What is the Alliance Protocol

The Alliance Protocol is a set of rules to facilitate arrangements between decentralised blockchains such as PIVX and other companies. They are a very loose set of voluntary guidelines that aim to clarify the relationship between PIVX and any company or organisation that its allied with.

A brief history
Alliance protocol was built as a direct response to the ‘Arise bank’ fiasco, were PIVX founder s3v3nh4cks imprudently organised a partnership between PIVX and Arisebank, he done this without consulting any of the team and community. When AriseBank turned out to be a scam, not only was s3v3nh4cks left out of pocket and looking quite foolish, he had also managed to tarnish PIVX reputation quite thoroughly. The rest of the team decided that there must be a better way of doing these things and thus Alliance Protocol was born.

What has been built so far
So far The alliance Protocol project has produced the following deliverables

* Multiple governance conference calls
* PIVX Alliances logo designed – in keeping with PIVX branded but produced independently
* 2 Animated explainers
* A complete website with further information on all the current alliances. Www.pivxalliance.org
* An Alliance template, to help make proposals easier
* A PIVX Alliances litepaper which documents the process and the protocol in great detail
* The prudent screening of projects for alliance such as Merge, Particl and Numo

Alliances that passed, 
So far only 1 Alliance has ever passed, that was with Particl, The alliance was aimed at having some joint promotions and placing PART on ZDEX, in return Particl would add PIVX as a payment option on their upcoming marketplace – After this proposal was pushed through, s3v3nh4cks decided he wished to make ZDEX a private closed source project, following this a broken alpha was publicly released and it seems progress is stalling. With ZDEX being closed source It will be interesting to see if there is any volume or reason for PART to care about being added. Away from this it seems other efforts by the primary drivers of this alliance have faded, but it was still a very good initial usage of Alliance protocol.
You can here the discussion with Particl here – https://pivxalliance.org/2018/07/29/confcall-i/


Alliances that failed
So far there are 2 Alliances which were deemed to be unsuitable for PIVX. 

First was Merge which is a compilation of failed projects, bringing together all of the talent from those projects into a project built to develop for the PIVX network. It was deemed after some in depth discussions with lead developer Fuzzbawls and other community members on an open conference call  – https://pivxalliance.org/2018/08/26/confcall-ii/-- that Merge alliance should wait till they have a working product, Merge has since launched and is stable, so this should be revisted soon. It is worth noting that when Alliances don’t pass that the Protocol is still at work, there is much to be gained from avoiding embarrasing incidents like the ‘Arise Bank’ scam.

Second was Numo. Numo is a payments processor which would have integrated well with PIVX. However this alliance was cut short for reasons yet to be made public, some funds were paid out for development but no official alliance was launched and thus yet again the added due dilligence Alliance protocol encourages managed to expose potential pitfalls in an alliance.
The conference calls linked contain information on some other possible alliances however nothing substantial materialised from them.


Lesson learned

Looking forward I feel that I need to make it clearer that I will not be working on any actual alliances I will just be working on the framework, its down to the individuals who initiated the alliance to push forward with the activities they claimed they would complete during the proposal process.

I also realise that more effort needs to be made promoting the alliance protocol so that other businesses know that PIVX is ready to work with companies.


Where has funding come from

The vast majority of funding has come from my own pocket, this project was completely funded by me for the first 6 months, Since then I have had 2 proposals passed for modest sums of 1000 PIV each. So a Total of 2000 PIV has been allocated to this from the PIVX budget over the entire time.
I have had 0 private dontations.

What has funding been spent on
So Far funding has been spent on the following

* Alliance team member wage 100 piv for Gets
* Alliance team member wage 100 piv for BUER
* Alliance team member wage 100 piv for Cryptosi
* Helping to write the Alliance Litepaper – 100 piv for Brought
* Helping to write the Alliance Litepaper – 150 piv Strontium
* Particl PIVX alliance explainer – 150 piv
* Moved to the discord tipbot – 100 piv
* Proposal fee for the month where s3v3nh4cks sabotaged all PIVX budgets – 50 piv
* Proposal fee for QT wallet upgrade – 50 piv
* Facebook post boost test – 20 PIV

How much funds remain
There still remains 1080 PIV ready to be used for Alliance business

What is on the horizon
Since S3v3nh4cks has left for Veil, there has been renewed energy and positivity around PIVX, our development is now lead by Fuzzbawls and so PIVX is gathering more respect, there has been an instant noticable rise in inquiries about alliance with PIVX, I intend to capitalise on this positive energy shift with some good new alliances.

PIVX Litepaper is now complete and will be added to the official GIT if ACKed, hopefully some of the Forks will also find use in this protocol and it can become somewhat of a standard.

The first PIVX PACK will soon be announced, and it will be a charitable formation, this has been spearheaded by Snappy, but will lead to some very helpful benefits for people donating their time to PIVX

The PIVX ‘payments’ LitePaper will soon be started, this will document a method of holding funds on the behalf of the blockchain and also donating directly to different parts of the PIVX machine, dev, support, marketing, translations.

Z-CIA (code integrity association)
-PIVX based fork support, membership will cost a set amount.

PIVX Brand Custodian PACK
PIVX PACK, designed to hold the licence rights to PIVX branding on behalf of the blockchain, this aims to give PIVX brand a legal footing in the most decentralised way possible

Masternode hosting Services standards
This proposal will standardise masternode hosting services and allow for companies to meet these transparent standards and apply to be awarded an endorsed status by the PIVX blockchain. 


Thanks to the Alliance team members for all their support and Special thanks to Brought, strontium, Princess buttercup and Eric for their awesome work on the Litepaper