Earlier this week, Rachid Ajaja and Matthijs, Co-Founders and CEO/CTO respectively, joined TokenClub for an AMA with our Chinese community to answer questions about the team, how AllianceBlock started, and what is coming up in the future.
A Chinese translation can also be found here.
1. Can you introduce yourselves and the team to us? Where are you based?
Rachid Ajaja: There were three of us that founded AllianceBlock back in 2018. My name is Rachid Ajaja and I am the Founder and CEO of AllianceBlock. I worked 10 years in investment banking as a Quantitative Analyst in various investment banks including Barclays and BNP Paribas. I also led the AI research team at VINCI in France.
Matthijs de Vries: I became a software developer at a young age and managed the product development at PostNL, one of the largest companies in the Netherlands. I also founded and managed three other companies prior to founding AllianceBlock.
Amber Ghaddar is our third Co-Founder, and she has extensive experience in investment banking, she worked at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, she was also a speaker in multiple conferences including TEDx. She obtained her B.Sc in Science & Technology from McGill University in Canada, graduated with two masters (Neurosciences and Microelectronics & Nanotechnologies) from Universite Aix-Marseille in France and read for a PhD in Molecular Medicine at Vita Salute in Italy.
RA: We started working on AllianceBlock over three years ago and have since grown to be a large global team, with more than 20 developers currently working with us, and we’ve also added a number of new appointments to help AllianceBlock. We have people working in Netherlands, Switzerland, France, the UK, and elsewhere.
2. What is AllianceBlock? Can you give us an introduction to what the project is trying to do?
RA: AllianceBlock is building the future of finance. We are creating a protocol that will bridge decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi) to bring the benefits of both areas to one another. This new protocol is designed to reflect how traditional finance would be designed today with current technology. Our ecosystem streamlines issuance, validation and clearance while integrating a progressive regulatory and compliance framework in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
This will enable traditional institutions to save costs by eliminating regulatory and technological inefficiencies they currently face, as well as enable them to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by DeFi and introduce additional products to their clients. There is so much rapid innovation in this space that it can be hard to keep up. Through this, we will provide a secure and regulatory compliant gateway for billions of dollars present in TradFi to flow towards DeFi and enable DeFi platforms and protocols to be used by a much greater audience. In doing so, we will unlock DeFi for the world.
However, we are also focused on adding value to DeFi projects more directly. Our initial seven products have a large focus on providing services to DeFi projects, allowing us to integrate with other crypto partners and generate revenues — and thus value to AllianceBlock token holders — much sooner.
3. When did AllianceBlock start?
MV: AllianceBlock started after I met Rachid in a Telegram group where we discussed the problems we both saw. We aimed to build a decentralised platform with a milestone-based financing for projects. Amber joined us with her extensive experience in traditional finance. We then, after meeting many financial institutions, saw that we can provide a solution that can bridge both worlds, and this is how our current vision is being built.
Since we started building AllianceBlock, we’ve been privileged to have been part of Europe’s leading startup incubators, Station F and L39, as well as being 2019 Alumni in the Zurich Kickstart Innovation Program.
4. Why the name AllianceBlock?
RA: As we are bridging the world of TradFi and DeFi, this results in an extensive ecosystem, where participants benefit from being part of this ecosystem to each other. We don’t see other DeFi projects as competitors, we see them as partners. Hence, we make up an Alliance together to make this happen. Obviously, we make this happen through blockchain technology, hence we have the name Block as well…
5. What have you achieved since launching your TGE in September 2020?
RA: So much! It has been a lot of hard work since then. We have been hard at work developing our protocol and creating partnerships with both DeFi and TradFi partners. For example, we became part of the London Stock Exchange Partner Platform, which gives us greater access to members of the London Stock Exchange. We also partnered with the likes of Orion Protocol, DIA, API3, Ramp, Frontier, Avalanche, Covalent, EWT, and Binance Smart Chain.
MV: We also recently launched the website of our new Data Tunnel product, and will launch the MVP of this soon, and we launched our Liquidity Mining as a Service platform earlier this year. And we’ve made lots of progress building our other products, which are going to be launching soon.
We’ve recently secured investment from Binance Smart Chain’s accelerator fund, which is a $100m fund aimed at investing in projects doing exactly what we’re doing — bridging the gap between DeFi and TradFi.And there’s so much more!
6. What is the purpose of the ALBT token?
RA: So the ALBT token is at the heart of the protocol. It’s the backbone of our ecosystem, and it’s used in lots of ways. It’s used as the medium of exchange, for staking, as a means of reward, and for network fees. All of our products will use ALBT.
7. What is your involvement with Binance Smart Chain?
RA: We announced on Friday that Binance had made an investment in AllianceBlock through their accelerator fund. This investment from a firm like Binance is obviously really exciting to us, and is a recognition of what we’re building. We think our visions are well aligned, as Binance’s fund is aimed at projects like ours that are working to bridge TradFi and DeFi. And, as a part of the fund, we will benefit from exposure to the fast-growing Binance Smart Chain community.
MV: Even before this investment though, we’ve been working to bring AllianceBlock to both Binance Smart Chain and other blockchains, as we are a chain agnostic protocol. So we want to make sure AllianceBlock can be accessed by as many users as possible. Binance Smart Chain is ideal for us to work with, because it provides access to all the benefits of the BSC blockchain.
We built a bridge so that users can stake their ALBT (by swapping to bALBT), and we’ve ported our Liquidity Mining program to BSC too. Users can stake their BNB/bALBT and receive rewards for example.
8. Can you tell us some more about some of these products?
RA: The important thing to understand is that we decided to build the AllianceBlock Protocol in a modular way so that we could deliver working and usable products quickly. This is important both because DeFi moves fast and concepts change quickly, but also because we wanted AllianceBlock to be self-sustaining and revenue generating as quickly as possible.
These products are independent, but they will interconnect to form a protocol capable of supporting a new financial infrastructure to host both DeFi and traditional firms in order to add value to both areas.
The AllianceBlock protocol is based on three pillars, and all our products fall under these categories. The pillars are:
1. Regulation and compliance
2. Data, and;
3. DeFi technology
So for example we launched our Liquidity Mining platform, which fits under the DeFi technology pillar, and have been working to extend that. So for example, our platform now supports multiple chains (including Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain), as well as trading protocols (like Uniswap, Balancer, and PancakeSwap).
MV: And we just launched our Data Tunnel product, which obviously fits under the Data category. This Data Tunnel is an important part of creating the new financial system, as it will power the new data economy, which we see as a huge growth area — not just for DeFi and TradFi, but for many entities.
The Data Tunnel will, for the first time, bring together DeFi and traditional data providers and consumers, making it possible to publish, monetize, and use data in a simple and decentralized way — without needing to understand blockchain.
The Data Tunnel is more than a marketplace, as it will be the Oracle of Oracles. It does not just act as a relay station, but rather it is capable of taking data from partnering oracles, subsequently simplifying and enriching this data, before channeling it back to the oracle providers. It will act as a single source of truth aggregating all connected oracles, and can be easily integrated into any DeFi project.
Through this, AllianceBlock acts as the tunnel which will allow DeFi, TradFi, and a whole host of other entities, to take advantage of increased data opportunities. It solves a number of issues in the current system, including the difficulty of monetizing datasets, their inaccessibility, the multiple formats they can be found in, and the lack of control firms have over data access.
The Data Tunnel lowers the barriers to entry for SMEs and data enthusiasts, and enables easier integrations for software developers and data researchers. It also allows governments or non-profit organizations to share data without requiring expensive new data platforms and portals, while still retaining total access control. And, because it enables for queries across multiple datasets, it means that revenue can be shared between many data providers.
By making it easier to sell data, the Data Tunnel provides a new revenue stream for data holders, while unlocking previously hidden data to give consumers improved access and a better customer experience, including more flexible payment options.
As with the wider AllianceBlock protocol, it is chain agnostic, allowing it to support the most users possible across multiple chains. It leverages Ocean Protocol’s data technology, as well as our partners and supporters such as Parsiq, API3, Covalent, DIA, Aikon, and Chainlink.
We live in a big data world, where big data is often confined to the largest firms. The decentralized and easy to use AllianceBlock Data Tunnel changes that, allowing anyone to publish or access datasets. It also enables DeFi projects access to more and better quality data, a crucial element for nearly all DeFi projects.
9. What is coming up?
RA: So much stuff! We talk about AllianceBlock being #nomercy because we are working to deliver non-stop. We said we would deliver our Data Tunnel in Q1, and we did. In Q2 and 3 we have lots more stuff coming, including launching products like our, Data API, and Decentralized Bridge. We also want to expand the Data Tunnel so it supports at least 4 chains.
We’ve also got lots of new hires coming on board which we will be able to share soon — including 5 executive-level positions. And we’re sponsoring a code academy and a hackathon.
We also want to start marketing more, especially as our products go live. And I’m really excited about another one of our products we’ve been building in secret — the AllianceBlock Funder. We’ve been working on this since December, and while I can’t share too much right now, I can post this:
It’s going to be another really interesting product that we think people are going to enjoy using a lot — and will make AllianceBlock an important part of the DeFi space.
About AllianceBlock
AllianceBlock is building the first globally compliant decentralized capital market. The AllianceBlock Protocol is a decentralized, blockchain-agnostic layer 2 that automates the process of converting any digital or crypto asset into a bankable product.
Incubated by three of Europe’s most prestigious incubators: Station F, L39, and Kickstart Innovation in Zurich, and led by a heavily experienced team of ex-JP Morgan, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs bankers, and quants, AllianceBlock is on the path to disrupt the traditional market with its state-of-the-art and globally compliant decentralized capital market.
Website | Telegram | Discord | CoinGecko | White Paper | Green Paper | Token Economics Paper
