CVA Podcast: Shirly Valge, Velas

Transcript

[Music] hello hello this is your host straz ahmed ready to kick off another bite size episode of the crypto valley association podcast special thank you to ceva bank for supporting this initiative as they pursue their mission to redefine finance for the new economy now let's discover together the growing trends of this fast-moving space and try to shed some light on the mysteries it contains today we are joined by shirley valga chief operating officer of the velus network an artificial intuition empowered delegated proof of stake blockchain and ecosystem well that is definitely a mouthful and i cannot wait

to dig deeper so let's dive straight into the world of blockchain ecosystems hello shirley how are you doing today hello shiraz i'm doing very well thank you for inviting me over to your show and i cannot wait to start with our interview yes likewise thank you thank you for participating i mean how about we start off are you giving us a little bit of insight about how you first got into the blockchain space well coming originally from estonia i've actually been using services on distributed ledger technology for 20 years without knowing what the actual underlying infrastructure was and whereas by now 99 of public services in estonia are on tlt and the only thing

you can do is getting married and divorced so technology is kind of running in my blood and six years ago i started my first entrepreneurial endeavors and with that i also started to look into the investment space i attended investment meetups and camps to get to know about my opportunities how to enter the space but the barriers were relatively high back then to get involved in the stocks or shares or real estate market and also the yields were not that attractive for someone like me that always has strived for more than average so i had read and heard uh about bitcoin and blockchain

here and there but it wasn't until i met the my good friend now and the founder of paxful.com it's a global cryptocurrency trading platform from 2015 who kind of helped and mentored me to enter the space so i started my first investments early 2017 after learning to technology for half year like in the daily space like learning all the news and technologies and keeping my finger on the pulse and then yeah i made my first investments i remember people thinking me i'm crazy but after half a year it turned out to be a good good outcome i i stayed in the space and i i never stopped learning and

for personal reasons i moved to zug november 2017 and actually didn't know it before but then it turned out to be the hot spot the crypto valley and i immediately saw a chance to start a career up still at a relatively early stage emerging industry and this is where my career started in the crypto space so i first was a sales and marketing in a mining investment firm which had its actual mining farm in by the zurich lake and after that i started with velas right before it got incorporated so it

was like two and a half years ago wow now when i started that's great and you mentioned you know you're always learning and i think we as we learn we become crazier you know even if the people you met believed that you were crazy back then they probably still believe they're crazy yeah yes i feel like i'm in some crypto bubble here and whenever i go back to estonia they they don't they don't really grasp what's going on here in in zug and switzerland versus in other in other countries where it's not so concentrated around this one industry maybe yeah i mean there's a lot of opportunity for further further adoption right and it's uh it's it's incredible to to hear

about the journey you've been through and and and where you've where you've landed now being being at velas and you know i said some very big and complicated words to explain a little bit about what velas is doing maybe you can you can simplify that that for our audience and tell us more about villas yes so um velas is it stands for virtual expanding learning autonomous system it's actually routed from coinpayments.net which is a payment processing platform from 2013 that's now the biggest in the world having 3 000 different currencies on its platform with 3 million active users and the idea of velas chain started from integrating

all these different tokens on their platform and they saw what are the bottlenecks and what are the issues out there and they started developing a chain from the scratch and shortly thereafter they rebranded the whole project to velas and we got incorporated fourth of july 2019 so we just recently celebrated two years from the incorporation date and yeah we're based in the tripto valley in seoul but the global the team is quite global it's i think we're covering pretty much every continent and we grew quite fast we started with three people working fully on the velos

project and in one year recruit 10 times and by now we're like team of 60 people working full time on velas and um the idea was to apply artificial intuition which is a term like marketing term for decentralized artificial intelligence on the network to balance the security and the transaction throughput and the centralization that we want to keep as decentralized as possible and secure the network from hacks by uh applying ai on its consensus so the ai part is still in the final stages of the research it has been going on now for

one and a half years with our ai partners in moscow who are also the official advisors for artificial intelligence for the russian government it's a very strong team we recently migrated onto a solana code base so we're actually the fastest evm chain in the world because we also added a ethereum virtual machine support meaning 20 projects can run on vellus chain and benefit from the instant transactions from extremely low transaction fees we're at 0.0001 right now and up to 75 000 transactions per second which are not limited to software so

it's just limited to hardware so we're i think we're the best performing blockchain out there right now and yeah we're also building in-house products on top of our chain because we want to present how easy it can be to use decentralized products and services for anyone with any technical skill set so we're basically merging centralized user friendliness with the decentralized technology oh yeah that's uh one of them we'll definitely get into more about uh the the ai part and also the adapts that you're you're creating decentralized applications i mean but maybe we we stay on the veras and that's chain to start off with i mean uh what differentiates

uh you with regards to this from other other chains that exist out there so the difference is right now we're still delegated proof of stake but once we apply the ai then it will learn from the behavior of the network uh it will apply the necessary parameters on the blocks or let's say there is a an attack on the network it will slow down the performance to mitigate these attacks and and it's it's not static as other blockchains out there so it constantly this is what we mean by expanding it's it's either slowing down or speeding up

the transactions and behaves at the best interest of the network so whatever it is needed for the network it will it will apply the necessary parameters and uh yeah well if we want to dig deeper to the ai part then we need to have another podcast with our ai expert in it but this is uh this is like on the high level what the ai will do that's that's wonderful i mean ai powered delegated proof of stake i mean it's uh it's definitely something that is much deeper and i would say beyond uh some of the things that are that are currently out there so i mean i'm very much looking forward to seeing how how that develops further and and then if we

speak about one of the projects that you're going within velas will orbit to decentralize social network i mean with everything going on in our days regards to census share the data of users and all of this i mean it seems like something that would be really welcomed by communities i mean tell us more about this initiative yeah exactly so especially what we saw with the recent the platformizing uh trump and all the centralis or the censorship that is happening now in youtube twitter facebook google ads even are blocking and selecting what they should show and what not

as well as the content ownership so these big monopolies like facebook and whatsapp and also the privacy is a big issue of course they pretend to be privacy respecting but the reality is they're not and we're hearing more and more about data breaches and people also have learned about more about their rights thanks to the gtpr rules so um congratulations and bellas is now in a couple of weeks launching a decentralized social media platform we changed the concept in between a bit because the you know the market moves very fast and we wanted to be

adaptive with the trends so we changed the concept in between and now we're launching the bitorbit app which is targeted to content creators and influencers um giving them back power over their own data and content and allowing them to monetize their content with integrated crypto wallets in the app and it's all decentralized so there is no platform fees and there is no censorship there will be an ai tool applied which excludes the illicit content but but other other than that there is no censorship so um there is a freedom of speech so to say

and content creators will be able to decide if they want to have their content publicly privately or paid so um it's it's uh integrated with the wellas account with one click payments and uh i think it's a breakthrough in the decentralized social media space basically it will be like a hybrid of only fans and instagram snapchat solution but on uh decentralized blockchain wow okay that's very very interesting i mean so are you planning the the payment side right i mean which is like giving back to the users going back to these influencers the contributors to the platform are you planning to to reward

them with with us tokens i mean i know that you have your own token is there something planned around that maybe you can tell us more about this side of the platform and maybe also the tokenomics of of the cryptocurrency that you have yeah we have the velas coin because it's a native coin of the velos chain and this this will be one of the payment uh currencies there but we're also we are interoperable so we will be um able to process transactions on any currency because we have the wallets out there well as well as since um one and a half years and these are multi-currency wallets

we have an easy bridge with ethereum already but we're also launching a vellus vault which allows any currency out there including bitcoin to be wrapped on developed chain and transacted at the at the attributes as well as has to offer like instant transaction speeds at 0.001 transaction fee and at the scalability that velas offers so we're pretty much uh enabling any currency to be transacted on the balance chain but the transaction fees of course are charged on invest currency so basic basically this is the business model that

that the last coin value is behind in the wireless blockchain as the platforms and products have no fee to use they're free of charge okay well it's very very um interesting and i mean you mentioned creating the vault and all these various projects and initiatives i mean it's got to be what we love about the space is the ability to really uh see all these opportunities and capitalize on them but then there's also there must be that kind of dual-edge sword already like doing all of these things are we able to really kind of focus and concentrate on on the ones that are going well the ones that might be picking up traction i mean how how have you you've seen in your

experience like the being so let's say distributed with all these different projects how have you been able to still give focus to to to some of your team and to ensure that you're not spread too thin yeah it's definitely a challenge of you know developing the infrastructure plus all these products in-house it was a big mouthful which we we took on because if i compare all the other blockchain companies there then some of them or most of them don't even develop their own wallets and we we wanted to present that at least some of the products we wanted to build in-house and i think it's a good initiative it's also what

distinguishes us from others and and this is how we attract users on our network and drive up the participation in the network and yeah and our actual goal and mission is to bring this technology to the masses and i think creating by grading products which look and are in user experience you could think they are centralized but actually they are decentralized i think this is the way to gain mass adoption that's wonderful i mean it's a great great vision and mission to be honest i really can't wait to see what the future holds for for velas and all of these projects that that you're working on and maybe to

to kind of bounce off of that i mean where do you see the the future of the blockchain industry as a whole and maybe that the future of velas well we i would like to think that we get a substantial market share over from ethereum because it's extremely seamless to ship from ethereum to velaz chain have all these benefits on top and in terms of the fintech and factory future i i would like to hope that the data protection it's it's going to be solved somehow and that we will not see

all our data flowing into this big corporates and uh and loss of privacy and yeah i see that the okay in the example of estonia for example how i mean we just had one chance to start using services public services on the blockchain and we didn't have an alternative way of doing it the old way and also it was so consumer friendly and it was it was better and it was more optimized so people wanted to use these public services in the new way in digital and on distributed ledger technology they could enter and access them and they can still access them 24 7 wherever they are in the world

so i see also conventional services moving the same way they can run and operate on on blockchain but the user interface should be maximum easy to grasp okay what it's a beautiful vision for for the future and i really hope that some of the others that you that you mentioned really do come true i think we still have a long way long way to go and there's a lot a lot to build and to develop so yeah keep keep keep at it and i'm sure we'll be able to touch base soon see if your predictions were really true and yeah and then as we're just slowly approaching the end of the episode and unfortunately i mean i really want to

thank you for your time again uh surely and actually give you the opportunity if you have any final words for our listeners today any activities that might be happening surely so as i mentioned maybe or maybe i know maybe i didn't mention but we have announced this summer our grants program and as well as an ecosystem investment fund so i'm encouraging developers and teams to come and learn more about our grants program we're giving up to 100 000 spending per project this is basically free money to build tools for vellus ecosystem and build projects like nfd

platforms or games even or taxes so there are different things we would like to see on the network to be built and it's all outlined on docs.bellas.com or or just go on to bellas.com and we have a big button there built on vellus so feel free to check it out and there is an application form for the teams so we're looking to welcome them on our ecosystem wonderful wow thank you thank you so much thank you for sharing and if you enjoyed this conversation feel free to check out more on our website crypto valley.swiss where we host plenty of events educational material and even provide information on how you can join

our growing community thanks again shirley for joining us thank you so much our pleasure thank you thank you stay tuned stay safe until next time from the crypto valley in switzerland bye [Music]