Consensus 2021 Announcements by AllianceBlock’s Co-Founder and CEO Rachid Ajaja

6 min readMay 28, 2021

Consensus, the largest conference in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, took place virtually between May 24th and 27th, bringing over 10,000 professionals from across the globe. It focused on exploring the evolution of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology through a variety of educational panels, workshops, keynotes, fire-side chats, networking experiences, and other immersive activities.

One of the most important moments during the conference, however, was Rachid Ajaja’s announcement on recent milestones achieved by AllianceBlock. The team he leads has built the new generation of financial services infrastructures and based it on three pillars: decentralized finance technology, regulations and compliance, and data management. As co-founder and CEO, Ajaja shared key details on AllianceBlock’s partnerships and product launches that promise to change the game for the industry as a whole.

First Milestone: Partnership with Databricks

His first announcement was regarding data. He stated that centralized and decentralized data providers and users operate in silos and are unable to link their resources due to technical limitations. There is no doubt that centralized data providers are the main actors in this space, but the DeFi space is still young and is growing.

AllianceBlock recently launched its Data Tunnel product, sometimes referred to as the Netflix of data. The Data Tunnel aims to become the Oracle of Oracles in both the DeFi (decentralized) and TradFi (centralized) spaces.

Toward this end, Rachid was pleased to announce AllianceBlock’s partnership with Databricks, the leader in cloud-based data engineering, data, and AI. Databricks is used for processing and transforming massive quantities of data and exploring this data with different tools. Databricks was recently added to Azure and is the latest tool for the Microsoft cloud. In February, it raised a Series G at a $28 billion valuation, and AllianceBlock is happy to announce that AllianceBlock is Databrick’s partner in the decentralized space which will enable centralized and decentralized data to come together.

Second Milestone: Collaboration with GBG

During the Consensus panel, compliance was discussed at length, and it is accepted as a thorny subject that is undeniably necessary to first facilitate institutional interest in DeFi. It is also required for creating a more compliant and secure space for DeFi investors.

The issue faced by blockchain and DeFi players today is whether anonymity means less transparency or transparency means less anonymity. AllianceBlock has thought long and hard about this problem and Rachid was proud to introduce AllianceBlock’s trustless KYC/AML solution that solves this issue.

With this solution, you can be not only transparent and compliant but can also retain control of your data. AllianceBlock achieved this solution by partnering with GBG, one of the most established and leading ID verification companies in the world with access to 60% of the world’s population in over 70 countries.

What this means for the average user is that instead of having to perform your KYC for every project or on every exchange or with every financial institution, you can now perform your end-to-end KYC once, send it to many downstream providers for many projects, and most importantly, keep the master copy of your KYC in your own browser with a key that you are the only one to hold.

Even more, you can automatically use your GDPR right to be forgotten if you ever wish to wipe your data from the internet. This is ID decentralization and encryption at its best.

Furthermore, by using a strategic partnership with AIKON users can associate their social logins in Google, Facebook, and Apple with secured and encrypted key management while controlling their information that is shared downstream. This is the first needed step to make banks and other institutional players comfortable enough to enter the DeFi space.

Third Milestone: AllianceDEX Launch

As part of AllianceBlock’s effort to build a decentralized capital market, the project has announced a decentralized exchange. The new DEX will have its own take on an automatic market maker (AMM) algorithm called SYNC. AMMs are decentralized exchange protocols that rely on algorithms to price assets. Usual DEXs are built upon Constant Function Market-Making or CFMM.

Uniswap is perhaps the most well-known AMM service, but one of the main issues faced by AMMs today is the issue of impermanent loss. This occurs when the underlying volatility of one of the pairs in a trading pool ends up creating major losses for the liquidity provider. AllianceBlock’s aim here was to create an AMM that minimized impermanent loss.

Looking at data for uptrend and downtrend trades using AllianceBlock’s AMM versus the figures for Uniswap and Balancer, in which the user can set his or her own trading weights, both Uniswap and Balancer lead to highly asymmetric gains and losses depending on the weight and movement of the market. The AllianceBlock solution leads to symmetrical results and without trading fees, we see huge improvements in what the AllianceBlock DEX can achieve: a symmetrical distribution in both uptrend and downtrend markets.

Fourth Milestone: Decentralized Bridge Test

The last product to be announced by Rachid at the conference was AllianceBlock’s decentralized bridge that will further enhance blockchain interoperability and achieve AllianceBlock’s ambition of becoming blockchain agnostic.

The need to be the decentralized bridge of choice arose because most bridges today rely on relayers that are heavily centralized, and most bridges focus on linking only two blockchains. Furthermore, most link to the Ethereum blockchain. This means that we can easily find a bridge between, say, ETH and Aave or between Aave, ETH, and BSC, but to find a bridge that links Aave to BSC and DOT is quasi-impossible. Therefore, AllianceBlock wanted to create a more efficient bridge.

What is special about AllianceBlock’s bridge is that it is governed by a set of validators and has a novel synchronization mechanism based on the Hedera Hashgraph consensus service. This allows the validator to synchronize in a decentralized manner instead of by using heavy and slow gossip protocols.

In the end, this means that the AllianceBlock bridge is cheaper and more effective than other bridges, and it will enable more efficient inter-blockchain token transfers, and in the future, data transfers. It also means the AllianceBlock bridge will enable more cross-chain integration and the creation of unique products.

From a technical point of view, this bridge will be open-source to the developer community and AllianceBlock’s road now starts with test net and the team will release the code after the release of the main net that will support at least EVM-to-EVM and later more non-EVM sharing.

Rachid wrapped up the presentation by stating that this overview hopefully gave everyone a better idea of how hard the team is working and how the team aims to bridge decentralized finance with traditional finance by having a DEX, trustless KYC/AML built on top of the DEX, and a decentralized bridge that will enable cross-chain swaps.

You can learn more about the AllianceBlock project here and you can follow the team on Twitter and LinkedIn, and you can chat with the team on Telegram.

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 investment bankers, and quants, AllianceBlock is on the path to disrupt the $100 trillion securities market with its state-of-the-art and globally compliant decentralized capital market.