Interview with Richard Dennis, Founder & CEO of temtum, a Next-Gen Payments Network

temtum, is soon to launch its purpose-built, next-generation payments network designed to solve some of the inherent problems with existing cryptocurrencies.

We caught up with Founder and CEO Richard Dennis to find out what these inherent issues are and how temtum plans to take on the established players and release a payments platform to achieve critical mass adoption.

Why are you launching temtum? How is it different from other cryptocurrencies?

Since I first got involved with Bitcoin off the back of working on the Tor network, it became clear that BTC was never going to be a suitable network that could grow to be a large scale peer-to-peer payment network – it was just so slow and even got me flagged at the University for using too much energy mining from my office. This was around 2014 while lecturing Cryptography at Portsmouth Uni, and so for my PhD I decided to create a network that would scale and be suitable for mobile devices, while being highly secure.

Over the past four years, temtum has been developed on the foundations of the Temporal Blockchain that myself and Dr. Gareth Owenson created. We took a very different route to 99% of this industry in that we bootstrapped, wrote peer-reviewed papers on our research and went ahead to create, what we now believe is the most efficient Blockchain technology that exists and will solve the inherent problems with cryptocurrencies, that intend to be used for instant, feeless payments.

You’re launching at a time when sentiment is returning to Bitcoin but also following on from so many projects that have failed to deliver products. How will this affect temtum?

Well, this is a very real issue for the next generation of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects launching in 2019 and beyond, including temtum. The community is not looking for new projects, they’re looking to the top 20-30 currencies to deliver on their promises and in some cases actually launch the first part of their projects – there’s almost this feeling of ‘not another cryptocurrency?’ and it simply doesn’t matter how game-changing that technology may be. This is completely understandable and we’re actually of the same opinion, with the amount of money that has flowed into the industry, where is the tech?

It’s a different industry to the one we saw back in late 2017 and we as brands need to explore how we launch in the right way, for the benefit of future consumers and the network, rather than speculators. We’ve delivered our tech before some of the biggest projects in the space, meaning we can focus on distribution, mass adoption and integrations with global technology providers before even the likes of Ethereum are in a position to do so. Joseph Lubin himself has stated that Ethereum may be 2 years off of being scalable.

If you have to launch into what is apparently still a swamped marketplace, how will you find the users to go mainstream? Especially when it’s incredibly difficult for some people to determine which is THE cryptocurrency to use?

It is actually impossible because the right one isn’t available yet. Bitcoin will remain as a store of value, a crypto Gold if you like, one of the next-gen dapp platforms will come through as the chosen technology as some of them are exceptional and then it’s up to what currency can be the global payment network for the masses – which we hope will be temtum.

Crypto communities and partnerships are often overstated when it comes to the potential of a project or currency to succeed. Really in order to take steps to mainstream adoption, we should be looking at niche industries that have suitable audiences, such as Gen Z, tech and device lead brands and those with vast communities that will be accepting to a currency being used within that community. At temtum we’ve started to set up within the industries that not only match that criteria but that suit our technology and brand.

We stand for inclusion with technology that is underpinned by speed, sustainability and scalability – the existing crypto community simply isn’t enough to create a successful currency that’s used daily, but we know how to deliver outside of just crypto and that really sets us apart in this market.

You’ve stated Bitcoin, Ethereum and VISA etc. are failing to deliver, can you tell me more?

I’ve always believed in the power of cryptocurrencies as a form of payment, for fast and secure transactions between individuals and across borders. However existing cryptocurrencies are failing to deliver on this vision. For example, reports suggest that Bitcoin uses the same amount of energy as Iceland in a year, temtum can process thousands of times more transactions for the same cost as an average UK home for a year, around $600. If a currency isn’t sustainable now, before we have real-world adoption, then it’s not fit for purpose as a future payment network.

We can power our network using a fraction of the processing power of leading cryptocurrencies and traditional financial networks. Bearing in mind temtum was built to scale, we can eventually power networks bigger than VISA & Bitcoin combined on just 50 smartphones for example. The impact this will have on the carbon footprint of processing global payments is huge, and is actually now very exciting for the traditional financial institutions who have been spooked by press reports on Bitcoin. We intend to be the first carbon neutral global payments network.

We want to offer next-generation consumers a genuine, working alternative to existing payments platforms. Away from centralised institutions, away from traditional methods, where everyone is welcome and no one is left out. That doesn’t negatively affect the health of our planet and creates financial freedom – essentially a currency for everyone.

A currency for everyone sounds pretty ambitious. How do you plan on executing?

We’ve completed our mainnet solution, so as soon as the currency is distributed we expect it to be usable daily and we’re working on the solutions to ensure that TEM is not simply sat on exchanges being speculatively traded. We have various partnerships in place and more to come, which will enable the currency to be in the hands of everyday consumers in our target niche industries.

This strategy will enable us to achieve adoption outside of the crypto communities at rates that have never been seen before and we’ve worked tirelessly to get here rather than purely on a fundraising vehicle.

temtum was designed for the specific purpose of being fast, free, secure, scalable and sustainable. There’s no mining, there are no fees, this currency will work with all existing payment options through some of our innovative integrations with banking networks, including VISA. We’ve done everything we can think of to make sure this is the most stable and user-friendly currency, which will be ultimately powered by the users on a public network.

It’s early days still for the industry but people are already embracing cryptocurrencies. Early stage technology adopters and future generations of consumers are adopting elements of digital currencies and moving away from institutionalised payments in certain parts of their buying journeys. temtum is here to offer them the best product possible for the future of payments.

What’s the technology that’s making this all possible?

temtum is built on the Temporal Blockchain with our own unique Consensus Algorithm, which combines to give us our 4 technological pillars – Speed, Security, Scalability and Sustainability. At a time where there is a very competitive ‘transactions per second’ speed race in the industry, temtum is currently delivering proven 1800 tps on our mainnet. This is prior to network scaling, sharding and delegation, all of which are close to completion and will essentially give the network an unlimited TPS figure – it will only be limited by network scale. As other projects make ‘millions of TPS’ claims, we’re yet to see sustained evidence of even a fraction of these speeds, so we’re very happy to see we’re right up there on speed.

There’s nearly always a tradeoff in Blockchain, so much so that the term ‘trillema’ was coined for the fact no technology was able to solve ALL 3 of the main restrictions of Blockchain – Speed, Security, and Scalability. Well at temtum we believe that without a 4th, Sustainability, Blockchain will still not be fit for purpose. Security, Scalability, and Sustainability are all solved with a unique feature of temtum – a quantum source of randomness.

This randomness enables the network to select a leader for processing transactions, without it ever being pre-determined, which is highly efficient, uses next to no energy and is secure against the future of quantum computing. We’re already outperforming the next layers of the biggest projects in the space when it comes to Speed, Security, Scalability, and Sustainability.

Can you tell us more about the temtum team?

I founded temtum in 2014 with our now CISO Dr. Gareth Owenson at Portsmouth University, where I was actually the worlds’ youngest cryptography lecturer at the time at the age of 22. David Shimmon joined us, along with some seed funding for the development of the Temporal Blockchain solution and he set about bolstering our team with more than 25 years of cryptography experience, an extensive network in finance and multiple Silicon Valley C-Suite executives.

Five years of research, 12 peer-reviewed published papers and four years of blockchain development has led to the creation of temtum – Cryptocurrency. Evolved.

So what’s next for you? When will temtum launch?

temtum has already launched. Before we said anything publicly, we had a completed manner, which is a launched network as far as we’re concerned and positions us very well against some of the biggest projects. The difference here is that we’re yet to distribute the currency, $TEM. We’re going to announce our plans and recent developments in full in the very near future. Although it’s still early days of the world knowing what temtum is and what we’re all about, we’re certainly not in the early stages of development and we’re very much ready to show off what we have created.

How can people learn more about temtum?

We’re on Telegram, Discord, Twitter and Reddit.  More information can be found on the temtum website https://temtum.com and in the temtum white paper. If your readers have any questions, we’d be delighted to hear them – [email protected]