Hi everybody, welcome welcome welcome. We're going to go ahead and get started here in just a moment for two as all of our speakers arrive and are
Yes, join as well. So good day, good evening. Good morning, wherever you may be tuning in around the world. We'll give everyone here again just another minute or so and we'll go ahead and get started.
Right again everybody welcome. Thank you very much for joining we're gonna give our speakers just another moment or so here to join us on stage here and We'll go ahead and get started if this is your first time joining I'm going to be your host today Kyle
a cop partner at Stax Ventures. Really excited to have everyone today is we're going to be speaking about a very interesting and talkable topic and that is about private communication and what that means when it comes to on-chain and on-chain
chain communication and some future decentralized applications or DAPs that are being built in around the space and one in particular and kind of how they've evolved over time and also their history in private communications as well. So welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. Again, I'm your host
to CaliComp partner at Stax Ventures. Today we will be speaking about Praveka and some new features that the team is launching but more importantly looking at the picture of private communication and what that means when technology
like cryptography or blockchain get involved in what that means in the stacks ecosystem and for Bitcoin layers as well. So if this is your first time joining welcome to the crypto internet show, this is our weekly series
speaking about everything that's happening, in stacks, the broader ecosystems and building on Bitcoin layers. Today we are going to be joined by the founder of Praveeka Muhammad. Welcome to the stage.
Hey Kyle, how are you doing? Hello everyone. I'm so excited to be here.
We're absolutely excited to have you and maybe Mohammed just a quick Background on yourself as you and I've spoken about before you've actually been in
the Stax ecosystem for some time. Tell us about that journey, kind of how you got into it, why Stax, and then we'll jump into Pervika. But give us your history in the Stax ecosystem.
Yes, actually I started my blockchain journey since 2015. I was exploring the technology from different perspectives and by 2018 I just
started to know about it was block stack and now it's stacks. Then I started to explore how to start building applications that's related to the data privacy and protects user from being monetized.
by other big data giants and all these things. For me, I have more than 23 years of solid experience in the software engineering, cryptography and information security. And through entire my career, I faced a lot of problems relating to cybersecurity,
comes to communication activities like emails, voice and video calls, messaging systems, all these things. When you start thinking about how these platforms and the web tools are secured, you're going to face a lot of troubles.
When you think about enterprise communication like people and banks and in the big enterprise entities like governmental communications and all these things, they are facing really a big problem when it comes to
securing the communication layer by using any kind of communication activities. Then I started to to to start to explore the tools that block stack at that time supporting the developers to build
And then we came with Pravika. It was started as a proof of concept on how to secure the email communication and then we closed the pre-seed round and then the journey still working.
All right, well, let's take a quick step back. Thank you, Muhammad. I want to actually come back to some of the either misnomer's or just potential roadblocks that you can run into around private communications and that communications layer specifically around the enterprise.
price. It sounds like with your background in 20 plus years in cryptography, you saw this is not only a real opportunity to build per beca, but you've seen what issues exist and what issues need to be solved in this industry around the enterprise. Could you share a little bit more about what those issues
are what those problems are, why they exist at the enterprise level for communications. Yeah, sure. Think about, for example, the email communication. We have a great problem with the email communication call business email compromise attack. It's simply when someone compromises your business email and then acts on behalf of you.
I believe that there is a public report from FBI mentioning that in the last five years, this problem worked, $26 billion of losses in the US because of business-emmade compromise attack. And when you think about the core of
this problem is because the centralized services. Like if anyone compromised your email, then he can act on behalf of you, especially in the financial transactions. And also when you think about any other communication activities like for example, video calls, video conference
voices, voice calls, all these things still debuting on the Web2 architecture, which is based on client server model. And these things causing a great problem in terms of data losses and data breaches when it comes to private communication.
Actually, there is a report mentioning that because of using the normal communication tools and the enterprises, the average losses per instant, about $4 million. And guess what? It is in all industries around us.
not only in the tech industry, but you can find it in the healthcare industry, in the financials, whatever it is. As long as we are using communication tools, then they are vulnerable because of the Web2 architecture.
And 4 million sounds small. It sounds like it's just going to grow from there, especially with the more reliant we are on technology. And would you agree? Or do you see that number going down anytime soon? These numbers are increasing.
Exaponementally, especially that after COVID-19 pandemic, everyone started to use the online communication tools to do the work, to communicate with people and all these things. And these numbers increasing every single day.
Every single day we see upcoming news about data breaches because of whatever it is the tool and the messaging, the email, the conference calls. And also we see that some way two companies still promoting themselves as
to E or end to end encryption platform and then people started to discover it is not. So this is a great problem, especially after the increasing in how we are starting to use the communication platforms after COVID-19 pandemic.
with the pandemic, as you saw, more reliance on digital communication, digital applications, and also search around decentralized applications or DAPs as well, which leads us to Pervika. How is Pervika born? What is its story? What is
is per veka for those who may not be aware of it in its infancy and then we'll talk about some of the releases. But right now, how is per veka born and what is it helping to solve in this industry? Yes. As I mentioned from a while, we started
a just an MVB project aiming to solve that business email compromise attack. We started just to focus on the problem of email communication and how to make it private and secure and how to move the underlying protocol from being centralized and controlled by single
entity to be in a decentralized environment, so allowing enterprises to be in safe in terms of data breaches. And then after closing the pre-sea drowned, early into
2020, we started to take the concept to be not just for emails, but for the whole communication activities. And then we started to focus deeply with the messaging industry because we see the potential of Web 3 messaging or
you can call it private and secure messaging, whatever it is like you can think about it for us, for individuals and also for communities and also the bigger emperor when you think about it as for enterprises.
You can define Pravika as a web 3 messaging and blockchain enabled conversation. Perfect. I was just about to ask a question around that. I think you might have answered it. But for those listening, you mentioned
private messaging and private communications. So how are you different from some of those other applications that may exist that people are using for communications today, whether that be signal or in some cases what sound and many others that we've heard are
doing private and social messaging. How is Pervika different? Yeah, this is the correct question. Thank you, Kyle, for this. When you think about private communication, you need to think about two important things, identity management and the storage management. When you think about identity management,
The majority of all messaging application that we are using on a daily basis, they are using whatever it is in terms of identity management. You can authenticate by your email or your username or your mobile number. So
When you think about mobile number, for example, you need to give the service provider your mobile number and then they're going to send you SMS as an RTP to authenticate, right? I think a couple of weeks ago, there is an announcement from Signal about
attacks that happening because of using the third parity SMS verification from Tweloo, I think, and they announced about compromising the user credentials for more than for around two-time users, then they started to fix it.
This problem will remain as long as we are relying on the centralized identity management like your email address, username password, mobile number and all these things. This is in terms of identity management.
all these things. You just have your decentralized identity and here for example it is secured on the Bitcoin network and then you are the owner and no one can ask you to provide any kind of identity credentials rather
other than your decentralized ID. We're going to start in the probably a club just by your dot btc name or whatever it is, built on stacks and then we're going to expand it to integrate the Mirama's users and so on. So this is in terms of the decentralized identity. We knew, think about the store,
level, you need to make sure that every single communication activity is totally encrypted at the client side and then you act as just like a blind service provider. You just routing the messages to the right direction and make the whole
verification functionality. For example, when you send a message over Provica, what Provica is doing is verifying that you is you. You Kyle the BTC who already sent this message and then delivered it to the target or to the other side.
So I think this is the most important two things, the identity management and the storage management. So with that real quick for context for those tuning in for the first time. So Dom BTC is the Bitcoin name space.
that can be purchased. So just like a dot E third dot S-O-L for Salona, there's also a dot BTC that can be purchased. And you can also purchase these in a community fashion from writer as well as we just had an exciting announcement the writer ID side of things where we actually
have those domain services and names at the community level, whether that be crash ponds or megaponds or otherwise as well. So that's what we were speaking about in work terms of decentralized identity and the namespace as well. So, Mohammed, you mentioned Proveka Club. What is the Proveka Club?
Yes, this is the latest triple product that we are about to launch next week and we're going to make it open for everyone to start trying.
When we started to think about the messaging platforms and we started to down with the team discussing the roadmap and how we can deliver these tools and a seamless experience, we started to make like different categories here.
The first part, which is related to one-to-one communication over the mobile devices. So we already have now probably a messenger that you can check it on the website and you can participate in the test of life and start using it with your decentralized ID. And then we
We started to build like a year ago, something like this. Oh, like a couple of years ago, we started to build the enterprise version for it, which is related to enterprises with more identity management tools to make it branded for the
the price and according to the identity management for, in both on-boarding and for any other identity management for employees. And now we found that there is something missing to complete the
based functionality inside the platform like to utilizing your NFT. You don't need to copy paste your NFT image here. You just extract it from your wallet and put it as your verified avatar and so on. So we
The communication platforms that are already available in the market right now, they are trying to make tweaks and work around to enable these things by building some bots or some extensions because it is already way too based. But when you think about the private club,
It is totally cryptonative communication. So we don't need to build these such kind of bots like in Discord or any other extensions to make it available for our users. So Praveka Club is mainly to create your own club.
wherever you are, a builder or someone in the crypto community, you are influencer, you are an NFT project and you need to find a place where you can communicate with your community members in a private, secure way and also with a crypto-native function. This is all about Pravekar Club.
So it's really a really great Mohammed and kind of a similar question to how we talked about messaging apps so How Does Proveka Club now fit in the community stack when it comes to Dow communication tools
or Dow management tools. Is this something that works in tandem? Is it competitive? How do you fit within those Dow tooling stock that we've seen more communities move over to versus just maybe email or Excel spreadsheet communication?
Yes, in terms of now there are some functionality that we're going to add it through the roadmap, but the main focus now for the Praveka Club to start using the basic functionality which is creating your club.
you would exit close channels inside your club. For example, if you have any of the projects and you need just only the any of the owners to join a special channel under your club, then you'll have the right to create
something called exocluse of channels and so on. And in terms of competition here, we started to see a high demand for such kind of these problems. I can mention to you now something like four, five platforms,
or products that already raise millions of dollars and when you go to check what this website is about you find some landing pages, some decent information and there is nothing to try.
I do understand this because building in the web tree is something not easy and also there is in such a kind of communication platform and the huge amount of data in and out you need to take care about a lot of things from the technical perspective. You need to try this
different stacks of tools that you are using to develop to make sure that you have a high-skillable product and also you have something easy for everyone to start using it. So I don't think that there is a competition right now
at the time being because everyone is building. Everyone is building. So there is no market share that you need to go and try to take a piece of this market share to you. No, everyone is still building and we still
But I think we have a great advantage here because three years of development and solving all the technical problems that you're going to face to come up with a scalable product in the messaging industry, this is something that you need time to do.
and we've done in terms of finding how to build these products in a private and secure way. And with your background as well, the team's background in having such a long-standing background in cryptography and also communications, it just it makes sense and
I want to come back to something you mentioned the roadmap. So Dow tooling is on the future roadmap. What else is upcoming with this new release? What can people expect on the longer roadmap envision for Praveeka Club as it rolls up?
I think he missed that question. Kyle. Yeah, no problem. What is up on what is upcoming on the road map and the longer term vision for Praveeka Club? You had mentioned doubt tools, maybe on that, but
what else is to come and that longer vision for the VK Club? Yes, so I think there are some features that we can roll out until the end of this year starting with wallet-based authentication and as
As I mentioned, we're going to start with the hero wallet as long as you have a wallet. Even if you don't have that BTC name, you will be able to start using Pravegan. Because our main objective here is to make it wallet to wallet communication. But if you have a dot BTC name,
and advantage. So you will be cryptographically verified. So there is no manual verification here as any other communication platforms. You need to have a large number of followers and some other criterias that you need to
make sure that you have all these things before getting verified. But in the Provica Club, if you have just your .bTC name, .ID name, any BNS that you already own under Stackstrain, then you will get the verification sign.
And also the avatar here, if you own some entities under your wallet, then you can choose one of them as your verified avatar. And you will get the verification sign beside your profile image.
Also we have something to call that we call it wallet to wallet invitation. You think about it like you are interacting with many people with your wallet, right? So you are sending some SDX, receiving some SDX by NFT and all these things.
transactions that already done using your wallet, we can extract and this is something that's not private. You can go to the ext, the ext, the ext, the ext, the ext, the ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext, ext,#
a wallet invitation for anyone that you already interacted with so you can invite him to the private club and you can start communicating it a private and secure we especially in the DMs. Also we have something new here that we call
the eternal messages. So the eternal messages is something in the DM and the eternal message allowing you to take a piece of conversation like I'm discussing with you Kyle and telling me wow, Provica is going to be something great and then I'm going to take your permission
can we take this piece of conversation and put it as an eternal message forever and then we get just a transaction ID. So even without Probiker you have a transaction ID and then you can start using this to promote to anyone maybe after some time
Wow, this is something already stored on chain and it's gonna be stored in a plane tech is not encrypted one because this is something that you need to show to people after a while or anything that you need to put it on chain This is what we call
it a terminal message. And also we have something great, also a new thing called Web3 reactions. So we know that old communication platforms that we are using social media, like anything we have, and the Web2 we have reactions, right?
We have like, we have dislike and all these things. Can you tell me what's the value of getting 100,000 likes for your post or for your contribution inside any communication platforms and with the communities? You could zero value. Just like.
But when you think about this reaction and the Web 3 space, we need to put a value here. So the Web 3 reaction, we're going to start this approach by launching the first reaction, what we call it, value.
So if Kyle posted something inside Stacks Club over Privic Club and I like it, many people thinking that this is something valuable, I can push value. And this value, I can send some STX fractions
to show you how much I appreciate what you already posted. So this is something called Web 3 reactions. And also we have some other crypto based functionality for that communication. We have something
called "Valuated Massages" and these "Valuated Massages" related to the value of the massage log. You can see this message value, for example, 500 STX and so on.
And there are some of these functionalities that we are about to launch or to roll out one after one directly after the launching. This is this is awesome. I mean, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, almost eight different
features that you're going to be launching and rolling out with the Pervika Club in this new launch. One thing I did want to come back to, a question I saw come through is around wallet to wallet. So we talk about wallet to wallet communication, wallet to wallet invitation.
We've also seen a number of unfortunate security issues and security leaks and just wallet situations happen over the past few years. If we're using wallets to communicate, not just to authenticate, our other assets that may be in our wallet at risk.
or with Proveka it actually separates where our name for instance the .btc are assets and otherwise are put together. So if you could share a little bit more the technicals of how that works I think that'd be fairly helpful.
Yeah, this is the correct question. So everything interacting with your wallet, it required your signature. So when you start sending something like wallet to wallet invitation for some people interacted with you and you need to
bring them for a private club to communicate, you need to sign this contract. And because you are already in this tool that hear you extension over your browser, then there is no interaction with your wallet without
permission. So we don't interact directly, we don't extract your keys, your keys living in a secure place, and you are the only one has the right to sign any transaction that's based on wallet interaction here.
I saw that there was a question or two in the crowd. I've got one more question for you, Mohammed. If you do have a question, just go ahead and raise your hand or request to speak. We'll bring you up on stage and have you ask your question here in just a moment.
mentioned earlier, you closed a pre-seed round. You also, if I recall correctly, was a part of the STACS accelerator program. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience? How did that play a role in Proveka's growth and evolution over time?
It was about the experience with the stacks accelerator. I think we are so lucky at the time when stacks accelerator started at the first time we are so lucky to be from the first code.
So, we started, actually this is the first time we started to communicate together Kyle. It was something that, oh wow, a lot of people here do care about how to build
value and how to interact with the stacks and how we started to learn from each other, how the team behind stacks, accelerators are now stacks, benches. They don't help you because this is a job that they are doing.
but they are helping you because they are believing in what you are building. Actually sometimes I was forget to do something and then getting notification from someone from Staxx Accelerator. We need to do this, you need to do that and so on. So I believe it was a great experience especially
we came after closing the pre-C drowns. Once we closed the pre-C drown, I think after six months, something around this, the announcement about Staxx Accelerator came and then we started to participate and then we started to meet a lot of people and it was a great experience.
Thank you mom and it was a great experience to work with you and excited to see how Pribeca has evolved over time. One last question. So you mentioned all these great features, the idea for others to start their own clubs.
and get engaged, but where can everyone go to learn more if they are building a wallet and want a partner with you in some way? Where can people go and how can they connect with you after this session to do more with Pervika?
Oh, sorry, I discovered that I was muted. Okay, so if you have something that you need to ask about private club or something to ask for integration for some more wallets or ask even if you would like to ask about any feature for the time being
You can communicate with me over Twitter here or you can send me an email. I'll do at provica.io but after launching Provica Club you will find me over Provica Club all the time. Just send the connection request to abdo.bit.
And then we can start communicating in a private and secure way and I'll be there all the time to answer all your questions and also taking your feedback because this is something very important here Kyle. We are building such a product that
it respects you from the privacy perspective. To do this, we collect zero data from your site. And we don't have such tools that allow us to learn more about how you are interacting with the application.
So the only channel that we have is you. You will feedback, you will suggestions, and anything you feel that this is something that can enhance the product from the functionality perspective, from the performance perspective, please
to us because there is no way to collect these data without allowing us to communicate together. You will find that there is a special club for sure for Provica, so there are some channels inside, go and talk to us or send me a
actual request at abdodab.btsc and then we can start communicating at the DMs. Wonderful, Mohammed. Thank you very much. Looking forward to connecting and also getting started on a Praveeka Club and having that secure communication
very soon. Again, thank you for joining us today. To those in the audience, thank you as well for tuning in to this week's Crypto Internet show. Make sure you do check out Proveka and connect with Muhammad as well through Proveka Club and get the chance to communicate with him.
the team at Bill Jones Club as well. And if you would like to tune in live, ask questions or join the conversation in the future. Be sure to follow stacks on Twitter and tune in every week at 5 p.m. Eastern on Wednesdays. As today is a special edition
But until next time everyone, I'm your host Kyle Ellicott with Stax Ventures. Everyone have a great day, great week, and we'll see you soon. Take care everybody. Thank you, Kyle.