1. Introduction

Cryptocurrencies have been a rapidly growing phenomenon that captured global attention, by disrupting legacy financial services. Early adopters are excited by the freedom that the new world of crypto brings, and have been to adopt the narrative despite the technical challenges involved. However, the absolute majority was left behind, thus greatly limiting the adoption.

Many don’t have the time or boldness to learn anything new that is related to their money, hence they're always waiting for a trendsetter to pick up. This trendsetter role has been taken now by big corporations such as Facebook, who despite the privacy criticism, have been at the forefront of technological advancements.

The most focused push of Facebook in the blockchain space is Diem. The latest interview between Raoul Pal and Diem’s VP Dante summarizes it well: “Diem’s core mission is to improve both financial inclusion and financial mobility”

What Facebook is about to launch is the biggest unbanked and underbanked institution globally. Diem aims to provide modern banking services as we know them to over 2.7 billion Facebook users and to solve some of the main problems of cryptocurrencies such as adoption, high entry-level for regular users, and transaction costs. Diem will enable millions of unbanked users who don't have access to basic financial services such as savings, lendings, credit cards, and credit scores. All financial services most of us are taking for granted will become available to anyone with a smartphone through day-to-day applications such as Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook. This would help reduce social inequalities, open the door for new opportunities for developing countries, and enable emerging economies. 

That said, Diem will be facing several significant challenges. Governments and regulators will be closely monitoring Facebook, concerned with Diem’s challenge of the traditional governmental seigniorage rights. Developers will be encountering restrictions building their ideas, due to the closed garden nature of Diem. Users will also be deterred by Diem due to the association with Facebook, and concerns about their data being used for data mining and personalized targeting. This is where an opportunity reveals itself.  

2. Pontem Overview

Pontem is a decentralized platform that allows the development and testing of new products and apps based on the Diem technology stack. The platform is permissionless enabling anyone to experiment with their ideas and test their product market.

The goal is not only to create a permissionless, less restricted space where developers will be able to launch new projects, but also one where users will be able to experience these products the way the developers intended.

Pontem aims to be the “Kusama” for Diem, a Canary network, that will enable developers to test value in addition to technology, ensuring their products have market fit. This is a critical stage that will justify the developers investing time, effort, and money into applying and passing the necessary procedures of getting accepted into Diem. After testing their solutions in Pontem, developers will then decide whether it would be worth their time to pass all the tests and regulations compliance to add their product to the Diem ecosystem and Facebook user base. Pontem will provide tools that will help developers to package and deploy their latest product code updates to the Diem network.

While Pontem is a step towards launching on Diem, a feedback loop that will actually bring users out of the Facebook / Diem ecosystem into Pontem is also expected due to the fact that product managers and entrepreneurs will need to develop fully functional fintech products in order to test these prior to attempting to deploy them to Diem, which will result in an abundance of operational services and products being available for use on the Pontem network. 

We expect to see an emergence of decentralized versions of existing popular services, yet also we will evidence a completely new set of products and services enabled by this new technology.

The platform is cross-chain by design, which means that Pontem will enable access to liquidity, users, and adoption provided by other popular Polkadot protocols. Other cross-chain protocols such as Cosmos are also possible to integrate, however, it’s noteworthy that such integration depends on the existence of bridges between Polkadot and the respective protocol.

Pontem is fully compatible with the Diem tech stack, integrating the Move VM and the Move language compiler. Pontem is planned to run as a Polkadot Parachain; this will also enable cross-Parachain data exchange which will open the gate for new ideas and new opportunities. 

3. Pontem Network: Architecture

Pontem is an open-source permissionless blockchain that shares a number of design and feature similarities (and aims to become fully compatible) with Diem. Below is a description of the Pontem architecture:

3.1 Move VM

The Move language and the Move Virtual Machine, both developed by the Diem team, are among the safest smart contract technologies to date. Unique features implemented in Move VM and language include:

  • Access Control - In Move, any custom asset can be declared as a resource type, making it safe and access-controlled by default. This feature allows for example to maintain ownership information and privileges of digital assets even within smart contracts. If an asset is sent to a smart contract, ownership is not changed. For example, if a hacker gets access to a Move smart contract, he would not be able to withdraw the assets to his own wallet unless that functionality is a feature of the smart contract.
  • Atomic resources architecture - Prevents developers from making basic mistakes that are common in smart contracts development such as reentrance errors or double-spending errors. In Move, resources can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between storage locations.
  • Modules - Are similar to banks. Each resource is stored in an individual vault, controlled by the owner’s account. Resource operations are limited by the functions supported by the specific module, which may be called from outside the module. Developers can deploy new modules to the network.
  • Scripts - Each transaction on the network may contain a script that can call several modules or initiate several actions. Developers can use one transaction to engage a number of actions which significantly reduces the number of smart contracts required for an application. This results in safer applications, better user experience, and significantly more flexibility.
  • Bytecode verifier - An integral part of Move which checks new modules and scripts for security properties before these are published. Once verified, the Bytecode interpreter module executes the code. This feature reduces the number of runtime errors.
  • Formal verification - Modules can be verified using formal verification automatically before being deployed.
  • Gas system - Similar to the Solidity gas usage system, users set gas and gas prices for their transactions.

3.2 Parachain

Technology-wise Pontem aims to bring the Move VM and Move language to Polkadot and its ecosystem while maintaining compatibility with Diem. If economically feasible, the Pontem network will implement its own Parachain and include a Move VM pallet (A module that enables Move VM to operate on Substrate). An alpha version of the Move VM pallet is already implemented. The pallet will further need to be upgraded in order to support Substrate storage and gas. Pontem received a Web3 grant for the development of the pallet.

The Parachain will have its own validators who secure the network and connect to the Polkadot Relay Chain using Parathreads. Users and validators are also expected to participate in protocol governance. Through Parathreads and the Relay Chain, Pontem may access liquidity and users from other Parachains and, if supporting bridges exist, even from other protocols like Ethereum, Cosmos, Avalanche, or Binance Chain.

3.3 Standard Library

Diem features Standard Library, a framework for smart contracts development that allows product managers and entrepreneurs to quick-start their projects. The library contains features such as smart contracts to work with accounts and their balances, hashes, timestamps, fixed-point math, account limits, and more. In order to maintain compatibility with Diem, Pontem implements the same standard which allows developers can use their code on both networks. Standard Library still needs to be adopted for Substrate requirements as its currently missing native functions such as block number/timestamp, signatures, and more.

3.4 Toolset

New technology requires a set of useful tools to make developers' lives as easy as possible. Pontem will provide a rich toolset for developers. A number of tools are already available (adopted from Dfinance). All the below tools support a number of blockchains and allow migration  between network:

  • Move Language VSCode plugin
  • Compiler and package manager - allows to compile Move modules/scripts and publish/fetch them from Github
  • Resource viewer - allows reading resource data from Parachain storage
  • Disassemble Move binary and even read human-readable results 

More tools will be constantly developed in order to provide developers with a “Swiss knife” within the Pontem ecosystem.

3.5 Governance

Governance is an important part of the Pontem network as decentralized governance is one of the key aspects of true decentralization. Governance handles network decisions such as network code upgrades, deciding the rewards mechanism & details for validators. Pontem is going to use the standard Polkadot governance module, a stake-based voting mechanism allowing anyone in the network to participate in proposals votes or to create new proposals. While most proposals are active for a period of 8 days during which votes are accepted and at the end of the period a resolution is reached, emergency, shorter period proposals, are also possible. Governance uses a council mechanism, referring to several community elected nodes which approve proposals to reach a referendum and decline dangerous or malicious proposals. 

4. The Pontem Token

The Pontem network is fueled by the Pontem token which will have multiple utilities and functions within the network. Upon the launch of the network, inflation may be necessary to be added in order to maintain the financial incentives for liquidity providers and for validators to continue securing the network. 

  • Transactions fees 
  • Gas for Move VM execution instructions
  • Rewards for Parachain validators & nominators
  • Staking deposits of Parachain validators
  • Governance

More tools will be constantly developed in order to provide developers with a “Swiss knife” within the Pontem ecosystem.

4.1 Initial Token Distribution

The total token supply at launch will be 700,000,000. The table below describes the initial token distribution planned. A public sale may or may not occur, details of which will be set at a later date. Unsold and unallocated tokens will be assigned to the Pontem company.

Funding Stage

Price

Raised

%

Tokens

Seed

$0.02

$980,000.00

7.00%

49,000,000

Private

$0.03

$3,570,000.00

17.00%

119,000,000

Public (optional - TBD)

TBD

TBD

TBD

TBD

Market Maker



3.00%

21,000,000

Pontem Technology



TBD

TBD

Network Incentives



19.00%

133,000,000

Liquidity Rewards



9.00%

63,000,000

Team



14.00%

98,000,000

Advisors



5.50%

38,500,000



$4,550,000.00

74.50%

521,500,000

4.2 Token Vesting Schedule


Lockup

TGE

Vesting (delta)

Seed

none

7.50%

15 months

Private

none

15.00%

12 months

Public (optional)

none

100.00%

none

Market Maker

none

100.00%

none

Pontem Technology

6 months

2.98%

60 months

Network Incentives

none

2.08%

48 months

Liquidity Rewards

none


up to 30% APR

Team

12 months


24 months

Advisors

2 months


24 months