Concordium’s aim is to disrupt the disruptors. With leadership from Volvo, IKEA, Credit Suisse, Uber and Saxo Bank, Concordium’s mission is to unlock a global, decentralized, multi-trillion-dollar Web3 economy built on trust and real world utility.
Concordium’s blockchain is regarded as one of the prime decentralized permissionless blockchains: we’re a science-based proof-of-stake blockchain with a groundbreaking ID framework and a high degree of cryptographic software competence, ready to usher in a brand new era of trust in Web3.
What do you think makes this company unique?
Blockchain protocols that cannot support regulative demands for the many, varied use cases built on the blockchain will simply not succeed in the long term.
At Concordium, we have solved this by building digital identification into the protocol, so that any application built on the Layer 1 blockchain can incorporate customer, supplier and counterparty identity verification with ease.
The digital ID framework protects privacy by enabling users to disclose only the information that Zero Knowledge proofs need to complete a particular transaction, without storing any ID information on the chain. The use of digital IDs to facilitate transactions in decentralized applications (Dapps) such as those used in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) industry are likely to accelerate adoption: they’re so convenient, both for companies and consumers, and they manage to balance privacy and accountability without sacrificing one or the other.
This way, we can satisfy regulatory obligations in an automated fashion, and protect everyone involved at a much higher level than used to be possible.
The thought of a blockchain entrepreneur might conjure up the image of someone who began as a coder tinkering in garages, someone who got lucky with plenty of risk willing capital ––but we’re talking about software which is unstable, vulnerable to hackers and impossible to scale. In turn, we are spearheading a more mature part of the blockchain industry.
We see a huge demand for blockchains like Concordium and few others with science-backed scalable software that lives up to the highest software certification and operates to a zero-downtime discipline. The world needs to see blockchain in a new light, and we can help people do just that.
More from Interviews
- Chat With Avi Perez, Co-founder and CTO at Pyramid Analytics
- An Interview With Jo Werker, CEO at Boostworks
- A Chat With Dr Nikhit Anilbhai, Co-Founder at MedTech Company: Your Cue
- A Chat with Mikhail Taver, Founder and Managing Partner at Taver Capital
- A Chat with Sam Booth, CEO at Cloud Waste Reduction Platform: Turn It Off
- Meet Nick Lynes, Co-CEO and Co-Founder at AI Video Company: Flawless
- This Student Outsmarted His University With A Game-Changing App
- A Chat with Sophie O’Brien, Founder at Entry Level Recruitment Platform: Pollen Careers
How has the company evolved over the last couple of years? And what can we hope to see from Concordium in the future?
Concordium has overcome the speed and scalability constraints of classic blockchain protocols by using a Proof of Stake model in which a subset of nodes (called “bakers”) subject to a two thirds quorum finalize transactions. It is a deterministic blockchain where transactions are finalized with no possibility for rollbacks, contrary to many of the probabilistic blockchain such as Ethereum, where rollback occurs and transactions are voided.
In 2023, we’ll be looking to further increase our transactions per second, by adopting a variant of the HotStuff consensus protocol and sharding. Ensuring a world class decentralized governance is not a trivial task, and Concordium is also working with ETH University in Zurich on an enhanced governance body based on state-of-art science for further decentralized decision making.
On the use case side, Concordium sees an ever increasing interest from all sorts of directions, from tracing green energy in its transmission systems to smart city visions, and even an increasing institutional engagement.
Other use cases are in the gaming and metaverse space, using blockchain to replace wet signatures on multi-party documents, or simply to immutably store a document as proof of its originality. More obvious use cases are digital IDs, tokenization including NFTs and SBTs, automated market-making, borrowing, and lending applications in DeFi, Internet of Things (IOT), supply chain traceability and settlement for ESG compliance, insurance contracts and GameFi and a catalog of industry specific use cases as well as voting.
Concordium has issued a native, listed, cryptocurrency (CCD). To incentivise the community (note runners) to participate in the network, security holders are given access to staking opportunities and generate yield. The digital ID functionality, by spreading trust, will expand these opportunities to lending products and other DeFi products.
Our next step is a fun-named one: we’ll employ “LEGO boxes,” low code/no code elements for smart contracts, to bring blockchain to even more people. That is, and remains the core mission for Concordium, in 2023 and beyond.
