Get to Know CoreLedger
As a company, CoreLedger has been around a few years now, but we’ve never properly introduced ourselves. In this blog post, we’ll tell you a little bit about ourselves and our evolution as a company focused on driving enterprise blockchain adoption.
Who Are We?
We are a steadily growing startup, working with clients from all over Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. At our core, pun intended, we are a team of technology nerds and professional problem solvers. As CoreLedger co-founder and CEO Johannes Schweifer likes to say, “I have a passion for finding solutions to complex problems. The discipline doesn’t really matter as long as it is a challenge.”
Our 16 member team is global, like our customers. We maintain permanent offices for our core team at our headquarters in Liechtenstein as well as in Baar, the heart of Switzerland’s Crypto Valley. A number of us work remotely from different locations in Europe and Asia, and we are expanding the team to better serve our growing customer base in Latin America and the Middle East.
Our Journey: The Early Years
Our company was founded in 2017 by a team of experts in blockchain technology, software development, and system architecture, all of whom had already worked with CEO Johannes Schweifer on earlier projects. He has a long history in Crypto Valley, having founded or co-founded several startups, including Bitcoin Suisse back in 2013. CoreLedger was a natural result of all this rich experience with Crypto and Blockchain, but not all of it was purely positive. “Although I invested in Bitcoin as early as 2011, and believed in blockchain technology from the very beginning, I really didn’t like the speculative aspect of it at all. There is so much innovative potential, but most people only see a way to get rich quickly.”
CoreLedger AG is meant to unleash this innovative potential and to power use cases beyond speculation and finance. This was not easy, especially during the heady days of the ICO craze, which completely eclipsed all other use cases. Nonetheless we kept our eyes focused on the horizon instead, seeing blockchain technology as a means to either create completely new business processes or enhance existing products and services in such a way that they become cheaper, faster, more transparent, more reliable, and globally available 24x7.
Nobody uses a new technology just for the sake of using a new technology; there must be a tangible benefit. Our products are meant to realize this benefit. It was a long journey to direct the attention of the market to the fact that digital assets are not just tokenized financial products; information on blockchain itself can be an asset.
In order to work with digital assets, there are four fundamental things you need that have added value on blockchain compared to off-chain solutions; Documentation, Tokenization/Accounting, Governance, and Trading. So, from 2018–2019, we focused on developing a Token Economy Operating System (CoreLedger TEOS) that would allow anyone to easily do all of these token economy essentials via a simple user interface, or through an API for software developers.
We also set out to show how versatile these token economies can be, even in use cases where you might not naturally consider using tokens. Our early projects from this time included BD300, a mobile game running on blockchain; Smartmo, a bike parking app that featured a way to do micro-payments and control a smart lock with blockchain; and Ambitorio, an IP protection company who used our solution to encrypt 3D print files to be sold in limited printing runs, making them cheaper and easier to distribute.
One of the big takeaways from these early pilot projects was realizing the need to have reliable transactions with consistently low fees, which gave birth to SparkNet in 2019. This blockchain network is based on Ethereum technology, and maintained by project partners and customers of CoreLedger. Most importantly, SparkNet is committed to having zero gas costs for the entire life of the network.
New Products and Market Focus
As the market evolved, so did we. We realized that the industry was still struggling with fundamental problems when it came to understanding and adopting blockchain technology. Part of the problem is that there weren’t many working use cases on the market, and developing a good ideas for new tech is not so easy. You need either expensive consultants or a good in-house team. The maintenance of an enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure is not cheap either. In the middle of 2020, as the first round of lockdowns drastically changed the way we did business, we launched a new flagship product, the Active Sandbox. In order to address these barriers to adoption that we saw in the market, we designed the Active Sandbox to provide a capable, easy-to-use no-code solution to experiment with blockchain ideas, train in-house personnel, and get hands-on experience with the technology.
Our Active Sandbox gives startups the opportunity to build and test their business ideas on a live blockchain. This way, they can fine-tune solutions, and build a functioning proof-of-concept that can be used to pitch to investors and get customer feedback. The Active Sandbox has proven popular for projects around the world, and in a variety of industries from Agribusiness, to Real Estate, to notarization and IP protection.
2021 was a big year for us. Our first round of Active Sandbox projects in Latin America matured, giving us valuable feedback and brand new opportunities for our customers in Brazil and Argentina. We also launched our grant program, offering discounts and technical support to qualifying startups in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
The success of the Active Sandbox led to the completion of the CoreLedger TEOS Suite, which solves another problem we saw in the market, namely the sheer difficulty of starting a blockchain project from scratch. With a variety of white label products we made it as easy as possible for others to develop their own blockchain products without needing a smart contract developer or having to worry about the underlying blockchain infrastructure. In 2021 we also completed development of our API and had the first productive launches of several partner products, such as the NOTRZR app. We are especially proud that CoreLedger TEOS has proven a valuable launchpad for non-speculative business ideas, for which it saves money and shortens the time-to-market.
Giving back and promoting adoption
Making it as easy as possible to start working with blockchain was only half the battle. We also wanted to help educate and inspire entrepreneurs and business owners with the exciting possibilities that blockchain brings to business. In 2020, we started to increase our educational efforts, publishing use case articles on Medium, doing webinars, and offering free E-books that go in-depth into various use cases. We often receive emails from students or individuals interested in learning more about the technology, and we are always happy to connect them with resources. Johannes also gives lectures in blockchain CAS classes at HSLU (Hochschule Lucerne), where he speaks about real blockchain use-cases beyond speculation, still a rarity in 2022.
Based on his classroom experience, we also started offering the Active Sandbox to researchers and universities as a pedagogical tool. Blockchain technology is a buzzword right now, and being able to demonstrate real experience on CVs and grant applications is a huge benefit when looking for funding. Plus, we love to see the interesting new use cases that students and and researchers come up with using our platform.
What’s next for CoreLedger?
In 2022, we’ve doubled down on our Enterprise Blockchain focus. But while much of the space is still obsessing over tokens, crypto, or NFT speculation, a growing audience of businesses are waking up the practical uses for blockchain technology. Fortunately, we’ve spent the past few years preparing solutions just for that.
As of 2022, the industry has still a huge appetite for Token Sales, in one form or another. We’ve focused on addressing this for businesses through use cases like revenue sharing. And CoreLedger’s customers now have a white-label Token Sale portal at their disposal, with access to KYC and AML processes, payment services (crypto and fiat) as provided by our partners, as well as token creation tools for both Fungible and Non Fungible (NFT’s) tokens.
For the past year, we’ve been significantly expanding our partner network, and in 2022 we are increasing these efforts so that we can provide our customers with a full 360° solution for their projects. CoreLedger AG excels at providing a blockchain infrastructure and white label products, and our partners can complement these offerings with legal and regulatory advice, marketing, consulting, and custom software development.
We’ve sharpened both our company focus and our solution offerings to better reflect the realities that companies large and small face when they start looking at, or working with, blockchain technology. It’s telling that our most popular solution is our no-code testing and development platform, the Active Sandbox, for startups and SME’s who need to quickly prototype or raise investment. By making it affordable and easy to use, we hope to boost blockchain inclusion across all industries and to improve competitiveness.
For those interested in tokenization, CoreLedger TEOS offers the possibility to create entire ecosystems that combine fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFT’s). Outside of industry applications, these can also be used for Metaverse concepts, to build games, or for social credit systems. We also offer specific solutions for notarization, documentation, and cryptographic linking, all simple but highly effective use cases for blockchain to protect identity and improve IP security in our everyday lives.
One of our most precious innovations, however, will always be TokenWARP®, a novel way of doing barter on blockchain. We found a solution to solve one of the most fundamental flaws of barter economies — scalability. The TokenWARP® is a patent-pending solution for connecting many parties into a single atomic transaction. This gave birth to our old company motto “make anything transact-able.” The concept dates back to our earliest days, but it wasn’t until 2021 that we realized it can be used for so many more things that are out-of-reach for standard tokens. As regulatory issues and compliance problems are hindering most blockchain innovations, the Token WARP can actually make many of these concepts possible with full compliance. This means that registered shares, correspondence banking, storage certificates and more can now be realized, with TokenWARP connecting them to vast digital marketplaces.
All of us at CoreLedger are genuinely excited about the potential that blockchain technology has to radically improve the way people do business around the world, especially as our lives become increasingly digital. If you’re interested in partnering with us, using one of our solutions for your company, or just want to talk about how blockchain might be a good fit for your project, please get in touch with us. We look forward to hearing from you!
At CoreLedger, we believe that blockchain is a practical technical solution to improve and solve a wide variety of issues across industries and sectors, which is why we try to cut through the hype and focus on real world applications, not just what’s technically possible.
CoreLedger’s mission is to help businesses of all sizes quickly and affordably access the benefits of blockchain technology. From issuing a simple token, to enterprise- grade token economy solutions, we have all the tools you need to quickly and affordably integrate blockchain into your business whether you’re a new startup or a big multinational enterprise.
Interested in our results-focused, real-world approach? Then visit our website for more information, or get in touch with us directly to discuss your project.
