FortKnoxster is a platform for private communications. The platform ensures all communication is private by using end-to-end encryption on the data that is transmitted. The FortKnoxster platform supports a huge variety of communication methods, from plain old email and attachments inbox to private chat functionality. In addition, it also supports voice communications, which is becoming a must-have feature for many chat applications. FortKnoxster provides support for regular calling, voice messages, and conference calling. All of these features are present within its end-to-end encrypted service, so everything remains private.
Let’s Talk Privacy
Let’s discuss privacy for a minute. Bitcoin and crypto users should inherently understand the need for privacy in communications. After all, Bitcoin is created as uncensorable money, which requires some level of privacy. As the web has evolved, some of its original design flaws are becoming apparent. One of the prime flaws is around not making things private by default. Don’t take my word for it – that’s what the founder of the world wide web, Tim Berners Lee, believes.
Some of the newer advances in peer to peer communications technology and cryptography are allowing a smooth experience over a completely encrypted channel, so there’s no massive data leaks like what happens today in ‘walled-gardens’ of the world, most notably Google and Facebook.
As more internet and web users throughout the world understand the scope of data collection by corporations and governments, they are looking to more to alternatives that respect their privacy. These products can sometimes be hard to find because there’s not much money in advertising with this model. They need to find alternate business models and revenue models.
That’s a big advantage of using a crypto-asset on the blockchain – the users are able to pay with their wallet for the services they want to consume, instead of being a product being sold to advertisers. The project is in line with other projects emerging in the space where users are in control of their data rather than third parties.
The FortKnoxster Product
The FortKnoxster team describes their product as ‘Telegram on Steroids’, perhaps to give you a sense of what they do via existing products users may be familiar with. The team has already built out a demo that’s live on their website today to play around with.
In terms of features, it combines the usual communication app features – instant messages and voice calls, with an inbox for email, and a place to share files aka Dropbox style. All these features – a combination of Telegram, Skype, and Dropbox type functionalities are built on top of the fully end-to-end encrypted platform. This means once you’re inside the FortKnoxster ecosystem, you know your data is secure irrespective of the type of data, be it files or voice or text.
The team uses the blockchain for digital identity and encryption based on public key cryptography, with the identity registered with a public/private keypair on the blockchain.
The FKX Token
FortKnoxster has its own native token, FKX. The main purpose of the token is to provide storage and bandwidth to the network. As you can imagine, such a messaging platform will need a lot of storage to store an encrypted copy of all the files and communications. In order to incentivize people to store this data for the network, the FKX token is used.
Thus, the data in the ecosystem is stored in a peer to peer fashion, and the FKX token is ‘mined’ using a proof of storage algorithm as opposed to proof of work that’s common for many other crypto-assets. The token ensures that peers in the distributed network retain copies of data as needed, and provides them with payment in the form of native currency to do the same.
The same token is also used to pay for services, such as an upgraded storage plan. This is needed because otherwise it would be trivial to overwhelm the network with huge amounts of data.
The team is doing a token sale for the FKX tokens. Check out the website for more details. If you want to participate in the token sale, you should also read the whitepaper.