Factom, originally designed to fulfill a gap in enterprise-level data and blockchain-based record-keeping, was founded by Paul Snow and David Johnston in Austin, Texas in 2014. Factom had one of the first blockchain token sales, which started on April 2015. During the first day of its launch on the dApp Koinify, Factom raised 579 Bitcoin, which was worth $140,000 at the date of the sale. Upon its launch, the pricing of Factom’s native token, Factoids, had the same initial asking price as Ethereum, according to a 2015 article by CoinDesk. 

Table of Contents

1. Factom Quick Facts
2. Eventual Transition Into Accumulate blockchain
3. Differences Between Factom and Accumulate 
4. Accumulate Tokenomics
5. Accumulate Network Statistics
6. Accumulate Benefits
7. Accumulate’s Roadmap
8. Frequently Asked Questions on the Factom to Accumulate Transition

Factom Quick Facts 

• The Factom whitepaper was peer-reviewed by Vitalik Buterin 
• One of the first token sales ever
• Raised 579 Bitcoin on the first day of its token sale in 2015 
• Partnered with Gates Foundation 
• Grant recipient from the Department of Homeland Security 

Eventual Transition into Accumulate Blockchain

Generally speaking, some of Accumulate’s core functionality preserves parts of Factom’s more distinctive design aspects while improving on UI/UX, its range of use cases, and scalability. 

When Factom first surfaced, blockchain development was largely explored for trustless transactions and record keeping. Factom’s team of developers realized some of the inefficiencies of Bitcoin’s requirements for validating data, but Factom’s team used the Bitcoin network’s strengths to the team’s advantage. Some of the Bitcoin network’s requirements were not only inconvenient but rather unsuitable for larger data sets that were utilized by enterprises. To improve on these pain points, Factom’s development team improved on some of Bitcoin’s weaknesses when releasing Factom, but then used some of Bitcoin’s strengths to its advantage – such as the network’s security and size due to the network’s reliability. Factom was able to commit to Bitcoin in real-time, making Factom’s chain of chains architecture unique. 

Factom’s design gave way to: 

• Faster indexing
• Reduced complexity
• Lower storage costs 

Factom took the advantages of the Bitcoin network’s security one step further with the use of anchoring, a process that Accumulate still implements today. The results of consensus on Factom were uploaded to Bitcoin’s blockchain every 10 minutes. Large amounts of data were entered into Factom and then secured on Bitcoin through a single data point. This not only gave users an immutable history of transactions, it also had lower data requirements, and only asked users to sync with only a small portion of Factom to run the application. The design’s ease enhanced sharding as well. Thus, Factom’s approach allowed for scaling to become more efficient. 

Then in late 2021, the Factom Authority Node Operators (ANOs) voted to rebrand and upgrade into Accumulate. Accumulate was created to continue Factom’s legacy with a complete rewrite of the Factom codebase. 

Differences Between Factom and Accumulate 

Factom’s ANOs voted to upgrade and serve as the basis for Accumulate – a faster, more widely usable, and more scalable improvement of Factom– organized around digital identities called Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs). The Accumulate Protocol is an identity-based, Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) blockchain designed to power the digital economy through interoperability with Layer-1 blockchains, integration with enterprise tech stacks, and interfacing with the World Wide Web

What is an Accumulate Digital Identifier (ADI)?

An ADI (also called identity) is a human-readable URL that can represent users, institutions, devices, etc. An Identity may have accounts, which hold its assets, whether those are tokens, data, or keys. An identity can be represented as: “acc://Bob”. Identities provide structure on the Accumulate Blockchain and allow smart contracts, consensus building, validator networks, and enterprise-level management of digital assets.

Accumulate architecture allows the processing and validation of identities. Every ADI on the network also has an associated set of hierarchical keys. Each key has a different priority level, allowing users to manage security settings, or organize complex signature authorization schemes. Accumulate’s system anchors all transactions to Layer-1 blockchains while providing enterprise-grade security to anyone that wants it.

Accumulate Digital Identifiers can:

• Send and receive blockchain tokens like a Bitcoin address 
• Support smart contract rollups 
• Maintain legal and regulatory compliance 
• Maintain predictable gas costs 
• Multi-signature authorization for wallet transactions 
• Flexibility to be managed by an individual, an organization, or even a device
• ADIs can also be transferred or controlled by multiple parties to create a consortium that manages a user’s identity and data. 

Accumulate Tokenomics

Accumulate has a token supply that deflates with increased demand for the network. The token supply occasionally mints tokens to distribute to validators and stakers. However, at different times that vary by transaction volume, a portion of ACME tokens are burned when ADIs are created. Burned ACME tokens are reissued in future blocks. Accumulate’s demand mechanism incentivizes staking and burning ACME. 

Supply: 500M Tokens 

Release at Mainnet: 150M 

Grant Block and Dev Block: 60M and 90M 

Grant Block Breakdown: 

• 50%: Allocated to Governance 
• 25%: Core Development 
• 10%: Ecosystem Development 
• 15%: Business Development  

FCT Conversion to ACME: 50M

Conversion plus Activation Block: 200M of the 500M Max Supply 

Uncirculated Pool: 300M tokens (60%) 

Monthly Mint Rate: 1-2% of uncirculated pool tokens will be minted as ACME to create credits. 

Accumulate Metrics

• Community: Since launching, Accumulate Network’s community has quickly grown to over 150,000 people. 
• Transactions: One of the fastest blockchains globally with 70,000 transactions per second (TPS). 
• Block Time Settlement: Near instantaneous with 1-second block settlement 
• Node Validators: 30+ node validators to be onboarded
• Testnet Transactions: Accumulate’s testnet has seen over 1.2 million transactions.
• Site Events: Growing interest in Accumulate has resulted in 172,277 site events since inception.

Accumulate Benefits

• Low-Cost Transaction Fees: Predictable, low-cost transactions average $0.025 per token transaction.
• High Scalability: 70,000 transactions per second enable scalability for enterprises and individuals.
• Speed: Single second transaction settlement speed makes Accumulate one of the fastest blockchains available.
• Interoperability: Anchoring with other chains gives way to an interoperable design.   
• On and Off-Chain Integration: A smart contract model that offers support for dApps.  

Accumulate’s Roadmap 

Throughout the rest of 2022 into 2023, Accumulate’s development plan has two major components: ecosystem and core protocol. Some of the ecosystem updates that are anticipated for Accumulate include integrations with some of the most important Layer 1 protocols, as well as integrations with prominent stable coins. 

Planned updates to the core protocol include staking rewards, staging automation, validator automation, and signature chain pruning.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Factom to Accumulate Transition

When did Factom become Accumulate? Factom will officially become Accumulate after the hard fork is completed. On November 10-21, 2021, Factom’s Validators unanimously voted to upgrade into Accumulate. In the summer of 2021, Inveniam acquired Factom Inc.’s 40 blockchain patents. 

How many validators will Accumulate have? Accumulate’s ecosystem has been designed to support somewhere in the vicinity of up to 50 validators when Accumulate Mainnet activates.  However, the architecture was designed to support more validators as the platform’s volume increases. Accumulate requires validators to have substantially less hardware per transaction than other major blockchains to make validator onboarding easier. 

What are Accumulate’s benefits? Key hierarchies, human-readable addresses, and its multi-chain architecture. Key hierarchies allow keys to be rotated, recreated, and redesigned, resulting in an overall safety improvement for your assets. Human readable addresses improve the current status quo of interacting with long alphanumeric text strings to send blockchain tokens to another person. 

What is the ratio when converting FCT to ACME? Any user that holds Factom (FCT) would convert to Accumulate’s ACME at a ratio of 1 FCT to 5 ACME.

What do I need to do if I hold FCT for it to convert to ACME? If you have FCT in your own wallet, you will have to import your FCT into an ACME wallet. After the hard fork, a user would use their private key for their Factom wallet to access an Accumulate wallet that would contain the converted ACME (at a 1:5 ratio of 1 FCT to 5 ACME).

What do I need to do if I hold FCT on an exchange like Bittrex? Bittrex and other exchanges with FCT will be updated for the conversion to take place. More information will be published on this in the future.

Will WFCT holders convert to ACME? Yes, WFCT (Wrapped Factom) holders will be able to convert to ACME at the same ratio that FCT converts to ACME (1 FCT to 5 ACME). The conversion portal will be available at https://wfct-burn.netlify.app