Insights from designing Crowd Genie’s product roadmap
By Akshay Mehra, CEO
One of the big themes in the current Distributed Ledger and Crypto communities (which unfortunately get linked, even though they are quite unique) is the lack of volumes for the tokens, because the promise of blockchain based applications just hasn’t been delivered.
After our Token Sale, we have been busy building on the promise, laid out in our White-paper (http://bit.ly/2MRyF08), and we have been adamant that we don’t want to be one of those ICOs that promise a lot, but deliver little.
Over the course of the last couple of months, we have been busy designing and developing the platform. The team has looked around at different options; evaluated the pros/cons of different blockchain architectures; and designed a plan that works for our business and regulatory environment.
Learnings from the Design Phase
Before getting into the design, some of the learnings from the process: When you strip out the hype around DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology), and we started to evaluate what would work for you, a few things become clear:
- Promise is not Reality. We have been through a lot of different DLT architectures — and it became clear that when you lift the hood, there isn’t a lot under it. Sometimes the architecture itself is a mere derivative of Ethereum, or the implementation is shoddy, or the documentation is non-existent
- Knowing Solidity does not make you a Blockchain coder! I cannot tell you how many times, we have been pitched by “development shops” who claim to be have the talent inhouse to build our platform. And the basis for their confidence — they have built smart contracts for a couple of ICOs, and have designed their own wallets (both of which are open source and meant that they made a few minor edits!). We finally decided that we need to take a lot more time to test the knowledge of any of the potential developers, and are very pleased with our team.
- Public blockchain is not always needed. DLT is a great technology, but for a lot of enterprise/ business applications, a public blockchain’s features are actually barriers. For instance, quasi-anonymity of blockchain would not work for personal data/ information. Similarly, you may not a trust-less verification for some internal transactions and consensus. From our standpoint, it became clear that we need to get to a hybrid approach of public and private blockchains, and only expose those data to the public that our users might want to see, and importantly is compliant with privacy and regulatory rules.
Crowd Genie’s approach
In our design phase, it became clear to us that there were some design choices we had to make to build out the platform
Build an end to end ecosystem
Crowd Genie envisages a platform that goes from verification of the its users (borrowers and lenders), to enabling lending and investment using our tokens against assets, and eventually a secondary market for trading the assets.
All of this is a hugely regulated activity. Just for verification, we have to first get the information of the users; then verify that the data is correct and there is no fraud; and finally ensure all of this data is secure and private. After going through a lot of existing KYC blockchain systems, including those that work on DLT, we realized that none of them would meet our regulatory requirements. As a result, we would have to build it on our own.
Further, because the sector itself is so nascent, products/ Dapps of one company don’t work very well with those of another, so for instance even if there was a viable KYC product, it did not have robust APIs that would play well with another company’s lending platform.
So, we realized that we need to build the full ecosystem — from KYC to Lending platform! And that has a ton of complexity under it.
Hybrid Blockchain architecture
Our platform is going to be built on Ethereum and Quorum blockchains.
All internal data, and personal KYC information will be on Quorum, where the nodes are all within the organization, and the privacy module of theirs looks quite robust that essentially ensures that it only gives the validity of the information (yes/no), and does not give access to the underlying information. In addition, its features of coding some data as private is an important feature for financial services.
All lender and borrower transactions and investments will be on the public blockchain — Ethereum. It helps to have a well-known source for tracking transactions and we want that any user of our platform should be able to know where their investments have gone, and what they have received as repayments.
Fiat to Token exchange is important
One of the key elements of the platform will need to be a process by which lenders can use tokens to invest into assets, and borrowers can then convert this into Fiat for use in their business, and on repayment, convert fiat to tokens.
The exchange will be the entry and exit for users from the ecosystem.
The criticality of having such a window for converting between fiat to token makes it important that there is a robust, and stable window for doing these transactions. We need a system where the CGC token’s (which is the Crowd Genie’s internal currency) price discovery is clear, transparent, and ideally with manageable volatility.
Similarly, we needed to think through the processes for ensuring that the scenarios when the cash/ token transactions are separated in time. For example, if the repayments will take place with a time lag from the investment, and as such we needed to think through how to the borrowers and lenders will deal with exchange fluctuations, while still being fair to each party.
What’s next?
Now that we have the architecture that we feel comfortable with, we are getting into development, and by all accounts the alpha product should be available in about 8 weeks, and then a couple of weeks for the beta and final product.
As things get developed we will keep adding to this space.
Technology development
Our CTO, Kunwar, is also starting a series of articles that goes into more detail about the technology stack. His latest post is here →http://bit.ly/2L1pWqm
Keep watching this space!
