The Book of

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The Book of Fermat

Copyright Fermat May, 2017 Edition 1

“It was when I was in the midst of solving another problem that I discovered a new space — a realm of pos-sibilities that heretofore had been a vacuum.”

Luis Fernando Molina

By Tom Lyons

Graphic Design by Ignacio Figueroa

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Contents

Welcome to the Internet of People 4

Part I: Building the Internet of People 5 The Internet: Death and birth of a dream 6 A new alternative 7 Fermat: A practical vision for a better way 8 Graphchain – the open social graph 9 Redtooth – the direct connection 11 Person-to-person apps – the Internet in our pocket, not theirs 12 The IoP token – our key to governing ourselves 13

Part II: Living in the Internet of People 14 A cyberspace for all 15 As it was supposed to be – The Internet of People for individuals 15 Open for business – The Internet of People for entrepreneurs 16 Makers make their mark – The Internet of People for developers 17 An interesting proposition – The Internet of People for investors 17 A more just society – The Internet of People for everyone 19

Part III: Fermat yesterday, today and tomorrow 20 The early days 21 The project moves out into the world 22 Fermat today and tomorrow 24 Appendices 25

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IntroductionWelcome to the Internet of People

Our world is at a crossroads. The digital technologies we have developed over the past 30 years have provided unprecedented levels of freedom and autonomy to individuals all over the globe. But these same technologies can be used for unprecedented levels of surveillance and control – and often are.

Our technologies allow us to find, create, and share information on an unprecedented scale, and give individuals the tools to accomplish things previous generations could not have imagined. But these same tools can and are used for propaganda, theft and fraud of unimaginable proportions, and for new forms of aggression, espionage, and war.

The technologies themselves are agnostic. As always, it’s people who decide if tools are to be used for good or ill.

Fermat is an ambitious project to use the digital tools at our disposal to build a new and more human-friendly cyberspace alongside the corporate and government-run cyberspace we

have now. A cyberspace in which individuals and organizations can interact freely, independently, autonomously, safely and, if they choose, privately.

It’s a simple idea, but with important implications. If it works, the result will be a true Internet of the people, by the people, and for the people. That could change a lot of things, we think for the better.

This is no utopian fantasy or political manifesto. Rather it is a practical effort by some very smart and talented people who are concerned about how the current Internet is developing, and who want to correct the imbalances by providing a new option alongside the old.

Our goal is to ensure that the fantastic technologies we have built serve us and not the other way around. This is a natural desire shared by millions of people.

Whether you are an investor or farmer, artist or entrepreneur, the Internet of People has something to offer you. In this paper we lay out the vision for this new world, and show you how it is already becoming a reality.

If this sounds like a place for you, we invite you to join us. It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s open to all.

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Part I

Building the Internet of PeopleCyberspace has been colonized by corporations and governments. What started out as a vibrant and powerful tool for individuals has increasingly become a hostile environment for our digital selves. It need not be.

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The Internet: Death and birth of a dream

Whenever we venture out into the Internet today, our digital selves are almost completely dependent on the services of private companies.

Whether we intend to share our thoughts with friends, get information, send a message, arrange a trip, or find true love, we are forced to use a private platform of some kind. That means entering a commercialized zone of the net and relying on a third party to do our business for us.

When we venture out into the Internet today, our digital selves are also almost completely exposed. There is hardly any path we can walk through cyberspace where someone is not watching what we do, where we go, who we talk to, the things we say, and what we buy or sell.

In thousands upon thousands of corporate and government databases, organizations are keeping dossiers on us, trying to construct pictures of who we are and what we want so they can sell us things, or just because they think they ought to know.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the World Wide Web appeared in the 1990s, people saw how the Internet could be a tool to empower the individual, a channel for spreading knowledge and speaking truth to power. They hoped to use it as a pathway to new and decentralized social and political structures. Some cyber citizens even declared their complete independence from government 1.

These dreams have not come true.

Today, tech giants like Google and Facebook have become the gatekeepers to cyberspace. Services like Amazon, Uber or Airbnb have become quasi-monopolistic providers of services. Governments are increasingly

controlling and censoring the Internet for national aims 2.

And instead of being free to use, the Internet has become exceedingly expensive: the fee most often being intimate information about ourselves that we provide willingly or, all too often, without knowing it.

The net is also far from secure, as evidenced by the almost daily barrage of news about hacks, security breaches, and cyber-espionage. And while it remains a potent channel for spreading knowledge, it has at the same time become the greatest mechanism for disseminating lies and propaganda the world has ever seen. Many people – including those instrumental in designing today’s Internet – are extremely concerned 3.

1 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.2 The open, universal internet is over. But did it ever really exist?3 The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

Internet of People

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A new alternative

What happened?

One problem is centralization. As the Internet grew in popularity, large companies built platforms to provide services. The best of them became quasi-monopolists. This was almost inevitable: from a technical and scale perspective, one global social network or one global search engine makes sense. But giving so much control to just a handful of companies can also be dangerous.

The other problem is that the Internet was not designed with individual privacy and safety in mind. It is in the nature of today’s technology to leave traces, for instance our IP addresses or the headers in our emails; or to expose our private information, whether in transit on insecure lines or in the leaky and often insecure databases of the companies to whom we entrust our data.

But what if there was an alternative?

What if it was possible to build a parallel cyberspace where people were more important than companies? Where our digital selves could wander safely, knowing they were not being spied on, and were in control of their own information?

The good news is, the technologies and techniques already exist to develop such an Internet.

The Fermat project was started almost three years ago by a small group of visionaries, developers, and investors who saw this opportunity for change and felt compelled to take it.

Since then they have been working behind the scenes to get the ball rolling. Now the time has come to open the project to the public. This is important, because Fermat is meant to be a public good – a tool to create a completely

open Internet that is managed by its users, freely available for all, and a safe haven for our digital selves.

This is the dream of Fermat.

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Fermat: A practical vision for a better way

The Internet of People vision turns the current Internet paradigm on its head. Instead of massive centralization, we offer radical decentralization. In place of overexposed data, we offer individuals almost complete control over their personal information.

The Internet of People is based on the principles that:

• Instead of countless gatekeepers, there should be no unnecessary middlemen in the Internet.

• Instead of a network of companies that connect us to others and handle our transactions for us, we should be able to connect directly to each other, and do the transactions ourselves.

• Instead of having to move through a cyberspace in which our personal data is constantly at the mercy of others, our digital selves should be in control of their own destinies.

To do this, the project is building a decentralized, open-source, community-built-and-run network that will allow people to do all the things they do now on the Internet – from social media and instant messaging to hailing cabs, finding dates, booking trips, and buying houses – but without the need for a Facebook, an Uber, an eBay, a WhatsApp, or any other business in the middle. And we are doing it in a way that is safe and secure and gives people back control over their data.

Our vision for this new cyberspace is based on a number of core beliefs. We believe people should be able to:

• Have complete control over their personal information and find each other directly

without having to sign up for private networks.• Connect, interact, and securely transact with

others directly, without having to rely on third parties to bring them together or worry about being spied on or having their data mined.

• Run the Internet services they want themselves, on their own devices, instead of doing their business on servers outside their control.

• Access the necessary Internet infrastructure freely as a publicly available service.

• Democratically decide how the network is developed and managed.

To put these principles into practice, the project is working on a set of core technologies that will form the basic Internet of People infrastructure. The most important of these are described below.

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Graphchain – the opensocial graph

Today when we want to find each other on the Internet, we have to register with a private network.

If we want to share our private thoughts and experiences with friends, we have to register with a social network like Facebook – which then owns and can do what it wants with the information we provide about ourselves as well as the records of everything we post and with whom we share. If we want to book a room in another city we have to register with a service like Airbnb, which likewise keeps our information for itself, including where we went and when and – through reviews – how we behaved while there.

There is no doubt that companies like Facebook and Airbnb provide valuable services. They not

only connect us with like-minded individuals, but also vet and vouch for who we are. But there is also no doubt that all this registering is both redundant and highly insecure. We simply have no control over what these companies do with the intimate details of our lives.

In the Internet of People, this approach is turned around. Instead of registering with private networks to help us find each other, we post our own profiles, which we control, and so find each other directly.

To make this possible, the Fermat project is developing a new technology called graphchain. This will be used to create a single global, open social graph onto which people can upload information about themselves. It’s a bit like a giant digital bulletin board where people can advertise their interests and let themselves be found, either by other people or by businesses.

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The big difference between this approach and the databases of the Facebooks, Twitters, LinkedIns, or Googles of the world is that users have complete control of their information. You can upload as much or as little about yourself as you want. You can also upload as many versions of yourself as you want, in the form of different profiles: one for social networking, another for business dealings, and so on.

The graphchain is cryptographically secure, so nobody can alter or misuse your data. With this technology you can choose to interact anonymously, pseudonymously, or openly with others in all sorts of different contexts. You can control who has access to your information and revoke this access if you are not happy with how they use it.

The graphchain solves one of the main problems of today’s Internet: lack of control over our personal information. In the Internet of People, our digital selves can travel through cyberspace wearing any costume they like, being whomever they choose to be with whomever they choose.

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Redtooth – the direct connection

Today, when we want to connect with each other, we must rely on private companies. If we want to chat with our friends and family, we sign up with WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. If we want to share photos and videos, we register with Instagram or Pinterest. If we want to make video calls, we create an account on Skype. All of these are useful services. But in order to enjoy them, we must surrender the intimate details of who we are, who we talk to, and what we say and do to a third party we do not really know.

In the Internet of People, we will no longer need third parties to connect us. Instead, we will connect our devices directly and securely to each other and share things privately among ourselves.

To make this possible the project is building a technology it is calling Redtooth, which is like a

global version of Bluetooth. Redtooth allows two devices to “pair” over the Internet the same way Bluetooth allows two devices to pair over radio waves.

Like Bluetooth, Redtooth opens up a direct connection between devices without any intermediary. Unlike Bluetooth, however, one device can pair with as many other devices as required. Once the devices have been paired they can communicate, transact, or do almost anything else with each other.

Redtooth solves another great problem of today’s Internet: that of the digital breadcrumbs of information we leave lying around when we travel through it. With Redtooth we can create safe and secure pathways through cyberspace that lead directly to our destination of choice, pathways our digital selves can travel with no fear of being spied on or tracked.

The Book of Fermat

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Person-to-person apps – the Internet in our pocket, not theirs

Today’s Internet provides limitless possibilities to do things. We can order taxis and food, watch movies and share videos, create things, build things, make music, publish novels. We can book flights, find answers, read news, make news or fake news. But whatever it is we do, we are dependent on the servers of third-party providers – in other words, on machines owned by someone else with the ultimate power to do whatever they like with our data.

Thanks to advances in our technology, especially in the power of devices like our smartphones, we no longer need to use this paradigm. We can now be our own servers. This has led the project to develop the concept of person-

to-person apps, which will be the key to the person-to-person economy that the Internet of People will make possible.

In the world of person-to-person apps, we download the services we want to use directly to our devices, and run them there, in an environment under our control.

Here too the project is addressing a key problem of today’s Internet: that of having to enter the private domain of a private company to make use of an online product or service. In our new world, the private companies will send their products and services to us, and our digital selves will make use of them, so to speak, “at home.”

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The IoP token – our key to governing ourselves

Most of the technologies mentioned above already exist, and where they do not the project is inventing the missing pieces. But if we are building a new infrastructure, with its own technologies and servers, aren’t we just substituting a new private intermediary for the old ones?

The answer is “No” on several counts.

For one, the Internet of People infrastructure is open source and free to use. It is being conceived as a public good. In the same way that Tim Berners-Lee made HTML freely available and so created the World Wide Web, the Fermat project will make the necessary infrastructure freely available and so create the Internet of People. And just like with HTML, no single entity will own or control the technology.

Secondly, the Internet of People is decentralized. Instead of a monolithic entity building huge data centers to control all the processing, the infrastructure of the Internet of People is run by its users. Like other decentralized networks, it provides incentives for people to make their own computing available to the network to run the necessary services. In place of corporate investment, we have community power.

Where do these incentives come from?

We have taken our cue from successful cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin and

Ethereum, and created our own medium of exchange: the IoP token. This will be the unit of value in our new Internet, digital money that people can earn for helping to run the infrastructure, for supporting the community, or when interacting with each other. It is a digital currency that is secure, inflation proof and – importantly – freely exchangeable for “real” money.

All of this will be developed and run by the community. While in the early phases the project built the basic infrastructure on its own, the governance of the infrastructure is now being made public. Increasingly the community is making decisions on how the Internet of People should be further developed and who will do the work of building and maintaining it.

This may sound like a recipe for chaos. But starting with Linux we have seen how open source projects can be very successful, and how the power of the community can be harnessed to create amazing things. Thanks to the open source movement and to more recent cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin or Ethereum, we have also learned a lot about how such projects can be collectively managed.

As with the existing technologies we are using to build our infrastructure, when it comes to governing our new cyberspace, many of the concepts needed to make it work already exist and have been proven to be effective. To these we are adding a number of important innovations of our own to help ensure we reach our ultimate goal – a free Internet for all.

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Part II

Living in the Internet of PeopleThe Internet of People offers a radical new vision of online life. It is a cyberspace in which people are more important than companies or machines, but where there is plenty of opportunity for all.

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A cyberspace for all

The original dream of democracy was to create a world in which every person was free and all were equally important – politically and socially. It was to create a society in which the community governed itself, and where everyone was guaranteed basic rights and respect, but where citizenship also carried with it a set of basic responsibilities.

This dream has yet to be fully realized in the real world. With the Internet of People we are building a section of cyberspace where we think the conditions are right to create such a world online.

What will this world look like?

As it was supposed to be – The Internet of People for individuals

For users, the Internet of People will be very much like the Internet we have now – while at the same time being completely different underneath.

It will have just as many interesting and useful products and services to choose from as we have today. But instead of having to register

with private platforms to enjoy these services, companies and platforms will register with us – and only with the version of ourselves we want them to see.

That’s because the open social graph that forms the backbone of the Internet of People is designed to let you create and upload any number of different profiles for any number of purposes. You can have one digital self for friends and family, one for business and career. You can have digital selves that contain information about your “real world” self, and others that allow you to travel through cyberspace anonymously.

In this new part of the Internet your digital life will be much easier: instead of constantly re-entering the same information for every website you want to join or use, you can share a single profile with any number of apps. You will also have more control over your data: instead of providing irrelevant or unnecessary pieces of information about yourself every time you register on a new platform, you only share the information really needed for a given transaction.

This new cyberspace will be far safer too. On the open social graph your identity information is cryptographically secure, so no one can steal it. And you can trace where it goes, so no one can abuse it.

Because the graphchain maintains a secure record of the relationships between people, it creates a world where it is easier to establish trust. In the Internet of People, if you encounter a stranger online who says he knows a friend of yours, you will be able to easily verify this fact. Similarly, if the Department of Motor Vehicles certifies that you have a driver’s license and are over 18, you can reuse this information in other apps without having to provide a copy of your license or give away your birthdate. And because Redtooth is cryptographically secure as well, when you connect with someone else, you can be sure that no one is spying or listening in.

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There is much more we could say about the new possibilities in this self-sovereign digital identity paradigm 4 that the Internet of People is implementing – more than we can fit into this paper. But there are two other points worth mentioning.

Since the infrastructure for connecting people is now a public good, and we no longer need to pay for services with our private data, the Internet of People will be far cheaper to use than the Internet we have now. In fact, it can even make us money. That’s because, as we explain below, in this new world businesses will have a strong incentive to pay us to read their ads and consider their proposals.

This is not farfetched. Large corporations have long understood the value of our personal data, which is why they are so happy to provide us seemingly free services in order to get their hands on it. In the Internet of People, we also think personal data is very valuable. We just believe that value should belong to the person whose data it is.

Because the Internet of People is public and community run, as a member you will also be a part owner. As opposed to today’s Internet of anonymous corporations, our new cyberspace is a collective run on democratic principles. All of us can have a say in how it is built, and all of us can help maintain it, promote it, improve it, and keep the dream alive.

4 Self-sovereign digital identity, in which the user holds and controls his or her personal data, has been a goal of many in the digital identity community for some time now. Fermat is one of the first projects to make it possible on a global scale. See http://www.coindesk.com/path-self-sovereign-identity/ for more.

Open for business – The Internet of People for entrepreneurs

While we believe strongly in decentralization, and do not trust large, monolithic and quasi-monopolistic organizations, that doesn’t mean we are against commerce. Quite the contrary, we believe the Internet of People will be an excellent place to do business – for entrepreneurs, startups, and established concerns alike.

With the open social graph, businesses will have a global database of potential customers at their fingertips – one in which they can find and directly reach out to people who have willingly expressed interest in the kinds of products or services they offer. This will be a boon to startups, which often struggle to develop their user base, as well as for established companies, which face equal challenges in growing it.

With its cryptographic proof of relationships and in many cases attested identities, businesses can be far more confident that they are reaching out to bona fide customers and prospects, and can have high confidence in the information these people disclose. That means less time wasted sifting through erroneous or incomplete data, or chasing bogus leads. And with its direct device-to-device connections and person-to-person

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apps, businesses will have new possibilities to create truly personal relationships with their customers, relationships built on trust and designed to last over extended periods of time.

Freed from reliance on the unsure nature of pay-per-click ads or dubious customer profiling, businesses will be able to spend their advertising budgets where they have the most clout: directly at their customers’ doors.

By only approaching those people who have already expressed an interest, businesses can get off on the right foot with their prospects. By offering those with promising profiles small sums to read their ads, businesses can launch highly effective direct marketing campaigns – campaigns that can generate higher levels of attention and higher conversion rates than currently seen today.

As anyone who has tried it can attest, growing a global online business is complicated and expensive. Expanding user bases mean increasing infrastructure investment just to maintain the connections and process the requests.

In the Internet of People, this infrastructure is provided to you free of charge:

• With graphchain you no longer need your own complex user databases.

• With Redtooth, you no longer need to build your own communications infrastructure.

• With person-to-person apps, customers can run your processes on their devices and manage their own data, reducing the scale of data centers and sometimes eliminating the need for them entirely.

Better yet, this infrastructure is global and infinitely scalable – bounded only by the limits of the Internet of People itself.

All this offers entrepreneurs, startups, small businesses, and established enterprises

something most of them yearn for: a level playing field against the giant, quasi-monopolists who are colonizing ever-larger chunks of today’s cyberspace and reaping the spoils.

Not only is the Internet of People business-friendly, it offers businesses a much better chance of competing on the strength of their ideas and the quality of their products, as opposed to the size of their war chests, their legal clout, or their government and industry connections.

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An interesting proposition – The Internet of People for investors

Bitcoin was worth almost nothing when it was released in 2009. Since then its value has increased a thousandfold, making millionaires of early adopters who held on to their coins. On the other hand, Bitcoin and other new cryptocurrencies have been and remain extremely volatile, and only a small proportion of them have risen in value in a meaningful way. This hasn’t stopped cryptocurrencies from becoming a very intriguing investment theme for many.

While Bitcoin was introduced specifically to be money, most cryptocurrencies today are being introduced not primarily as currencies but as a means of fueling and governing some online, decentralized platform. This is the case with ether, which provides the “gas” for Ethereum. And it is the case with the IoP token, which will be the medium of exchange, the source of incentive, and the fuel that powers the Internet of People.

How can you get tokens? There are many different ways.

As a direct investor, you can simply buy them.

Makers make their mark – The Internet of People for developers

The same things that make the Internet of People interesting for entrepreneurs make it interesting for developers and the digitally creative too. The Internet of People gives you the chance to work with cutting-edge technology to build fantastic new capabilities. By leveraging its ready-made, permissionless infrastructure, with standard protocols for locating, connecting to, and transacting with people, you can greatly reduce development time and cost, freeing up resources for developing great ideas.

As mentioned above, because most of the processing in the Internet of People typically occurs on the end user’s device, the growth of an application’s infrastructure is decoupled from the cost of servicing its user base. We believe this will be a great catalyst for new ideas and possibilities, making it possible for more people to get more apps and platforms from the drawing board to production and from there to viable, sustainable usage.

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If you are an entrepreneur, you will earn IoP tokens by running your business, as they are the medium of exchange (though they can be traded for fiat currencies if you wish). Alternatively, if you have a good business idea you can “sell” it to the project directly for tokens, and so become an investor. This is a particularly good way to earn a lot of tokens in these early days, when their value is still relatively low compared to their potential.

As a user of the Internet of People, you will have many chances to earn tokens as well. As explained above, you may be able to earn tokens by reading ads.

You may also be able to sell or rent information about yourself to companies that are interested in it, and so directly monetize your private data (instead of giving it away free to Google or Facebook for them to monetize).

You can also earn tokens by contributing to the community: you can become a miner, offering your computing power to the network in exchange for tokens; or, through the Fermat Contributions app, you can offer your services to the community, for example in marketing, public relations, or design, getting paid in tokens for your work.

Finally, we think the Internet of People offers something for the world at large simply by

providing a “reset” of the Internet.

By solving the problems that have arisen with today’s Internet, and addressing its current limitations, while keeping and even reinforcing all the good things it once promised, we are helping people return to the original dream. This will, we hope, be to

the benefit of all who choose to join.

A more just society – The Internet of People for everyone

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Part III

Fermat yesterday, today and tomorrowLike many similar projects in the history of technology, Fermat started with a single person and a vision. Over the past three years it has steadily grown, and now has chapters in countries around the world. Here we offer a short history of where the project has been, for those who are interested in its roots, and a vision for where we would like it to go, for those who are interested in helping shape its future.

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The early days

Fermat is the brainchild of Luis Fernando Molina, who was born in 1974 in Córdoba, Argentina.

As a teenager Molina became fascinated with computers, and taught himself to program from scratch. After studying physics at FAMAF University, Molina left Argentina for the Dominican Republic, where his computer skills caught the attention of a company building core banking systems for Latin American banks. Eventually he built up a company of his own, sold it, and went on to pursue various projects in different parts of the world. In 2013, he was in Dubai starting a new technology company to use computer algorithms to create geometric Islamic art when he came across Bitcoin. As with so many others, the encounter with the world´s first viable decentralized digital curreny changed his life. But while Molina quickly understood the power of the Bitcoin idea, he also saw some of its flaws. Much Bitcoin development at that time centered around wallets and exchanges, which Molina saw as just new types of

centralized structures. He wondered if he could use Bitcoin-like techniques to build a decentralized, open source, community-built-and-run network where people could transact directly between their devices, without any unnecessary middlemen, and so go back to the original Bitcoin vision. With this in mind he sat down with his old mentor and long-time friend Guillermo Villanueva to figure out how to do it.

They had no illusions about the complexity of the task, which was why they named their project Fermat – after the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, whose famous last theorem took over 300 years and 600 attempts to finally solve.

Like the creator of Bitcoin before them, Molina and Villanueva aimed to use as much existing technology as possible – the pieces of the puzzle that were already out there – but were prepared to invent new technology if needed.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, they were seeing a vision of a new and better world. They were also slowly starting a movement.

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The project moves out into the world

At first, Molina and Villanueva worked alone. But soon they began to look for others who might want to get involved. Molina pitched the idea to investors, but had no luck until he spoke to Lan Tschirky, a Swiss-based Vietnamese Angel Investor who had supported his previous business in Dubai and whose record of successful technology investments includes Powergetic (now Stem), the world’s largest intelligent energy storage network, and Avaloq, today one of Switzerland’s largest and most successful bank software solution providers. Tschirky liked the idea, and provided seed funding to get Fermat off the ground.

Molina’s first priority was to hire developers. But while the seed funding was a welcome lifeline, it was not enough to splurge on a large team. So instead Molina organized a competition in his native Argentina, the first prize of which was a chance to spend the summer in Budapest, where Molina was living at the time, and work on the project in exchange for room and board. This was 2014, and he received 180 applications. From these he chose six people to join Fermat, flew them all to Budapest, and set them up in a big, communal flat in the city. Their task: start prototyping the client-side infrastructure.

After that first summer Molina asked the group if they wanted to stay on. He offered to pay them either in national currencies or in the yet-to-be-invented IoP token. It was a measure of the early group’s belief in the project that they all chose to have significant portions of their salaries paid in the tokens (which, since the project did not yet have a blockchain on which to create the tokens, were accounted for in a spreadsheet).

Two of the original set of developers were from Venezuela, not Argentina, and they began talking about their work back home. This sparked what Molina calls a “chain reaction” in the country, with large numbers of talented developers,

worried about the uncertain economic situation in their home country, willing to work only for tokens. In this way the project grew during the fall of 2014 and throughout 2015, adding some four to five new people every month and carrying out a great deal of experimentation and development work.

In December 2015 Molina travelled to a conference in Mexico, where he spoke about Fermat in public for the first time. From that moment, the project spread outside of Latin America, gaining adherents in the US, Europe, and Australia. One of the most important of these was Philip Farah, a Fintech innovator, ex-McKinsey consultant and Cisco Systems Managing Partner based in Houston, Texas, whom Molina met in January 2016.

Molina credits Farah with helping him expand the Fermat vision from a project to enable device-to-device monetary transactions, which had been its initial goal, to the idea of enabling direct connections for any type of application. It was then that the full vision of the Internet of People was born.

Around that time the project published its first white paper, which was a mostly technical piece describing the client-side infrastructure. It also began reaching out to the general public, with articles in the press.

More importantly, by the end of 2016 the project was ready to start going live with key components and concepts. On the infrastructure side this began with alpha versions of the components needed to create the open social graph, including the profile server, the location-based network, and the content address network.

At the same time the project started its blockchain and began mining IoP tokens, the essential element of the incentive system intended to catalyze the build out of the Internet of People. IoP tokens were soon listed on various cryptocurrency exchanges.

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During the fall of 2016 the project had also begun organizing itself into chapters. Thanks above all to the work of Markus Maiwald, who developed the chapter structure, and Sarah Klostermair, who was responsible for social media and community management, the project began to open chapters and win adherents all over the world. By early 2017 it could count chapters in over 80 countries. The two also worked together to manage and support the growing community of IoP token miners.

Another key milestone in early 2017 was the release of the Fermat Contributions App and the Fermat Voting App, two key parts of the nascent community governance system. With these apps the project began implementing its distributed governance model, moving away from Molina’s “benevolent dictatorship” (as he put it) to a true self-governing community.

Using the Contributions App, anyone can now submit a Contribution Contract to the community

– that is, an offer of a service that would be of value to the project, including a suggested fee for the work expressed in IoP tokens. Posted in the Contributions Forum, the contract can be viewed by the rest of the community and, using the Voting App, community members can vote for or against the idea. If the contract is accepted, the contributor is guaranteed payment in IoP tokens from the system upon completion of the work.

At the moment, this represents a rather simple governance system. Looking to the future, the project has a roadmap for a sophisticated decentralized, self-governing model, taking the best ideas and learning from the experiences of similar projects in the past.

All of these are significant achievements for the small group of people who have been working over the last three years to get the vision going. Together, they represent the project’s first steps towards independence and self-sustainability.

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Fermat today and tomorrow

So now that it is here, where is Fermat going? The project’s present goals are clear, and can be divided into three categories.

Continue to build the infrastructure. On the infrastructure side, there is a detailed technical roadmap that lays out the different components that still need to be built, as well as the continued development of the existing components in order to reach full scale and capability. This includes building out the special servers needed to complete the desired functionality of graphchain, Redtooth and the person-to-person apps, as well as the IoP tokens and the governance system, while continuing to conceive and plan the development of new functionality.

Continue to build the community. Having built this exciting new cyberspace, we are now inviting everyone to come join us here. Markus and Sarah are continuing to work to found and support new chapters around the world. The project is also talking to investors and others who want to invest directly in IoP tokens and so support the growth of the Internet of People. The project is also talking to and working with several visionary entrepreneurs and developers who are excited to play a pioneering role in developing businesses and apps for this new cyberspace, individuals like

Adam Gelencser, the CEO of Virtual Planet, who is building his 3D virtual world on the Internet of People infrastructure. And of course the project is open to all individuals looking for a better, safer and more inviting home for their digital selves.

Begin to work with partner projects that share the same vision. They say there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. And often in history, when an idea’s moment has arrived, it will spontaneously come to life in many places at the same time. There seem to be movements arising all over the world of people who believe in individual freedom, privacy, decentralization, diversity, and collaboration, and like Fermat, many people are taking things into their own hands and building platforms where these ideas can flourish. That’s why Fermat is increasingly partnering with like-minded projects such as Cicada, Personal Data Locker, and the PIVX community, joining forces in a bid to build something better in cyberspace.

But of course we are not just looking for likeminded projects, but above all for likeminded individuals. The Internet of People is in its early days. We invite all of you to join us and help make it come alive.

www.fermat.org

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Appendices

Further reading

Fermat’s Inception

Fermat, the Internet of People and the Person to Person Economy

The Web of People

Bitcoin, Ethereum and the Internet of People

The Profile Server

Introducing the Graphchain

Introducing Redtooth

Contribution Contracts

Fermat Distributed Governance Model

The Location Based Network

Technical reading

First white paper: A Modular App Platform To Develop “Internet of People”

Apps. Second white paper: A Public and Open Peer-to-Peer Network of People

Software Requirements Specification

Road-maps

Fermat Road-Map

Contributions Governance System Road-map

Mining Governance System Road-map

Profile Server Road-map

IoP Wallets Road-map

Fermat Framework Road-map

Networks Statistics Road-map

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www.fermat.org

Mattermost: https://fermat.world/signup_email

web@fermat.org