believe that it is possible to make real-time trading *- which isn't part of our current proposal as, again, we talk about bi-directional exchange only - happen somehow, this field is moving so fast that I am sure someone will make it possible, perhaps even on top of the Herdius chain in the future

Github / Prototype: We are looking to release a demo in January outlining the early blockchain prototype. I will personally work on it in the coming weeks so you are going to definitely see something up there soon. To our defense, the infrastructure we propose is a bit more complex than a DEX that is relying on smart contracts and can only trade ERC20 tokens.

Hope I answered your questions, and happy to discuss further if I didn't.

- Balazs

[moonblocks]

Are you aiming to release the working prototype in January before you begin the ICO pre-sale?

Doing so would definitely increase investor confidence!

[Colorblind]

Are you aiming to release the working prototype in January before you begin the ICO pre-sale?

Doing so would definitely increase investor confidence!

Indeed. I can't believe that with team of that size all there is - a whitepaper that is not very informative. Github should not be empty at the point where you start asking for money.

[herdius]

Are you aiming to release the working prototype in January before you begin the ICO pre-sale?

Doing so would definitely increase investor confidence!

@moonblocks: Thanks for your question! As we state in the opening post, the pre-sale period has already begun and we are in talks with interested parties. But we recognize your point and are aiming to release the demo while pre-sale is still open. We will definitely keep you posted in this thread.

@Colorblind: Sorry to hear that you found the technical paper not very informative. If you have any points besides those which you raised above (to which Balazs responded), please let us know. We are always looking to improve and clarify things.

- Thomas

[Altcoinster]

There are plans for a bounty campaign in the next time?

[herdius]

There are plans for a bounty campaign in the next time?

We are currently not planning to do a bounty campaign. What we do have, however, is our Ambassador Program. Maybe that's of interest to you as well? You can find all the details here.

[Ai7xpressTV]

Will there be a signature bounty campaign for Bitcointalk forum and what about a airdrop? Would be nice if you organize one.

[Foerster]

There will be an airdrop and it will be organized in an innovative way to engage the community and avoid the usual drawbacks.

[Xalia]

This is a great project. I was very interested in this project and I joined.
Egretia

[witch]

There will be an airdrop and it will be organized in an innovative way to engage the community and avoid the usual drawbacks.

Any details available for that kind of distribution? And shouldn't the pre-sale start in Q1 of 2018 or has it been postponed??