FAQ
Questions
What motivated you to create your project? What problem do you want to solve?
What do you want to change in crypto?
For us, seeing all the problems in web2 and traditional finance, we wanted to make sure those were prevented in the future, and we want to make sure we're a part of that change. Phishing and social engineering attacks have been successful for way too long and it's time to fix that. Web3 technology has advanced faster than Web2-based security tech’s ability to adapt to it. As NFTs and crypto wallets gain popularity, a window for new, sophisticated, and malicious attacks has opened. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, cryptocurrency theft rose 516%, to $3.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency. In 2021, the reported median loss per hack was $1,900, according to a Federal Trade Commission report. As you can tell, we're security folks at heart, and we want that ingrained into everything! We're decentralized security, doing what Satoshi did for ledgers, for security. Decentralization is the next logical step in the equation. :::
Small investors are afraid of fraud. What can you tell us about long-term investment in your project?
Why should we trust you?
We've been building startups for nearly 10 years, we're not going anywhere. 😉 That said, all of us have been doxed on our materials and none of us are hiding from view. We're here to make lasting value for everyone: investors, customers, community members, and ourselves.
It’s common knowledge that smart contracts are vulnerable to attack and auditing is expensive. Has Interlock been audited?
Of course. Being that we're a security company we take auditing, both from a smart contract perspective, as well as from a security perspective, very seriously. Our smart contracts are going through rigorous auditing now and into the future using the best companies we can find. Most of my time as a professional hacker involved a form of auditing, so I will vet all auditors at a higher standard than most.
Why should I buy $ILOCK tokens when the current market is so unstable?
Also, why should your token holder keep holding? What are the key features of your project that will benefit Interlock users?
We believe that $ILOCK token will grow in value because it's tied to tangible outcomes for our users and customers. For example, our enterprise customers will use $ILOCK to buy threat data from us—and our users will be paid for generating that threat data while staying protected with our browser extension. This creates an immediate market for our token. Everyone who joins into the project early will be part of that growth journey and we want early adopters to see our ecosystem grow into more and more products that benefit individuals, enterprises, and most importantly, Web3.
Could you please share your future roadmap?
Here is the roadmap. We add to the roadmap all the time, so please come back to it often!
Did you listen to community feedback/requests when you create new products or expand on existing ones?
Yes, and that process hasn't stopped. Being that we've built startups since 2013, we always work to build what our customers and clients want most. We are still open to that feedback and want to continue to adapt to the needs of both customers and cybersecurity.
Many projects fail because the target audience and clients are not understood. Who is your ideal customer for your product?
Our ideal consumer customer is anyone who wants to stay safe from attacks online — especially DeFi users, who are constantly under attack from hackers and phishing attacks. Our ideal enterprise customer is a 100+ person company that is forward thinking, needs security for their browsers, and is in the fintech, technology, or financial sectors.
How can new users understand your project easily?
Is there some kind of educational program or some YouTube videos to make it easier for newcomers to understand your project?
We will definitely consider making more training content but thankfully on the product side, it's very easy! Once you install the extension, it does most of the work while you earn. More will come later for sure. For now, feel free to join our social channels to keep up with us and chat about what we do, someone is always around: Social Links
I saw that there will be “security stakers” who will earn $ILOCK tokens by staking harmless gray area entities?
Can you explain more about it? How can I participate?
You’re talking about our bounty hunter group, which is on our roadmap for later this year. It will be a special, invite-only group with extremely cool prizes and rewards: Think NFTs, extra tokens, and prestigious positions in the network. We're REALLY excited about our bounty hunters. Keep an eye on our socials in the future where we'll share more details about how you can become one and earn $ILOCK by securing the internet.
What are Interlock’s killer features?
- We're the first Web3 blockchain-based security company with a sensor network created by our users. Everyone with the extension is participating in making the network stronger for themselves and the companies/projects they use and like. This wasn't possible before blockchain and crypto! 2. We have an enterprise product and we’re making this strong security available to everyone, everywhere! The enterprise product is live and has paying customers with thousands of users. Our consumer version will be just as powerful.
As DeFi projects become more popular, there have been many attacks and millions in losses. What security approaches will you implement in the DeFi apps on your blockchain that will give investors confidence about the safety of their crypto assets?
We'll be protecting projects and individuals, differently but cohesively. By integrating our Trust & Safety products into projects, it will enable people to understand risk and prevent fraud before they sign that wrong smart contract or interact with a malicious user. In the browser, we're actively stopping attacks across many facets, but mostly focusing on stopping malicious pages and bad downloads. We can also stop ice phishing and prevent you from interacting with bad contracts in your wallet.
Can you share the best thing your project has achieved so far?
I think our biggest achievement is building a great team with great investors! We're lucky — every project has great tech but it's more important, in my opinion, to have a great team.
What does your browser extension do?
Our browser extension is the first product in our ecosystem of community-driven security products to protect DeFi. It blocks ads and protects you from browser based threats.
What attacks does your browser extension protect me from?
Our browser extension protects you from all types of browser threats including: Phishing, Coin Theft, Resource Theft (illicit mining), Pump/Dump Campaign Alert, Illicit Service Wallet Addresses (drugs, sex, violence, coin tumblers, embargoed, etc.), Malvertising, Malicious Browser Extensions, Malicious Scripts, Spearphishing, Icephishing, Scam Coins, Scam Wallet Addresses, Scam Wallet Software, Scam Exchange, Scam Swapper...etc.
How does it work?
Interlock maintains and grows a visual model database of over 67.83 billion pages — over 6 petabytes of visual data. We use it to power our enterprise solution, which analyzes over 12 trillion links per year to prevent web attacks in real-time, zero-day, or otherwise. Our browser extension uses this database to account for context within the browser in order to identify malicious sites in real-time — even if they’ve never been reported or seen before.
Is this a web browser? Is it a VPN?
No, our consumer product is a browser extension you can install in your favorite browser, be it Firefox or a Chromium-based browser.
Which browsers does it work on?
Our browser extension supports Firefox and chromium-based browsers like Chrome, Brave and Microsoft Edge.
Where does your funding come from?
We’re backed by top tier Web3 investors: Outlier Ventures, 8186 Ventures, GAINS, Pluto, KON, MaxStealth, RBC, FishDAO, Damo Labs, Waterdrip Capital, and Scorpio VC.
Who made this? Why should I trust you?
Interlock was founded by YCombinator alumnus and has a team with decades of experience in building security products. We're here to make lasting value for everyone: investors, customers, community members, and ourselves.
Does your extension block ads?
Yes, it will block nearly all types of internet advertising — everything from big blinking banners to search ads and video pre-rolls and all the rest.
Is my browsing data private and confidential?
Interlock respects our users’ privacy. You choose exactly what anonymized and private data you would like to share with us. The more you share, the more $ILOCK you earn. And you can always choose to share nothing at all!
How do I get support?
If you face any technical problems you can ask for help in our [📘 #Help-Centre](https://discord.com/channels/832432204138676274/946034786986778645) channel on Discord.
Is this a new blockchain?
No, this is a distributed application built on top of an existing blockchain.
What blockchain are you built on?
We are building all of our smart contracts on the Aleph Zero blockchain.
Why did you choose Aleph Zero?
The Aleph Zero platform is addressing many of the outstanding problems found in similar popular blockchain projects like Ethereum: transaction speed, energy efficiency, transaction cost, etc. While our idea is — in principle — possible to implement on most blockchains, doing so on Aleph Zero will help us scale more easily and also more cheaply. Additionally, we think that the Substrate / Ink! development stack for smart contracts on Aleph Zero is well-documented and robust enough to act as a solid foundation for the Interlock Network. Lastly, Aleph Zero’s strong community and growing popularity will help us attract new contributors to the project. We are both minting $ILOCK tokens and implementing our gray-area staking features on Aleph Zero.
What is the difference between you and MSFT ION?
Microsoft'S ION project is a decentralized P2P identity network — it does not yet have features pertaining to *trust* and *security*. Same goes for any other identity network, like fractal, cheqd, and Soverin.
Where does this solution fit in the big picture?
Very simply, you install our extension, and it detects fraudulent websites as you browse in real time, while preventing you from divulging any sensitive information to said website. The extension also allows you to flag harmful websites that we miss, or unflag nonharmful websites. You can also choose to share some/all/none (the default is none) of your browsing data with us, so that we can enrich our threat-intelligence dataset. For doing these things you can receive $ILOCK Tokens, which you can exchange for other currencies at an exchange, or use them with our other products. You can also use these tokens to *stake* any grey-area-entities that we have accumulated (i.e. entities that our heuristics have not been able to categorize as a high-probability threat or non-threat) — we are letting software do what it excels at (i.e. approximate categorization at scale), and letting people do things they are good at (i.e. precise and nuanced disambiguation) via crowdsourcing.
How did you implement this trust network?
Please see our technical Whitepaper and Website for implementation details.
What parts of your stack are open source?
The Aleph Zero blockchain that Interlock is building on is an open source project. All of our smart contracts are open source — because that is just how blockchain works, and because we would like our community to have access to these contracts for transparency. Our browser-extension is also open source. The backend parts of our stack (i.e. the data-processing pipeline and our database) are closed source, for security purposes. We may open source the backend components once they become more mature, or if the community expresses interest in it.
Are you a security company?
Interlock is not a security company — we are a Web3 focused information and data company founded by people who have years of experience in the security space. You could think of us as a next generation security company, or a security company for the Web3 era.
What kind of anonymity do you offer?
The Interlock Network is built around anonymous accounts — we never require you to identify yourself with a phone number or an email address. You can have as many accounts as you want, and if you want to link any of those accounts to your real-world identity, that is up to you.
What interfaces do you offer for accessing the network?
We try to make the network as accessible as possible. Initially we plan to offer a web interface and a browser extension. These two interfaces are not interchangeable and serve different purposes.
How does the Interlock Extension differ from the Interlock Web Interface?
The web-interface lets you access and query the data collected from the Interlock Network — it is basically a web interface to a database. The Interlock Extension actively protects you from phishing attacks and block advertisements — you can also use it to interact with the Interlock Network.
How do people get compensated on your network?
People earn $ILOCK Tokens in many ways some being by using our extension passively and anonymously sharing a subset of their browsing data, or by actively flagging and staking grey-area-entities. With many other options still being explored.
Does this project have a specific governance model?
Regarding technical contribution, we will follow an RFD/RFC model where project design documents are proposed and discussed on various community channels (i.e. github, discord, and others). If the project and community get large enough, we will likely adopt a governance model akin to Rust's. We diverge from the traditional RFC process in that we (a) adopt proposals by voting via smart contract and (b) developers can show their support and affinity for each other and their ideas by using the upvote/downvote mechanism that is already in place. We do not require separate personal and developer accounts, but we also do not require the same account. Keeping with the theme of privacy and anonymity a developer can have as many accounts as they want and the project/community would have no way of knowing — which is already the situation in the real world (i.e. one can make as many GitHub accounts as they want). Decisions must be consensed upon — proposals require unanimous approval. Unanimous consensus is meant to eliminate the competitive nature of voting — all disagreements should be resolved at the discussion phase before a proposal comes to a vote. We believe that there are very few true and unresolvable contradictions in engineering. Proposals can be resubmitted for voting.
This sounds cool.
I would like to be involved — are you accepting any kind of investment?
We plan on pursuing a variety of fund-raising strategies. For starters we plan on doing a DAICO.
This sounds cool.
I would like to be involved — are you accepting any kind of coding contributions?
We are fully open source and will happily accept coding contributions. Also, keep an eye out for updates because we are planning on financing bug bounty programs using our $ILOCK Token in the future.
This sounds cool.
I would like to be involved — are you accepting any kind of writing contributions?
We would appreciate any kind of documentation or evangelism in the form of writing. We would happily compensate you using the $ILOCK Token.
Is there an Interlock Community?
We currently have an active presence on Discord and Telegram. All of our links are as follows: