[Messari AMA] Ana Andria (CEO), Kate Kurbanova (Co-founder), Maria Paula Fernandez (Head of Communications), Yana Mar (Head of Community), and Ilgiz Gimaltdinov (Product Owner) from Akropolis
Messari hosted a public AMA with the Akropolis ($AKRO) team in the Messari community group. This is a transcript of the conversation.
Messari: To start could you all give a brief background on yourself and how you got involved in crypto and subsequently Akropolis?
Maria Paula Fernandez : I'm María Paula, MP for short, head of comms for Akropolis - I got involved in crypto by being employee #2 of the web3 foundation, where I worked for 8 months. Later I migrated to Golem, where I still work as also, head of communications. I'm also the founder of ETHBerlin, the largest eth hackathon in Europe :)
Ilgiz Gimaltdinov : I'm working in fintech for the last 10 years. Prior to joining Akropolis overseed all product development for incubator projects at fintech fund, earlier worked at Digital Business Development Department at VTB Bank, one of the leading universal banks of Russia. Being in fintech spacie , I'm looking for web3 tech since 2016.
Yana Mar : Soo small intro about myself too - my crypto experience started with hybrid intelligence startup (Cindicator) where I worked for a year or so as Head Of Community 🙂 I met Kate (Akropolis co-founder) there and was taken away by Akropolis idea and team - so now I'm Akro maximalist 😁
Ana Andria : I'm Ana, the founder. My background is predominantly on the buy-side, working latterly for Lehman Brothers. Seeing the outcome of the 2007/8 crisis, I developed an interest in financial resilience and solution to it, esp. without depending on the interbank lending system. These ideas gradually developed into Akro and have been further enhanced with our team and advisors
Kate Kurbanova : Hello everyone! As Yana I joined crypto with fintech startup Cindicator in 2016 as head of analytics. In January 2018 met Ana and joined Akropolis as advisor, then joined full time in May 2018. Before crypto i was trading traditional markets, mostly Nasdaq
Messari: Always great to hear origin stories! Can you give some background on how Akropolis got started and what problems is it looking to solve?
AA: the initial idea for an unraidable distributed pension fund was born out of what i have witnessed as a result of the Lehman Brothers fallout in 07-09. I kept coming back to the idea over time and when I found myself talking to board members of several major pension funds, I was surprised to find them agreeing with the basic concerns and premises. The problem is both simple and relatively unknown to the younger population: it's the current and ever-increasing pensions deficit crisis and no visible solutions to it.
We have a ton of research, documentaries and press on the topic in our wiki if anybody is interested to geek out on the topic. The problem can be described as follows:
People won't have pensions that they can expect or rely on in the near future - because math
In the event of an economic crisis, public funds and social security funds are the first pools of capital that a state typically taps into to plug the budget deficit. creating an alternative financial network that would not depend on the whim on the government (Russia, Poland, UK, Italy, Argentina, Venezuela - examples are plenty), doesn't depend on the interbank lending system and is resilient to contagion risks is what we wanted to explore designing.
In simple words: a way to save money, protect wealth against inflation, ensure access to credit and basic insurance and remittances through a p2p network that can communicate with but doesn't structurally depend on the banking system
Messari: It seems like a lot of the efforts in crypto (including bitcoin!) were born out of things witnessed during the crisis
So why did you decide to pivot and move from the initial pension topic? How did such a decision affect the prospects for your development?
AA: We started with more of an enterprise angle, with institutional parties supporting us but it became clear that their enthusiasm for exploring alternatives in this sector closely tracks public sentiment, which in turn was negatively affected by the collapse in prices. And, of course, client acquisition in enterprise usually exceeds 12 months. We have been offered to build closed PoCs specifically for institutional clients but felt it is a territory of major management consultancies like PWC, EY et al and would be a deviation from the original vision.
As we continued customer research, it became clear that pensions, savings, remittances, insurance have to be enabled for the product to be economically viable.
In that sense, we didnt strictly speaking pivot away from pensions, as pensions are effectively long-term savings with a tax shield. We pivoted into a different model, which we believe is more viable.
Messari: Makes sense, so what is the initial target market? and how are you planning to bring users considering that most DeFi products don't have many active users now?
AA: We analysed user acquisition strategies of many a fintech and defi projects in related space and always active reach out to projects to get their unit economics and lessons learnt. The primary strategy now is to reach out to informal economy players: existing co-operatives in EM, immigrant communities, mutual credit networks, etc.
geographically: the focus is on countries with substantial domestic inflation levels, or other drivers that Western users are not sensitive to
Messari: Moving on to roadmap - Do you have any update on when will be the next testnet release? Mainnet?
IG: We have regular development updates - the latest one was published just day before yesterday. Right now, we are focused on AkropolisOS development and integrations of different DeFi projects into our Co-op Governance Module. We want to launch a new testnet with all initial functionality by November this year and test it with our community. We will start a security audit after this and upon its completion (presumably by the end of the year), we will launch the product on the mainnet.
Messari: Thanks and if it's not covered there, we received a related question - when is staking going to be live? Will there be a way for early investors to stake locked AKRO and become a validator?
IG: taking is already working in our testnet (meaning no real coins are staked - but you can already start familiarizing yourself with the process) You can check it here. The manual for creating accounts and staking is here. And if you want to participate in the test staking period, please fill out this form
According to the conditions of our Huobi Prime Offering, we moved all locked tokens to the smart contracts with timelocks and vesting. This means that the tokens are being unlocked according to the vesting schedule - we can’t move them anywhere before dates hard-coded in the contracts. Due to this, we can’t move these tokens to the staking scheme - however, we’re working on different variants on how to reward our early contributors, so stay tuned for more updates!
Messari: That definitely adds clarity. So the community also seemed interested in hearing more about product delivery as well as timing – Given it was started two years ago, why is there no finished product? And what is the rationale for attending conferences and hackathons rather than building?
YM: Firstly, we’re not always at conferences and hackathons - and even when we are, we continue building the product - as Ilgiz said, we had a development update just a day before yesterday 😅 So I really want to give everyone heads up to go read our blog
We have a big team, and only 3 or 4 people are attending events, while our development studio is always working. You might understand, that the CEO and Community Managers don’t do the coding. However we did take our developers for a walk in Berlin this past August, Sometimes we let them go away from keyboard for like, 1 hour 😉
To the question of "no product in 2 years" - as Ana (and community too) said - we pivoted and moved away from pensions-only topic only in October last year - and we’re planning to launch mainnet on Ethereum by the end of this year, and our Substrate development is actually ahead of schedule by almost 3 months. We’re building our own DAO framework - AkropolisOS, which will help us to ship the product faster, and our DAO framework on Substrate is one of the first of its kind. So I would say that development is going pretty fast.
One of our core building blocks - C2FC was presented in February this year; it is already launched on mainnet and can be used - feel free to give it a try. We launched testnet for Co-Op Governance module on Rinkeby in June
It is also worth mentioning that we’re building a solution for a complex use-case - it’s not just a DAO, but a network of DAOs that can enter into financial transactions with each other as well as connect to different DeFi products and have fiat gateways.
Messari: I definitely recommend reading the development updates for those interested, a lot of cool stuff going on!
Moving on, a few questions surrounding partnerships:
- You've had several interesting partnership announcements this year. What partnerships are you planning to focus on in the near future?
- What’s the status with the product co-development and partnership with Singapore-based asset mgmt firm? Are you still working with them or not anymore after the pivot?
- Have you responded to the inbound inquiries from WBG and the insurance company in Ireland or is that another pipeline that’s not happening anymore?
AA: 1) Near future focus is squarely on the product delivery; we are happy with our relationships and will continue to work closely with MakerDAO (more news out soon), they are by far one of the most supportive and responsive teams in the ecosystems; and chosen on-off-ramp partners
(2) As I mentioned in my earlier response, the priorities of the board have changed, so we of course maintain a relationship but developing an private blockchain PoC is not a part of our product philosophy. As you can see, institututional acceptance of public blockchain solutions took longer than expected and major strides have been made only recently, with EY's announcement and today with France announcing openness to a public blockchain
(3) Yes, of course, we have. As we said, building institutional private solutions is not in line with our product philosophy but seek to maintain friendly relationships as there is more openness to OS solutions
Messari: Definitely does, thanks! We’re starting to go a bit overtime so I’ll try to get to all the questions we received. To hit you with a few more miscellaneous questions and then we have some quick ones before we open it up –
-Please tell about your development on Substrate - how is it going? What are the pros and cons? Challenges you faced and wins?
-What is the rationale for 46% of tokens going to the Foundation, how are they being used?
MP: 1. Substrate stuff :)
Our development on Substrate is going great and much faster than we initially thought - we ahead of our roadmap by 3 months already. More on that in our dev update
Pros:
Substrate is written with years of blockchain development experience in mind and has cool features - for example, WebAssembly and Hot-swappable consensus
- It is written in Rust language which is pretty convenient as it gives high performance, security, easy refactoring
- Building on Substrate gives much-needed flexibility for development - it is possible to develop your own modules for runtime. It also has a lot of existing building blocks (runtime modules) which work with balances, smart contracts, etc. and can be used for project development.
- RocksDB as storage - it is a very productive and popular embedded database.
- convenient tools that make developer’s life easier, for example, polkadot.js.org/apps, telemetry, browser extension, officially supported Parity libraries for the frontend, etc
If we were to address challenges or cons, then it’s worth mentioning that Substrate is a fairly young framework, so the documentation might not be full somewhere (although Parity/Polkadot team is working on this and made a lot of improvements in this field recently). Another thing is that updates and releases come out quite often so everything you built already will work properly only on the old Substrate version - so if you want to build on Substrate, please be wary of this :)
Now, let's address the question of allocating 46% to the Foundation, because I believe there is a bit of a misunderstanding in the reading of "foundation tokens", this is not literal.
46% definitely is not excessive, mainly because these tokens will be used for very important stuff people have already asked in this AMA, the onboarding of the users that are part of our PMF. Our user-base is mostly formed by people that might not be part of the financial system, or not in crypto, or both.
We need to onboard these users and even though we won’t go around giving away crypto, we need to make AKRO available for them to take an active role in voting. We also destined a part for validator rewards and network fees for the start of our staking process.
We are committed to incentivizing and onboarding users properly, and this takes tokens (aka incentives 😊) and a lot of education and community work. Our Foundation Tokens will be allocated to users mindfully, and with the purpose of growing the network.
If you were a teen in the 90s you might have received an AOL (America Online) cd for free in a shopping mall or so - they onboarded millions of users worldwide to the internet. Think of tokens as the new CDs
YM: (just a note - dev update again, so guys, pleeeeease, just read what we write in our blog and share on our social media - it will help you understand where we're heading and on what stage we are)
Messari: That's a very helpful analogy, I like that!
Okay last couple of questions I promise, and then we can wrap up :)
when is huobi going to enable deposit?
When is the code going to be open source? Can we ask for the link to the repo if we want to check it?
What is main revenue source for Akropolis?
KK: Akropolis and Huobi are two different сompanies and we don't control Huobi’s deposit and withdrawal. Feel free to address this question to Huobi at support@huobi.com. We are also in communications with them regarding this issue and make everything possible from our side to solve it but we can’t decide for them or know when they open deposits and withrdawals
YG: I'll get last 2 questions. Most of our code is already open source - you can check our GitHub repo
Some part of development is being done in closed repos (as we need to add documentation and want it to be developers and users friendly) - and will be opened in time.
We anticipate various potential sources of revenue. All of the below have been validated with our partners and product specialists:
- % of the spread charged by external capital providers
- % of the spread from the financial services and products
- % of the remittances providers fees
Messari: Great, well this was very informative! Thank you so much Akropolis team for taking the time and to the community as well for submitting great questions. I’m going to open up the chat now, feel free to stick around if you’d like 😊
To end it off, if you could drop links for the best way keep tabs on the project that would be great
YM:
Telegram chatroom - @akropolis_official
Telegram ann channel- @akropolisAnnouncements