Akropolis, the Poca DeFi project: witnessed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, building a new Web 3.0 class financial

Financial activities can be divided into formal finance and informal finance, both in developed and developing countries.

By definition, informal finance refers to the sum of financing activities that do not pass through legally established financial institutions to finance funds and financing activities that are used to finance funds beyond existing legal norms. This concept was first proposed by economic anthropologist Keith Hart.

It is easy for people to associate it with illegal finance, black market finance, etc. This is a misunderstanding of understanding. Autonomous financial organizations have existed for centuries. Whether it is a savings credit association or a credit union, they are common all over the world. Kenya's Chamas – saving, is the most profitable informal financial organization. Chamas saves $4 billion in annual savings, and the entire informal economy contributes more than 47% of Kenya's GDP.

Akropolis, known as the “Boca Eco First DeFi”, has entered the market of informal finance. On August 9th, in the chain node AMA, Akropolis founder Ana Andria and the team answered many questions from the community.

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Original intention: witnessing the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I am disappointed with the traditional financial system

Akropolis' goal is to establish a sector-specific informal financial and financial network protocol consisting of autonomous financial organizations that aim to provide basic financial services, including savings, investment and social security, through distributed networks. The government, banks and other financial institutions rely on it and can effectively hedge related risks during the financial crisis.

Akropolis founder Ana is an experienced special case investment expert with a strong interest in decentralization and blockchain. In fact, most of her career has been in investment banking and asset management, from investment banking to hedge funds, and then from Lehman Brothers to private equity. As the Lehman Brothers collapsed from the inside, Ana became interested in technology and economic resilience. Over time, Ana and her team began to explore the ideas behind Akropolis.

“I am disappointed with the traditional financial system because I have worked in the investment banking and private equity industries for more than 10 years. The current financial system has become opaque and inefficient, and although it is too big to fail, it continues to decline.” Ana said So she tried to find a solution for the most risky people without relying on the bank's financial safety net – this is the original intention of Akropolis.

The Akropolis Agreement aims to provide a new digital financial environment for the cooperation and value exchange of digital financial institutions by providing a unified programming interface. With Akropolis, users are free to choose a decentralized, smart contract-based autonomous hosting or designate a regulated custodian.

“We believe that the future of finance belongs to the user, but not necessarily the network managed by the user. Our paper suggests that banks and other financial companies will be replaced by a joint network of autonomous cooperatives, each of which will be its owner. Acting in the interests of and interacting with other parties in a single digital financial environment," Ana said.

Practice: Building a Web 3.0 financial service from Ethereum to Boca

Akropolis was originally implemented based on the Ethereum blockchain and is applicable to any blockchain with Turing complete virtual machines. Due to the widespread impact of Ethereum's high gas bill and high latency, the application developed by Akropolis based on Ethereum was limited. As a result, Akropolis has also begun work on the development of the Poca Ecology.

One of the important tasks of the Akropolis team is to research and develop network interoperability and support related ecosystems, such as running a verifier node in Polkadot, building a parallel chain of Akropolis, and becoming a certifier node for ChainX.

“We decided to build our own chain—AkroChain, which is based on the Substrate framework, and we plan to integrate it into the Polkadot ecosystem. We also decided to participate in the Poca’s slot auction, linking AkroChain to the Polkadot ecosystem. Because Boca has better advantages than Ethereum, such as higher scalability and interoperability. After integration with Boca, our users will be able to operate with digital assets and dApps from different chains."Ana Said.

Ana, who is also a consultant to the Web3 Foundation, said that the project was created to provide Web 3.0-level financial services to the organization in which the user is located.

Akropolis is known as the “Poca Eco First DeFi”, and Ana believes that the main feature of DeFi is its ability to achieve a certain degree of visibility and transparency in financial solutions. Another important point is the inability to achieve interoperability or integration between solutions and products in traditional finance. DeFi represents the most promising Ethereum case to date and has become a fertile ground for developing new products and solutions, while at the same time having a relatively low barrier to entry in terms of time, skill and cost.

Compared to other DeFi projects, Ana said: “Our strength is that it is based on a long-standing, time-tested concept that people are used to saving, investing, and planning the future before the bank or government exists. The main difference is in giving a better user experience and a unique market-oriented strategy, and we are more focused on getting users from existing groups such as the informal economy that already have interest and needs."

Progress: For 3 types of users, Staking will be launched soon

The informal economy is a market with a market value of tens of billions of dollars, and more than 60% of the world's employed people are in the informal economy. Ana said that Akropolis is mainly for 3 types of users:

(1) cryptographically friendly customers who need DAO to meet their financial needs; (2) users from developing countries (eg Kenya, South Asian countries); (3) have identified and accepted the need to migrate to new infrastructure over time Developed users.

So how do these users participate in the ecological construction and governance of Akropolis? It is reported that Akropolis will start Staking after the launch of the Akro chain, which is scheduled to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2019.

AkroChain is guaranteed by the DPOS Consensus, so anyone can participate in block verification. To participate in block verification, you need to get the AKRO first, then run your own node and attract the community's Token for Staking, or delegate it to the selected certifier.

Currently, the Staking rules are as follows: (1) The first 30 nodes of the AKRO pledge will verify that the minimum threshold for the block (2) to become a verifier is 1,000,000 AKRO tokens. (3) The minimum threshold for attracting community participation in Staking is 100,000 AKRO.

Talking about the advantages of the Akro chain Staking, Ana said that the Akro chain verifier will have two main sources of revenue, network rewards and network fees. The main advantages of Akro are: (1) We don't have token inflation (2) Our certifiers not only get online rewards, but also get “service cost” commissions, whose overall value is related to the size of the network, which can make Staking profitable. higher.

For details, please review this issue of AMA: https://www.chainnode.com/ama/363766

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