Review on Factom by Fabrizio Zampieri

If successful in its ambitions, Factom could become a ubiquitous protocol layer in an increasingly digitized world. Important partnership (beginning 2018): SoftStone (to integrate blockchain tech and smart city solutions for several regions in China), Ancun (to integrate Factom’s blockchain tech with Ancun’s electronic data notarization services), Rongdu Technology (to provide a blockchain backend for Rongdu’s existing fintech software), SmartContract (to give Bitcoin and Ethereum smart contract developers access to Factom data), and DataYes and Intrinio (to verify and audit data from the U.S. and Chinese financial markets, respectively). On Nov. 2016, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced they had awarded Factom a $500,000 grant “to build a Proof of Concept prototype of a digitized medical record system for individuals living in remote developing areas of the world. Factom’s developers were working on M2, which sets in place the consensus algorithm for the Factom protocol—the software supporting distributed processing—as well as enables transaction times in a matter of seconds, supports multiple blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and provides a more robust network, as well as new tools in its development suite/public testnet. Milestone 2 (what we call Factom Federation) provides the ability to run the Factom protocol over many different servers. Our goal is to distribute the execution of the protocol over servers run by many different parties.