It is commonly known that any great superhero has a well told history of what set them on their path. Origin stories explain how our favorite characters receive or develop their special powers and the transformation that explains who, or what, makes them the way they are. Whether it’s Batman’s story of witnessing the murder of his parents, or superman being sent to Earth to be raised by farmers, heroes always have a beginning to their story.
Alacris is no different.
However, instead of the power of flight, super-human strength, or nifty gadgets used to save the universe, our protagonists are armed with solutions of scalability and security and are on a mission to save Blockchain. Well, let’s say at the very least, make it functional for others to develop some really cool applications for.
But let’s start at the beginning…
Alacris Co-Founders Chris Swenor and François-René Rideau met in 2017 through a mutual friend, bonding instantly over, of all things, management techniques, which comes into play later on. Growing up on different continents, Chris in the United States and François in France, both developed an early interest in computer science, development, and coding. Chris moved from developing into more management and leadership roles with tech startups, most recently creating a 20-member team of consultants specializing in growth-stage startups, which became East Coast Product. François honed in on his software designer and development architecture skills, building out infrastructure at places like Bridgewater Associates and Google.
And as most origin stories go… Then something happened: That pivotal moment that changed their lives forever and set our duo on the course to create Alacris, which will transform the Blockchain ecosystem as we know it.
For Chris, our CEO, it was a sandwich.
“It was 2013 and I bought my friend a sandwich and he, being the dick that he is, paid me back in Bitcoin. He did me a huge favor, though. It was a very expensive sandwich, but more importantly, that brought (Cryptocurrency and Blockchain) into my sights,” he said. However, at that point it was more of a casual interest for Chris.
Enter our co-protagonist and Chief Architect, François. He had been following cryptocurrencies with interest but from afar since 2010 when it was used at PorcFest, and had helped with the Tezos project in its infancy. And so his first serious dip into the Blockchain world was through his brother, who asked him for help in researching cryptocurrencies, “He was trading cryptocurrencies and wanted to know which were good and which were bad. So, I started reading a lot of whitepapers. I gave him answers and at some point I read a whitepaper that claimed to solve scaling issues Blockchain had. Like maybe three quarter of whitepapers I read, its authors may have been more advanced than I was in many aspects of computer science, but apparently had no clue about the economics of cryptocurrencies. Thanks to what I learned from Tezos, I knew how to do it better,” François said. Soon, François put together what started as LegiCash, and sent his white paper to Chris and asked him, “Do you want to fix Blockchain with me?”
“He handed me 50 pages of brain dump,” Chris said about that initial whitepaper attempts from François. “I managed to get through it after about a week and met with him because it sounded very promising. I thought it was really cool and he asked if I wanted to be CEO (remember that bond over management techniques?) and I said, ‘let’s do this.’”
That “brain dump” eventually evolved from what was thought to just be a way to scale payments on the Blockchain into so much more: Something that made Blockchain work and eventually to what Alacris is now — A Layer 2 Operating System that is not only a side chain/state channel hybrid, but most importantly a system that implements and abstracts away lower-level functionality so that developers can focus exclusively on building their application using the Blockchain instead of dwelling on infrastructure.
Alacris is gaining traction and just closed its seed round of funding to make a total of $1 million, and is just six months away from test net and about nine from main net. “Getting to strategic investors and partners at this level gives us validity in the space, which is exciting. We are starting conversations with wallets and payment processors to make sure when our product is ready they can hit the ground running.” Chris said.
And that is the great thing about origin stories, they are only the beginning… to be continued.
