Ecosystem Q&A #3: The Best Aergo Knights — Community Vote & Interview
The Aergo Knights had a chance to vote on the best Knights for the month of June, here are the results.
On the 2nd of July we had concluded who the Knights saw as the top ones, with Patrick winning first place. Congratulations to the following Knights!
1st Place
PATRICK — $250 AERGO Tokens
2nd Place
ITAI — $150 AERGO Tokens
3rd Place
PAUL — $100 AERGO Tokens
They were rewarded a bonus on top of their earnings for their role as Aergo Knights. If you think you have what it takes to become one, we still have our submission form available here for those interested as we keep an open eye for talented individuals.
Further, we got to interview Patrick on a couple of questions, along with one with the Knights prior to their formalization. Read on for some Juicy insights.
Preliminary
Patrick: Aergo caught my interest early on, I heard about it via Twitter and started to research the project. Soon after I realized it’s potential.
One of the most important aspects behind every successful start-up/ company are the people driving it. Here I think that Aergo truly distinguishes itself from many other projects in the space. First of all we have Blocko which is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced firms for implementing successful blockchain solutions, and on the other hand we have a CEO with a proven track record at various multinationals relevant to the industry. These technical and commercial capabilities combined are the perfect mix to build a successful company.
Why do you think you were selected as the Top Aergo Knight?
Patrick: I started engaging with the community using Telegram, having conversations with both the community and Aergo admins to learn even more about the project. Along the way I also tried to help out new community members to make them familiar with the project and tried to answer as many questions as possible.
Soon after I started a community Twitter @AergoKnights to share news about the project, trying to create more awareness for Aergo. These initiatives helped me to become an official Aergo Knight and I am still eager to keep up-to-date with the project and contribute to the project by creating awareness and brainstorming with the team about new initiatives.
What do you think the Knights could be doing better at, and how?
Patrick: I think that we as Knights could play an even larger role as ambassadors of Aergo by finding creative ways to bring exposure to Aergo but also to amplify the messaging of the core team. An important aspect here is education of people about blockchain and how Aergo can bring value to their business by streamlining existing processes, removing inefficiencies, cost reduction by reducing intermediaries, revenue creation and so on.
What do you hope to achieve to grow Aergo’s Ecosystem?
Patrick: In order to grow a large and vibrant community we should find and engage with people that can contribute to the long term success of Aergo.
An important group of people are developers that can help to further mature and utilize the Aergo platform. In the end Aergo needs to on-board smart/ talented people to build meaningful and value added applications that will grow the ecosystem. Aergo being a fully open-source environment should bring flexibility, agility, and the ability to get started quickly and inexpensively, eventually once successful as this allows them to scale fast and leverage learnings from other platform contributors.
Developers being a key ingredient for success, this is where Knights should play a role and work together with experienced open source developers to understand how to best approach this community and create plans to rigorously execute in cooperation with the core team to bring awareness and eagerness to this community.
I think to really accelerate it is important to engage closely and team up with the Aergo core team. This way we can amplify each others strengths and really start making a difference in our journey to become THE blockchain for business.
We want to thank the Knights, and Patrick for sharing their thoughts and suggestions, along with their efforts. We are in the process of creating these pathways to better expand our ecosystem.
We had also interviewed the Knights prior to commencement, here are some of the takeaways which should shed more insight on the backgrounds and motivations of the Aergo Knights team.
Who founded Aergo Knights and what drove you to establish this community?
The Aergo Knights emerged after our encounter in the Unofficial Aergo Traders group, the three founding members being Patrick, Amec and Bertrand. We noticed during the month of April a growing excitement about Aergo and we decided to start promoting the hybrid enterprise platform at the end of the month. It was right after the release of the article about the Aergo Knights ambassadors, the real ones!
The drive behind that idea is to be more than simple stakeholders. We’re doing it because of a sincere admiration for the impressive value proposition of Aergo (A* tech, A* team, Blocko, existing large customers and more).
We want to add value to the project, that we believe will revolutionize the technological landscape much like Linux did, as much as we can. With initiatives ranging from a simple feedback to long-term projects inside the ecosystem like dApps.
On a side note, some of our members also realized that Aergo is a perfect situation for developer entry as an early adopter, and some of us are keen on learning how to code by using their tools and SDK.
Which countries does your community represent?
The knights are distributed around the world, like bitcoin nodes. Most of our members come from Europe (including The Netherlands, Belgium and France) and Asia (Korea, Philippines, Singapore).
Despite these two dominant continents, our reach goes far beyond; for example in Nigeria and Argentina.
Of course, this is just the beginning of the journey. We will focus on making sure we fully leverage the regional networks of our members according to the strategic choices of Aergo.
How do you see Aergo impacting your local market with existing enterprise technologies?
It’s clear that most businesses can benefit from the integration of blockchain based systems; we clearly see Aergo being an attractive platform to various types of actors in many sectors.
While large companies are known for being relatively slow at adopting new technologies, they probably are the first to consider a system upgrade for financial reasons. Because Aergo is a hybrid blockchain and uses a SQL syntax for its programming, we believe it will get adopted much faster (and with ease) compared to newer implementations like Solidity for Ethereum. Aergo will impact our local markets by integrating seamlessly with existing back-end systems in the enterprise world, thus allowing a wide range of actors, large to small, to consider the upgrade to trustless decentralized technologies. For example in the financial sector, supply chain or real estate.
We also see value for governments around the world; whether it is to enforce a transparent voting process, new education systems, ID management and more. Finally, startups and small structures can obviously adopt the Aergo hybrid platform to build brand new business models. To us, entrepreneurs are the most interesting customers that could adopt Aergo because of their disruptive nature (Uber, Tesla, “your favorite app”…).
Further examples highlighted by Patrick
- Insurance eg. smart contract execution on payments
- Voting
- ID management
- Use your own ID to login to social apps
- Being able to monetize your own personal data
- Being able to determine who sees what (e.g. insurance company) - Land Registry
- Supply chain
- Track goods using sensors to ensure being held in optimal conditions during transport
- Establish trusted link between manufacturer and seller of goods (re-stock of goods, etc) - Crowdfunding
Which countries besides Korea do you see opportunity for Aergos hybrid chain?
Any country in the world honestly!
The Aergo software stack (Mainnet chain+ various components) is a new paradigm for society, it could benefit to most enterprises and organizations willing to reduce their costs, improve their IT security, and automate their operations. Based on our different locations, we differentiate two main types of markets:
- “Developed” countries
- “Developing” countries.
The first group refers to wealthy countries or regions like the US, Europe, Korea and Japan. Generally speaking, Aergo will help large enterprises, public entities and even startups in these regions in order to reduce bureaucracy, cut costs and delays to maximize productivity. For these countries, the existing infrastructures (telecommunications, highways…) are quite good; organizations just need better tools and superior ways to do business with each other.
On the other hand, many developing countries are growing fast in Africa, Asia or elsewhere. For these countries, the opportunity of blockchain and cryptocurrencies is larger than developed countries because they have less infrastructure and less financial resources. In Africa for example, most people living in cities have smartphones but they lack access to certain vital services like healthcare, banking, education or connectivity. Just like they’re doing with clean energies, the different actors (private & public) in developing countries can build their society based on the latest technologies like Aergo to establish a future of abundance. They don’t need to repeat the mistakes made in the US or Europe the last decades, businesses and individuals in these regions can adapt faster and take technological shortcuts!
Finally, What advice do you have for the Aergo Team?
We feel like the team is extremely capable of achieving its goals, only a few details could be worked on in our opinion. Here are the domains you need to focus on in our view:
User Experience
Offer the Apple experience by making things as easy as possible to understand and work with in the ecosystem.
Interactive Community
You should give us as much opportunities available to experience the tech, dApps, and tools. Let us give feedback and participate as much as possible.
Rely on your Knights/Community members
Make sure you leverage the value of the members of your ecosystem to the full.
Don’t change!
We love Aergo as it is: a stellar project with real customers. You know what to do to get adoption, don’t listen too much to external voices and don’t watch what your competitors are doing more than needed!
From the Aergo Knights Team
