Unbanks Web 3 Intro
Hey everyone Alan here, one of the co-founders of Unbanks. We wanted to make a few videos and articles for you as a way of introducing the company and team. Including what we do and why we’re doing it. We want to start building in public and give an account of weekly updates on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it including the decisions we make in a way to have maximum transparency.
We know with what we’re doing it needs a lot of trust from the people who are going to be using Unbanks, so we want to be as open as we can and while building it and letting everybody who might use it or who might follow us on the journey of building it know what we’re up to and so you guys can put a face to the company of Unbanks. Video below;
So what is Unbanks?
Unbanks is a platform that we’ve built that allows users to link their bank accounts and start to earn passive income from their data. So a user will link their bank account and we will pull their banking data including transactional history from their bank account. We will anonymize the data so it cannot be used to identify anyone. We then add this to the thousands of other users on the Unbanks platform to create data sets.
We then sell the data sets and the money that we get from this flows back through to you the user and Unbanks will take an admin fee of 15% to help to continue to grow the business and continue to grow the community.
How did we come up with the idea?
How did we start or how did we even come up with the idea? Myself and my co-founder Ger, who is my first cousin, we’ve always been interested in ideas around passive income and how to essentially make money by not actually doing anything or while you’re doing nothing and just have passively streams of income coming in to grow your personal wealth.
So we were looking into the idea of making money from your data. We were big fans of the brave browser and have been interested in crypto since 2016/2017, while looking into it we came across a company called Swash you may have heard of.
They just released their token quite successfully recently and also Streamer the data union framework. We looked more into this idea and I was also working at a bank at the time so we knew how the banking system worked.
We are both very familiar with open banking and its use cases and so we started to dig into this a bit more and look at if it is possible to sell your banking data. Your banking data is very valuable so we started tinkering around with this idea. We made an mvp and launched the pilot in the UK in july, we kept that pilot at 25 users we got onboarded onto the platform.
As data came flowing into the platform we were testing our anonymization and sending the data to the streamer data union worked.
We ended up using streamer for the data monetization and everything went perfectly well with that. So then we applied to a few accelerator programs and we ended up getting into Outlier Ventures base camp which we are currently probably about halfway through.
We got into an accelerator!
The help we have gotten from the team at Outlier is amazing, everybody there is so helpful and it’s great to have all the experience of everybody in outlier, they offer a lot in terms of the legalities of everything.
They also offer help with branding, design and with honing your pitch so that investors will take notice and want to invest. So it’s been fantastic being in the outlier base camp so far. At the moment we’re gearing up for a few pitching events that we’re going to be doing to investors.
We’re also building out version two of the platform, what that means is we’ve essentially taken the mvp platform that we built earlier in the year and then we really expanded it mainly in terms of security and scalability. We’ve got many different environments such as UAT and Production, we’ve got really great identity and access management setup and we’ve got fantastic pipelines to deliver all of the infrastructure as code.
We’ve been working hard on building that out and then we’re going through building the front end now at the moment so busy times and we’re also finishing our tokenomics. This includes worksheets and the maths behind the tokenomics and how everything’s going to work the design of the token and we’re going to be raising money via SAFT which is similar to SAFE equity raising you might be familiar with.
We are planning our token launch mid 2022 and we’ll do the raise before then so we’re going to go out to investors December through to February and hopefully have a successful fundraiser and we’ll be able to move on and progress from there.
What we’re focusing on at the moment is fundraising and here is what will we do with the money should we get it, the majority of our time and effort and our money in the first six months of 2022 will be:
1. We need to get the token designed and built including getting all the legalities in proper order. That’s quite a big task so the first six months of 2022 a lot of our effort will go towards that.
2. Another focus will be getting users onto the platform so we’ll need to get as many users as we can onto the platform, we’re going to have various marketing campaigns live from December onwards and we’re working on our marketing strategy at the moment.
We’re going to launch in the UK first to try and get as many users as we can in one geography.
That’s just a bit of an update about where we are. We’re gonna be making videos each week and we’re gonna be touching on different topics that involve Unbanks like open banking, what is open banking, why are we using it, data unions, what are they and why are they fantastic? Why they are going to be the next big thing and our use of different kind of technologies and how we’re going to decentralize everything!
Currently we’re building everything on AWS and aim to have all of the platform securely working in December but we’re going to slowly decentralize over the next year year and a half as much as possible, decentralized storage, decentralized compute, decentralize authentication so we’ll also bring you on that journey of how we’re moving from a centralized tech stack to a decentralized tech stack and hopefully that will be interesting to to a lot of people in the community.
We hope this article was informative, if anyone has any questions or wants to get in touch we’re on twitter all the time Unbanks_app is our twitter handle or you can reach out via email hello@unbanks.me and we’ll get back to your reply and thanks for watching!
