"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole Earth will be converted into a huge brain" - Nikola Tesla, 1926

8.11.2024

… please take your shoes off.

All words and opinions are my own. I am a wander, I am not your financial advisor, I tell stories.

This is a story on a blockchain named Tectum. It is a Layer 2 for Bitcoin but it is also a Layer 1. A hybrid that is designed for…. A lot.

Okay, put your shoes back on, we are going for a ride.

It is 7 minutes to midnight. 1962 and the world is on the brink.

Aircraft carrier USS Randolph was deployed along with 11 US Destroyers. They were chasing down a metal whale, the Russian submarine B-59. Thunderous shockwaves would rock the waters as they US ships dropped depth charges to warn, shepherd and corner the B-59.

This was an exceptionally risky game. The Americans were not wanting to take down the sub, merely shackle and control its movements, yet to the men inside, feeling and hearing the metal ring out with each near explosion, with no communication with Moscow, they were being hunted.

With their air-conditioning down, the atmosphere was turning to poison with each breath. What if America have officially escalated the conflict? What if the sky was full of nukes hurtling across the oceans to one another’s cities. You cannot blame anyone to be second-guessing and even having fear in this moment, they could drown and if they were to go, why not take the Americans with them?

The decision required three. The three senior officers had to come to consensus, the three had to agree, if one didn’t then the nuke would not be fired. Vasili Arkhipov refused the order. Vasili prevented nuke warfare that day. The B-59 went back to Soviet Russia.

John F Kennedy and Nikolai Khrushchev were close to the brink yet did not press the button. The minute hand inched back from midnight.

You see, submarines were vulnerable to being cut off from the central hub of communication, be it London, Moscow or Washington. Therefore, there needed to be systems in place for communication in case there was no central control. They also needed be resilient, if a part of the sub was badly damaged, the systems had to still work thus even within the submarine the protocols and systems were distributed and decentralised.

In war, communication had ciphers, Claude Shannon is the father of modern encryption, he helped enable Churchill and Roosevelt to communicate, after World War 2 he published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. This helped how information is produced and transferred, it brought about the term “bit” for binary digit. The man not only helped the development of digital relays but helped quantify information, compress data, and transmit it efficiently.

The idea of distributed networks was published in 1964 by US Paul Baran, who wrote “On Distributed Communications”.

"Proposal for a Digital Communication Network" was published by Donald Davies from the UK the following year, he did not know of Baran’s work when he published. Both had similar ideas, it was Davies who came up with the word “packet”, which is a small, structured unit of data transmitted over a network. These ideas would heavily influence ARPANET.

In a case of parallel thinking, Soviet Russia, which had a rich history of scientific endeavour, was influenced by Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetic ideas.

Victor Glushkov proposed the OGAS - National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing – a national distributed computer network. These ideas influenced the military who would put the idea of decentralised communication to practice in submarines.

The computer systems have to be able to work in damaged environments and they need to carry out complicated tasks at speed – navigation, speed control, automated command functions, processing weapon control, the air con, and so on. Argon, MVK, Pallada, and Tsunami computer families were some on the Russian submarines.

These systems were decentralised in case parts were ever foiled and ruined. One of the Tectum core developers, Dimity Stakheev, was on the Russian subs in the 1980s, exposed to all this technology.

Patient Zero in Silicon Valley in regards to Bitcoin is Wences Casares. He came across it in 2011 on Craigslist and met up with a guy, who looked like Gandalf, at a café. He downloaded an app for Wences in order to get $2000 worth bitcoin. Wences handed the man his cash and the Bitcoin Gandalf went off into the mist, not knowing he had just influenced someone who would go on to establish Xapo Bank, which would have some of its custody bought by Coinbase, who would be custodians of BlackRock’s Bitcoin.

A younger Wences grew up on an Argentinian farm and his family lose “everything three times.” Once because of inflation, another because of confiscation, lastly because of massive devaluation. Therefore, coming across Bitcoin on Craigslist, a currency that did not need a central authority really stood out to him.

Wences saw a currency that improved upon Gold, something that had not been done in over 5,000 years. There will never be more than 21 million BTC no matter what and people lose BTC, it is deflationary. It is easier to transport, gold is heavy and you need a third party if you want to sell to someone else not in the room. BTC can be traded in real-time on the other side of the world.

Money is a way of saving, a way of paying and a way of pricing. Bitcoin is the money of the internet and the biggest leap forward in the democratisation of money.

This was a man saying Bitcoin could go to $1m in ten years, this was in 2014…

He presented this graphic at Chicago Gold Conference in 2015. Wences said at the time Bitcoin was mainly being picked up for curiosity and saving. He predicted it will become a payment mechanism then a way to price things such as oil.

Now, there are places around the world that accept Bitcoin as a way of payment but it seems since that conference the narrative of hoarding Bitcoin has grown stronger. Michael Saylor says sell it all to raise funds to purchase Bitcoin, borrow against everything in order to get more Bitcoin – he also says to use centralised custody over self-custody, which removes a key value of Bitcoin, that it is removed from centralised forces.

Scientist, engineer and DLT chief, Ming Guo purports that due to the scarcity of Bitcoin, it encourages hoarding and this prevents it from day-to-day payment. As it becomes a hoarder’s item, Bitcoin becomes a static economy.

Ultimately, Bitcoin is agnostic, people attribute all sorts of beliefs to it. There are those that hoard and some people use Bitcoin for the pseudonymity, the crypto-anarchists that Saylor rails against use it to live a life away from eyes of the centralised government.

Some developers saw Bitcoin and noticed it has pivotal qualities, qualities that opened up a flood gate of possibilities if you apply the imagination to it. These developers had experience with submarine tech and a history of creation, they started to think.

What if you melded both?

People say stash it but ultimately what is the title of the Bitcoin whitepaper?

A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

There have been forks of Bitcoin to help provide a similar protocol but faster however, they are not as successful. Bitcoin is the gold standard of the internet.

We had gold and then a bank note to give to someone as a way of exchanging ownership of that gold.

Well, with Tectum, you can have Bitcoin and exchange ownership with a SoftNote. Now that we are entering this new epoch of money, the SoftNote is flexible in that it can represent one of many crypto currencies. For the moment you can store Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron or USDT, there will be more cryptos in the future that can be transferred via the SoftNote.

This can be done offline; you simply hand it over rather than transfer on chain. Plus, it has an extra security advantage over cash, if someone steals my printed SoftNote, they cannot use it, they cannot spend it unless they have my passcode.

The SoftNote is a transport layer, a Layer 2 solution to Bitcoin. It is a product from Tectum, it is a payment technology development that allows for instant cryptocurrency transactions without the need for traditional bank accounts or wallets. Soon it will not just be crypto it will also be fiat currencies.

For the user they can open the SoftNote Wallet, you can download one for IoS. You mint as many SoftNotes that you wish / are able to. You provide the liquidity to the SoftNote, for example, I can put $50 USDT on the SoftNote.

It does not have to be printed but you can do that if you wish. Use your smart phone, scan QR code. You can select the option to print it if you wish. I can simply send a picture of a SoftNote to the intended recipient or handover a physical SoftNote.

Every SoftNote has its own passcode. When you handover the SoftNote to someone, they enter the passcode – the system generates a new access code, this is for the person who now has the SoftNote. What you are technically doing is providing funds to a wallet (the SoftNote) and you are handing over the wallet to someone else to have custody of it. You are moving the wallet rather than the Bitcoin, meaning the transfer is not recorded on the native blockchain and this brings a dimension of anonymity.

Speed of the transaction and the cost are hurdles for how crypto is utilised in day-to-day transactions, yet as Tectum have managed to make crypto have a similar quality to cash money. With the world becoming tokenised, the SoftNote is going to be passing through a phase of adoption as its capability is essential – the need for instant, seamless, costless or as close to free as possible.

Bitcoin is gradually getting understood. In the UK, the place with the “deepest” integration of Bitcoin is the Isle of Man. This is a place that would benefit from the SoftNote as there are pubs, book stores, cafés and some tourist attractions. As Bitcoin sees its trajectory, expect more places in London to accept the orange coin, SoftNote can easily smooth and finesse that integration and process.

At MIT, Christian Catalini gave access to Bitcoin to all MIT undergraduate students for a study. Pretty much every student sold it. In El Salvador, when each citizen was given a wallet with Bitcoin, they sold it into fiat.

This is because the education of Bitcoin is not there. As we educate more about crypto, as people are more aware of it, they can understand it better, appreciate it better. The big trick is to make it practical. As merchants and people adopt the SoftNote wallet, we will see crypto gather more mainstream use.

Sometime next year, fiat will be enabled by this route too, this will most likely called a CashNote or something similar – this is effectively is a single use debit card. Tectum will announce a big deal with UAE regarding a project, we will see what happens with that but it sounds rather large and generous. In one talk, Alex Gusseff, the brains behind Tectum, said they are about to sign with Visa on this.

Now, the SoftNote is simply one product. Tectum the blockchain is a hybrid layer 1 and layer 2. Lets dig further.

Russia, I have been told, means the land of the rowers. The rivers from north to south helped trade wander from the Black Sea to the Baltics. The Rus sat on the eastern borders of Europe and on the western edges of Asia. Then one day, the Russians decided to go east and forgot to stop because it was fun and there was fur. They went so far east they ended up in Alaska, some even got to California.

Russia’s landmass is larger than Pluto’s, most of Russia on the map is a federal appendage to the western homeland of the Rus, 85 federal subjects to be precise. 22 of them are autonomous republics, one of them is the largest statoid in the world, the Sakha Republic aka Yakutia, and that statoid hosts the coldest city in the world – Yakutsk.

Let’s zoom in on one autonomous republic, where Orthodox Christian resides with Islam, where the Rus meets the Tartars, the trade of Europe to the west and the Steppes to the east collide, with the Volga River taking rowers and boats north and to Moscow, or towards the Caucuses and the Caspian Sea to the south.

Kazan of Tatarstan. It has a rich background for programming, HPC, cybersecurity, AI, and it has a history of submarine tech too. In 2017, the Republic of Tatarstan announced they would bring the public sector to blockchain, calling the event “Blockchain: The New Oil”, a famous name, Vitalik Buterin, was at this event also.

The oil wealth has flowed into the tech start-ups and developments. Not far outside of Kazan, there have been advancements on KAMAZ autonomous vehicle project, building such things like the self-driving lorries. Kazan has seen a rise in projects and start-ups focussing on blockchain since 2017 and the region has seen US investment because of wage arbitrage and talent. You can get a Russian dev with vast experience for the same price as a low-level US dev who is still wet behind the ears.

Due to Kazan being a hotbed for technological and engineer mindsets, naturally someone like Alex Guseff found himself in the Athens of the Volga often. Just across the Volga from Kazan is Innopolis, a hub rich with talent for cybersecurity and blockchain, amongst other things. Self-sovereign ID, enterprise smart contracts, projects on Smart Cities such as Smart Car Parking take place, smart energy management, Kaspersky has deals within Innopolis to nurture talent and test ideas. The list goes on.

The internet allows connection, AI can give the internet initiative and flexibility, DLT/blockchain provides accountability. With all this, we can measure things such as the true value of an asset to the quality of the soil on a field by the second with the use of edge technology. This has amazing value.

There is great incentive to provide a high-quality product that aids IoT, payments, accounts, defi, health, AI, and so on.

And Alex is right in amongst this, actively contributing.

He is a well-travelled man. Born on Halloween in 1971, I believe in or around Irkutsk by the beautiful scene of Lake Baikal, which is famous for being an astonishing 1,642 metres/5,387 feet deep. A man who likes the outdoors and gets around the globe, Alex is a bit of a genius.

After graduating Irkutsk State Uni, he did some Alex things, then ended up in Milwaukee 1999 because he was studying at Moraine Park Technical College, not far from Chicago. And whilst in America, you may as well travel around it.

2012, after the US tour, Mr Guseff heads back to Irkutsk for more studying and also ventures to Kazan, St Petersburg and Moscow, as well as visiting Thailand and Singapore. Then the fun begins.

One thing to note is Crispmind. This is an intellectual property company that mainly focuses on cybersecurity and all things cyberspace, it offers IT services, machine learning UX/UI design. They have plenty of patents in their arsenal. Crispmind’s US HQ is based in Chicago but it started in Kazan and has a Sochi headquarters.

On his Linkedin, Alex began working for Crispmind in 2019 yet, I believe the truer start date is around 2014.

Tectum is a powerful blockchain that is proprietary of Crispmind, it is the crown jewel and this is a linchpin to much of the endeavours carried out by those that work with Crispmind, allow me to go through some examples:

Palm Chain

One of the places Alex visited in 2019 for Crispmind was the sunny and scorching UAE. Mohamed Juma is pro-active in automation and digitisation of supply chains, commodity trading and ports in the UAE, who worked with Crispmind to trial some ideas. The beauty of blockchain is it can cut out many intermediaries who would otherwise add on costs to supply chains. When you import or export commodities such as grains, metal or coal or whatever, along the supply route there are people who have to check documents, the goods, etc.

There can also be document mismatch leading to delays that can take days or even weeks.

Blockchain provides transparency as you can trace the origin of goods and documentation is less complex. Another thing blockchain is great for is increasing counterparty trust as the evidence is on the immutable ledger.

Palm Chain was a peer-to-peer platform for Dubai’s commodity trading and it is Shariah compliant. The first Shariah compliant commodity trading platform in fact. This is driven by Tectum.

Squareshare

"Special financial zones will offer international companies a legal regime based on the principles of common law, as well as regulatory and fiscal regimes based on international experience. Most importantly, more than half of the employees of companies operating in these zones must be Georgian citizens. High-profile international companies, such as the Rothschild Company, will be involved in setting up these centers.”

The Tectum blockchain was put to use in the Smart City tech park in Kobuleti to help with real estate. The team helped develop the SquareShare cryptocurrency. Alex Guseff went around Georgia in 2019, most likely to assist with the project.

Georgia is sat on an important crossroads, it sits on the Caucasus mountains, with Russia to the north and the Arabian Peninsula to the south. The EU relies on the pipelines that course through the Georgian valleys and China finances infrastructure as a part of the Belt and Road Initiative. The Rothschilds & Co have set up strategic plans to help make Georgia a financial hub.

Georgia has the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN) initiative to bolster economic growth, rural inclusion on digital programmes, develop the STEM fields, improve digital literacy, focus on AI and IoT.

The Georgia Institute of Technology launched the Georgia Smart Communities Challenge in 2018 to provide grants to projects building out smart tech. Georgia has been using IoT and edge tech to sort smart traffic systems, this helps emergency response time. Smart lighting to manage resources used in public spaces. Georgia is the cradle of wine, if they continue to develop their IoT and digital inclusion, it can be a great benefit to managing vineyards and yield. IoT sensors can be particularly useful to measuring soil quality and its needs, greatly helping quality of the wine in the region, as well as farming as a whole.

Grig Messenger

Anonymity, Privacy and Security. This is a defence grade messaging system. The team at Tectum were moving between UAE, Georgia, Russia and Finland, discussing the use of the messenger and utilising micro-gadgets to help with encryption, such as encryption within a Bluetooth headset.

Tectum's block size at best is 120 bytes with each block containing only one transaction, which is tiny but it can be much smaller meaning nodes in phone devices is possible. One of the key proprietary tech for Crispmind is SwapWire™.

SwapWire emulates hardwire connection by running channel switching protocol on top of packet switching protocol. GRIG PAY™ seems to be a proto-SoftNote, it was part of Grig Messenger and intended to be a way to send money to friends around the world.

The team have worked with an unnamed regional bank in Russia on three-factor authentication and have since worked on this to make it quantum proof, this is something that is important across the board of computational devices in any industry – IoT, healthcare, finance, and so on.

Over 2019, the team also had worked with Brazilian supply chains and worked on TraMed, PROF-IT and CroudMaster projects – I could not find much information on the last three.

Since 2019 we have had the Covid pandemic and the lock-downs, supply-chains froze, the world was at a stand-still.

80% of all dollars in existence were created in the last 5 years. The inflation of goods and assets is rising faster than nominal wage growth. We are working more, getting less value for it then spend the earnings on goods and assets that are costing more each year.

The interest payments on the US debt have become so large, they are more than the US military budget. That is more than China, Russia and European countries spend on their militaries combined.

The USD may have lost its Petrodollar agreement thus losing its “pegging” to oil transactions but it has risen to be the dominant stablecoin.

China used to buy US treasuries but now through the New Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the BRI are ways to invest dollar reserves in other assets rather than US treasuries.

2008, the drug cartel paper and the Feds QE was one way of preventing the economy going bust.

US sanctions increased 933% from 2000 to 2021. With USD printing and inflating, this causes the debts in smaller nations to be too vast, they struggle to stimulate their own economies as well as pay off the debts. Latin America faced a high inflation in the 80s and this led to mass defaults.

Now, it cannot keep happening. One of the fears is war will be used to force a reset but it does not have to be that way.

Pivoting to crypto is one way out, the US realises the USD dominating stablecoins is a benefit as it leads to US treasury purchases. Stablecoins can be a way for people to access a stable currency as opposed to their local currency, which may be inflating quickly.

People in countries such as India can be paid in crypto, which is another way the SoftNote is beneficial as 10% is not skimmed by some intermediary remittance or bank charge.

Alex Guseff keeps moving and recently he found himself back the birthplace of Tectum.

Kazan.

There is a plan to have a 3D digital twin of Kazan next year and this will be a common theme throughout the world. The implementation of Digital Tatarstan began in 2022, since then the level of digitalisation in Tatarstan increased from 61% to 95%. Demand for IoT has doubled in agriculture and transport, and for cloud solutions — 10 times in financial and insurance companies and twice in retail.

The plan in Tatarstan is to have every single square metre of land on the territory of the republic with Internet access by 2027.

Russia became the chair of the BRICS nation at the beginning of 2024 and in October they hosted the IFE BRICS Forum in Kazan. This was officially 16th BRICS summit though Putin said in a press conference it was technically the 17th. The heads of India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Russia and UAE were present with the Brazilian President participated via online feed as he had unfortunately accident two days prior to the summit.

There were 25 other country representatives present. The BRICS nations make up around 37% of the worldwide GDP whilst the G7 make up 29%. This is a rather significant summit and Alex Guseff was present to bring awareness of the SoftNote to the BRICS as he would hold a presentation to those at the summit.

There is an interesting comment from Tectum CEO David Track on a call October 31st. He had not heard from Alex after the BRICS summit at that point in time but he did say, “Alex has somewhat a relationship with the person who is the head of BRICS. He has been in communication with them and shared what we do as a company… Some eyeballs have been on us due to some partnerships that we’ve had… I can tell you he has the ear of perhaps probably the most important person in BRICS.”

If we are moving into a multi-polar world having Tectum’s SoftNote is a way to help transfer crypto and soon fiat seamlessly.

David Marcus claimed he knew of Bitcoin in 2009 and it was Wences Casares who told him to understand it more to appreciate it. Marcus went on to be in charge of Facebook Messenger and convinced Zuckerburg to create Libra.

Marcus could see it as this massive multi-billion commercial opportunity that brought with it, user transaction data, more engagement, more e-commerce, and a slice of fees from transactions.

Suddenly, Marcus began saying the now often said line that, “For me, now, it’s clearer that Bitcoin serves a purpose of being digital gold, not a good medium of exchange.” Funny that.

People like Marcus will say it is not a medium of exchange yet their cronies like Peter Thiel accepts Bitcoin as a payment for his products and services at Palantir.

In the end, Libra became Diem and Diem later became dead in the water.

Tectum helps scale Bitcoin and make it practical in day-to-day interactions, making it a method of payment, a medium of exchange.

And it is capable of much more.

How? What is the tech behind this?

After Diem, Marcus and others would all go on to form LightSpark – an institutional payments company focused on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.

El Salvador use Lightning Network but it suffers from bottlenecks. There is a key difference between Lightning Network and SoftNote. Lightning Network moves the bitcoin. SoftNote moves the private keys.

Facebook tried to seize the economic system; life was made difficult for them. Tectum’s SoftNote benefits other currencies, it enables their transfer to be done securely, near zero fee.

I will skim over the tech detail, if you do wish to delve deeper, you can look into their gitbook:

https://tectum.gitbook.io/tectum-blockchain-and-softnote-whitepaper/viii.-multichain-capacities

This is a highly efficient, multi-layered piece of kit. An issue with Ethereum, the more complex a smart contract, the higher the fee for gas. Tectum is designed to be fast, and it’s designed for data. High unpredictable gas fees are simply not suitable for anyone, individuals to institutions.

Designed to achieve unprecedented transaction speeds and scalability without compromising decentralisation or security. In test environments with no-stress it has reached 6 million in the past but as Alex Guseff says, along with anyone with a critical thought, that does come down once placed with burdens.

Still, this chain has reached 1 million to 3.5 million TPS with workload placed on it.

Unlike traditional blockchains, Tectum does not store data directly on the chain. Instead, it stores hashes linked back to data stored within a proprietary, decentralized database at a lower level. This method isolates transaction data from the main network pipeline, where it is encrypted, hashed, and archived, allowing for lightweight, verifiable access to transaction information.

Tectum's Proof-of-Utility (PoU) consensus mechanism employs verifiable randomness to elect a new Master Node every 200 milliseconds. A dynamic rating system enforces compliance, penalising nodes that do not follow the protocol. Each node maintains its own stack of blocks, which is validated by the Master Node. PoU is energy-efficient, as it focuses on functional tasks—such as validating network connectivity and latency—instead of computationally intensive activities.

Tectum blockchain is organised into three main tiers, each serving a distinct purpose to streamline data processing and maintain consensus across the network.

Upper Tier: This layer manages transaction stacking. The process begins by receiving a bundle of transactions from the Master Nodes and creating a sequential stack, with each transaction forming a separate block in RAM. A unique hash is produced for the last block in the sequence, representing the stack's integrity. The hashed stack of transactions is then returned to the Master Nodes, minimizing network load by avoiding the transfer of the entire stack of blocks.

Second Tier: This middle layer handles the distribution of transactions across the network. Here, the Master Nodes relay the stack of transactions and the final hash to all nodes. Each node independently constructs its stack from the transaction bundle and verifies it by checking the hash. Consensus is reached when each node's final hash aligns with the one produced by the initial Elect Node. Only then is the stack of blocks added to the network's ledger.

Third Tier: The lower layer functions as a decentralized database that stores a variety of files, such as client files, system files, and intellectual property documents. These files are kept in at least seven server locations for redundancy and security.

TET stands for Tectum Emission Token and the hard cap is 10 million tokens.

The TET token allows users to mint SoftNotes, transfer value within Tectum wallets, and does not incur gas fees. When Tectum transitions from a private to a public blockchain model, TET will enable staking, allowing stakers to increase their chances of being elected as an Elect Node in future network cycles.

Alex Guseff is a co-founder of Crispmind in 2014, which began in Kazan. Around 2019/20 it seems he gained the proprietary rights of Tectum. Yet, Tectum project began in 2007. I have not fully solved where this chain is from but there are some roots.

Meet Gumar Iskandarovich Kadyrov.

You may recall from earlier that Kazan hosted an event in 2017 called “Blockchain: The New Oil”, which Vitalik attended. Kadyrov was at the event also.

He says of Tectum:

“The core functionality and benefit of the Tectum™ Blockchain is its ultra-fast transaction processing speed and impeccable security, but commercial applicability is driven by the presence of additional bridge components that allow Tectum™ to reach its full potential.”

Kadyrov studied General Medicine at the Kazan State Medical University (KSMU) from 1990 to 1995 and has had a high-level career - www.linkedin.com/in/gkadyrov/details/experience/

To name just a few places, he was an advisor to the Minister of Civil Defense; Deputy Director General of Investments at ITIL Insurance; Trade Representative for Russia in Ecuador; Chairman of the Committee on Trade with China; and CEO of International Trading Systems, which was focusing on developing blockchain trading systems.

Kadyrov also mentions around 2019 that access for some investor wallets is with biometric data such as the face and the veins in the finger. The face is one form of verification, the veins is to gain access to the private key.

BitCAD had a successful investment round in 2017 and Kadyrov was a part of the team.

medium.com/@alfamisu/bitcad-encrypted-smart-platform-286781eb366d

https://bitcad.io/BitCAD.pdf

When Wences Casares established Bitcoin vaults for elite wealth, you gain access with a finger print but it also detects a pulse, if there is no pulse there is no entry. This is a common theme amongst protocols for high-value clients.

Vlad Mitrofanov has a background with as Director of Innovation at Citi, and Head of IT at Allianz.

Kadyrov also said in the spring of 2019 that they had worked with a Moscow team led by Sergei Suchkov, who is a top geneticist working on personalised, targeted medicine. Tectum has been dealing with some high-level data.

Since 2007, Tectum went through various changes and evolved. The further back in time you go, the harder it is to see where this Tectum stems from, however it did come from Kazan and Kazan is an important tech city in the wealthy Volgograd region of Russia. As it is crucial city, it looks like high-level business, academic, government circles are involved; it is more likely a public-private consortium applying some of the more sophisticated theories and tech at their disposal for a universal blockchain solution.

There is similar consortium in blockchain, for example, R3 with Corda/TEN and The Canton Network has been building in this space.

I know Alex studied or was present for the second time in Irkutsk University in 2012 and Kadyrov did some talks there also, there is a chance this is where the pair met. However, that I can only speculate, they could have met earlier or later for all we know.

According to the Russian version of Crispmind website, Alex was Financial Director – see here https://криспмайнд.рф/

“Another thing I quickly realized was that Tectum’s design really wasn’t optimal for cryptocurrency and tokenization. The way it’s designed, it has far more potential in logistics, IOT applications, and as a high-speed digital notary engine. Since then, we’ve added major improvements to the software and rewritten most of the backend to continue improving the product.” – Alex Guseff

It appears Alex begins to take over the baton of Tectum in 2019 and ends up with the rights to it. His intention is to commercialise the chain.

The internet helps provide information flow, as AI advances it helps mould that information into a use much faster than us, IoT helps provide information for the internet to sense the world, blockchain provides accountability. As humanity progresses, we will effectively create a digital twin of life on Earth, we will create this digital, dynamic library much like a digital brain.

Tectum is latin for roof, and in a part of the midbrain, the early anatomists recognised a “roof” over the tegmentum and cerebral aqueduct – leading to this part being called tectum. It deals with a vast number of stimuli and information from reflexes and senses.

The dream of the Tectum Blockchain is to deal with stocks, supply chains, flight tickets, the taxi reservation, the hotel booking, weather system data, geo-positioning, media rights, medicine, genetics, smart cities, and so on. Anything you can record data on, Tectum wants to be the chain.

A lot of blockchains seek use and mainly do so by providing cheap tx and memes. That draws in use and eventually they can be steered towards utility as more business comes on chain.

Tectum is going for a key utility. Around September 2021, SoftNote presale is announced and is positioned to be a transactionless payment solution.

SWIFT is much slower than Tectum and it has cut nations out of its messaging system. Mastercard and Visa are the big two and are utilising blockchain but they are centralised and have processing fees, KYC and can take time.

David Track has said further down the line Tectum will present a solution to Mastercard and Visa.

For businesses, it goes beyond the SoftNote, Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs) cannot compete with the budget of massive corporations. This leads to them utilising less reliable cloud data storage options. As an alternative, Tectum can offer integration for products and systems to enable efficient operation.

Additionally, the sheer ability to consume vast amounts of information, the Tectum blockchain can withstand DDoS attacks where the slower databases would be overwhelmed. Considering the roots of this project - stemming all the way back to the submarines of the ‘80s that had to keep functioning in spite of damage received, to the modern digital heart of Russia Kazan of today – Tectum is this robust system that is the next stage of the internet; the one of agreement, value, AI, and digital twins.

Russia has a rich history of scientific endeavour. Alexander Popov pioneered early wireless communication at the end of the 1800s. Viktor Glushkov lead the development of the USSR national computing network, the OGAS. Russia today is one of the leading nations on quantum computing. Tectum is another advancement from the nation that Winston Churchill once called, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

Bitcoin is revolutionary because it requires no central bank. One of the ways to pacify Bitcoin is to make it a passive object, one that is hoarded. Tectum allows it to be moved and encourages the use of it as payment as well as other crypto.

It raises other crypto up with it. Overtime, more crypto currencies will be covered by the SoftNote.

In a world that is entering a new era, one of multiple-powers, multi-currency, an era of new private money, Tectum offers a solution to be able to transact this.

Tectum isn’t just a fancy name, it is their ambition, to be the flow of the neural network of the digital world.

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole Earth will be converted into a huge brain" - Nikola Tesla, 1926

8.11.2024

… please take your shoes off.

All words and opinions are my own. I am a wander, I am not your financial advisor, I tell stories.

This is a story on a blockchain named Tectum. It is a Layer 2 for Bitcoin but it is also a Layer 1. A hybrid that is designed for…. A lot.

Okay, put your shoes back on, we are going for a ride.

It is 7 minutes to midnight. 1962 and the world is on the brink.

Aircraft carrier USS Randolph was deployed along with 11 US Destroyers. They were chasing down a metal whale, the Russian submarine B-59. Thunderous shockwaves would rock the waters as they US ships dropped depth charges to warn, shepherd and corner the B-59.

This was an exceptionally risky game. The Americans were not wanting to take down the sub, merely shackle and control its movements, yet to the men inside, feeling and hearing the metal ring out with each near explosion, with no communication with Moscow, they were being hunted.

With their air-conditioning down, the atmosphere was turning to poison with each breath. What if America have officially escalated the conflict? What if the sky was full of nukes hurtling across the oceans to one another’s cities. You cannot blame anyone to be second-guessing and even having fear in this moment, they could drown and if they were to go, why not take the Americans with them?

The decision required three. The three senior officers had to come to consensus, the three had to agree, if one didn’t then the nuke would not be fired. Vasili Arkhipov refused the order. Vasili prevented nuke warfare that day. The B-59 went back to Soviet Russia.

John F Kennedy and Nikolai Khrushchev were close to the brink yet did not press the button. The minute hand inched back from midnight.

You see, submarines were vulnerable to being cut off from the central hub of communication, be it London, Moscow or Washington. Therefore, there needed to be systems in place for communication in case there was no central control. They also needed be resilient, if a part of the sub was badly damaged, the systems had to still work thus even within the submarine the protocols and systems were distributed and decentralised.

In war, communication had ciphers, Claude Shannon is the father of modern encryption, he helped enable Churchill and Roosevelt to communicate, after World War 2 he published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. This helped how information is produced and transferred, it brought about the term “bit” for binary digit. The man not only helped the development of digital relays but helped quantify information, compress data, and transmit it efficiently.

The idea of distributed networks was published in 1964 by US Paul Baran, who wrote “On Distributed Communications”.

"Proposal for a Digital Communication Network" was published by Donald Davies from the UK the following year, he did not know of Baran’s work when he published. Both had similar ideas, it was Davies who came up with the word “packet”, which is a small, structured unit of data transmitted over a network. These ideas would heavily influence ARPANET.

In a case of parallel thinking, Soviet Russia, which had a rich history of scientific endeavour, was influenced by Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetic ideas.

Victor Glushkov proposed the OGAS - National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing – a national distributed computer network. These ideas influenced the military who would put the idea of decentralised communication to practice in submarines.

The computer systems have to be able to work in damaged environments and they need to carry out complicated tasks at speed – navigation, speed control, automated command functions, processing weapon control, the air con, and so on. Argon, MVK, Pallada, and Tsunami computer families were some on the Russian submarines.

These systems were decentralised in case parts were ever foiled and ruined. One of the Tectum core developers, Dimity Stakheev, was on the Russian subs in the 1980s, exposed to all this technology.

Patient Zero in Silicon Valley in regards to Bitcoin is Wences Casares. He came across it in 2011 on Craigslist and met up with a guy, who looked like Gandalf, at a café. He downloaded an app for Wences in order to get $2000 worth bitcoin. Wences handed the man his cash and the Bitcoin Gandalf went off into the mist, not knowing he had just influenced someone who would go on to establish Xapo Bank, which would have some of its custody bought by Coinbase, who would be custodians of BlackRock’s Bitcoin.

A younger Wences grew up on an Argentinian farm and his family lose “everything three times.” Once because of inflation, another because of confiscation, lastly because of massive devaluation. Therefore, coming across Bitcoin on Craigslist, a currency that did not need a central authority really stood out to him.

Wences saw a currency that improved upon Gold, something that had not been done in over 5,000 years. There will never be more than 21 million BTC no matter what and people lose BTC, it is deflationary. It is easier to transport, gold is heavy and you need a third party if you want to sell to someone else not in the room. BTC can be traded in real-time on the other side of the world.

Money is a way of saving, a way of paying and a way of pricing. Bitcoin is the money of the internet and the biggest leap forward in the democratisation of money.

This was a man saying Bitcoin could go to $1m in ten years, this was in 2014…

He presented this graphic at Chicago Gold Conference in 2015. Wences said at the time Bitcoin was mainly being picked up for curiosity and saving. He predicted it will become a payment mechanism then a way to price things such as oil.

Now, there are places around the world that accept Bitcoin as a way of payment but it seems since that conference the narrative of hoarding Bitcoin has grown stronger. Michael Saylor says sell it all to raise funds to purchase Bitcoin, borrow against everything in order to get more Bitcoin – he also says to use centralised custody over self-custody, which removes a key value of Bitcoin, that it is removed from centralised forces.

Scientist, engineer and DLT chief, Ming Guo purports that due to the scarcity of Bitcoin, it encourages hoarding and this prevents it from day-to-day payment. As it becomes a hoarder’s item, Bitcoin becomes a static economy.

Ultimately, Bitcoin is agnostic, people attribute all sorts of beliefs to it. There are those that hoard and some people use Bitcoin for the pseudonymity, the crypto-anarchists that Saylor rails against use it to live a life away from eyes of the centralised government.

Some developers saw Bitcoin and noticed it has pivotal qualities, qualities that opened up a flood gate of possibilities if you apply the imagination to it. These developers had experience with submarine tech and a history of creation, they started to think.

What if you melded both?

People say stash it but ultimately what is the title of the Bitcoin whitepaper?

A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

There have been forks of Bitcoin to help provide a similar protocol but faster however, they are not as successful. Bitcoin is the gold standard of the internet.

We had gold and then a bank note to give to someone as a way of exchanging ownership of that gold.

Well, with Tectum, you can have Bitcoin and exchange ownership with a SoftNote. Now that we are entering this new epoch of money, the SoftNote is flexible in that it can represent one of many crypto currencies. For the moment you can store Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron or USDT, there will be more cryptos in the future that can be transferred via the SoftNote.

This can be done offline; you simply hand it over rather than transfer on chain. Plus, it has an extra security advantage over cash, if someone steals my printed SoftNote, they cannot use it, they cannot spend it unless they have my passcode.

The SoftNote is a transport layer, a Layer 2 solution to Bitcoin. It is a product from Tectum, it is a payment technology development that allows for instant cryptocurrency transactions without the need for traditional bank accounts or wallets. Soon it will not just be crypto it will also be fiat currencies.

For the user they can open the SoftNote Wallet, you can download one for IoS. You mint as many SoftNotes that you wish / are able to. You provide the liquidity to the SoftNote, for example, I can put $50 USDT on the SoftNote.

It does not have to be printed but you can do that if you wish. Use your smart phone, scan QR code. You can select the option to print it if you wish. I can simply send a picture of a SoftNote to the intended recipient or handover a physical SoftNote.

Every SoftNote has its own passcode. When you handover the SoftNote to someone, they enter the passcode – the system generates a new access code, this is for the person who now has the SoftNote. What you are technically doing is providing funds to a wallet (the SoftNote) and you are handing over the wallet to someone else to have custody of it. You are moving the wallet rather than the Bitcoin, meaning the transfer is not recorded on the native blockchain and this brings a dimension of anonymity.

Speed of the transaction and the cost are hurdles for how crypto is utilised in day-to-day transactions, yet as Tectum have managed to make crypto have a similar quality to cash money. With the world becoming tokenised, the SoftNote is going to be passing through a phase of adoption as its capability is essential – the need for instant, seamless, costless or as close to free as possible.

Bitcoin is gradually getting understood. In the UK, the place with the “deepest” integration of Bitcoin is the Isle of Man. This is a place that would benefit from the SoftNote as there are pubs, book stores, cafés and some tourist attractions. As Bitcoin sees its trajectory, expect more places in London to accept the orange coin, SoftNote can easily smooth and finesse that integration and process.

At MIT, Christian Catalini gave access to Bitcoin to all MIT undergraduate students for a study. Pretty much every student sold it. In El Salvador, when each citizen was given a wallet with Bitcoin, they sold it into fiat.

This is because the education of Bitcoin is not there. As we educate more about crypto, as people are more aware of it, they can understand it better, appreciate it better. The big trick is to make it practical. As merchants and people adopt the SoftNote wallet, we will see crypto gather more mainstream use.

Sometime next year, fiat will be enabled by this route too, this will most likely called a CashNote or something similar – this is effectively is a single use debit card. Tectum will announce a big deal with UAE regarding a project, we will see what happens with that but it sounds rather large and generous. In one talk, Alex Gusseff, the brains behind Tectum, said they are about to sign with Visa on this.

Now, the SoftNote is simply one product. Tectum the blockchain is a hybrid layer 1 and layer 2. Lets dig further.

Russia, I have been told, means the land of the rowers. The rivers from north to south helped trade wander from the Black Sea to the Baltics. The Rus sat on the eastern borders of Europe and on the western edges of Asia. Then one day, the Russians decided to go east and forgot to stop because it was fun and there was fur. They went so far east they ended up in Alaska, some even got to California.

Russia’s landmass is larger than Pluto’s, most of Russia on the map is a federal appendage to the western homeland of the Rus, 85 federal subjects to be precise. 22 of them are autonomous republics, one of them is the largest statoid in the world, the Sakha Republic aka Yakutia, and that statoid hosts the coldest city in the world – Yakutsk.

Let’s zoom in on one autonomous republic, where Orthodox Christian resides with Islam, where the Rus meets the Tartars, the trade of Europe to the west and the Steppes to the east collide, with the Volga River taking rowers and boats north and to Moscow, or towards the Caucuses and the Caspian Sea to the south.

Kazan of Tatarstan. It has a rich background for programming, HPC, cybersecurity, AI, and it has a history of submarine tech too. In 2017, the Republic of Tatarstan announced they would bring the public sector to blockchain, calling the event “Blockchain: The New Oil”, a famous name, Vitalik Buterin, was at this event also.

The oil wealth has flowed into the tech start-ups and developments. Not far outside of Kazan, there have been advancements on KAMAZ autonomous vehicle project, building such things like the self-driving lorries. Kazan has seen a rise in projects and start-ups focussing on blockchain since 2017 and the region has seen US investment because of wage arbitrage and talent. You can get a Russian dev with vast experience for the same price as a low-level US dev who is still wet behind the ears.

Due to Kazan being a hotbed for technological and engineer mindsets, naturally someone like Alex Guseff found himself in the Athens of the Volga often. Just across the Volga from Kazan is Innopolis, a hub rich with talent for cybersecurity and blockchain, amongst other things. Self-sovereign ID, enterprise smart contracts, projects on Smart Cities such as Smart Car Parking take place, smart energy management, Kaspersky has deals within Innopolis to nurture talent and test ideas. The list goes on.

The internet allows connection, AI can give the internet initiative and flexibility, DLT/blockchain provides accountability. With all this, we can measure things such as the true value of an asset to the quality of the soil on a field by the second with the use of edge technology. This has amazing value.

There is great incentive to provide a high-quality product that aids IoT, payments, accounts, defi, health, AI, and so on.

And Alex is right in amongst this, actively contributing.

He is a well-travelled man. Born on Halloween in 1971, I believe in or around Irkutsk by the beautiful scene of Lake Baikal, which is famous for being an astonishing 1,642 metres/5,387 feet deep. A man who likes the outdoors and gets around the globe, Alex is a bit of a genius.

After graduating Irkutsk State Uni, he did some Alex things, then ended up in Milwaukee 1999 because he was studying at Moraine Park Technical College, not far from Chicago. And whilst in America, you may as well travel around it.

2012, after the US tour, Mr Guseff heads back to Irkutsk for more studying and also ventures to Kazan, St Petersburg and Moscow, as well as visiting Thailand and Singapore. Then the fun begins.

One thing to note is Crispmind. This is an intellectual property company that mainly focuses on cybersecurity and all things cyberspace, it offers IT services, machine learning UX/UI design. They have plenty of patents in their arsenal. Crispmind’s US HQ is based in Chicago but it started in Kazan and has a Sochi headquarters.

On his Linkedin, Alex began working for Crispmind in 2019 yet, I believe the truer start date is around 2014.

Tectum is a powerful blockchain that is proprietary of Crispmind, it is the crown jewel and this is a linchpin to much of the endeavours carried out by those that work with Crispmind, allow me to go through some examples:

Palm Chain

One of the places Alex visited in 2019 for Crispmind was the sunny and scorching UAE. Mohamed Juma is pro-active in automation and digitisation of supply chains, commodity trading and ports in the UAE, who worked with Crispmind to trial some ideas. The beauty of blockchain is it can cut out many intermediaries who would otherwise add on costs to supply chains. When you import or export commodities such as grains, metal or coal or whatever, along the supply route there are people who have to check documents, the goods, etc.

There can also be document mismatch leading to delays that can take days or even weeks.

Blockchain provides transparency as you can trace the origin of goods and documentation is less complex. Another thing blockchain is great for is increasing counterparty trust as the evidence is on the immutable ledger.

Palm Chain was a peer-to-peer platform for Dubai’s commodity trading and it is Shariah compliant. The first Shariah compliant commodity trading platform in fact. This is driven by Tectum.

Squareshare

"Special financial zones will offer international companies a legal regime based on the principles of common law, as well as regulatory and fiscal regimes based on international experience. Most importantly, more than half of the employees of companies operating in these zones must be Georgian citizens. High-profile international companies, such as the Rothschild Company, will be involved in setting up these centers.”

The Tectum blockchain was put to use in the Smart City tech park in Kobuleti to help with real estate. The team helped develop the SquareShare cryptocurrency. Alex Guseff went around Georgia in 2019, most likely to assist with the project.

Georgia is sat on an important crossroads, it sits on the Caucasus mountains, with Russia to the north and the Arabian Peninsula to the south. The EU relies on the pipelines that course through the Georgian valleys and China finances infrastructure as a part of the Belt and Road Initiative. The Rothschilds & Co have set up strategic plans to help make Georgia a financial hub.

Georgia has the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN) initiative to bolster economic growth, rural inclusion on digital programmes, develop the STEM fields, improve digital literacy, focus on AI and IoT.

The Georgia Institute of Technology launched the Georgia Smart Communities Challenge in 2018 to provide grants to projects building out smart tech. Georgia has been using IoT and edge tech to sort smart traffic systems, this helps emergency response time. Smart lighting to manage resources used in public spaces. Georgia is the cradle of wine, if they continue to develop their IoT and digital inclusion, it can be a great benefit to managing vineyards and yield. IoT sensors can be particularly useful to measuring soil quality and its needs, greatly helping quality of the wine in the region, as well as farming as a whole.

Grig Messenger

Anonymity, Privacy and Security. This is a defence grade messaging system. The team at Tectum were moving between UAE, Georgia, Russia and Finland, discussing the use of the messenger and utilising micro-gadgets to help with encryption, such as encryption within a Bluetooth headset.

Tectum's block size at best is 120 bytes with each block containing only one transaction, which is tiny but it can be much smaller meaning nodes in phone devices is possible. One of the key proprietary tech for Crispmind is SwapWire™.

SwapWire emulates hardwire connection by running channel switching protocol on top of packet switching protocol. GRIG PAY™ seems to be a proto-SoftNote, it was part of Grig Messenger and intended to be a way to send money to friends around the world.

The team have worked with an unnamed regional bank in Russia on three-factor authentication and have since worked on this to make it quantum proof, this is something that is important across the board of computational devices in any industry – IoT, healthcare, finance, and so on.

Over 2019, the team also had worked with Brazilian supply chains and worked on TraMed, PROF-IT and CroudMaster projects – I could not find much information on the last three.

Since 2019 we have had the Covid pandemic and the lock-downs, supply-chains froze, the world was at a stand-still.

80% of all dollars in existence were created in the last 5 years. The inflation of goods and assets is rising faster than nominal wage growth. We are working more, getting less value for it then spend the earnings on goods and assets that are costing more each year.

The interest payments on the US debt have become so large, they are more than the US military budget. That is more than China, Russia and European countries spend on their militaries combined.

The USD may have lost its Petrodollar agreement thus losing its “pegging” to oil transactions but it has risen to be the dominant stablecoin.

China used to buy US treasuries but now through the New Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the BRI are ways to invest dollar reserves in other assets rather than US treasuries.

2008, the drug cartel paper and the Feds QE was one way of preventing the economy going bust.

US sanctions increased 933% from 2000 to 2021. With USD printing and inflating, this causes the debts in smaller nations to be too vast, they struggle to stimulate their own economies as well as pay off the debts. Latin America faced a high inflation in the 80s and this led to mass defaults.

Now, it cannot keep happening. One of the fears is war will be used to force a reset but it does not have to be that way.

Pivoting to crypto is one way out, the US realises the USD dominating stablecoins is a benefit as it leads to US treasury purchases. Stablecoins can be a way for people to access a stable currency as opposed to their local currency, which may be inflating quickly.

People in countries such as India can be paid in crypto, which is another way the SoftNote is beneficial as 10% is not skimmed by some intermediary remittance or bank charge.

Alex Guseff keeps moving and recently he found himself back the birthplace of Tectum.

Kazan.

There is a plan to have a 3D digital twin of Kazan next year and this will be a common theme throughout the world. The implementation of Digital Tatarstan began in 2022, since then the level of digitalisation in Tatarstan increased from 61% to 95%. Demand for IoT has doubled in agriculture and transport, and for cloud solutions — 10 times in financial and insurance companies and twice in retail.

The plan in Tatarstan is to have every single square metre of land on the territory of the republic with Internet access by 2027.

Russia became the chair of the BRICS nation at the beginning of 2024 and in October they hosted the IFE BRICS Forum in Kazan. This was officially 16th BRICS summit though Putin said in a press conference it was technically the 17th. The heads of India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Russia and UAE were present with the Brazilian President participated via online feed as he had unfortunately accident two days prior to the summit.

There were 25 other country representatives present. The BRICS nations make up around 37% of the worldwide GDP whilst the G7 make up 29%. This is a rather significant summit and Alex Guseff was present to bring awareness of the SoftNote to the BRICS as he would hold a presentation to those at the summit.

There is an interesting comment from Tectum CEO David Track on a call October 31st. He had not heard from Alex after the BRICS summit at that point in time but he did say, “Alex has somewhat a relationship with the person who is the head of BRICS. He has been in communication with them and shared what we do as a company… Some eyeballs have been on us due to some partnerships that we’ve had… I can tell you he has the ear of perhaps probably the most important person in BRICS.”

If we are moving into a multi-polar world having Tectum’s SoftNote is a way to help transfer crypto and soon fiat seamlessly.

David Marcus claimed he knew of Bitcoin in 2009 and it was Wences Casares who told him to understand it more to appreciate it. Marcus went on to be in charge of Facebook Messenger and convinced Zuckerburg to create Libra.

Marcus could see it as this massive multi-billion commercial opportunity that brought with it, user transaction data, more engagement, more e-commerce, and a slice of fees from transactions.

Suddenly, Marcus began saying the now often said line that, “For me, now, it’s clearer that Bitcoin serves a purpose of being digital gold, not a good medium of exchange.” Funny that.

People like Marcus will say it is not a medium of exchange yet their cronies like Peter Thiel accepts Bitcoin as a payment for his products and services at Palantir.

In the end, Libra became Diem and Diem later became dead in the water.

Tectum helps scale Bitcoin and make it practical in day-to-day interactions, making it a method of payment, a medium of exchange.

And it is capable of much more.

How? What is the tech behind this?

After Diem, Marcus and others would all go on to form LightSpark – an institutional payments company focused on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.

El Salvador use Lightning Network but it suffers from bottlenecks. There is a key difference between Lightning Network and SoftNote. Lightning Network moves the bitcoin. SoftNote moves the private keys.

Facebook tried to seize the economic system; life was made difficult for them. Tectum’s SoftNote benefits other currencies, it enables their transfer to be done securely, near zero fee.

I will skim over the tech detail, if you do wish to delve deeper, you can look into their gitbook:

https://tectum.gitbook.io/tectum-blockchain-and-softnote-whitepaper/viii.-multichain-capacities

This is a highly efficient, multi-layered piece of kit. An issue with Ethereum, the more complex a smart contract, the higher the fee for gas. Tectum is designed to be fast, and it’s designed for data. High unpredictable gas fees are simply not suitable for anyone, individuals to institutions.

Designed to achieve unprecedented transaction speeds and scalability without compromising decentralisation or security. In test environments with no-stress it has reached 6 million in the past but as Alex Guseff says, along with anyone with a critical thought, that does come down once placed with burdens.

Still, this chain has reached 1 million to 3.5 million TPS with workload placed on it.

Unlike traditional blockchains, Tectum does not store data directly on the chain. Instead, it stores hashes linked back to data stored within a proprietary, decentralized database at a lower level. This method isolates transaction data from the main network pipeline, where it is encrypted, hashed, and archived, allowing for lightweight, verifiable access to transaction information.

Tectum's Proof-of-Utility (PoU) consensus mechanism employs verifiable randomness to elect a new Master Node every 200 milliseconds. A dynamic rating system enforces compliance, penalising nodes that do not follow the protocol. Each node maintains its own stack of blocks, which is validated by the Master Node. PoU is energy-efficient, as it focuses on functional tasks—such as validating network connectivity and latency—instead of computationally intensive activities.

Tectum blockchain is organised into three main tiers, each serving a distinct purpose to streamline data processing and maintain consensus across the network.

Upper Tier: This layer manages transaction stacking. The process begins by receiving a bundle of transactions from the Master Nodes and creating a sequential stack, with each transaction forming a separate block in RAM. A unique hash is produced for the last block in the sequence, representing the stack's integrity. The hashed stack of transactions is then returned to the Master Nodes, minimizing network load by avoiding the transfer of the entire stack of blocks.

Second Tier: This middle layer handles the distribution of transactions across the network. Here, the Master Nodes relay the stack of transactions and the final hash to all nodes. Each node independently constructs its stack from the transaction bundle and verifies it by checking the hash. Consensus is reached when each node's final hash aligns with the one produced by the initial Elect Node. Only then is the stack of blocks added to the network's ledger.

Third Tier: The lower layer functions as a decentralized database that stores a variety of files, such as client files, system files, and intellectual property documents. These files are kept in at least seven server locations for redundancy and security.

TET stands for Tectum Emission Token and the hard cap is 10 million tokens.

The TET token allows users to mint SoftNotes, transfer value within Tectum wallets, and does not incur gas fees. When Tectum transitions from a private to a public blockchain model, TET will enable staking, allowing stakers to increase their chances of being elected as an Elect Node in future network cycles.

Alex Guseff is a co-founder of Crispmind in 2014, which began in Kazan. Around 2019/20 it seems he gained the proprietary rights of Tectum. Yet, Tectum project began in 2007. I have not fully solved where this chain is from but there are some roots.

Meet Gumar Iskandarovich Kadyrov.

You may recall from earlier that Kazan hosted an event in 2017 called “Blockchain: The New Oil”, which Vitalik attended. Kadyrov was at the event also.

He says of Tectum:

“The core functionality and benefit of the Tectum™ Blockchain is its ultra-fast transaction processing speed and impeccable security, but commercial applicability is driven by the presence of additional bridge components that allow Tectum™ to reach its full potential.”

Kadyrov studied General Medicine at the Kazan State Medical University (KSMU) from 1990 to 1995 and has had a high-level career - www.linkedin.com/in/gkadyrov/details/experience/

To name just a few places, he was an advisor to the Minister of Civil Defense; Deputy Director General of Investments at ITIL Insurance; Trade Representative for Russia in Ecuador; Chairman of the Committee on Trade with China; and CEO of International Trading Systems, which was focusing on developing blockchain trading systems.

Kadyrov also mentions around 2019 that access for some investor wallets is with biometric data such as the face and the veins in the finger. The face is one form of verification, the veins is to gain access to the private key.

BitCAD had a successful investment round in 2017 and Kadyrov was a part of the team.

medium.com/@alfamisu/bitcad-encrypted-smart-platform-286781eb366d

https://bitcad.io/BitCAD.pdf

When Wences Casares established Bitcoin vaults for elite wealth, you gain access with a finger print but it also detects a pulse, if there is no pulse there is no entry. This is a common theme amongst protocols for high-value clients.

Vlad Mitrofanov has a background with as Director of Innovation at Citi, and Head of IT at Allianz.

Kadyrov also said in the spring of 2019 that they had worked with a Moscow team led by Sergei Suchkov, who is a top geneticist working on personalised, targeted medicine. Tectum has been dealing with some high-level data.

Since 2007, Tectum went through various changes and evolved. The further back in time you go, the harder it is to see where this Tectum stems from, however it did come from Kazan and Kazan is an important tech city in the wealthy Volgograd region of Russia. As it is crucial city, it looks like high-level business, academic, government circles are involved; it is more likely a public-private consortium applying some of the more sophisticated theories and tech at their disposal for a universal blockchain solution.

There is similar consortium in blockchain, for example, R3 with Corda/TEN and The Canton Network has been building in this space.

I know Alex studied or was present for the second time in Irkutsk University in 2012 and Kadyrov did some talks there also, there is a chance this is where the pair met. However, that I can only speculate, they could have met earlier or later for all we know.

According to the Russian version of Crispmind website, Alex was Financial Director – see here https://криспмайнд.рф/

“Another thing I quickly realized was that Tectum’s design really wasn’t optimal for cryptocurrency and tokenization. The way it’s designed, it has far more potential in logistics, IOT applications, and as a high-speed digital notary engine. Since then, we’ve added major improvements to the software and rewritten most of the backend to continue improving the product.” – Alex Guseff

It appears Alex begins to take over the baton of Tectum in 2019 and ends up with the rights to it. His intention is to commercialise the chain.

The internet helps provide information flow, as AI advances it helps mould that information into a use much faster than us, IoT helps provide information for the internet to sense the world, blockchain provides accountability. As humanity progresses, we will effectively create a digital twin of life on Earth, we will create this digital, dynamic library much like a digital brain.

Tectum is latin for roof, and in a part of the midbrain, the early anatomists recognised a “roof” over the tegmentum and cerebral aqueduct – leading to this part being called tectum. It deals with a vast number of stimuli and information from reflexes and senses.

The dream of the Tectum Blockchain is to deal with stocks, supply chains, flight tickets, the taxi reservation, the hotel booking, weather system data, geo-positioning, media rights, medicine, genetics, smart cities, and so on. Anything you can record data on, Tectum wants to be the chain.

A lot of blockchains seek use and mainly do so by providing cheap tx and memes. That draws in use and eventually they can be steered towards utility as more business comes on chain.

Tectum is going for a key utility. Around September 2021, SoftNote presale is announced and is positioned to be a transactionless payment solution.

SWIFT is much slower than Tectum and it has cut nations out of its messaging system. Mastercard and Visa are the big two and are utilising blockchain but they are centralised and have processing fees, KYC and can take time.

David Track has said further down the line Tectum will present a solution to Mastercard and Visa.

For businesses, it goes beyond the SoftNote, Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs) cannot compete with the budget of massive corporations. This leads to them utilising less reliable cloud data storage options. As an alternative, Tectum can offer integration for products and systems to enable efficient operation.

Additionally, the sheer ability to consume vast amounts of information, the Tectum blockchain can withstand DDoS attacks where the slower databases would be overwhelmed. Considering the roots of this project - stemming all the way back to the submarines of the ‘80s that had to keep functioning in spite of damage received, to the modern digital heart of Russia Kazan of today – Tectum is this robust system that is the next stage of the internet; the one of agreement, value, AI, and digital twins.

Russia has a rich history of scientific endeavour. Alexander Popov pioneered early wireless communication at the end of the 1800s. Viktor Glushkov lead the development of the USSR national computing network, the OGAS. Russia today is one of the leading nations on quantum computing. Tectum is another advancement from the nation that Winston Churchill once called, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

Bitcoin is revolutionary because it requires no central bank. One of the ways to pacify Bitcoin is to make it a passive object, one that is hoarded. Tectum allows it to be moved and encourages the use of it as payment as well as other crypto.

It raises other crypto up with it. Overtime, more crypto currencies will be covered by the SoftNote.

In a world that is entering a new era, one of multiple-powers, multi-currency, an era of new private money, Tectum offers a solution to be able to transact this.

Tectum isn’t just a fancy name, it is their ambition, to be the flow of the neural network of the digital world.