Unido with Michael Swan
Brief Information
Unido is an enterprise platform for decentralised capital markets. Unido enables enterprises to seamlessly manage their crypto assets through an enterprise-grade platform with a suite of DeFi and crypto banking management tools.
Introduction AMA
Eric: Welcome @xChrispac and @michaelpac! How are you guys today?
Michael: Hi Eric, great to be here today. thanks for having us!
Chris: Very good thanks for having us here!
Eric: from where are u two logging in from?
Michael: I'm in Sydney, Australia. My kitchen specifically :P
Chris: I'm in sunny Adelaide, South Australia
Eric: Haha. Nice. So we would like to know about your background first before talking about UNIDO. can you share a bit about that?
Michael: Personally, I come from a traditional finance, having worked in Macquarie on their multi asset custody platform, and more recently in Goldman Sachs where I was a Vice President.
After a decade in traditional finance, it became evident to me that centralised control of finance stifles innovation and over the last 2 years, I have since become a crypto convert.
My years in finance, working with the world’s biggest corporates and fund managers did give me an important insight into the realities of enterprise getting involved in crypto. They are limited by their own corporate governance, hamstringing their ability to adopt new technologies. The custody of the private key was, and remains today, a major issue stopping mainstream corporate adoption of crypto. This realisation led my search to PAC Blockchain 18 months ago and their work on Unido.
Eric: Welcome to the dark side!
Michael: This is the bright side, believe me!!
Eric: How about you @xChrispac?
Chris: I’ve got a career background over 20 years’ experience in software development and founded PAC Blockchain in Australia.
PAC supports enterprises both with digital transformation and, more recently, adoption of blockchain technology.
Eric: Awesome. What are your roles in Unido?
Michael: Im Chief Commercial Officer, leading the efforts around commercialising the product, building partnerships and bringing on board new custodial/ banks/ brokers
Chris: I’m the founder and CEO of PAC, leading the tech development of Unido, and Michael has the perfect complimentary skills for the team!
Eric: So what is Unido?
Chris: Unido is an enterprise platform for decentralized capital markets. It enables any enterprises who hold crypto in their books, such as Grayscale, BNY Mellon and other neo-banks, asset managers or crypto-native businesses, to seamlessly manage their crypto assets. We do this by providing a suite of crypto banking tools and an enterprise bridge to allow businesses to securely invest crypto funds into DeFi through platforms such as UniSwap, Balancer and Compound.
Underpinning the Unido Enterprise Platform is the secret sauce called “Unido Core”. At its heart, Unido core is a proprietary (and patented) key management technology that provides enterprise-grade security for any transaction which utilises it.
We have unlocked this technology through an API which means that 3rd party developers can build on top of Unido Core to create a whole host of applications, to benefit from it’s enterprise grade security and flexible governance features.
The use cases for Unido Core are wide ranging and we have created the UDO token and Ecosystem Fund to support this development.
Eric: Wow interesting. How does Unido Core work exactly?
Chris: Signing a blockchain transaction requires the entire private key for the account. The secret sauce is Unido Core which is our patented multi-party computation (MPC) and obfuscation algorithm that divides the key into portions and stores these securely amongst members of the wallet.
This distribution vastly reduces the chances of the key being lost or stolen, and provides a mechanism for multiple members, varying levels of access and usage rights — delivering the required governance and enterprise security that organisations require to adopt.
As you can imagine, this key management and signing technology can be used to secure any on-chain transaction occurring on the blockchain, not just crypto buts supply chain, data — the list is limitless.
Eric: What if one party cannot retrieve his part? Can it be tolerant of that scenario?
Chris: It’s like a multi signature wallet, as long as there are enough signers the wallet can always be recovered by the remaining signing members
Eric: What are the utilities of UDO?
Michael: UDO is a utility token, which will be required to pay for transaction fees and must also be staked in order to receive access licences for the various Unido product offerings and including the Unido Enterprise Platform and Unido Core. The Unido Treasury built-into the ecosystem will enable enterprise users to seamlessly exchange stablecoins for UDO to power their transaction and purchase additional licences for their organisations.
This will mean that we continuously purchase UDO off the open market as adoption increases. Once we launch the Unido Core API, the token will also be used for governance rights to distribute the Ecosystem Funds to subsidise 3rd party dApp developers who wish to utilise our technology.
Eric: Why is unido important to the crypto space?
Michael: The token consists of an initial burn on fees paid to reduce the total issuance by 20%, to magnify the buy-side demand on investor tokens, by reducing the total circulating tokens. We will also launch a liquidity mining program to reward our early supporters staking UDO/USDT and UDO/ETH pairs.
Our primary market for the Unido Enterprise platform are enterprises who hold crypto on the balance sheets and need an effective way to manage and invest these funds. Based on the latest figures there is currently roughly 61 billion dollars in crypto assets in corporate treasuries. The likes of Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, BNY Mellon and many other household names have opened the door to a wave of enterprises adding crypto to their balance sheet.
We expect this number to grow exponentially, especially as we’re in a macro situation where most companies are trying to hedge from inflation due to all the money printing in the world! Unido is perfectly positioned to serve enterprises who want to hedge their assets by adding crypto to their balance sheets but don’t have tools to do this.
In bringing Unido to market, we hope to support the exponential adoption of DeFi and Crypto Assets by institutions which has been some years in the making!
Eric: What makes unido unique from the competition? I assume Bitgo and Coinbase custody are some of those.
Chris: There is currently no other provider out there that we’ve seen that provides an integrated suite of enterprise crypto banking and DeFi investment tools that satisfies the compliance, security and governance needs of large institutions and there’s no other solution which protects the funds in such a decentralised fashion — the likes of bitgo are heavily centralised which means higher fees, less efficiency.
Underneath our Enterprise Platform, we have the “secret sauce” patented Unido Core technology that is hyper scalable and can be utilised by 3rd party dApps through our API to apply the same Unido Core traits to ANY transaction happening on the blockchain.
Eric: Yes. They are. Very interesting product, a pioneer I must say. How big is the team now?
Michael: We have an established team as PAC Blockchain has been consulting and doing agency developing for clients in the blockchain space for the last 8 years. The patented Unido software has been in development and evolution for the last 3 years, all done in house at PAC, in Adelaide, Australia. We have had approximately 10 employees involved on a full time basis over the years, mainly all Devs, with a few support roles. Their backgrounds vary, but include tertiary degrees in Computer Science and related fields, Commerce & M.B.A.s
Eric: Can you tell us about your investors and advisors?
Michael: The token private sale was anchored by AU21 Capital, Weaksimp Capital, Tokenomik Inc, Titans Ventures, Master Ventures, Moonwhale Ventures, Onchain Capital, Vendetta Capital, Pheonix VC, Wandarin Capital, Lotus Capital, Kyros Ventures, Morningstar Ventures and Faculty Capital. These are all top tier professional crypto investors, some of which are previous venture capital investors in PAC, so have had inside visibility to the development of Unido and the commercial uptake discussions to date.
Unido is incubated by Faculty Labs, who have previously brought to market Alliance Block, Bridge Mutual and SpiderDAO.
Eric: Wow. strong backers here. Any important dates we should know about?
Michael: The $UDO Polkastarter IDO will be launched on February 26th. More people have been finding out about Unido and our community has been growing rapidly -we’re now at over 33k people on Telegram! However, we want to focus on giving everyone a fair chance to get their hands on $UDO, which has been highly sought-after ever since the private sale.
So we will open the 2nd round of Polkastarter whitelisting shortly, so join our announcement channel and stay tuned!
Community AMA
Q:What are the inspiration to start unido in polkadot and heard banking is in your project,so is your project fully decentralised and country restriction and what the unique specialities of unido
Chris: The Polkadot substrate blockchain has been selected for its ability to run a very high throughput of transactions with customisation of the economic model. In particular, the transaction fees for recording API activity can be set as the working tokens themselves. Thus, working tokens are spent for their own usage and the cost of each transaction is the number of working tokens used in that transaction. This structure gives the benefit of having all transactions be at no cost to the companies that publish the transactions or the users spending their working tokens for API requests. Using tokens in this way on more conventional blockchains — even highly efficient gen 3 blockchains — would be cost-prohibitive.
Q: How does @UnidoEP differentiate itself and what plans do you have to overcome the first mover advantage of other platforms?
Chris: There are some other very clever platforms on the market which in isolation either make dealing with crypto very easy, or offer extreme security.
For example, a regular hot wallet makes crypto very easy, and a cold wallet makes crypto very secure but Unido is the only one that provides the best of both worlds together, along with corporate governance packaged in, we are the first platform to address the corporate needs of high security, ease of use , governance and access to defi networks all in the one platform
Q: What benefit are both getting from these partnerships and Will this partnership give rise to growth and success? Whats the main reason behind the collaboration?
Michael: We are very excited to have just announced this partnerships and we have many more like this in the pipeline. Its mutually beneficial: From LGCY perspective, they can broaden their user base by allowing their ecosystem devs to build DApps on their chain which are targeted at enterprise, by utilising the Unido signing engine to match their DApps to work with corporate governance and security that enterprise requires to adopt new technology. From a Unido perspective, this represents a hyper-scalable user acquisition opportunity for us, as the LGCY network and their eco developers will be pushing the Unido integrated solution, which ofcourse attracts fees each time the signing engine transacts
Q: What sectors that your team are disrupting now ?
Chris: Our primary focus for Unido EP is enterprise with crypto on their balance sheets, and asset managers
Going forward, Unido Core API will used be used by 3rd party dapp devs to provide more secure blockchain authentication in many different blockchain use cases
Q: Can you tell us about market pie you are trying to conquer, your competitors and your SWOT analysis for your offerings?
Michael: We have 3 product variants in the Unido suite, to cover each section of the addressable market. Unido Enterprise Platform is for enterprise/ corporate use, Unido custodial is a variant for neo-banks, custodial providers and exchanges, but we are also offering the Unido Wallet, which is a lightweight retail wallet, designed for individuals and MSMEs who dont require the entire tool suite of EP, but want the security benefits of the Unido multi sig engine and access to Defi networks, all on a smart device.
Q: To use a smartphone wallet application with multi-sig features, do users have to do KYC to be able to use the wallet? Can you provide more information about the advantages of the Unido smartphone wallet application?What makes it unique & different that no other wallet can find?
Chris: At this stage no kyc is necessary to use the downloadable version of Unido — it’s super quick and easy to set up an account so head on to the App Store, download it and give it a go!
The main advantages are that we have the main qualities of ease of use combined with extreme security, and soon we’ll have a direct connection to leading Defi networks so that you can earn a yield on your hodl
Q: It’s easy to make a token but it’s really hard to make this token valuable? So what’s your startegy to make your token more valuable and what’s your plan to maintain token price and supply?
Michael: We are aligning the UDO burn rate in line with the adoption of the Enterprise Platform. A portion of the Consumption Fees received from enterprise users utilising the platform will be sent back to the Unido Treasury and burnt up to a point at which we reduce total circulating supply by 20%. After this point we will move from a “Burn” to “Recycle” model to re-inject liquidity back into the ecosystem.
In addition to this, we will be launching the Liquidity Mining program after TGE which will reward early supporters of the token whilst providing liquidity whilst we grow and scale our community.
Closing Remarks
Eric: Ok. thats all the time we have for Unido. Please invite everyone where to follow the project @michaelpac
Michael: Thanks for the time for us to discuss Unido. Its a really exciting time in crypto with big enterprise coming in. We are very well positioned to ride the wave of corporate blockchain addoption
Chris: Thanks Eric and everyone for participating!
Michael: Please stay tuned to our announcement channels on TG and Twitter for the POLS access next week. https://t.me/unidogroup
Chris: Follow us at: https://twitter.com/Unidoep
Eric: thanks! we will surely track this very substantial and interesting project! Thanks everyone!
Michael: Thanks for joining everyone 💪💪
