AllianceBlock Co-Founder and CTO Matthijs de Vries joined the #RaccoonFam for a text AMA on DeFi Raccoon’s Telegram—here are the highlights
AllianceBlock was asked to participate in an AMA for the Defi Racoons #raccoonfam. The focus of the AMA was to educate a new audience about AllianceBlock, explain how our interoperable suite of Defi tools can help projects and retail users & discuss our upcoming plans.
The following transcript is edited for clarity, but you can also follow the discussion on Telegram here.
Introductions
DeFiRaccoons: Hope you are all ready #raccoonfam! Today we’re having an educational AMA with Matthijs de Vries, CTO at AllianceBlock!
That’s correct, today we’re finally being honoured with his presence! And he’s here today to share with us many of the exciting updates and releases.
As you know there will be 2 parts, the muted part where I and Matthijs will be talking about AllianceBlock in general as well as the latest news and updates! Then we’ll unmute and have the community ask questions and some winners will be chosen.
So @defimati, without further ado, can you please briefly tell us who you are and what your role is at AllianceBlock? We’ll be having the elevator pitch in a minute!
Matthijs: 🔥
Matthijs: Absolutely! I’m one of the founders of AllianceBlock and a huge software nerd since I was around 11 years old. I have been developing software in many industries and programming languages over time until I got into management at one of the largest enterprises in the Netherlands. I got hooked to crypto though and then ultimately felt the need to add value to the industry and community by founding AllianceBlock together with Rachid [Ajaja] and Amber [Ghaddar] back in 2018.
I am the CTO at AllianceBlock, I focus a lot on the development of our products, but in reality, I love to be involved in every aspect of the business 🙂
DeFiRaccoons: Awesome, it’s nice to see people with a real love for what they do getting involved in the space. but since you have this huge background, please bear with us to really understand what’s going on here!
Matthijs: The passion grows still every day ❤️
DeFiRaccoons: Because it’s the first time when a project actually aims on filling this gap between TradeFi and DeFi, if executed correctly, we can assist with a little piece of history here!
Matthijs: And as we believe, a quite important gap to be filled.
DeFiRaccoons: And you guys are actually building this for what, 4 years now. It’s one of the important features of successful businesses continually building. Aight, awesome, again guys, please tune in to their community for whatever we won’t be able to get out of this one. I’ll make it easier for you.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/allianceblock
Website: https://allianceblock.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/allianceblock
Matthijs: Exactly, we started in a bear market, and we feel quite at home again nowadays in the new bear market 😄
Bear market = build market for us
DeFiRaccoons: If you know what you’re doing there’s no bear, there’s always something to build higher!
Matthijs: 100%
About AllianceBlock
DeFiRaccoons: Aight, now that we got to know you a little better, I’d like to move a little bit to what AB is all about! So, what is it all about, and what key unique features are you looking to bring to the space? Can you give the raccoons the infamous elevator pitch about AllianceBlock?
Matthijs: AllianceBlock’s mission is to build seamless gateways between TradFi and DeFi. We do this by developing an end-to-end infrastructure leveraging decentralized technology to empower individuals, startups, and businesses to build decentralized, secure, and compliant solutions and accelerate their vision. We aim to be the industry standard for DeFi development and TradFi adoption with our interoperable and composable suite of solutions and compliant products.
Our vision is that technology, community, and an ecosystem of partners to become the foundation for a new participatory economy. One that is fair, transparent, sustainable, and inclusive.
DeFiRaccoons: That’s indeed unique, and let me say that, as far as I know, there’s no one else doing this for all the 3 pillars of Finance — individuals, startups, and businesses. It’s really important to fully understand how important are individuals in the overall scheme of things.
Matthijs: If they do, we can only applaud that and invite them to join our ecosystem and join forces instead of working against each other. We are here to benefit the industry.
DeFiRaccoons: And that’s also the healthy type of behavior that this space needs. We can also tell this by the name of your project!
Matthijs: Yes! Our name does exactly give that approach away 😄 We have an opportunity in a multi-trillion dollar market.
AllianceBlock’s mission is to build seamless gateways between TradFi and DeFi. We do this by developing an end-to-end infrastructure leveraging decentralized technology to empower individuals, startups, and businesses to build decentralized, secure, and compliant solutions and accelerate their vision.
DeFiRaccoons: Thank you for that! I just wanted to give the raccoons a taste of where this could go! Now, getting back to it! Of course, individuals are as important as the big players in the game. But there’s also someone else that people usually forget about when talking/ thinking about a project, and I’d love to take this opportunity to get to know your team as well!
DeFiRaccoons: I’d like to take a look at those that make this project possible and invest their time and resources in it. How many of you are working on AllianceBlock right now and what’s their background? How many developers are there?
Matthijs: Sure, we have over 60 people working across 20 countries, with a big focus of the team in The Netherlands (where we are also officially registered). The team consists of highly-talented developers with all types of experience ranging from smart contract development, protocol development etc.
DeFiRaccoons: I remember the time of the launch! Was happy to be part of it!
DeFiRaccoons: Over 60 people, you guys are over the startup category, and we can tell by the professionalism you get things done.
Matthijs: And I agree, individuals are as important as the big players in the game, especially combining these individuals in a group. We have, for example, a huge deal to thank our community, they have been an amazing support for years and we couldn’t be here without them.
DeFiRaccoons: Yes, in such a short time frame that many people are very impressive!
Matthijs: Technically, it’s way more, we are launching communication about this Friday actually 👀[editor’s note — AllianceBlock introduced Nuant]
DeFiRaccoons: Perfect! I’m sure your community has plenty of reasons to do so, why don’t we get to talk about a few of them?
AllianceBlock’s End-to-End Infrastructure
DeFiRaccoons: So let’s jump into some juicy details, but please don’t get too technical on it, for we wanna be able to reach as many as possible, and I’m no developer myself, lol! So AllianceBlock is building an end-to-end infrastructure for blockchain builders, with solutions for DeFi, data, and regulatory/compliance.
DeFiRaccoons: Could you briefly explain in layman’s terms what these three encompass? Can you highlight the solutions you’re building for each?
Matthijs: Absolutely, we have a suite of products that together form a DeFi infrastructure with optional regulatory compliance built-in.
DeFiRaccoons: Ah ok, so it’s optional.
Matthijs: These products can work completely standalone but also work perfectly hand in hand, interconnected.
DeFiRaccoons: Perfect, so filling in any startup needs.
DeFiRaccoons: So whatever new projects or even big institutions need, they can easily get involved with AllianceBlock, and kick off with crypto — you guys take care of everything, from the early stages of KYC (love the security part) to fundraising and everything.
Matthijs: Few of our products that are live:
- DeFi Terminal, that allows DeFi projects to launch liquidity and staking solutions for their communities in a no-code environment but highly secure and decentralized, so they own all the smart contracts deployed.
- Fundrs, our P2P financing platform that is based on working together as a community with a reputation system at its heart and milestone-based financing built-in. aiming to have a more sustainable fundraising ecosystem.
- Bridge to enable low barrier interoperability for projects between a large number of networks.
- DEX: with an AMM that has been developed by ourselves (so no Uniswap fork!) that drastically reduces impermanent loss
Soon to come:
- Single-Sided Liquidity Protocol that can be rolled out for several DEXs, not just ours
- Data Tunnel for a fair, low barrier and transparent way of sharing data, creating a new data economy (I did a keynote [at CV Summit 2022 at Crpytovalley Zug, Switzerland] on this last week if you want to watch back)
- TIDV (Trustless IDentity Verification): our trustless on-chain identity verification tool, ZK-based allows you to compliantly use third-party tools (and our own where relevant) without having to share your personal details.
Matthijs: We help projects reach success no matter which stage they are in their life cycle, can be upon inception with Fundrs [for capital raising] or later on when they have already products launched with the DeFi Terminal [for liquidity mining and staking], Bridge [for transferring tokens and data across networks], and TIDV [for compliance] for example as building blocks. All products come with SDKs that allow easy integration for the project’s dev teams in their existing product/ecosystem.
DeFiRaccoons: I love how well structured you are regarding the needs of the space. There’s a lot of info to chew in here, but don’t worry guys, we’ll break it down into smaller pieces.
Matthijs: A lot of the solutions we offer are based on problems we experienced ourselves. We felt a need and solved it, when we had proof it worked, we created it in a way it can be used by others as well.
We help projects reach success no matter which stage they are in their life cycle…A lot of the solutions we offer are based on problems we experienced ourselves. We felt a need and solved it, when we had proof it worked, we created it in a way it can be used by others as well.
DeFi Terminal
DeFiRaccoons: I like that you guys are all about making it easier for those with awesome ideas to complete their dreams, with no code required. Indeed, and we can see that you guys treated from all of the angles, from the individual POV — awesome example with the liquidity loss, to smaller and big community and projects.
And again, we’ll take these step by step. Let’s actually start with the DeFi Terminal, because I feel this is key in the ecosystem growth and even brings awareness of the tech that’s being developed, through other projects.
Matthijs: As I said before, we want to benefit the industry 🙂 we were the ones in the community before and we saw the problems that plagued the industry and felt the need to add value here. That’s what you can see reflected in our solutions.
DeFiRaccoons: That’s the to-go, and probably one of the reasons you guys got through, what 2 bears so far! But now, let’s talk a bit about the DeFi Terminal, it allows project owners to get their liquidity mining or staking campaign setup within an hour — no code, branded, and secure.
DeFiRaccoons: First of all what’s the difference between liquidity mining and staking? Can you give us a use case of why a newly launched project might want to consider launching a staking campaign? What’s the benefit of using your DeFi Terminal?
Matthijs: Bears sound so negative, 2 builder markets 😛
DeFiRaccoons: With this type of mentality, there won’t be any difference between the 2, that’s the way to go I guess!
Matthijs: Sure thing! when a project wants to deploy liquidity for its token on a DEX, they create a liquidity pool, usually funded from its own treasury. In order to improve their liquidity and lower the price impact of larger buys and sells, community members or token holders can provide liquidity to those pools as well. But risk for liquidity providers is always impermanent loss. Creating a liquidity mining campaign allows those liquidity providers to stake their liquidity pool tokens in a contract in exchange for [additional] rewards, effectively ensuring improved liquidity for a project in a given timeframe.
Staking is meant to tie community members to a project for a longer period in exchange for rewards. Staked tokens are locked for a longer period of time usually (sometimes multiple years). We see more and more projects using staking as an integrated tool in their ecosystem (for example to ensure an opportunity to buy tokens of a project on a launchpad if staked x tokens for y time)
DeFiRaccoons: So I guess the question will raise the interest of the project owners & devs in our community, lol. Easy to go, user-friendly solutions to reach out to both DeFi lovers and the huge TradeFi mass.
Matthijs: The DeFi Terminal also offers a no-code white-labeled solution. This is interesting for early-stage projects as they can easily and securely create new liquidity mining and staking campaigns in minutes rather than months(!). And with a click of a button, they launch a web application in their look and feel (colors and logo) for their community to easily participate in those campaigns (we have put a LOT of focus on great UX that these projects can benefit from).
DeFiRaccoons: Aight, this sounds fair for all, so from my understanding, you actually receive twice the rewards? One from the liquidity pool, and one from the [liquidity] mining? Is that accurate?
Matthijs: For later-stage projects, they can use our SDK so that they can integrate the DeFi Terminal solutions deeper into their existing ecosystem so that they can tie staking and LM functionality to features of their products. This is generally a low-code solution as an SDK requires some development to integrate. That’s accurate, you get a part of the trading fees as an LP and the rewards from the LM campaign.
DeFiRaccoons: Minutes, wow, so far I loved all the numbers we’ve had in the session, makes everyone feel comfy about it!
Matthijs: 18 projects launched their LM & Staking platforms already through DeFi Terminal 🙂
DeFiRaccoons: So there’s a legacy in the space for you guys already! I really love this [liquidity] mining program, and if I remember right, there’s also a Youtube vid ‘bout it, right? Let’s see!
DeFiRaccoons: Tell us about the use case for liquidity mining campaigns, why is this important?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5daYKPiK2g
Matthijs: Yeah exactly!
DeFiRaccoons: Love the graphics BTW, makes it a lot easier for everyone to understand the process.
Matthijs: Nice, thanks for sharing! We speak to many projects in the space at many different stages and use cases range from keeping the community close and engaged with your project while you build out your roadmap (early stage) to enabling stakers/LMers to participate in certain features of your ecosystem. We are also working on an NFT staking mechanism that is, for example, interesting in the gaming industry — imagine staking an NFT of a weapon that will then increase the damage it can do the longer you stake it, for example. Use cases can be found everywhere 😄
DeFiRaccoons: Cool to see this expanding in the different niches of the industry! And not gonna get over the fact that it’s a lot like a step-by-step for any project really, regardless of the tech behind it, wherever they are in their journey, you guys help keep them engaged with the community and whatnot! But that’s actually not the only thing cool about it. There’s also a Fundrs dApp that we haven’t talked about yet, so let’s take a look!
Fundrs
DeFiRaccoons: Let’s talk about the Fundrs dApp. So Fundrs is a financing platform based on reputation and merit. I see there’s a symbiosis between 2 participants seekers (startups) and funders (capital providers). Please do tell us more about how everything works and when we can expect the fundraising rounds to be live!
Matthijs: Yeah, so actually Fundrs brings us back to 2018, when we founded AllianceBlock. We saw the ICO boom and then the downturn of the market because of it. We saw the opportunity of P2P funding, but we wanted to contribute to making this more sustainable. Fundrs is the result.
We wanted to ensure we can create a participatory platform where both Funders (providing capital) and Seekers (those that are seeking this capital) can work together in order to achieve the best outcome. No backdoor deals or talks, open communication, reputation based: if you add value (by sharing insights, answering questions, voting, etc.) you earn reputation and therefore you gain more opportunities in the platform.
Couple that with milestone-based financing where projects can only get the funding they need for the first next milestone (as decided by the community of capital providers) and we end up with an actually sustainable ecosystem. And this is much needed. Startups have a high rate of failure in general, even (way) more so in crypto
DeFiRaccoons: Indeed, if we have this decentralized tech, why not use it at its finest right? it’s all about transparency. And as far as I know, NFTs are also involved in this system, am I correct?
Matthijs: Yes, but not for the sake of profile pictures. A lot of what you do in our ecosystem will be more and more combined in an NFT so you can build an on-chain presence and reputation that is fair and transparent. We believe in equal opportunity here.
DeFiRaccoons: What would their role be for that, because back in ’18, this was just a dream, and not even. Perfect! agreed, and I actually think that NFTs in the future will be used in a whole different way than we do today. Like tickets for subways and whatnot!
Matthijs: In 2018 we saw a downturn in the market and we took the time to learn a lot and work out all the problems we have seen. By 2020 we started building the solutions to mitigate those problems. Exactly, Soulbound NFTs are a great example of what’s possible. For the Data Tunnel, we also use NFTs to represent a dataset, and they are used to distribute the revenue through a royalty-based mechanism over the dataset publishers and the contributors that added value to it.
A lot of what you do in our ecosystem will be more and more combined in an NFT so you can build an on-chain presence and reputation that is fair and transparent. We believe in equal opportunity here. — Matthijs de Vries
Compliance and Regulation Solutions
DeFiRaccoons: Indeed, and if we go all the way back then, there were other ‘issues’ that we haven’t seen, or didn’t want to at that time. And here I mean regulations or the lack of it. You guys took care of that as well. Let’s talk about your solutions for regulation and compliance, specifically the AllianceBlock TIDV and AllianceBlock Cross-Border Regulatory Compliance Rules Engine.
DeFiRaccoons: Please, kind Sir, can you tell us what these 2 products do and how they can help projects navigate the crypto wild west towards better compliance with regulators and institutional players in mind?
Matthijs: Yeah, so with our partner GBG (a big identity verification provider in the UK) integrated into TIDV (Trustless IDentity Verification), we have a decentralized on-chain identity verification tool for DeFi solutions (but also traditional solutions). You verify your identity once through GBG, and then the ZK (zero knowledge) proof of this identity (on-chain) can be used to get access to compliant/regulated services.
This, without sharing your identity data with third parties (a big problem still in this industry, to be honest, a lot of identity information got hacked/leaked/stolen, unfortunately).
Take for example liquidity mining: if we want institutions to participate (and they have repeatedly shown big interest) we need to be able to provide compliant liquidity pools on DEXes. Through on-chain verification, we can ensure that only verified wallets provide liquidity and participate in liquidity mining campaigns.
DeFiRaccoons: No, I totally agree on this, big issue with the leaking of personal data (from big players to small ‘wins’), and let’s face it, having a KYC also helps build the trust of other institutions and even governments.
Matthijs: With Cross-Border Regulatory Compliance Rules Engine we can ensure that transactions that take place between two actors or services respect a set of predefined rules that can be programmed and enforced per jurisdiction and use case. This is all on-chain of course!
DeFiRaccoons: Haha, on the same page as you on this one, for sure. I’m all about KYC, but if we can have that private at the same time, that’s a game-changer.
Matthijs: And for projects enforcing KYC is still quite a high barrier; a KYC verification on a low volume (which almost always has to be prepaid) can be quite expensive and hard to integrate in an automated way. KYC through TIDV is reusable and thus cheaper.
DeFiRaccoons: Perfect, so I’m all sold for your project! You guys were able to take, as you said yourself, the best of both worlds, right?
Matthijs: Exactly, we aim to have a seamless gateway between the two.
AllianceBlock Partnerships
DeFiRaccoons: And we can see how complex this is on the backend, but how easily actually is for people and projects to work around it, which is what will eventually bring wide-adoption. But now, another thing that is really important when looking into a project is the partnerships. While browsing your website, I’ve seen that you have a bunch of them, and the leaders as well. Not to mention the already launched — 18 — projects [on DeFi Terminal]!
DeFiRaccoons: So, what partnerships do you currently have, and what value do they bring to the project both short-term and long-term?
Matthijs: As we are building an ecosystem we are having a wide array of partnerships that contribute to the effectiveness of this ecosystem: layer ones (for example Peaq and EnergyWeb), DEXes (for example Pangolin), and more traditional companies like Databricks, GBG, TopTech, etc. Some of them we put in effect straight away by integrating them into our ecosystem immediately (DeFi Terminal, Fundrs) others make more sense a bit later on the roadmap. But we take great care of only selecting partners that add actual value.
For Fundrs we will list dua and Bonq, which are projects that will not only benefit from capital raising through our platform but will also integrate with several of our solutions. So they are not just listed projects, they are also partners we work closely with.
DeFiRaccoons: Indeed, many should understand that partnerships can be on different levels, not just marketing (which is another layer actually) — but you are nicely integrating this as well. Also important to continue building even after agreeing on it, ofc!
Matthijs: Exactly, we are not here for short-term hype, we are here to build a sustainable future.
Next Steps for AllianceBlock
DeFiRaccoons: That’s already been proved so we’re cool! And you mentioned, some make sense a bit later in your roadmap, so shall we take a look at it as well? Can you tell us about the roadmap and what plans you have for 2022?
Matthijs: Yeah, one of the things that we are focusing on is building out our NFT protocol and integrating it further, doubling down on regulations throughout our ecosystem, revolutionizing the data economy through the Data Tunnel, and largely rolling out P2P funding solutions by white labeling the core technology of Fundrs. We have already a couple of use cases in the works for this with other projects 👀
DeFiRaccoons: Perfect, on point as usual! Let me thank you personally before we move to the next section, for making it easier for everyone to understand how to scale their opportunities and investments in DeFi, as well as doing it more securely, and with fewer losses!
Community Questions
Question: I saw that AllianceBlock launched a new Staking Platinum Tier for Fundr and rALBT multipliers. Can you explain in more detail about this? How much $ALBT must the user stake to gain access to this tier?
Matthijs: Q1: We have added a new platinum tier, which allows you to stake a max of 1M ALBT, you’ll need a minimum of 250K ALBT to get this tier. The gold tier, therefore, has been stretched up to a max of 250K ALBT (100K before). The multiplier of this tier will be reduced soon though!
Question: I see that, within the @allianceblock , every client will have an investor’s profile with a reputation score. Why is this reputation score important? How can a client build up their reputation & what are the benefits of doing so? Also, what all instances will cause a fall in score?
Matthijs: Reputation score is hugely important to achieving our vision and goals. When we say equal opportunity, we cannot let someone that was lucky once with a lot of funds give more opportunity than someone that doesn’t have a lot of funds but can add a lot of value. That’s why in the next stage of Fundrs, when projects are listed, by sharing insights on the listed projects, answering questions, and participating in the process of the capital raising rounds, you build up a reputation. By being very active, you get more reputation, the more reputation you have, the more opportunity you get in the ecosystem.
This is different from the traditional world, where you often need to have the right education, be born in the right country, or come from the right family. We don’t want to care about these things. If you prove yourself, you gain reputation, if you do the opposite, you lose reputation. Simple and fair.
This will also play a role in other products in the future, for example, Data Tunnel.
Question: Benefits of #AllianceBlock Provide an infrastructure that enables “legal, safe and secure trading of all types of digital assets”. How will you handle the law and the legal requirements that accompany its implementation? Will it conflict with the decentralized component?
Matthijs: Regulatory rules can eventually be programmed on-chain so that they can be enforced on-chain. Transactions can then only be finalized when the contract allows the transaction. Otherwise, it will be reverted. With TIDV, we can ensure an original verified identity with a wallet so we can couple this with these rules. Also, by the way, TIDV is very interested in DAO structures to ensure unique people voting.
Question: As a business development professional myself, I’m curious if there are any pipeline updates from the team on LMaaS, TVID, etc? I know sharing specific names isn’t wise, but curious if the community could get insight into month-over-month or quarterly growth?
Matthijs: As said before, we are talking to many different projects in different stages, and the pipeline for DeFi Temrinal, TIDV, and Fundrs is filled. But additionally, we are also looking at white labeling these products even further, so we can let other projects do business development in their ecosystems, so we can keep focusing on further developing those products.
This is different from the traditional world, where you often need to have the right education, be born in the right country, or come from the right family. We don’t want to care about these things. If you prove yourself, you gain reputation, if you do the opposite, you lose reputation. Simple and fair. — On the value of reputation score and rALBT in the AllianceBlock ecosystem
About AllianceBlock
AllianceBlock is bridging the gap between decentralized and traditional finance by remedying issues in both spheres and linking them more closely. They see the future of finance as an integrated system in which the best of both worlds can work together to increase capital flows and technological innovation.
They are building this future by bridging traditional finance with compliant, data-driven access to new decentralized markets, DeFi projects and ecosystem-scaling tools such as funding and interoperability. As such, they are building a next-generation financial infrastructure that aims to provide regulated financial entities worldwide with the tools they need to access the DeFi space seamlessly.
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