Themis: The Decentralized “Alipay”

Themis is a blockchain-based fair exchange system that provides decentralized digital currency hosting services and resolves the issue of fair exchange mediated by digital currency. It can be used in point-to-point digital payment of custody payments and the exchange of digital currency over the counter.

Choosing digital currencies to pay for goods, bills and even tuition fees is becoming a worldwide new payment craze. More and more countries like Japan, the United States, Germany, and Australia pay with Bitcoin. In April 2017, the Japanese cabinet recognized the virtual currency such as bitcoin as an authorized payment instrument. In August 2013, the German Ministry of Finance approved Bitcoin as a legal private asset and the U.S. retail giant Overstock launched various digital currency payment channels.

In the wave of digital money payment, we also noticed that there was a big delay between the payment of digital currencies and the delivery of goods, which could not be completed at the same time. We lacked the financial hosting service infrastructure to solve the trust issue. Although some centralized hosting services are currently available, it is not safe to rely on a single third-party solution.

‘THEMIS’ is targeting a decentralized Alipay. In December 2016, we started the design exchange agreement, starting with hosting services and connecting buyers and sellers using digital currency. Product Director Danish said THEMIS is the first secure hosting service that does not rely on a single trusted third party, guaranteeing a fair exchange between buyers and sellers.

THEMIS offers application scenarios including point-to-point managed payments, digital currency exchange transactions and secure account custody. According to Danish, the traditional centralized digital money service is overpriced, and most users’ privacy data still lies in the hands of a few operators, exposing themselves to different degrees of risk of disclosure. THEMIS will enable direct transaction between buyers and sellers. With the DPoSR consensus mechanism, reputable nodes can be elected as both the custodian node and the arbitrator node. The user initiates the transaction by first placing the digital currency in the escrow account, the trustee and the arbitrator The parties manage part of the “key fragments”, the transaction is successful, the custodian and the arbiter node automatically withdraw from the transaction.

For the decentralized hosting services will increase the difficulty of user operations, Danish said that although the technology used a lot of encryption technology, but for the target user, THEMIS can provide similar to the market digital money service providers operating experience; the other hand, Decentralized blockchain nodes reduce the probability of single-point attacks and active node-center fraud, which makes it difficult to tamper with the uplink information.

Among the trading services of different currencies, THEMIS has expanded the cross-chain exchange of atoms, buyers and sellers that can use different digital currencies to complete the escrow transaction, alongside, THEMIS has issued its own token GET token, which can be used to pay custodian and arbitration service fees.

THEMIS R&D and consulting team are from the well-known universities and laboratories in UK and China. The team are technology-oriented R&D. Product director Danish is University of London University of London blockchain technology center developer, most of its core team with college research background. THEMIS has entered into a strategic cooperation relationship with Hexin Financial Technology Research Institute, completed a series of designs based on smart contracts, and the research results have been embedded in the THEMIS blockchain.

So far, around the GET tokens, THEMIS has reached a cooperation scene with the Sunshine Insurance Agency, Bao Pai You APP. In the meantime, THEMIS is also setting up a new OTC platform to provide more diversified decentralized financial services.

It is reported that THEMIS has recently completed several millions of dollars in financing, investors include Node Capital, Creation Capital, Consensus Capital, Jiuding Blockchain Laboratory, Neptune Venture Capital, etc., a number of well-known institutions.