Cosmos Validators Brief 4: Validator.Network

Validator.Network (Validator ApS)

This Brief comes from Martin Dyring-Andersen, CEO, and the rest of the team at Validator.Network in Denmark, Copenhagen.

Martin’s been a longtime Cosmos/Tendermint follower/builder who many of us originally knew from his FX clearing work using Tendermint as well as his ongoing effort of enabling currency-backed interest-bearing stablecoins via e.Money.

While there are many notable things mentioned in this Brief, probably the most interesting thing above all is the mention that there will be potential for immediate real-world impact from these applications being built on Cosmos/Tendermint.
It’s been my opinion that thanks in part to the ICO frenzy seen in Ethereum that last couple years, the community of investors, builders and developers are taking a much harder look at what’s actually possible, necessary (in the real-world) and if it meets the current capabilities of the network…. From this it would make sense that we’ll see new networks with applications sort of leap-frog over previous development phases seen in previous networks.

Anyhow, without further delay…

Tell me a bit about yourselves — as much/ little as you guys would like to share.

Validator ApS, the company behind the validator.network service, is operating out of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is part of a group of companies which also includes e-Money.com which will be issuing currency-backed stablecoins in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Our executive team consists of Martin Dyring-Andersen (CEO), Henrik Aasted Sørensen (CTO) and Marianne Schmidt Nellemann (COO). Henrik and Martin each have more than 20 years of experience in IT development and operations, while Marianne is a financial expert with extensive banking experience.

Jesse:
Quick follow-up question…a lot of us have been excited to see your e-Money progress. What’s the ETA on that? Have you received necessary regulatory approvals? And will that be like a basic wallet app that’s easily refillable with fiat? Will you be partnering with banks or how do you load up a wallet with fiat?

Martin Dyring-Andersen:
Thank you for asking all the right (hard) questions. :-)

We’ve been working diligently with the Danish FSA and advisors for a year-and-a-half, to find the right regulatory box to fit into. This is still on-going, though we expect certainty in the near term.

As trust will be a key driver for our tokens, we expect to be best-in-class by offering quarterly proof-of-funds, segregated accounts for funds and an insolvency fund.

In addition to this our tokens are interest-bearing, so we are hopeful that the market will judge in our favor.

Our vision is an “easy refill” wallet, but this is highly dependent on banking relationships. Our version 1.0 will allow “top ops” through us for larger amounts and through exchanges for smaller amounts.

Launch is planned over the summer, hopefully coinciding with IBC being rolled out. We’ll start with eEUR and eGBP.

Outside of Cosmos/Tendermint, how have you been involved with blockchain so far? What projects have you participated in? What projects do you find particularly intriguing?

Martin has previously worked with algorithmic currency trading and participated in the development of a prototype of a Tendermint-based FX Clearing system in early 2016. This background, combined with the novel possibilities within Cosmos, sparked an interest into issuing currency-backed stablecoins on the network.

Outside of Cosmos, the projects that we find particular intriguing are infrastructure projects such as Hashgraph, Polkadot and Monet due to their novel approaches to solving scalability challenges.

On the integration side, IRISnet is working on bridging Cosmos with the enterprise space, which is obviously of great interest to our stablecoin project. IOV is working on the “last mile problem” to make the technology available to a wide range of users, which is also tremendously important.

How did you get into blockchain space initially and what keeps you interested?

Our blockchain interest was triggered by Martin’s involvement in the FX Clearing system.

There is a lot of innovation continuing to happen in this space, and everything is moving ahead at breakneck pace. This is obviously a very exciting field to work in, with a plethora of new opportunities surfacing every week.

Once you cut through the incredible amounts of hype, there are actually applications with potentially huge, real-world impact left. As an example, we see blockchain and stablecoins playing a major role in the future of global financial inclusion, which is among the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals.

Going through the list of Cosmos-based projects, of which there is presently 80, it is clear that the potential is huge and the technology has wide applicability.

Where do you see the blockchain space evolving in the next 1–3 years?

We feel that Cosmos has found a great balance between between features and complexity. When we have explained its benefits to people outside of the blockchain world, we’ve found the advantages and advances easy to communicate. It’s definitely our opinion that things such as interoperability, doing away with proof-of-work and having immediate finality is the right direction for blockchain technologies to move in the coming years.

Regardless of which technology ends up dominating the market, we also believe that the time for a mass adopted blockchain application is not too far away, although it’s very likely that the user will not actually pay any attention to it being backed by a blockchain, much like users today don’t really care what database is being used by their favourite websites or apps today.

With regards to Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges faced by the project overall?

The greatest advantage of Cosmos is that they have a first-mover advantage in the interoperability space. But in order to stay ahead, Cosmos must convince developers to join the ecosystem and build their applications for it.

Martin Dyring-Andersen:
Another challenge is to ensure that the development process involves the broader community, and doesn’t remain centralized. It definitely feels like Game of Stakes has demonstrated that the validator community is strong, resourceful and ready to assume responsibility for the future direction of the Cosmos network. Community involvement will be key and a significant advantage in the upcoming competition among blockchain technologies.

With regards to being a validator in Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges you will face?

Game of Stakes demonstrated that there is a healthy community of very proactive validators, that are ready to assume responsibility for keeping the network running by building tools and debugging errors and corner cases. We come out of Game of Stakes with great faith in the people that will be part of the upcoming launch of the mainnet.

Among the challenges that the community will face is keeping things decentralized by not having too powerful validators. We believe that an important part of this will be influencing delegator behaviour by adjusting fees.

We plan to create tooling that will help validators decide on a fee algorithmically based, on a configurable policy.

For more information on Validator.Network check out their website at: https://validator.network/
You can also find them on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/validator_net