Economy Monitor Guide to Smart Contracts

Blockchain Examples

Percy Venegas

• Publisher: EconomyMonitor.com
• eBook ISBN: 9781508055075
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Law
• Index: Law

Although the interest around smart contracts is generally defined in a narrow way, centered in applications terms such as Bitcoin contracts, Ethereum contracts or Smart Contracts Bitcoin, or even just in technical trading aspects such as Ethereum price, in reality the field is more diverse. A number of companies and non profit organizations are serving governments, institutional and private clients implementing distributed ledger technology. In this accessible book, we present the detailed corporate profile of several smart contracts companies, their trading and social network volumes, and provide a gentle introduction to smart contracts examples. ECONOMY MONITOR Guide to SMART CONTRACTS offers a demonstrably effective way to diversify risk when investing in cryptocurrency securities by focusing on companies that are offering products with actual demand in the real economy. The book is also useful for managers seeking to learn about vendors of fintech, blockchain, and computable contracts technology.

Inside this book:

I Companies

(Corporate profile, Funding, Team, Clients, Leverage points, Regulatory compliance information)

Interbit (BTL)

Symbiont

Counterparty

Lisk

BitShares

R3CEV

Ripple

Ethereum

Stellar

Chain

Clearmatics

II Social Signals

What is breakdown of followers and influence by twitter handle?

What is the trend of the number of Tweets over Day?

What is the trend of author favorite count over month?

What is the contribution of Retweet count over month by Sentiment?

What is the breakdown of sentiment negative signals?

What are the values of author friend count by country?

III Appendix

Examples (Programming smart contracts)

About Consensus

About the author

Percy Venegas is a former Intel engineer, co-founder of Economy Monitor, and member of the founding advisory board of the Social Venture Capital Conference, Latin America, Caribbean and South Florida.

He has published in journals such as International Advances in Economic Research and Financial Assets and Investing, and more recently he has been a speaker on the topic of Trust-less Crypto Markets at the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies Seminars.

Percy holds an MBA in International Business from MIB School of Management in Trieste, Italy. He attended the MIT Sloan China Program, Lingnan University College at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, and earned an Executive Master in Sustainable Development and Corporate Responsibility from EOI Business School, Campus Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He's also lived in New York and is currently based in Costa Rica.

I

Companies

The following companies and organizations are in the smart contracts business. We include competitive analysis, risk profile, and price trends.

1

Interbit (BTL)

Overview

Interbit uses a combination of Ethereum and BTL proprietary technology that addresses the two major problems facing blockchain in finance: privacy and speed. BTL is the first public - pure play blockchain company.

Company information

BTL Group LTD (TSXV:BTL) is a public company traded in the Toronto Exchange. Offices: in Vancouver and London.

Service/Product Offer

Interbit: A payments and smart contracts platform.

Interbit network: where member banks run individual nodes.

Services: consulting, workshops, proof-of-concept and feasibility studies.

Key Features

1)Multilateral netting and clearing through smart contracts 2)Multilateral credit limits through smart contracts 3)Combined messaging, clearing and settlement 4) Payment processing, with multiple platforms supported (ATMs, bill, cash mobile money), and smart money (built in rules) 5) Bilateral settlement of FX transactions and cross currency payments.

Clients/Backers

XapCash (xapcash.com), which was acquired by BTL, is building a remittances platform using the Interbit product.

During Q4 2016 VISA (visa.com) is running a test for interbank settlement service, with embedded regional compliance. By choosing an Ethereum-based blockchain and not a private permissioned blockchain, VISA signals confidence on the scalability, privacy, and decentralization of the BTL implementation of Ethereum. VISA is also developing a cross-border payment technology (to rival SWIFT) with another company in this study, Chain.

Market validation

Selected as one of six blockchain companies to participate in the EY Startup Challenge 2016, which is focused on building blockchain solutions for digital rights management and energy trading.

Source: Wolfram|Alpha Knowledge base

Funding

Market capitalization CAD ~$16.5m, cash CAD ~$1m

Active revenue generating projects with VISA (visa.com) and EY (ey.com)

Revenue Model: 1) Integration fee target $50,000 to $250,000, 2) Ongoing monthly license fee $5,000 to $20,000, 3) Percentage fee based on volume

On its market segment (Chain, BTL, Digital Asset Holdings, R3, Ripple) only Chain is cheaper than BTL.

Team

18 full time employees (as of October 2016).

The Founder and CEO previously founded Quickbitcoin, a Bitcoin ATM company; the co-founder and CTO has 5 years of blockchain experience and was also a co-founder at Quickbitcoin; the Head of Risk is a certified fraud and cyber crime investigator with experience in the payments industry; one Director was VP at Goldman Sachs; the CFO and Director comes from the Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Pharma sectors; one Advisor has built 40 start-ups in 21 countries.

Regulatory compliance

Preventative compliance and tamper-proof audit trials: Regulators and operators have read only-real time access to monitor risk, Automated AML reporting.

Leverage points

BTL technology is still in proof-of-concept stage.

Website

btl.co

2

Symbiont

Overview

Symbiont is specialized in “smart securities”. Focused on 3 product areas—the Delaware Blockchain Initiative, insurance and syndicated loans. Symbiont uses its own “embedded consensus” approach to security, in which smart contract functionality is “layered on” to make it both energy efficient and less prone to attacks (e.g permissioned contract logic, and transaction execution, reside in different layers); the trade-off is that modularity is required (the ledger and the smart contract are two separate systems)-- although Symbiont offers a blockchain solution, so it is not necessary to have multiple vendors if not desired.

Company information

Symbiont.io, Inc. is a Delaware registered entity. The company is headquartered in New York, which attests its focus on capital markets clients.

Service/Product Offer

Symbiont Distributed Ledger, the original Symbiont blockchain.

Symbiont Smart Securities®, the smart contract technology, separate from the underlying network, and that can run on virtually any blockchain.

Symbiont Assembly™: a dedicated distributed ledger/append-only database available (allows for unbreakable audit trail) as an API with open-source utility libraries (the application programming interface is conceived for rapid enterprise deployment). By introducing this product they look into improving the cost-benefit ratio: that enterprise client can reduce the risks and costs involved in maintaining multiple disconnected ledgers.

Key Features

1) A simple interface for specifying the terms and conditions when issuing smart securities, as well as integration with market data feeds. 2) Their technology is blockchain agnostic, can operate with Symbiont’s own offering, and almost any other blockchain. 3) Symbiont’s partnership with Gemalto (gemalto.com) makes it one of a few blockchain and smart contract providers to provide security at a hardware level. 4) Symbiont is best in class in terms of high speed, with 80,000 transactions per second (for comparison VISA can handle 56000).

Clients/Backers

Investors are Atlantic Merchant Capital (amci360.com), a private merchant bank, and Celeridem Capital Management (celeridemcapital.com). Individual investors include Duncan Niederauer, former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and Matt Andresen, former co-head of Citadel (citadel.com), one of the leading market makers - largest alternative asset managers in the world.

Clients include the State of Delaware (Delaware Public Archives Project, which will provide record-keeping of professional licenses, property deeds, liens and birth, death, marriage records, and corporate entity records).

Market validation

Symbiont partnered with Goldman Sachs and Blackstone’s owned Ipreo (ipreo.com), on a joint venture for the global syndicated loan market: Synaps Loans (synapsloans.io). This market is particularly interesting use case for blockchain technology because despite its size (US$ 4.7 trillion) it suffers of severe inefficiencies, with settlement periods ~20 days. The project is currently in proof of concept testing by Credit Suisse in the R3's Lab and Research Center (R3 members include banks BBVA, Danske Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotiabank, Société Générale, State Street, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo, and buy-side firms AllianceBernstein (abglobal.com), Eaton Vance Management (eatonvance.com), KKR (kkr.com) and Oak Hill Advisors (oakhilladvisors.com)).

Funding

USD 8.25M in 2 rounds (as of October 2016).

Team

The Chairman of the Board & President has 22 years experience in Wall Street (Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Salomon Brothers), 15 of those as Managing Director. The CEO and Co-Founder holds two patents in electronic foreign exchange trading systems and has 15 years of management experience; The CTO and Co-Founder, and the Managing Director of Operations and Co-Founder were also founders at Counterpary, also included in this study; the EVP Sales and Marketing has 20 years of experience; most of the developers are experienced (10 years or more) but tend to come from outside the blockchain space.

Regulatory compliance

Symbiont is working with the State of Delaware on its Delaware Blockchain Initiative.

As a private blockchain for commercial applications, Symbiont also supports arbitration between parties through normal legal and regulatory channels.

Leverage points

The syndicated loans product is still in proof of concept phase, and the insurance technology (catastrophe swap platfor...

Table of contents

• About the author
• Introduction
• I. Companies
• II. Social Signals
• III. Appendix
• Disclaimer