I just built an ICO platform with your HSM!
One of the fun things when working on new technology in a startup is all the people we meet. Rather than dealing with the same crew over and over again, new contacts and introductions are made on almost a daily basis. In the crypto finance and blockchain field, the supply of people and ideas seems to be endless. Some fade away while others become partners, customers, and friends. One who stood out was Thomas Taroni.
Thomas was introduced to us by none other than our master networker Michael Guzik from BVV. “You guys should talk, I think there are some synergies,” he claimed, so our CTO Andreas picked up the phone and called Thomas. Two hours later (note the duration) he was ecstatic: “We need to start collaborating with them!”
Thomas and his brother Stefan, along with Carla A. Bünger, have built a very exciting IT company called Phoenix-Systems. They provide private clouds for companies here in Switzerland. On top of that they created an unstructured database as repository for the Swiss printing industry. As Securosys’ head of development, Marcel Dasen, put it: “Originally unstructured databases failed because computer systems simply didn’t have enough memory. Moreover, nobody was crazy enough to actually do it.” They have now stored and indexed several million newspaper articles dating back more than one hundred years in this database. What’s even better is that with a nice user interface and some process logic, this unstructured database also serves as basis for an extendable customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Despite his tendency to enter into long discussions, Thomas is a man of quick actions, soon requesting one of our HSM for testing. Within a week he came back to us, full of praise: “This HSM works really well and was super easy to connect to. I’m going to add them to our private cloud offering.” He continued enthusiastically: “It was really great working with you guys. We got the test equipment quickly and support whenever it was needed. And by the way, I just built a ICO platform with your HSM!” Wait, he did what?
In addition to having his own company, Thomas serves as the Head of IT for Smart Containers, who were just getting ready for their own ICO. He was responsible for the whole technology stack, which includes managing the website that serves as the investor interface and connecting them to various services, such as registration and KYC (know your customer) verification. The technology stack also encompasses the whole system needed to mint the tokens and distribute them to all the wallets. Being a diligent and smart engineer, Taroni wanted to make sure the technology worked efficiently. When he looked at existing system he was completely surprised to find most of it still based on Excel and manual data entry. “You know, the guys from XYZ (company name withheld) are still working through their Excel sheets and sending out tokens manually. It will took them months to complete the process!”
Rather than suffering the same problem as XYZ, Thomas decided to take matters into his own hands. He built an ICO platform secured by a Securosys HSM. Initially he only used the HSM to generate good, high entropy random numbers for trustworthy key pairs. From there he moved on and integrated all the required services into the platform, including initial wallets. This system is now creating a lot of interest. Apparently, ICOs haven’t really been automated: a large amount of manual labor is involved, a process which is not just slow but also very vulnerable to errors. Obviously, this hasn’t been satisfying impatient investors, and so there is a huge demand for something better. Being entrepreneurs, together, we are now considering setting up a new company that provides an automated ICO platform secured by Securosys’ HSMs. If the idea comes to fruition, we will of course “eat our own dog food” and use this platform for our own ICO.
Our fun collaboration with smart people hasn’t been limited to Zurich and the Crypto Valley. It extends to techies in Australia, crypto hackers in London, and programmers and entrepreneurs in many other parts of the globe. We enjoy working with them to secure their blockchain and crypto assets systems with our HSM boxes and services. We’ve been meeting people from all over the world and look forward to working on even more, exciting projects with them.
