AMA with AllianceBlock CEO & Founder — Rachid Ajaja
Introduction
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:32]
Welcome to our AMA session for today! We are with @Agorajix of Alliance Block
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:33]
@Agorajix thanks for taking the time
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:33]
My pleasure, thank you for having me
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:33]
I would imagine it must be a crazy time for you and the team.
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:33]
So please introduce yourself first @Agorajix
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:34]
Indeed, the last few months have been crazy especially the last three weeks
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:34]
My name is Rachid Ajaja, I am the CEO of AllianceBlock
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:36]
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. I hold an engineering degree in Computer Science and Signal Processing, and a Master’s degree in Probability Theory, Stochastic Process and Quantitative Finance.
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:36]
wow. impressive background you got there.
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:36]
So tell us, what is Alliance block?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:37]
AllianceBlock provides the bridge between traditional and digital capital markets for all participants, reflecting 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.
We are aiming to build the world’s first globally compliant decentralised capital market
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:39]
What is the token of the Alliance block project and what does it do? @Agorajix
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:41]
The ALBT token is the backbone of the Prometheus Network ecosystem.
The Prometheus Network has been designed to increase the token’s inherent utility and value over time through a combination of token features such as rewards, ratings, and access
By design the ALBT token fulfills a number of critical functions that ensure ongoing demand correlated to ecosystem growth. We believe that well designed token economics are essential to supporting actual utility of the token.
Please check out our token economics paper: https://www.allianceblock.io/AllianceBlock_Tokenomics_p78qCV3nt.pdf
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:42]
What is the role of AI in your platform?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:45]
It’s a good question, in our green paper we speak about Augmented Collective Intelligence and the role of a reputation score in order to make decisions in our ecosystem. At a later stage when we deliver our product, we will start leveraging AI and more specifically Federated AI in order to build our framework and have a smart governance combining the community inputs and AI
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:46]
What was the inspiration of the project? Was there a personal pain point you wanted to tackle?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:50]
I started as an investor in crypto back in 2017. This is the year when I did my first ICO! After that, I made many more investments and saw the problems related to ICOs. This is when AllianceBlock started, after meeting Matthijs 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
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:51]
Tell us about the team. How big is it, who are your cofounders?
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:54]
@Agorajix
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:55]
My two cofounders are Matthijs and Amber,
Matthijs was a software developer at a young age and then became a manager at PostNL to lead enterprise product development before discovering crypto.
Amber Ghaddar has extensive experience in investment banking, she worked at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, she was also 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.
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:56]
@Agorajix tell us about the public sale of Alliance block.
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:56]
There will be no public sale.
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 22:58]
[In reply to Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first]
awesome news! haha
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 22:58]
:)
Answers to selected questions from Twitter
Eric @exnetwork, [21.08.20 23:02]
@Agorajix the floor is yours!
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:04]
Thank you guys for all the great questions, please give me few minutes and I will give answers
Akira, [21.08.20 23:01]
As Defi is the talk of the Crypto town nowadays, Do you think Defi will incorporate Existing Financial system?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:11]
[In reply to Akira]
There is so much rapid innovation in this space that it can be hard to keep up. Financial institutions can’t enter DeFi because of lack of compliance with regulations, even though they are aware of the advantages DeFi can bring them, like saving time and costs, and the innovative models that could evolve into significant opportunities. Their hands are usually tied by regulators. Through our Prometheus protocol, being able to plug into a bank’s legacy systems and providing cross border regulation compliance through a single protocol ensures that FIs can still benefit from the advantages that DeFi have to offer.
Elena, [21.08.20 23:01]
What are the special advantages of ALLIANCEBLOCK to be able to defeat another competitor, when the project’s goal has too many previous projects doing and developing?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:13]
[In reply to Elena]
Many people see us as a tokenisation or security token platform and try to compare us to Harbor, Securrency and Securitize but we don’t consider ourselves as competitors, we are building a layer 2 blockchain agnostic protocol to provide the compliance and regulation layer, the data layer and the tokenisation / digitisation layer. Hence all tokenisation platforms can plug into our protocol in order to leverage our compliance and regulatory layer. The same applies for the exchanges, banks, and all DeFi applications. This is what is needed to create a true globally compliant decentralised capital market that has all the layers that exist in traditional capital markets.
David Prince, [21.08.20 23:01]
Trust and Security are the most important thing in crypto. Why people should feel safe with AllianceBlock?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:16]
[In reply to David Prince]
Through our data layer we ensure that user’s data is 100% owned and controlled by the user. Third party access is granted or taken by the user. This is good for FIs, to be compliant with for example GDPR, but also for the user, as they know in great detail which data point is accessible to which third party.
Essentially, access to the data registry is controlled via a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) mechanism that allows read-only access to the users. It uses zero-knowledge proof driven validation of users’ identities and eligibility by the issuers and the trusted legal and regulatory entities.
Alex Slesarenko, [21.08.20 23:01]
Have you spoken to your former colleagues at the investment banks about AllianceBlock? What do they say?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:18]
[In reply to Alex Slesarenko]
All of our former colleagues working in the business side of investment banking know how difficult it is to deal with compliance, it takes a lot of resources and costs up to 10% of revenue of the financial institutions. Usually When there is a transaction, booking systems check for compliance rules at time of booking. Our cross border regulatory and compliance protocol allows for automatic pre trade checks, where non compliant transactions are greyed out, and cannot be accessed. This solution allows for a decrease in trade errors and cancelled trades, speeds up the trading process while decreasing the costs. The same solution can be used for exchanges (traditional and crypto), also for wealth managers and asset managers and so on.
I read about its very volatile and at the moment risky investments How is ALBT able to maintain stable value/purchasing power? DeFi apps and platforms are gaining and adoption. How is ALBT positioned for DeFi?
Zeus Young, [21.08.20 22:59]
I read about its very volatile and at the moment risky investments How is ALBT able to maintain stable value/purchasing power? DeFi apps and platforms are gaining and adoption. How is ALBT positioned for DeFi?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:23]
[In reply to Zeus Young]
We are working with multiple liquidity providers that we are aiming to bring to our ecosystem. We plan to be releasing our solution very soon.
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:30]
[In reply to Fall in love]
The Prometheus Protocol allows traditional financial institutions to participate in the DeFi ecosystem. The ecosystem collapses multiple layers of traditional banking in order to streamline issuance, validation and governance while integrating a unique regulatory and compliance framework. We developed some features in our PoC such as digitization of shares, fund shares, … data traceability, Blockchain Role Based Access control to give access or revoke access from users and also simple compliance and regulation rules in order to do pre-trade check (can be used for both participation in new issued instrument or in the secondary market)
Dalmasca Blockchain, [21.08.20 23:00]
What is the path your ecosystem takes to reduce costs and increase efficiency? How are you working to integrate a phased regulation and compliance framework?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:32]
[In reply to Dalmasca Blockchain]
The issue is financial institutions can’t enter DeFi because of lack of compliance with regulations, even though they are aware of the advantages DeFi can bring them, like saving time and costs, and the innovative models that could evolve into significant opportunities.
We bridge the gap by being able to plug in to bank’s legacy systems and providing cross border regulation & compliance through a single protocol ensures that FIs can still benefit from the advantages that DeFi have to offer.
This is unique to other projects as they tackle single pain points and not the overarching issue.
omaha99, [21.08.20 23:00]
Would you agree with me that adoption and utility are key factors a to project’s survival and success? What’s being done to drive global adoption of amidst crypto regulations, legislation, and competition?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:37]
[In reply to omaha99]
We at AllianceBlock are proceeding in two main phases:
1st phase is to have a tailored product with financial institutions that we are speaking to that solve specific issues related to compliance and regulations with respect to asset digitization. Once we have proven track record with these financial institutions we move to the next phase;
2nd phase: Opening our protocol to include more participants, as we know our solution already solves real problems that we have tackled. And this is how we will start having more adoption and moving step by step toward a true decentralised capital market.
If we want to see adoption we need traditional players to be in the game and make the money flow. To allow this we need to be able to bridge.
True decentralisation does not exclude anyone. We think that TradFi and DeFi can exist in harmony, and that defi will benefit tremendously from the resource influx TradFi can provide.
Regulation is coming, and the more prepared we are, the better position we will be in to make sure that DeFi can stay and have a good impact.
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:45]
[In reply to Fifi]
Bank’s legacy systems halt innovation because of ancient technology that can’t connect to modern APIs, let alone DeFi. We plug into those ancient systems so banks don’t have to first start expensive and long term system upgrade projects, this means we provide an important solution for TradFi partners and mitigate our risk of competition through first mover advantage.
We incentivise all participants by saving time and costs and streamlining regulatory and compliance issues, this will unlock significant capital for the DeFi space.
Fadang, [21.08.20 23:01]
Adoption is most important factors that all sustainable blockchain projects what plans you has made for the adoption of Adoption in reality, actual use cases and our real society?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:50]
[In reply to Fadang]
A key to adoption is use cases that are viable and sustainable, the next step is traction with these use cases. It is evitable that the DeFi and TradFi relationship and crossover is the next step in the evolution of finance. We have been working on AllianceBlock for over 2 years and with our TradFi background we have formulated important relationships to increase our adoption rate and make our model a reality.
Quan Bao, [21.08.20 23:01]
What consensus algorithm is AllianceBlock currently using? Why did you decide to integrate PoA and DPoS in Q4 2020? What problems does it solve?
Rachid Ajaja | Will never PM you first, [21.08.20 23:52]
[In reply to Quan Bao]
We are planning to use PoA and DpoS. In order to become a node you need to comply with the rules, so this is the POA (Proof of Authority) feature, You can give those nodes voting power with tokens so this is the DPoS feature: a hybrid protocol but it is not named like this in the token economics paper. There are 3 types of nodes, institutional nodes which are the most important, Data nodes, for compliance with GDPR for example, data curations and service nodes, for example KYC/AML, issuers, lawyers, etc
Incubated by the famous accelerators Station F and L39 (the largest European Fintech incubator) and 2019 Alumni in the famous Kickstart Innovation Program in Zurich AllianceBlock was one of the 12 VC-vetted fintech startups generating buzz at the Money20/20 conference in Amsterdam.
- Visit our Website: www.allianceblock.io
- Join our Telegram: https://t.me/allianceblock
- Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/hF7AGgt
Documentation:
- Download our White Paper
- Download our Green Paper
- Download our Token Economics Paper
