A NEW announcement popped up in early February on the BitcoinTalk forum about a new token called Enumivo (ENU) which proclaimed itself as a blockchain + universal basic income. Unlike most announcement of this kind which usually leads to an ICO (initial coin offering) asking for investment from the public, the developer (who remains anonymous) gave away a total of 400 million ENU tokens, via free airdrop to Ethereum holders, out of a total supply of 500 million.
The goal was to distribute the tokens as widely as possible and it seems to have met that objective in a matter of days. In a short while, several volunteers of different nationalities have come together to form a core group. A chat group was created on Telegram Messenger that now has over 600 members and a separate chat group was created for Chinese speakers with over 200 members. The project has a bare-bones website at www.enumivo.org.
Much about the project details still remains a mystery as the white paper is still being written and the core members are just getting to know one another, but here are a few things we do know about the project:
1. Enumivo will be a clone of the open-source EOS platform (set to officially release in June 2018). EOS is regarded by many as a 3rd-generation blockchain (with Bitcoin being 1st and Ethereum heralding the 2nd) -- its key features being the ability to run decentralized applications for free (no transaction fees), and being able to handle millions of transactions per second.
2. Enumivo is set to release two months after EOS, on August 2018. Future applications running on EOS can be ported over to ENU as far as its licensing allows. Developers can also create independent applications on ENU.
3. ENU is trading at ForkDelta (forkdelta.github.io), a decentralized exchange. ENU tokens were initially released as ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. According to the roadmap on the website, these can be swapped for ENU tokens one day after the ENU chain is released.
4. The developer jokingly refers to ENU as a "poor man's EOS" as EOS tokens are now trading at around USD 9 (after having reached a high of around USD 18 last January) and now has a total market cap of over USD 5 billion. In contrast ENU is now trading at roughly half a cent (0.000005 ETH) giving it a total market cap of USD 2.5 million, but that's not so bad given that it is not even a month old.
Being a cheap alternative should not be a reason for writing off this project. Linux was also once known as the "poor man's Unix" but it now powers most of the internet. Google's Android is built on top of Linux, and a lot of machines and appliances with smart capabilities (TV's, cars, etc.) also use Linux as their base operating system.
5. The developer's identity was recently called into question in the chatroom, with a user demanding to know who the developer was, given that he "invested" in the token. The developer replied to the effect that even Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's famed founder, is simply a pseudonym while his real identity remains unknown. He further clarified that tokens were given essentially for free, and if the person did buy his/her tokens, it was not from the developer but from other people who got the tokens. Since there was no call for "investments" by the developer, he sees no need nor pressure to reveal himself, citing that the project itself is more important than his identity.
6. Speaking of credibility, a blog called SomethingDecent (www.somethingdecent.co.uk) recently documented the 9 ETH Story which highlighted the developer's honesty and sincerity in his dealings. To summarize, someone mistakenly sent the developer 9 ETH (roughly USD 7,600). The developer could have simply run away with this amount or pointed to his original disclaimer which said "If you send anything greater than zero, I will consider it as a donation," and the sender would have no way of going after him. Yet, the developer returned the 9 ETH (after making sure of the sender's identity) and that solidified his reputation in the eyes of many.
7. To learn more about Enumivo, look for it on Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram.
Next week, we'll talk more about the developer's vision of a Universal Basic Income and how blockchain technology fits in with that plan.
Disclosure: This writer was recently recruited to be part of the Enumivo Core Group as a volunteer.
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.