Out of the darkness, came light. From nothing, there was something: an idea — AllianceBlock.

The Neolithic is a period of permanent settlements and the development of the first modern tools. For us, this was about setting down roots, building the foundations of our products, and establishing key partnerships.

In 2018, decentralized exchanges, liquidity mining, and even blockchain interoperability were just ideas and proofs-of-concepts. And yet it was also during this period where we raised awareness and got our first believers in our disruptive mission and in the boundless optimism for the future potential of decentralized finance.

We attended exclusive summits and received recognition for the product that we were building. We have established our first key partnership, one that would bear fruit still down the road.

With these, we were able to release an MVP of a decentralized Investment Platform that is based on a fair, participative, inclusive and transparent economy with users at the center of governance.

The wheel and plow were both invented in the Bronze Age, both of which brought mobility and economic growth to early civilizations. In the same way, during this period in our history, we were given wheels to move faster and plows to better refine our strategy.

We’ve partnered with the Quant Network to set the early beginnings of connecting different networks together. We’ve incubated in several accelerators that allowed us to understand better the work we have to do and connected us further and farther with partners and resources.

This allowed us to be recognized as one of the 15 best early-stage startups at Money20/20, Europe’s Largest Fintech Conference.

This showed confidence not just in our MVP, but in our mission as well.

Advances in metallurgy and mass production of tools are the key technological advances in the Iron Age. In the same vein, this also signified the advancements in our products and strategy that would serve as the key foundational piece for the rest of the products that we would eventually build — as we’re slowly seeing the rise of DeFi adoption and investments in digital assets.

We released our White Paper to set the vision for the tools that we’re going to use in building the next generation of finance. We went through another accelerator, Kickstart Innovation, one of Europe’s largest multi-corporate accelerators, and found more funding options through our incubation at Station F. We partnered with Holo to further build on decentralizing our product solution.

But just as in history, when disease took the world by storm — in our case the COVID-19 pandemic — progress has slowed down, and we took the time for internal reflection and regrouping.

The Medieval Age brought about the invention of mechanical printing, which allowed greater access to knowledge and innovation. Fresh from our incubation at Faculty Lab, our Medieval times brought about our expansion of the original concept of a decentralized Investment Platform to further focus on unlocking DeFi’s potential and creating a new generation of financial infrastructure serving worlds of centralized and decentralized finance while providing a compliant gateway between them.

To fuel this, we have released our token — ALBT — the lifeblood of the future ecosystem of products we were developing. We have also released our Token Economics explaining in detail how this will power the infrastructure we were trying to build. Our Smart Contracts were audited by Certik, to ensure that our token is secure. And yet in its early days, we saw that our token lacked liquidity and trading volume but as in the Medieval times, you live to fight another day.

In order to build liquidity and volume for our token, we got our first listing on Uniswap, one of the first movers in DeFi decentralized exchanges at the time. We also partnered with Orion Protocol for liquidity mining, and with AIKON for identity verification.

Out of the hardships in the previous age, we’ve successfully pivoted, and rose from the ashes, stronger than ever.

During the Renaissance there was an explosive development in the arts. In our own history, our Renaissance was characterised by the rapid growth of our DeFi partnerships and the development of the foundational blocks of our product ecosystem. Taking our key learnings from the Medieval Age we realised there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve our goal of having robust, reliable, and auditable products.

We started to feature our token on decentralized exchanges like Liquid to improve the trading volumes and liquidity for our projects: with liquidity mining campaigns on Uniswap and a pool on Balancer. This was followed by a partnership with Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and a pool on PancakeSwap.

With this experience we saw the difficulty in having liquidity mining, staking solutions, and analytics belonging to different platforms and services — there was no way to access all of these in one place. In addition, we found bridging solutions to the existing pools were centralised, slow, and not secure. We were convinced that in order to address these, we had to build the tools we need in our standard. This was when the idea for the AllianceBlock Bridge was formed to address the bridging problem, and for AllianceBlock LMaaS (Liquidity Mining as a Service) to provide a one-stop shop solution for liquidity mining, staking, and analytics.

We also partnered with Chainlink, Covalent, API3, and the Ocean Protocol, some of the blockchain world’s largest data providers, for data access and analytics in our products. We then spotted another problem opportunity to tackle. These networks had amassed a wealth of data that they could not actively leverage and aggregate. This led us to the disruptive idea for the AllianceBlock Data Tunnel, or the “Netflix of Data”, to make DeFi data more accessible to our partners, clients, and open source projects.

Integrating these data for analytics in AllianceBlock LMaaS, we also saw that in order to have access to different data sources, you had to build your own technology layer on top of them to drive true analytics. This led to the creation of AllianceBlock DataQuasar by our technology partner Devraaj, our enterprise-grade Data API compiling data from different aggregators into API that can feed the markets. DataQuasar is a one-stop solution for cross-chain and DeFi partner data.

And as we grew our liquidity and trading volume across multiple DEXs and chains, we observed a huge amount of impermanent loss which also is a huge opportunity for us to think about how to optimise for it. This led to the creation of AllianceBlock DEX, our algorithmic automatic market-making (AMM) solution.

At this point all of these products were in their earliest stages, some just ideas, some already working and integrated within our existing solutions. The Renaissance — in world history as it was in ours — was a period of boundless creativity.

If the Renaissance was for the arts, the Enlightenment was an explosion of development in Mathematics and the Sciences. In our history, this was when we had established key partnerships with traditional finance institutions, and rapidly expanded on the development of our products with both TradFi and DeFi partners alike.

We’ve had another Smart Contract Audit released by Zokyo, which further boosted the credibility of our token to be listed on more digital asset exchanges such as Bitfinex.

We also joined the London Stock Exchange Group partner program, which expanded our connections to TradFi institutions.

We partnered with various DeFi institutions like Plasma.Finance, PAID Network, and DIA, and had our LMaaS and single-sided provisioning solutions integrated to their platforms.

By extending these products to our new partners, we saw more projects leverage our solution, and we’ve gained access to new platforms, users, and data sources.

The Staking Program on our liquidity mining platform went live and we launched the AllianceBlock Data Tunnel MVP on Testnet.

Within AllianceBlock’s enlightenment, you can see our products begin to interconnect — the early beginnings of a unified ecosystem that leverages the logistics of traditional financial methods and the innovative and lucrative nature of DeFi.

The harnessing of steam was the major technological catalyst in the Industrial Revolution. During this period in our history, with our first products already highly developed, we expanded on major product-focused partnerships, catalysts for products we were developing already, and for those yet to come.

Through our earlier partnerships in the DeFi space, we noticed our partners’ struggles with setting up compliant DeFi applications with proper Know Your Customer (KYC) and regulatory frameworks for their platforms. This presented another product opportunity for us, as KYC solutions at that time had to be done multiple times for each user, project or institution. To add to the challenge, each party was at risk of data leaks due to improper data management.

This led us to develop the AllianceBlock Trustless IDentity Verification (TIDV), a decentralized user verification framework where the users are always in control of their data. With this product, we have partnered up with GBG, one of the largest KYC/AML providers in the world.

We’ve also extended our liquidity mining and compliance solutions to key partners such as Ava Labs and Energy Web, both of which will also be eventually integrated into our own products.

We have also been selected by Binance for their $100M Accelerator fund, allowing us to grow further, and farther, full steam ahead.

The Digital Age was brought about by the establishment of the World Wide Web as the “Information Superhighway.” For us, this meant getting onto the fast lane, where we saw multiple major product releases, significant team expansion, product development announcements, and yet more key partnerships that would further improve our current products and build the foundations for upcoming ones.

First of all, AllianceBlock LMaaS went live with four clients immediately leveraging our white label liquidity mining solution, with more still to come.

We also launched the AllianceBlock Bridge, our interoperable blockchain solution, connecting multiple chains, protocols, and exchanges and making them more accessible to traditional clients. This was released in partnership with Hedera Hashgraph. Our partnership with Energy Web also allowed us to integrate the Energy Web Chain into the Bridge. A security audit report for the Bridge was also released by Omniscia which confirmed its adherence to the Diamond Standard (EIP-2535).

We partnered with Unizen, Elrond, and Pangolin, where the AllianceBlock TIDV is being integrated into their own respective platforms.

Last but not the least, we have also formally launched the development of the AllianceBridge DEX, our algorithmic AMM solution that optimised impermanent loss and solving another yet key problem in DeFi.

In order to realise our mission not only as a blockchain project but also as a business that wants to invite institutional investment into DeFi, we added nine seasoned industry leaders from the financial and technology industries (Barclays, Deloitte, IBM, Lisk...) to our Business Development arm, Devraaj. Devraaj is a technology and professional services provider leveraging AllianceBlock open source decentralized technology.

To help young companies, we entered into an Ecosystem Partnership with CV Labs in Switzerland, Lichtenstein, UAE to gain exposure to and incubate young DeFi projects as well as provide new alternative investment opportunities to traditional using our Fundrs module and future ecosystem partnerships.

Just in this past quarter, we’ve seen a lot of growth and development, but we’re not ready to slow down yet.

In a few short years, we find ourselves in the Future. It is now. The world has changed and continues to change. Traditional finance is not anymore new to the innovations of the blockchain, to the prospect of tokenized assets, and the utility of cryptocurrencies. We went on the road of DeFi with stride — and we’re just about on time.

In the near future, we’re going to be adding the final blocks of our ecosystem, and see our mission not just in the mind’s eye, but fully realised. We will be launching MVPs and then official releases of AllianceBlock DEX, AllianceBlock DataQuasar, AllianceBlock TIDV, AllianceBlock Data Tunnel and AllianceBlock CBRCRE (Cross-Border Regulatory Compliance Rules Engine), and the AllianceBlock Terminal in the next two quarters.

Coming full circle, we go back to our initial idea in 2018 of a decentralized Investment Platform, and put forth a solution that leverages the building blocks that we’ve already in place for this new generation of infrastructure. It’s called AllianceBlock Fundrs, the first fully decentralized milestone-based investment platform that is based on reputation score and Collective Augmented Intelligence (CAI). Fundrs will utilise the current infrastructure that we have with AllianceBridge, AllianceDEX and LMaaS to support project funding; as well as, the AllianceBlock TIDV and AllianceBlock CBRCRE for identity verification and reputation scoring.

Further down the line, we will be launching the AllianceBlock Protocol, which fully integrates the AllianceBlock Bridge, AllianceBlock DEX, AllianceBlock CBRCRE, AllianceBlock TIDV, and AllianceBlock Fundrs. The protocol can be used standalone or on top of legacy financial systems and will be the fullest realisation of the mission we had when AllianceBlock was started.