Q&A — Mihai Ivascu, CEO of Modex.
Tonight I’m sharing a Q&A with Mihai Vascu, the CEO of Modex. Modex is the world’s first app store for blockchain with a unified development platform.
Back in January, I participated during their pre-sale. They postponed their public ITO (initial token offering) to make sure they had their platform up and running (alpha).
Mihai’s team has not been sitting still, and with their ITO launched this week it’s the perfect moment for a Q&A about their vision and most important — their product.
Could you tell something about your previous professional experience and how this makes you suitable for your position as CEO of Modex?
I was fortunate enough to have an amazing journey so far and to meet extraordinary people along the way, some of them clearly influencing and shaping my career. I’ve turned 30 this February and, as an experienced entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in project management, fintech, software development, and start-up consulting, I’m constantly thinking how to develop products that make the world we live in a better place, at least from the tech point of view.
Three years ago I’ve set out to rethink how people interact, but also how they send money to each other, regardless of where they live. And that’s how I’ve launched Moneymailme, an innovative chatting app that combines social interaction with the joy of sending and receiving e-money, instantly. Moneymailme facilitates micropayments, file-sharing, and chatting simultaneously, allowing users to make payments part of an enjoyable social experience. In 2017, I was happy to see that Cfi.co named Moneymailme “UK’s Best Social Payments App”.
Moving on, together with my team of financial software experts and programmers, we created and launched Modex, a Smart Contract Marketplace, and app ecosystem that allows for easy, user-friendly access to multi-protocol smart contracts.
People used to invest in ideas during the ICO boom, but nowadays it’s highly important to have a working product backing the idea.
With Modex, developers can monetize your knowledge, get recognition, and improve their skills with the help of dev tools, peer reviews, and security audits. Also, companies can find solid, security audited smart contracts for a variety of use cases. Our objective with Modex is to significantly reduce barriers to entry and enable many more developers and companies to start developing and using blockchain technology.
Modex has a well-formed team and some impressive advisors, could tell us something about how you formed the team?
Indeed, I am delighted to work with a great team of 50 professionals and advisors, people with high-level experience in developing banking and financial software, formers from Google, Oracle, Temenos, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, E&Y, as well as a committed and skilled team of marketing and PR pros.
I am thankful to all of them for joining me on this incredible journey and for pushing the boundaries even further when it comes to taking the Modex platform to the next level. The team started to take shape before launching Moneymailme, several years ago, when we set out to create a project that made a difference. Then, along the way, I’ve met other like-minded people who wanted to join our company, believing in the change and added value we can bring.
Before and after launching Modex, several top advisors joined our team, bringing their invaluable experience and market knowledge on-board. Amongst them, Adrian Clarke, former innovation director and principal technical strategy advisor at Microsoft, whose pioneering work was instrumental in the development of the Microsoft App Store, or Onur Bildik, who’s an exec at Google.
As mentioned in my introduction there’s quite a gap between the pre-sale and the ITO that is ongoing right now. To summarize what were the main reasons, and how do they benefit your company and investors?
Indeed, we chose to delay the ITO. Even if it may have seemed frustrating at some points, we believe it is what was best for the project. We’ve invested a lot of resources in developing this project and, just like our supporters, we want this project to succeed, to see a real outcome for everybody and for the development community out of this.
We decided to have the main sale after the launch of the platform. We really wanted to show we’ve managed to deliver the product, even before the ITO, and to show all of our contributors we are heavily invested in this.
People used to invest in ideas during the ICO boom, but nowadays it’s highly important to have a working product backing the idea.
Modex does just that, being one of the few ITOs on the market with a functional product. We don’t believe in the review of a whitepaper or a Telegram channel but in the review of a solid, competitive and game-changing product. This is Modex, as a tech company, and it’s really important to show all of our supporters and partners that we have a strong product, not just hype!
Also, I am happy to announce that we are working on getting a DLT license. This will mean that we are a company that is fully regulated and complies with the latest regulations and procedures in Gibraltar.
After receiving that license, we’ll be officially allowed to operate distributed ledgers for 3rd parties. I think it’s an important step for the industry to see that a jurisdiction is regulating companies like this.
Zooming in on the Modex Marketplace, how will it benefit both developers who want to get out their work and businesses who want to integrate blockchain?
We believe Modex will become the go-to place for developers looking to monetize their programming skills and increase their revenue, as well as companies in need of blockchain development services and ready-to-buy smart contracts, because of how easy to use and comprehensive our platform is.
Providing the full suite of blockchain tools in one place, the Modex dev platform was built with developers’ needs in mind, to enable them to create the next generation of smart contracts.
For businesses and end-users, our product is the world’s first integrated platform for buying, customizing, compiling, deploying and interacting with smart contracts. On Modex, you can find a variety of smart contracts to choose from, written by some of the best developers from all over the world, and the “test before buying” option even allows a preview of the respective smart contract.
Our cutting-edge Unified Developer Environment is important both for developers, as well as entrepreneurs who wish to streamline operations and increase productivity by implementing innovative blockchain solutions. Composed of a series of tools specially designed to respond to developer’s needs, Modex UDE comes with its own Solidity dedicated IDE, fused with a Test Net environment, bytecode analysis, block explorer, and a suite of oracles which will allow developers to push the boundaries of blockchain even farther, by allowing smart contracts to access information from external web sources.
At the base of all of these interactions will be the MODEX token, a token empowered by developers, which acknowledges and rewards their hard work in building Smart Contracts. The MODEX token brings added value not just to developers, but also to businesses and end-users. Our token will connect developers with the real world, helping companies and end-users find the right solutions for their needs.
In order to run a successful marketplace, you’ll need abundant supply (in this case contributing developers) how will Modex stimulate developers to join?
We have great bonuses and incentives for developers. Through our ‘One Million Tokens’ campaign, the first 1,000 developers joining our Dev Platform will each receive a bonus of 1,000 MODEX Tokens.
We are focusing the majority of our marketing efforts and budget on growing the developer's community. Also, the feedback we received from developers has been great so far in terms of the product and the dev tools, which shows that we are on the right track. Project repository, issue tracking, project documentation, and collaboration tools are some of the functionalities developers can access at the moment.
We are also organizing monthly hackathons, that help us recruit and reward talented developers from across the world.
We strongly believe that the best ambassadors for the Modex platform will be our happy developers, who have a real chance to efficiently monetize their development skills on blockchain and evolve in this growing segment.
For this specific reason, the marketing budget will be focused on empowering their voice and supporting their talent, by increasing the number of Modex Tokens offered for active bounties and smart contracts.
Did any institutional investors participated during the pre-sale and could you tell something about their profile?
Yes, we have had institutional investors in the pre-sale. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose much more information about them at this point, but I can say for sure that they are strategic partners as well, who are very interested in our platform and are looking forward to be using our smart contracts in their businesses as well.
We look forward after the ITO to announce some of these strategic partnerships and use cases for the Modex products.
About which milestones on the roadmap are you most excited for?
I’m happy to report that the team has done a tremendous job until now. Even so, we’re not taking our foot of the accelerator as there are more game-changing features which we’re currently working on.
The purpose of the marketplace is to capture a part of the value created in the Modex UDE and to assist companies who need blockchain development in order to decentralize their current solutions, to fast track their blockchain adoption. The first version of the marketplace was launched in March, and the first version of the developer platform together with the bounties module was launched this June.
For 2019, Next year the focus is to finish our Modex developer environment. We are launching the Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) as part of the Modex developer platform at the end of September. The purpose for the next year is to transition to a DApps infrastructure in order to assist startups and companies to build decentralized applications through Modex. Our journey has been incredible so far, but even more announcements are in the pipeline, so keep an eye on us!
The Modex ITO funding will enable and advance development of our ecosystem of solutions, addressing key use-cases to help individuals, corporations, and organizations evolve and broaden their scope of services. Since we’ve managed to accelerate the development process, we are now one year ahead of the schedule with the timeline thanks to our technical team and all our partners.
The most exciting milestone at at the moment is the IDE, which we are launching at the end of September. We believe this will have a big impact on developers especially.
Thank you for your time Mihai 👍
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The Modex ITO ends on the 24th of September, you can get your Modex tokens here.
I am not a financial advisor who tells people to buy certain assets, but I do am an early investor in Modex.
As an investor I am very excited to see what the future beholds for this project. Although you must understand, my time is limited. That’s why I got compensated for my time to write this article.
Thanks for reading,
Mr. Backwards
