We at Ai-Fi.net are not sure if this is the right place for the discussion. Let me know if this is not and then we will find a different venue for it.
We have been working on the project for about two years now. It is designed to be a privacy-centric network (Internet) infrastructure such that users may construct their own social networks (most are inherently private), cloud storage or servers, personal VPN (for smart homes), and all other Internet functions that need not be hosted in public services (Facebook, WeChat, Homekit, etc.). We'd like to do this without being part of the surveillance capitalism and without demanding the account registration from our users, much like the Bitcoin/Stellar distributed ledger architecture. With this goal in mind, we pretty much need to fund it on fees and the service charges on our users are going to be on a per transaction basis which is naturally "micro" in nature. Cryptocurrencies are the only technology that will make this micropayment service scheme possible.
We think collecting cryptocurrencies as service charges is fairly straightforward. However, collecting them in an anonymous way is quite an another thing. We have put off this effort to the next release with some decent ideas on how that can be done. However, for the current release, we have built a system based on Stellar network for managing the digital assets. We have put together a mechanism such that some digital assets may be published over Ai-Fi Root Registry, which is protected and tied to Stellar Network accounts that may be publicly accessed but privately audited and protected, much like that for Certificate Transparency, but self-managed by individual asset owners. We have implemented this protection mechanism for users' email addresses by taking advantage of the Stellar Network blockchain without re-inventing the wheel like the Certificate Transparency architecture. This Stellar based Root Registry supports the encryption of our end-to-end SecureEmail and protects our users' public identity from theft.
Our SecureEmail takes advantage of the Stellar Network to protect one of our most important cyber identities and deliver the end-to-end encryption to emails, the most popular software in the world, without requiring an Ai-Fi service account and/or the need to start out with a new mailbox/provider. Our contribution to the dApp industry is the implementation of the SecureEmail that cleanly separates the public aspects (e.g email address and pre-key store) from the private (email content and metadata). This has not been possible without the help of the Stellar/blockchain technologies. We want to make sure if this is the thing you deemed as "Doesn't seem to have Stellar implemented in any meaningful way".
By the way, to support the various privacy-centric utilities and services without demanding an account (trackable), we need to re-invent just about everything. The "Krypton Token" is one of them, which is a bit counter-intuitive and needs our users to pay more attention to it. This is why we concocted our "Bug Bounty" program to put money where our mouth is. The bounty happens to be in Stellar Lumens, which is probably something you want to encourage. This absolutely does not imply we will use the grant solely to fund the bounty program.
All in all, we think we have utilized Stellar in a very significant way, delivered our SecureEmail to protect the world's most popular software regardless of the email providers, integrated with a powerful file sync utility (Nextcloud), and accomplished all these with anonymity totally in line with the spirit of dApp without demanding an account sign-up. Hidden in this 2.0 release are those foundational supports critical to all other upper-layer applications, not immediately obvious to ordinary user. There are many exciting features to come in future releases, especially the anonymous micropayment design slated in 3.0 that we are very proud of.
Please don't construe this reply as a demand for reconsideration. Nevertheless, we would appreciate if you can answer some of the points raised here. We are doing some great stuff, but its broad scope makes it difficult for us to evangelize it. Stellar as a payment/exchange infrastructure will be a great help to our cause and we want to be part of it.
We have constructed an infrastructure which is difficult to encapsulate in our short proposal to your SCF program. We do have a website containing write-ups and documents that attempt to explain us more. We also have released a mobile client Ai-Fi Central and a sync cloud Ai-Fi HomeCloud client in the Apple App Store, a home server runnable on Raspberry Pi 4, and an Ai-Fi Desktop extension on Windows platforms. We are doing over a large number of Internet applications, based on an over-the-counter, pay-as-you-go payment scheme and many foundational supports underneath. The best way to understand us is to try out our applications first hand to see for yourself whether or not we are the real thing and or we have Stellar implemented in a meaningful way.
Thanks for your time.
