Hi, we wanted to keep Gepom operational for our current customers until Procurean has finished with development, and also thought it makes sense to launch Procurean under a separate name because it is contextually quite a different product (with a whole lot more functionalities) than Gepom was.

Yes. You can see some of our client base at https://gepom.com, and we will be publishing case/result studies of different use cases in the following months. Be sure to keep an eye on our blog.

Hi, the guarantee is meant for businesses with existing partners on the network that are prepared to guarantee (vouch) for a newly joined business. The amount paid for a guarantee is dependent on what two businesses agree on - it can be symbolic if the guaranteeing business is prepared to take the risk without any immediate reward.

Businesses are able to register and use the alpha, but we will also include the community in a number of different ways in participation. We will release more info regarding this closer to the alpha release.

Going to court is a negative scenario (meaning the businesses couldn't resolve the issue internally). That is something businesses can always do - but it of course takes time and it is not always economically viable due to legal costs that arise.

We want to lower the risk of this happening with the trust mechanism - trust rank, because no single business will want to receive negative evaluations that will have a negative impact on their existing relationships with other businesses on the Procurean network (the network will trigger an alarm with their existing partners) and also future relationship from potential businesses that will get discouraged by a bad trust ranking.

Hi, you can start a new inquiry as soon as your registration is verified and authorized. It depends on you, usually business define at least 3 days for the auction time, so potential sellers have enough time to prepare and bid.

Hi, Procurean uses the Ethereum public blockchain as the blockchain layer.

Hi, of course. Businesses can choose to exchange documents offline in addition.

Hi, Procurean is a B2B network and therefore only available to businesses.

The Alpha-1 release will have a limited set of functionalities, but enough for businesses to start using Procurean:

• Smart Instruments - Blind Reverse Auction
• Market Tools - Discovery
• Market Tools - Vendor Management (Partial)
• Infrastructure Tools - Item Management (Partial)
• Infrastructure Tools - Electronic Documents (Partial)
• Trust Rank - Without Guarantees & Self-Assesment

Hi, the Alpha-1 release is planned for July.

Hi, quoting directly from the Whitepaper:

The business’s resulting trust rank is a composite number calculated from a weighted sum—the weight being the trust rank of the evaluator, of quantitative evaluations ranging from 1 to 10 and their financial indicators.

The reputational component dissolves over time to ensure relevancy.

This effectively means that the evaluations given from businesses with a greater trust rank will be of bigger importance and the reputational component of the trust rank dissolves over time in a linear manner to ensure that the most weighted evaluations are the most recent and therefore the most relevant too.

Secure by design means that the system has been designed from the ground up to be secure. Our infrastructure effectively locks us out of the transaction, trust processes and decision-making mechanisms in a way that we can't ever influence them, even if we or any other 3rd party later would want to influence the behavior in any way (positive or negative). 

The guaranteeing business gives a time-constrained guarantee to the asking business by staking its own trust rank. The given guarantee is fueled by tokens provided by the requesting party and issued on the Procurean network with a smart contract. All changes (positive or negative) to the trust rank of the requesting business are immediately reflected in the trust rank of the guaranteer for the remaining time, and the reward pool of tokens is redistributed to the guaranteer at the end of the guarantee period.

It's basically trust rank sharing for a certain period of time used by new businesses to enhance their trust rank.

Hi, we won't have any bounty, but you can participate in our Airdrop program when it goes live (meanwhile sign up for our newsletter to stay updated).

We don't. We support a whole range of procurement scenarios each meant for its respective role in procurement (strategic and non-strategic), but non-strategic and low sourcing priority items are what businesses will most likely want to "try out" and it is the first thing with which we can win them over and hook them for later use when they see the attained results.

Hi, the private sale is currently on-going, and we've recently successfully completed our seed investment goal.

The initiator of the smart instruments (various procurement and inquiry scenarios) has to sign the contract with his private key to authenticate the deployment. To be able to deploy the smart contract, the initiator (buyer in most cases) has to pay the GAS fee. There is no extra fee charged on top of the blockchain fee required by Ethereum.

No, one of the main goals of Procurean network is to remove trade barriers between participating businesses and lower transaction costs to a minimum. Procurean will generate and exchange documents in accordance with GS1 standards between participating parties. Businesses can choose to exchange paper documents additionally, but this won't be needed. Document storage will also be reinforced with blockchain technology.

Hi, yes! The business can issue a dispute on the Procurean network if they feel they've been given a wrongful evaluation. The network uses a pre-determined algorithm of trusted partners who then vote with a qualified majority vote to confirm or reject a given evaluation.