IBS Journal July 2018
49
There is a yearly subscription charge for each of these entities depending on how many signatories are included. For those companies that only have access to view the list via the application, or who receive a tokenised URL (of the lists), there is no charge. We have also included simple functionality that enables sharing of lists to be done in the existing way. This allows for inflexible counterparts who aren’t so quickly responsive to technology or process changes. This means that there are no restrictions nor dependencies on other parties. Another facet that makes the application really easy to adopt and immediately useful.
For large organisations who aren’t too keen on adopting further applications that they need to maintain, APIs into their existing system infrastructure are offered.
What’s the technology under the hood?
We have partnered with Applied Blockchain to build the technology. Gartner listed it as a Global Top 20 Blockchain Development and Consulting Firm in 2017, leading the way in delivering proof of concepts and enterprise applications. Shell has a stake in it as do one of our own investors, Calibrate, which is obviously quite handy for us.
We have our own private blockchain built on Parity, an Ethereum client, with nodes hosted in the AWS cloud services. Users of the application are not required to host a node, but any party can, should they want. Our consensus protocol is proof of authority.
What sets you apart from the competition?
As far as we are aware, we do not have any competitors of the application (of managing authorised signatory lists) within the blockchain space. However, if you compare what we are doing verses those that are doing it on a traditional centralised database, the customers have complete control and own their own data, they can offer peer-to-peer sharing of their signatory lists (and not via a third party), there are no dependencies on their counterparts to ‘join’ the database (or contractually sign up), there is a full immutable audit trail of all amendments to the signatory lists and significantly enhanced security. These are basically general benefits that a decentralised blockchain database can provide over a centralised one.
What was your smartest move?
Right from the very start, Cygnetise has been extremely fortunate. Sometimes this was due to some smart decisions and sometimes it’s been down to pure luck. One of the strokes of luck was bumping into Damian Bell (business development director at Cygnetise) on an evening where I spoke about blockchain to a small audience of about 20 people. A year and a half on, he has single-handedly led our salesforce covering more ground and landing more sales than a small team would.
A smart move was engaging a very credible and thorough cyber security company. We have an ongoing relationship with Zerodaylab, that ensures our product is watertight. Initially we were looking at spending far less money on companies with less of a name. Sometimes when your
gut tells you, you need to listen and we busted our budget on this. It’s definitely one of the most sound investments we have made though.
I think that also the overriding smartest move was keeping the product as simple as possible so we could get to market early, secure the product market fit, and now continuously improve the application following feedback from our customers. I believe the adoption of customers is the most important thing. Too many people in this space seem to be ambitiously building a product that does more than enough, and then later find out that they have made it really difficult for customers to adopt.
Once you have customers, you can then start getting fancy with functionality.
Where did things get tough – what was your biggest setback?
We have been really lucky with everything and have not had any major setbacks. There were times when the product development has been hampered (a problem with having a first-to-market blockchain application), and new customer on-boarding has not been as quick as we’d like, but we continually learn and adjust the way we do things. Finding and hiring an in-house CTO has also been extremely difficult as there is so much demand for them here in London. Again, this took longer than expected but we have recently got there and are very happy.
Where do you want to be in five years’ time?
In five years, we would have hundreds of thousands of corporate customers adopted and an exit. Major partnerships, spin-off applications would also be good too, but I do need to provide the shareholders with a decent return.
Our mission is to have more corporate customers on our private blockchain than any other in existence. If we have that, I think we’ll have many options of what we want to do.
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