Hi everyone, we're here at Salana Breakpoint for the first time in Abu Dhabi.
I'm Rachel Peper.
I'm here with the CEO of Accountable, Wojtek Pavlovski.
Wojtek, thanks so much for joining us.
Oh, it's my pleasure and great pronunciation of the name.
Maybe you know some other V Wojtek.
I do know one, and I have been practicing, but thank you very much.
Kudos to you.
So let's actually start with accountable and tell me a little bit about the problem you're trying to solve.
So in the world of tokenization and when you're trying to move, um, you know, information that lives outside of blockchain, and, and to represent that on the blockchain itself, we need to make sure that this information actually is true.
So what we are doing is we are allowing for verification of off-chain data, on-chain, of course, as well, and doing that in a privacy preserving way.
So an example of it would be um trading shop that wants to allow people to deposit capital to their shop, and they want to prove to them that I'm having, I have your money.
I'm running those strategies.
I'm following the mandate that you gave me for a trading shop.
Their IP is contained behind exchanges, custodians, and so on.
They cannot give you a key to that exchange because otherwise they will go out of business, right?
Like they would expose why they are so good.
So we give them means to prove it without exposing the sensitive information, and they can share it privately or publicly with the people that are interested to know.
What they are doing with.
And so you also recently had some exciting news.
You raised another funding round.
It, it was a couple of months ago, so, you know, like you always celebrate for one hour and then you move on and you never think about it, but yes, uh, we raised 7.5 million, I believe it was like 3 or 4 months ago.
I don't remember when it was announced because, you know, the news are always delayed.
But Pantera Capital, one of the leading VCs epa, trusted us with our mission.
And um yeah, we are very happy to have them on board.
Also OKX, the exchange participated and and a couple other funds um to make it all happen.
So it was our second round, um, challenging, raising money, it's not great, uh, especially if you are sometimes not seen first glance as a very hot deal and everybody's knocking to your doors.
I remember during our first fundraising that happened a year ago, we, my co-founder and CTO, um, he counted we had 170 calls with VCs.
Of course it wasn't 170 different counterparties, but it just shows that like you need to get 168 slaps in your face saying no, what you're doing makes no sense, and then these two people that trust you make make the whole difference, so uh.
No, congratulations.
And so with that additional capital, how do you see this next phase of your growth, particularly when it comes to this piece about the, you know, proving reserves or the next step from that going a step deeper.
So, we are very heavy on the engineering side, and, um, you know, the company is mainly about engineers.
I was the only one doing the BD, right?
And at one point, if you want on board, you know, the largest institutional players.
You need to have support both on the engineering side, even more to onboard them, you know, and also on the BD side.
So this is our main focus that we need to be able to serve um those clients and do it at scale.
Um, we want to become a standard in financial verification.
To do that, you need to move very fast, right?
There are basically no competitors on, on that front, and we want to onboard as many clients as possible as fast as possible as well.
So the The race that we did was to pay for talent for senior people that can really move the needle from the engineering side and sales BD as well.
And so when you do this accountability, let's call it verification, and you know, many people are talking about proof of reserves, giving out the rubber stamp.
What are some of the issues with taking a sort of limited approach?
What are some of the challenges?
In the past, or still that is the case, um, oracles were like Chainlink or Redstone, um, were leading on that front.
The problem with Oracles, and by the way, we work with both Chain Link and Redstone, they sort of outsource that part of the business to us, is that they are very limited in the scope what they can do.
So first of all, um, let's imagine a situation.
You have 100 BTC on your Coinbase account.
That would be nice.
That, that would be nice.
And then you ChainL comes to you or Redone comes to you and they tell you, OK, give me the API keys to this account, and I'm going to know that you have this 100 BTC.
And then you issued a derivative of that BTC, which is, I know, uh, whatever, FinTech BTC on chain, and you issued 99 of those FinTech BTCs that are backed by hundreds.
They can say, yes, she's over collateralized, she has more money that is backing the derivative that she issued than um than the ratio basically requires.
However, The world is moving in the direction where we are tokenizing hedge funds that move 24/7 that are trading on 20 different exchanges at the same time, that you want to prove that they are delta neutral, that they never lost more than 1% during one day, that their sharp ratio is xyz.
They need this type of vacuum that is also privacy preserving where you can connect all of the data sources and you do that locally in your own infrastructure, and we give them software that enables verification. that the data came directly from the source and that it wasn't tampered with anything in the process and you can create your own financial image locally without anybody else basically looking behind your shoulder and saying, yeah, he has the money, here's the money.
No, the cryptography can give you that possibility without involvement of any third party.
You are the full owner of the data and then you can communicate with them.
That's why we built a network on which you can host the data to people peer to peer.
And give them the answers for the questions that I have and proof of reserves, which we actually call proof of solvency because we also track the liabilities on the network, which was the problem that nobody solves, you know, proving that you have the money but proving that you have no liabilities that exceed that money, that's where the world will need to continue.
So we give them this possibility and we see with counterparties like Solstice that launched yesterday with us that we give them means to show to the global public, don't worry, we have the money, we are back, we are following the mandate that you trusted us with and this is like, you know, copy paste type of situation that we do with basically everybody in the space at the moment and this is becoming the new normal, something that people require like smart contract audits, right?
In 2017 you could get away without it.
Like it was good to have.
Now you wouldn't put a cent into a protocol that doesn't have it.
Same as with this verification that we do now.
People need to prove that they are doing a good job, and then they can think about giving you money and tokenization, it's a prime example of it that you need to merge the information from the offchain world.
And give it to the people that are relying on this token that you gave them on chain that it's supposed to be representing them.
Yeah, I think that's a really great evolution in this journey from proof of reserves to proof of sovereignty and, and closing question.
What do you think this means on the institutional side?
How are you seeing some of the institutional side, the asset managers embrace it you mentioned hedge funds?
Yes, so for example, we work with companies like Galaxy, Amberg Group, all of these institutional partners, and many of them are tokenizing their strategies.
They are doing tokenized CLOs.
They are doing tokenized loan books.
They are isolating their business and they let.
People to invest in that particular thing.
These LPs have now means via verification like ours to come and in real-time check whether this product that they invested in is actually working as intended, manage the risk, not based on self-reported data that one person is going to send you a PDF once a month and they say, everything is right, don't worry, now you can stop talking, stop tweeting.
Stop reassuring people that everything is fine on a day like 10th of October last month when we experienced this flash crash, you go to this dashboard and you see yourself, and that's self-explanatory.
You don't need to explain yourself.
The data doesn't lie, and the world is moving in that direction, and many institutions already seen it.
For example, with Galaxy, we worked since, I believe, February this year when we were a very tiny company.
But they wanted to be the most transparent hunter party on this planet because that's their edge.
It was an edge, now it's becoming mandatory, and that's great for all of us involved because our money became safer, not saying safe, safer.
Yeah, that's all we can hope for.
Well, it's been such a pleasure talking to you and thanks so much for all that you're doing, kill this ecosystem to lift everyone.
Thank you, my pleasure.
Thank you for inviting me.
Thank you so much.
