Hello, We had an AMA with Allialce Block on September, 16, 2020. For those of you who are late to follow or watch, you can read the following AMA recap.
Segments:
- Introduction
- Twitter Questions
- Live Questions
Introduction
Zaenal;
Welcome to the CryptoFun community, thanks for taking the time for todayβs AMA ! We are glad to meet here: Matthijs de Vries @defimati Founder & CTO AllianceBlock
Matthijs ;
Hi guys! thank you so much for having me here, super stoked to be part of this AMA and community β€οΈ
Zaenal;
Before we start our first segment kindly introduce yourself to the community π
Matthijs ;
Sure! So I am Matthijs de Vries, Founder and CTO of AllianceBlock. I have been a software developer since a very young age, and eventually became a manager at PostNL for many years, leading several departments in enterprise software development.
AllianceBlock was also founded by Rachid and Amber. Rachid worked 10 years in investment banking as a quantitative analyst in various investment banks, including Barclays and BPN Paribas. He also led the AI research team at VINCI in France.
Amber Ghaddar has extensive experience in investment banking, she worked at Goldman Schs and JP Morgan. She was also a speaker in multiple conferences, including TEDx
Zaenal;
Thank you for the introduction. Now lets move on to the first segment. Are you ready?
Matthijs :
100%! π₯
Q1 ;
Could you please describe what is Allianceblock in few simple sentences?
A ; Matthijs :
AllianceBlock provides the bridge between traditional finance and digital capital markets for all participants involved and reflecting how the traditional finance industry would be designed if it was built today, with the modern day technologies.
Our ecosystem and protocol streamlines issuance, validation and clearance while integrating a progressive regulatory and compliance framework in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Basically... AllianceBlock will unlock trillions of dollars of capital in blockchain: we are aiming to be the first globally compliant decentralized capital market!
Q2 ;
What are the advantages of Allianceblock over other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
A ; Matthijs :
The cross border regulatory compliance layer of our protocol (CBRCL) offers a dynamic and cross border compliance for both Centralized Finance (CeFi) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi), all within a DeFi ecosystem, and for all participants involved.
Nobody else has this... The best part about this is, it makes us interoperable. Instead of competing with other projects, they can just easily integrate our protocol with their own specific solution and it will be benefit them immediately. This is also the reason why we established (and will establish even more) partnerships as many projects now see that our protocol is complementary to their own platform/solution
Q3 ;
What is the token use case? How did you make sure it captures the value of the ecosystem you are building?
A ; Matthijs :
Our token (ALBT) is the fuel that powers the AllianceBlock ecosystem.
In order to achieve the high levels of intra-ecosystem liquidity and to ensure enhanced viability of the network, the ALBT token fulfils the following functions:
- Means of exchange
- Means of reward
- Currency reserve
- Ecosystem treasury pool and liquidity mining
- Network fees payment
- Data access (payment for the queries)
- Voting and delgating of voting power
- Staking
- Network participants ratings
By design the ALBT token fulfills a number of critical functions that ensure ongoing demand correlated to the ecosystem growth. We believe that well designed token economics are essential to supporting the actual utility of ALBT. Check out our website please to find a really detailed token economy paper explaining all the utility behind it.
Q4 ;
What is the vision and mission of the Allianceblock project?
A ; Matthijs :
Based on experience from talking to a lot of traditional finance corporations, we have the vision that traditional finance want to use decentralized technologies in able to be quicker and to have the opportunity to cut costs. We also envision that a lot more promising blockchain and DeFi projects will come to exitence (and are already in exitence off course) that offer something really meaningful to traditional finance entities, but have no easy way to interact with them.
Our mission is to make a bridge between CeFi and DeFi a reality, so that all participants from both worlds can easily and safely interact with each other and have the benefits from both sites π
Q5 ;
Finally, what will Allianceblock achieve before the end of this year?π
A ; Matthijs :
By the end of the year we will have progressed a lot on initial real world use cases. Secondly, we will have greatly expanded our network in both the centralized finance world and decentralized finance world (in the shape of partnerships). We are working really hard currently, on both aspects above everything else.
Make sure to keep an eye on our announcements, we have a lot of great things coming up π
SEGMENT 2 TWITTER QUESTION
Q1. From Twitter: @VeeMeyr
As I read on your website, Allianceblock is a financial service. Have you followed the regulations to get permission to operate Allianceblock as a financial company or are you still planning to run it? Can you tell me how tough the alliance blockade is against government control?
A ;
AllianceBlock as a software solution provider, is not really subject ro regulatory oversight. The purpose of AllianceBlock is to better facilitate in terms of regulations.
With our protocol (or bridge actually) for other entities, so they can carry out their activities while regulatory approvals remain the primary responsibility of the financial institutions that use our platform. Our Cross Border Regulatory Compliance Layer (CBRCL), makes the regulatory approval process cheap, fast and ainless for financial institutions, thus it is the missing link actually. It will bridge traditional and decentralized finance. Governments impose regulations, we will seek to work within the boundaries of each jurisdictions legal system.
Q2. From Twitter: @AmeliaPNanda
We all know DeFi will not replace traditional finance, so how does AlianceBlock seek to create an ecosystem that allows the two to operate together?
A ;
We have spent two years working on the fundamentals of our protocol and ecosystem. We have been incubated by 3 top tier incubators (Level39, where Revolut (5bn valuation now) has been incubated, Station F and Kickstart Innovation). During this time we have been in contact with various serious players in traditional finance. This is were we learned that TradFi DO want to enter DeFi, but are missing the regulatory link. This is what we solve through our protocol at first. Then there is the large amount of projects out there that solve a single problem with a nice shiny solution, but not have the means to interact with the tradfi players sufficiently. This is why our protocol is so important, we can make all participants from both sides interact with each other and benefit from each other.
Q3. From Twitter: @AAA4466L
As it is known, AlianceBlock recently announced an important partnership agreement between AllianceBlock and AIKON. What will this partnership contribute to AlianceBlock and what support do you expect from the AIKON team?
A ;
We expect many service providers to join the AllianceBlock ecosystem through our protocol. This is important, as many projects based on decentralized tehnologies are out there and offer something meaningful and important, but have troubles interacting with traditional finance (or vice versa). Partnerships like the one with AIKON provides us with the blocks necessary to provide a full solutions to all participants involved.
Q4. From Twitter: @aslubaka
What are the main considerations for TradFi institutions to use the Prometheus Protocol to connect with DeFi? (In terms of incentives compared to Business as Usually)
A ;
As mentioned before, we started already in 2018. In this time we have not only worked on technology, but on things that most startups forget to work on: product/market fit. So we have spent a lot of time with traditional finance players to learn about their objectives and their current limitations with regard to decentralized finance. They have come up with several Proof of Concepts (PoC) on their own, but have not yet managed to bring it to life as a real world meaningful use case. This is the lack of compliancy with regulations, which we provide (in a cross-border manner!). Traditional Finance off course want to reap the benefits from DeFi: it is much quicker and cheaper. Why would not they want to? Taking away the current limitations with our protocol will finally unlock the large amount of capital that can finally flow into the DeFi space...
Q5. From Twitter: @Ridho1673
What is Allianceblock project plan to promote $ALBT and expand its user base in Asia, especially Indonesia? Why should Investors and communities hold $ALBT in the long term? And are there any new news or features coming in the Allianceblock platform?
A ;
We have just announced the huge news that we have a partnership with Top Tech in the Philippines. This brings a lot of possibilities in the future for both traditional finance and cetranlized finance in the Philippines and beyond! We see Asia as a very important and serious market, so we approach it as such.
Long term ALBT holders are able to stake their tokens themselves or delegate their tokens and still reap rewards. This is fundamental to a well operating ecosystem that we aim to realize.
More important news updates will be realeased in the coming weeks and months. We have definitely some really things in the pipelines and I can assure we will not disappoint π
SEGMENT 3 LIVE QUESTION
Q1 ;
and what plans are you putting in place to ensure that continuous and endless support is being given to the community?The importance of community members in any project for it to attain it Mission and Vision cannot be overemphasized. Can you briefly tell us how much you value your community members?
A ;
We have the AllianceBlock Fund, which is allocated in our token economics exactly for the purpose of the community. We want to make sure that members of the community that have something valuable to contribute to AllianceBlock, our protocol or to the ecosystem as a whole, will have the means to do so.
Additionally, we are working on having monthly, or maybe even bi-weekly, questions and answers sessions in our main channel, so that we can keep everybody up to date about our developments and educate about the importance of the ecosystem that we are building.
Q2 ;
How will Alliance Block bridge traditional to decentralized finance? What do you think has a better service the traditional or the decentralize finance?
A ;
There is no black or white answer here that will tell you traditional finance is better than decentralized finance of vice versa. I think many can agree that traditional finance is working on ancient concepts (and technologies), but we can agree that equally so DeFi is plagued by lack of safety and complexity of operations. By bridging the best of both worlds, we can create an ecosystem that is offering the transperancy and easy of access of decentralized finance, but the security and access to larger amounts of money from traditional finance
Q3 ;
I read that you were incubated by the most prestigious incubators in Europe. So do you plan to be an ecosystem just for Europe or have a global reach?
A ;
It is true that the top incubators we were incubated at, were Europe based. But do keep in mind, they were globally orientated. Another important aspect of having had Europe as a base for this, is the fact that we have our HQ in The Netherlands (also Europe). However, this does not mean at all that we are focused on Europe. On the contrary, the recent announcement of the partnership with TopTech in the Philippines should show that we are very serious about operations and opportunities in Asia. We have seen that there is a huge fintech innovation push in Asia, so it is exactly the right time for us to participate in that as well.
Q4 ;
How does Allianceblock plan to remove existing barriers to the interaction of traditional finance users with a decentralized economy? How to close the gap between cryptocurrency and real users?
A ;
I assume that your definition of "real users" refers to users that are working exclusively with traditional business models from CeFi (regular banking apps for example, or in some cases even without any help of any techonology).
For the "regular" technology involved, it's important to keep user's experience the same, so they don't need to adopt blockchain technology. It's important that they don't have to know or understand the technology behind it. If you use a banking app right now, do you need to understand it's backend mechanisms or that it uses web sockets or not? The answer is no, the same goes for solutions on blockchain technology. When we say we provide a bridge, this bridge is connected to existing legacy system of financial institutions, so that current user's experience can remain the same and no actual adoption process will have to take place for them that could hinder innovation from banks.
Q5 ;
AllianceBlock Parnertships with TopTech establish
What are the #AllianceBlock advantages of this partnership?
A ;
In short: it's huge.
The possibilities of having a partnership like this are too many to explain in such a briefly manner, but let me put it like this: imagine the amount of blockchain projects that we have seen to come to existence in the past few years that have built amazing protocols or technical solutions, but in the end couldn't be put to real use because there was no real use case for them?
Through a partnership like this, we have not just a single use case, we have a long lasting strategic way of working together to build many, many use cases together that can be useful all over the world. It's a very big step.
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.