Elevates Sanjeev Kumar and Rajneesh Arora as Co-Founders

Spice Money, India’s leading rural fintech, is gearing up to achieve its goal of becoming the country’s largest rural fintech player by strengthening its leadership team. As a step towards this, the company has elevated Sanjeev Kumar from his earlier role of CEO to Co-founder & CEO, where he will drive the company’s strategic business plan that spells growth for both Spice Money and Travel Union. Rajneesh Arora, previously Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer, has now been appointed as Co-founder & Chief Product & Strategy Officer. He will work closely with the Product and Strategy teams to deliver unique and world-class experiences to Spice Money’s partners and end-users. Sanjeev and Rajneesh will be supported by a strong team of next-in-line leaders with expertise in different verticals. This fortified leadership team will fuel the next round of growth for Spice Money by furthering digital and technological innovation, thereby empowering every corner of rural India.

Spice Money has scaled exponentially in the past year, with its Adhikari (merchants / nanopreneurs) network growing to become 8,00,000 strong and its micro-ATM network crossing over a lakh. The company has witnessed a YoY growth of 127% in its GTV as well. Spice Money has also expanded its business to the rural travel sector with the recent launch of Travel Union, India’s first B2B rural travel-tech platform, that addresses the key challenges faced by the rural travel agents and their customers. 

Dilip Modi, Founder, Spice Money, said, “Spice Money is all set to move to newer heights of digital and technological transformations. This needs high momentum and laser sharp focus, which will be led by our new and thoughtful leadership. I founded Spice Money with a vision to digitally and financially empower rural India. I am grateful to have found partners in our senior leaders at Spice Money, who understand and share this vision. We want to encourage an entrepreneurial culture through this co-founder approach and I am confident that our momentum will be continued and in fact, accelerated. All of Spice Money’s teams will work towards implementing the right strategies, plans, structures and people in place to successfully achieve our aspiration to become the largest rural fintech company in India.”

Spice Money, with a team of over 700 employees, has recently been awarded the ‘Great Place to Work’ Certification, which is one of the most definitive ‘employer-of-choice’ recognitions and is testimony of the company’s incremental efforts towards creating a transparent work culture as well as learning and development.

‘Breakthrough moment’ for financial services paving the way for regulated institutions to issue tokens for payments and settlement

Today, SETL published a technical whitepaper detailing the Regulated Liability Network’s (RLN) performance tests on SETL's Global Banking Blockchain, on an environment run on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The network was capable of processing 1 million transactions per second (tps). The full whitepaper is available here.

The 1 million tps throughput dwarfs both crypto and conventional systems. Ethereum currently can process only 15 tps with more recent blockchain technology boasting tens of thousands of tps. Traditional card payment systems process around 1700 tps on average with volumes peaking at around 24,000 tps. 

Background

The RLN is a distributed ledger approach first mooted by Citi’s Tony McLaughlin in his paper, The Regulated Internet of Value.  In that paper, Tony McLaughlin proposed a single shared network for tokens, stating, “Such a network would be significantly different from today’s siloed financial architecture — a regulated internet of value. This system would embody tokenized currencies, bonds, equities, trade instruments, and other regulated financial instruments in an ‘always on’, programmable and global network.”

Open for Participation

SETL opened its sandbox for trials in November and has so far attracted some of the world’s largest banks, custodians, and e-money companies.  Central banks are being given free access to the test platform to experiment with how they can issue Central Banks Digital Currency (CBDC) alongside regulated commercial bank and custodian tokens.

The trial is expected to last six to nine months and will explore how RLN can be used to settle interbank and crossborder transactions on a real-time basis, including delivery versus payment and complex liquidy management arrangements.  If successful, the network could become an important part of the international financial markets infrastructure.

Anthony Culligan, Chief Engineer at SETL commented: "This is a breakthrough moment for financial services. We are deploying the technology used by social media, ride-sharing and online markets, to create an extremely effective payments and settlement infrastructure. It is inherently distributed, secure and resilient.  We are glad to have performed this successful scalability test on AWS realizing the scalability benefits cloud brings to financial services." 

The whitepaper details a system which creates a very large-scale distributed transaction processing platform. Each bank, central bank, or custodian controls a segregated partition on the RLN, into which they issue tokens representing liabilities to their customers. Those tokens could be cash, securities, or other obligations. The RLN then co-ordinates atomic movement of value between the partitions. Those movements could be simple retail payments, cross border transactions, or complex wholesale movements such as repos or delivery-vs-payments. The goal of the testing performed was to demonstrate the scalabilty of the technical implementation to support 1,000 banks around the world initiating 1,000 tps to be processed in a simulated three-partition scenario. The environment built on the AWS global infrastructure using SETL’s open source blockchain components successfully scaled up to process 1 million tps showing such architecture could support instant settlement of transactions at a global scale.

Philippe Morel, Chief Executive Officer at SETL, highlighted RLN’s societal advantages: "RLN builds on the technical advantages of a DLT solution. With the scalability test we have demonstrated today that SETL-based RLN could be pushed to exceptional levels in terms of speed and scale, for the benefits of customers who will be able to execute a large volume of transactions in real time.”

“RLN is also contributing to promoting more responsible DLT use-cases. RLN is based on SETL’s DLT which is markedly more energy efficient than public blockchains. We are confident it will set new standards in electricity costs per transaction and our goal in the next months will be to benchmark that precisely. Users care about energy efficiency and it must be a design goal.”

For the first time, solution offers both real-time visibility for CFOs and the experience employees today expect from tech tools

TripActions, the only all-in-one travel, corporate card, and expense management solution, today announced the launch of TripActions Liquid^TM in Europe. Through its partnership with Stripe, TripActions Liquid is now the first — and only — fintech-powered travel and expense management offering that can support card issuance in multiple currencies. The expansion increases TripActions' ability to provide an end-to-end solution for global companies of all sizes while eliminating expense reports for employees and automating the entire expense management process for customers. 

With world-class partners that include Stripe, Visa, Modern Treasury, and Plaid, TripActions is positioned to replace legacy, disparate travel and expense solutions, completely revolutionizing the entire T&E stack. 

“TripActions Liquid has averaged 34% monthly growth in transaction value this year — companies clearly can no longer afford to use those antiquated, analog systems,” says TripActions co-founder and CEO, Ariel Cohen. “It’s imperative to have real-time visibility into spend, carbon consumption, and employee safety. No other company is able to offer the full end-to-end travel, corporate card, and expense management capabilities of TripActions Liquid. We’re really in a league of our own in this market.” 

With its broadening international footprint, TripActions Liquid gives finance teams real-time spend visibility and control over global spend, empowering them to drive cost-savings, productivity, and compliance. Policy controls are embedded into smart corporate cards issued by Stripe, automating expense management from swipe to reconciliation, from home office to hotel room. 

"Expense reports are a thing of the past. What TripActions Liquid has brought to the market is the end of expense reports," says Joel Jeselsohn, Chief Financial Officer at Berlin-based Relayr, a leading EU-based solution for risk-free digital transformations. "Thinking about the reporting capabilities of other solutions, it’s night and day. TripActions Liquid is superior to legacy systems."

Legacy options require finance teams to review every expense transaction. Powered by physical and virtual corporate smart cards, with TripActions Liquid policies are pre-set, reducing reporting hours up to 66% and reconciliation time up to 95%. For end-to-end TripActions enterprise customers, reconciliation time is reduced from weeks to hours. Additional benefits include:

• Spend controls: Set spend controls upfront to prevent out-of-policy spend before it happens. With a custom policy builder, admins can tailor spend controls based on role, expense category, business context, and more — automating and minimizing the number of transactions that finance teams need to review and approve.
• Smart cards: Give employees a simple way to pay for what they need and eliminate expense reports. With smart virtual and physical cards, issued by Stripe in USD, EUR, or GBP, policies are built-in to ensure responsible spending and automated expense reporting for authorized expenses, whether employees are paying for travel booked on TripActions, routine expenses, spot purchases, or recurring subscriptions.
• Expenses and reimbursements: Eliminate the hassle of expense reporting for out-of-pocket business expenses (cash, mileage), and deliver rapid reimbursements. Employees receive rapid reimbursements, executed by TripActions’ partner banks, through direct deposit when they connect the app to a European bank account that supports SEPA or BACS transfers.
  • Automatic approval workflows: Configure TripActions Liquid to flag transactions that require attention and automatically approve and reimburse everything else. 
  • Mobile receipt scanner: Extract relevant data from receipts and auto-populate expense reports in an instant.
  • Personal card import: Connect personal card accounts and easily import transactions for reimbursement, eliminating the need to add expense details.
  • Rapid reimbursement: Get funds directly deposited into the employee's bank account through partner banks within 1–2 business days via SEPA and BACS for auto-approved expenses. 
  • Calendar sync: Automatically populates attendees when Liquid app is linked to a user’s calendar, eliminating one more step for auto-reconciliation.
• Automated reconciliation: Accelerate month-end close with receipts and payment details captured automatically, streamlining reconciliation from days to minutes — while helping to reduce the environmental impact of paper consumption. 
• Spend reporting: Get a real-time view of all business spend in one place to stay on top of what’s been spent, monitor trends, and take action if costs get out of line.

"With 39 offices in 30 countries, Teads—The Global Media Platform—needed a truly global, modern tool that simplified travel and expense,” says Anush Jeunet, Corporate Buyer at Teads. “Providing straightforward solutions alongside quality support is essential for a rapidly growing business and TripActions has absolutely delivered on those requirements, especially as international business opens up once more."

The combination of TripActions’ user experience and innovation, coupled with its fintech-powered spend management solution, TripActions Liquid, has created a cloud-based powerhouse that offers unmatched visibility, cost control, and efficiency as the company revolutionizes the entire corporate travel, expense, and spend stack.

"TripActions Liquid is a powerful example of the possibilities enabled by Stripe's global financial infrastructure," said Eileen O'Mara, EMEA Revenue & Growth Lead at Stripe. "Running smart corporate cards with programmatic spending controls and reconciliation across multiple countries was unfathomable just a few short years ago. We're thrilled to see TripActions build its Liquid product on Stripe and accelerate its global expansion."

Temenos’ open banking platform will enable the Gibraltar bank to reimagine retail, corporate and private banking for the digital age

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company, today announced that Trusted Novus Bank has selected Temenos for a complete end-to-end digital transformation. The Gibraltar bank will replace its legacy core and front office system with Temenos Transact and Temenos Infinity on The Temenos Banking Cloud. Temenos’ open banking platform will enable Trusted Novus Bank to reimagine its banking services for the digital era and scale efficiently to meet its goal to grow its customer base over the short to medium-term.

Trusted Novus Bank is a locally based full-service bank supporting the everyday banking needs of retail, corporate and private banking clients through branch, call center and digital channels. It is the oldest established bank in Gibraltar with a reputation for the provision of mixed services from under one roof. Under new ownership, the bank changed its name to Trusted Novus Bank in 2020 with a mandate to expand its overall business and dramatically improve the digital experience for customers.

With the power to self-provision banking services, a sandbox to create and test applications and a marketplace of pre-integrated fintech solutions on The Temenos Banking Cloud, Trusted Novus Bank can now create personalized, real-time customer experiences tailored to its different lines of business. Further, by improving straight-through-processing (STP) and automation, the bank will be able to dramatically free up employee time from administrative tasks and allow them to focus on value-adding, customer-facing activities.

Christian Bjørløw, CEO, Trusted Novus Bank, commented: “We chose Temenos because we needed a banking platform, built for the cloud and accessible via APIs, that would give us agility and flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing banking landscape. We want to expand our retail, corporate and private banking and scale fast to increase our customer base. With the Temenos Banking Cloud, we can deliver personalized, real-time customer experiences on a scalable platform that will foster innovation and keep the bank at the forefront of technology, and at the same time be true to our vision and values.”

Jean-Paul Mergeai, President – International Sales, Temenos, added: “We are proud Trusted Novus Bank has selected Temenos to power its digital transformation. This is a strategic project for Temenos, with Trusted Novus Bank joining the fast-growing community of leading banks to adopt Temenos’ open banking platform. With banking services powered by The Temenos Banking Cloud, Trusted Novus can dramatically reduce costs and turbocharge innovation to deliver outstanding customer experiences. Trusted Novus has exciting plans to extend its banking services on our platform, and we will be working closely to ensure rapid time to value.”

Nasdaq (Nasdaq: NDAQ) today announced that 21Shares has listed its first two physically backed exchange traded notes (ETNs) on Nasdaq Stockholm. The two instruments listed have Bitcoin (ISIN: CH0454664001) and Ethereum (ISIN: CH0454664027) respectively as underlying assets. In conjunction with the listing, Nasdaq launches a new segment for ETNs, securities listed on a regulated exchange tracking an underlying asset with liquidity supported by a market maker.

21Shares, one of the world’s largest issuers of cryptocurrency exchange traded products (ETPs) are listing the first two physically backed products on Nasdaq Stockholm with Bitcoin (Ticker: ABTC) and Ethereum (Ticker: AETH) as underlying assets. As of November, 21Shares managed USD 2.9 billion in 20 European crypto exchange traded products and 82 listings.

“We are excited to become the first issuer of physically-backed crypto ETNs for Nasdaq Stockholm, one of the most tech-forward global exchanges,” said Hany Rashwan, CEO of 21Shares. “Our partnership is a strong endorsement of 21Shares’ mission to make cryptos more accessible in a simple and regulated manner.”

In 2015, Nasdaq Stockholm was among the first exchanges in the world to trade exchange listed products with Bitcoin as an underlying asset.

“Exchange Traded Notes provide access to alternative investments while maintaining the transparency of a regulated marketplace, and we are happy to launch this new segment at Nasdaq Stockholm with 21Shares as the first issuer,” said Helena Wedin, European Head of Exchange Traded Products at Nasdaq.

All ETNs listed at Nasdaq Stockholm are available to trade through most regular banks and brokers.

Eyes 5-fold growth in next 18 months - expand market footprint, accelerate product development and upgrade technology platform

Investors: Artha Venture Fund, Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Alok Bansal (Co-founder, Policybazaar), Ramakant Sharma (Co-founder, Livspace), Hardik Pandya (Indian Cricketer), Krishna Bhupal (Co-founder of Promaxo and Board member of GVK Power & Infra), Tuscan Ventures and Ohm Stock Brokers.

LenDenClub, India's leading peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, today announced that it has raised $10 million in a Series A round co-led from a consortium of investors inclusive of - Tuscan Ventures, Ohm Stock Brokers, Artha Venture Fund, Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Alok Bansal (Co-founder, Policybazaar), Ramakant Sharma (Co-founder, Livspace), Hardik Pandya (Indian Cricketer), Krishna Bhupal (Co-founder of Promaxo and Board member of GVK Power & Infra). The company earlier this year had announced that it was the only player in the P2P lending space in the country to have turned profitable.

With the current round of funding, LenDenClub valued more than US $51 million, now aims to scale up substantially, eyeing a 5X growth in disbursals in the next 18 months. The company has already disbursed more than 1200 crore worth of loans in this fiscal alone. The fresh capital will be used in aggressive expansion, taking its loan book growth to $1 billion and upscaling the user-base to 10 million from the current 2.5 million by FY 2022-23. Powered by a digital-first approach while offering its customers a smart, speedy, and easy to use, platform, LenDenClub is eyeing to offer a host of financial services as the next frontier transitioning to a digital banking model.

The company aims to invest heavily in innovating and upgrading its proprietary tech-stack platform to aid and upkeep the growth in its customer base whilst supporting all kinds of banking operations conducted on its platform. Additionally, the company aims to enhance its leadership strength and is eyeing strategic C-suite appointments in pursuit of its expansion goals, besides increasing the operational team size by the end of the next fiscal. It is eyeing fresh recruits for the role of tech, product, marketing, and customer service who will aid its growth plans of upscaling its presence across the country.

LenDenClub currently has over 2.5 million borrowers and 1 million investors and has registered loan disbursements worth more than Rs. 2000 crore, of which disbursals worth 1200 crore were achieved in the first 6 months of FY21-22 alone thus reporting growth of 1900%.

Founded in 2016 by Bhavin Patel and Dipesh Karki, LenDenClub leverages technology to bring borrowers and investors on the same platform – providing hassle-free instant loans to borrowers and offering new-age investment options to investors across the country. The company processes over 2.5Lakhs loan applications every month. The company currently has two high growth loan products - InstaMoney for salaried customers and small business loans for merchants and shopkeepers.

Speaking on occasion, Bhavin Patel, Co-founder & CEO, LenDenClub, said, “At LenDenClub we have always emphasised on leveraging technology creatively while adapting to an ever-evolving financial services marketplace. We have been constantly inventing products that yield greater returns for our investors and democratising credit while offering market competitive rates for our borrowers. Futuristic, customer centric-products and seamless digital experience offered by our platform backed by a focused market expansion approach, is what has aided the exponential growth of LenDenClub. We are privileged and delighted to bring on-board immensely diverse investors in this round and use their expertise to fuel further growth at LenDenClub. The aim is to accelerate growth while maintaining profitability on operations.”

Anirudh A Damani, Managing Partner, Artha Venture Fund, said, “We are thrilled to see such a rich trove of investors backing a startup that we have seen grow from 1 to 2 loans a month, to doing 35,000+ loans. We are eager to see where this round of investment takes LenDenClub and the path that it charts for itself.”

LenDenClub had raised $1.5 million as part of its Pre-series A round co-led by Micro VC fund Artha Venture Fund - I, Transworld Group and Ms Shuchi Kothari of the DSP Group in August 2019. The company has built a strong technology platform with this capital and has disbursed loans worth more than Rs. 2,000 crore. The company last year expanded its flagship digital loan platform InstaMoney to pan-India. From its presence in 7 states, the company has expanded the footprint of its key offering to pan-India whereby borrowers from over 19,000 pin-codes can now seamlessly apply and get instant loans. This has helped the section of the population living in tier 3 cities and rural regions not covered by banks especially in the small ticket loan category of up to Rs. 10,000. The company has witnessed 5-8 times growth in their loan disbursals during the last 3 fiscals and has one of the lowest NPA of 3.95%. 

Dinero believes "ETFs sahi hain" is a good place to start when it comes to investing

Neobank Dinero, located in Hyderabad, has established a strategic agreement with India's only listed discount broker 5Paisa to assist new-age retail investors in investing in alternative low-cost investment products. Dinero will assist customers in meeting their lifestyle objectives by investing in ETFs and giving them customised offers and rewards. In addition, developing the habit of investing in ETFs as a secure investment alternative in unpredictable markets assists end-users in building a robust portfolio.

This partnership will allow Dinero to offer state-of-the-art order execution capabilities with a specific focus on passive funds (ETFs) for users on the platform. In addition, users on Dinero's platform will also be able to open new Demat accounts with 5Paisa to conduct transactions and link their current 5Paisa account to Dinero's platform.

Commenting on the partnership Chief Business Officer of Dinero, Nikhil Potluri said  “Given the strong interest from retail investors in the capital markets, there is no doubt the future is passive investing. Indian ETFs are on the verge of exploding, similar to the adoption of passive investing in the US and Europe.  Our thesis is that ETFs provide an easy entry to capital markets for young retail investors and provide a significant cost arbitrage to Mutual Funds with respect to expense ratios, entry/exit loads, etc. Most mutual funds have been unable to outperform the broader markets in the past few years. Therefore, ‘ETFs Sahi hain’ is our motto. At Dinero, we are at the forefront of this revolution and are working towards building experiences around capital markets to cut information overload and reduce the entry barrier for the young and new retail investors.  Our partnership with 5Paisa will allow us to turbocharge this revolution, and we are excited to have them as our partners in this journey.”

Meanwhile, 5Paisa's Chief Marketing Officer, Raisa Kazi stated “Over the past 15 years, we have seen a huge influx of new retail investors in the Indian Stock Market. These are first-time investors looking for control, flexibility, transparency, and access to different online tools to manage their portfolios and investments.  One of the visions at 5paisa is to connect with such investors and enable them to invest in different Financial Services and Products. With such belief, we drive our Strategic Alliances and Digital Partnerships to empower our partners and enable them with Financial products and Services on their platform with our fully hosted solution. We are pleased to partner with Dinero and provide the ease of trading and investing to the users.”

Dinero in the month of January 2022 will be coming out with the beta version of their app for their customers which will help to meet the financial goals of the investors through low cost investment products.

Decimal Technologies, one of India’s leading digital lending and customer acquisition platform has developed a Video Banking Solution for AU Small Finance Bank, a leading SFB that has been at the forefront of digital banking innovations. The Video Banking Solution enables customers to complete the entire banking process in a matter of few minutes from the comfort of their homes without the need to visit a bank branch. It’s a completely paperless process that is as secure as offline banking.

AU Small Finance Bank recently launched AU 0101 Net Banking - "Badlav Hamse Hai", which leverages Video Banking Solution to bring 100+ products & services including investment in Fixed Deposits, Recurring Deposits, Mutual Funds, IPOs & Equities through a single gateway under a single umbrella offering Customized Access, Personalized Offers and Secure Transactions due to end-to-end encryption and OTP verification without the need for customers to visit a branch. Decimal Technologies is the digital partner for them and AU Small Finance Bank has used Decimal’s no code platform, Vahana to deliver personalised and tailor-made solutions. With AU 0101, customers can set up automatic payment facility for recurring bills and also pay their direct taxes or GST and generate tax reports as well, making it a complete one stop solution for every personal finance related task.

Customers can avail 24x7 banking services along with various savings and investment instruments in just a matter of minutes safely & securely.

Decimal Technologies has been witnessing stellar growth in FY21 on the back of its no code platform, Vahana and digital lending marketplace, Saarathi. In order to further accelerate this growth, Decimal is expanding its top leadership team and has made new appointments of talent from across the industry like Manish Sharma as Chief Business Officer for Saarathi & Dinesh Parekh to lead its Digital Solutions Business.

Lalit Mehta, Co-founder and CEO, Decimal Technologies said, ‘’We are extremely delighted to be the digital partners for AU 0101. Having delivered more than 100 solutions built on Vahana, developing the Video Banking Solution for AU Bank was a truly enriching journey for us. We are glad to be a part of AU Bank's vision of delivering innovative and tailor made solutions for their customers. Vahana Cloud (our Development Tools in the Cloud) and Vahana Hub (our API Gateway in the cloud) provided a seamless environment for our 50+ Digital Experts to collaborate and build the solution in just 3-4 months from concept to roll out. We are privileged to have customers like AU Bank that test the limits of our platform on every front.”

Sanjay Agarwal, Chairman and CEO of AU Small Finance Bank said, “We have emerged as the fastest growing small finance bank with unflinching focus on customer experience and commitment to financial inclusion by innovative use of digital technologies. Our vision of anytime, anywhere banking for everyone has been well served by our Video Banking solution developed in partnership with Decimal.

 Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook made news when he told the world at the New York Times DealBook conference that he was invested in cryptocurrency, though noted that he wasn’t giving out investment advice to others. He also noted that he was not committing Apple to participating in cryptocurrencies in any way. His investment came after an interest in digital assets led to further research, he said.

“Whether it is Elon Musk or Kevin O’Leary or Mark Cuban or, now, Tim Cook, there’s a degree of normalcy and safety and, even, intrigue for Main Street investors. There’s that feeling that they don’t want to miss out on an opportunity flagged by a great technologist or investor or business person. It’s a celebrity endorsement, but in a more realistic way. Tim Cook answered a question about his own personal habits and portfolio. He’s not out there hawking Bitcoin. That makes it even more valuable as a vehicle for changing consumer attitudes,” said Richard Gardner, CEO of Modulus, a US-based developer of ultra-high-performance trading and surveillance technology that powers global equities, derivatives, and digital asset exchanges.

“I think it’s reasonable to own it as part of a diversified portfolio,” Cook said. However, on the topic of Apple’s entrance to cryptocurrency, he demurred, saying “I wouldn’t go invest in crypto, not because I wouldn’t invest my own money, but because I don’t think people buy Apple stock to get exposure to crypto,” he said.

“I think that stance is fine, but, in many ways, I’m not sure that it is realistic long-term. Central banks are lighting themselves on fire to be among the first to develop, beta-test, and launch a successful CBDC. At this point, I think it is fair to say that major powers must consider that research mission critical. It really is a national security concern for other major powers to have CBDCs which gains traction for use in international remittances. For that reason, among others, central banks are moving toward launching their own digital currencies, and it is only a matter of time before they are a commonplace payment mechanism. Look at El Salvador, having named Bitcoin legal tender. Change is coming and companies will need to adapt,” said Gardner.

“One of the remaining questions is how custody will work for digital assets. Right now, cryptocurrencies are mainstream. But, there will be a time in the not too distant future where most will utilize digital assets in their daily life. Right now, we have custody solution providers who simply don’t cut the mustard in terms of the reliability of their security apparatus. One industry leader is embroiled in a lawsuit in which the plaintiff alleges that it is responsible for $70 million worth of losses. That’s not going to work long-term,” said Gardner.

Modulus is known throughout the financial technology segment as a leader in the development of ultra-high frequency trading systems and blockchain technologies. Modulus has provided its exchange solution to some of the industry’s most profitable digital asset exchanges, including a well-known multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange. Over the past twenty years, the company has built technology for the world’s most notable institutions, with a client list which includes NASA, NASDAQ, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Barclays, Siemens, Shell, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago.

“Cryptocurrency and digital assets are here to stay. The big names are on board. Institutional investors are on-board. Even regulators are beginning to come around. The last remaining piece of the puzzle is having a custody solution which actually affords investors and asset holders with the security that our society will demand. That’s a work in progress right now, and there’s definitely space in the market for a new entrant with a security focus to completely transform the equation,” said Gardner.

Today Blockpass is revealing its latest partnership in the form of Bonuz Market, the new ecosystem for creators, celebrities, brands and other people of fame to engage with fans on new levels. With this development, Blockpass' revolutionary KYC solution will be used to ensure regulatory compliance, and a safe and secure means to prove identity for all involved.

The Ecosystem will be powered by Solana, a fast, secure, censorship-resistant blockchain built for global adoption, Bonuz Market aims to give fans a means to get closer to the celebrities they admire. In the beginning, the platform's native Token $BONUZ will launch on Binance Smart Chain. The project is described as the 'world's first celebrity and brand token launchpad', Bonuz provides a means for creators, celebrities, brands and other people of fame to engage with fans through private channels, NFTs, Community Designed Merchandise, Metaverse and so much more. Bonuz currently works on the MVP and enlarging the team. The firm successfully signed top Advisors like Jovana Jovanovic who runs TikTok across METAP, Rich Stromback who is known as the most influential person of Davos, Kevin Kuranyi who is a former German National Player, Viven Kirby who is the Blockchain Lead behind the multi-chain wallet Clover Finance and Ari Last who is the VP of Simplex which is the world's leading fiat infrastructure provider for the entire crypto ecosystem. Leading Crypto key opinion leaders like Carl from the Moon, Davinci Jeremie, Cryptojack, Eljaboom, Chris of MMCrypto and many other top Youtubers already invested and secured their piece of Bonuz at the private sale which is still going on till the middle of December.

Blockpass is a digital identity verification provider which provides a one-click compliance gateway to financial services and other regulated industries. Through Blockpass, users can create, store, and manage a data-secure digital identity that can be used for an entire ecosystem of services, token purchases and access to regulated industries. For businesses and merchants, Blockpass is a comprehensive KYC & AML SaaS that requires no integration and no setup cost. You can set up a service in minutes, test the service for free and start verifying and on-boarding users. Currently with more than 160,000 verified user identity profiles, Blockpass facilitates instant onboarding, and to date almost 5000 services have taken advantage of this opportunity to get access to users with reusable digital identity profiles.

"Few individuals will be as big a target as celebrities." said Adam Vaziri, Blockpass CEO. "Fame and fortune bring attention from bad actors as well as fans, so it's important that robust identity verification measures are in place and we're delighted to be chosen by Bonuz to provide such a security."

Matthias Mende, Visionary Founder of Bonuz said: "We are working in a special environment in which fans will be really close to their celebrities and those celebrities will be able to filter those fans who they like to interact with. So for its correctness and safety it is absolutely mandatory to have a good KYC Partner like Blockpass in place which has already been delivering top results on a cost efficient level for us. We are aiming to onboard hundreds of thousands of users once Bonuz goes live and will launch new tokens on a weekly basis."

Blockpass has grown significantly in size and use since its inception, both in the number and range of users and organizations it has partnered with and the scope of its work. Blockpass continues to develop its digital identity protocol with updates and additions to improve the compliance experience. The existential need for DeFi projects to be regulatory compliant and the recent integrations have led to a surge in interest for Blockpass' On-chain KYC(TM) solution which promises to change the way blockchains enable compliance. Through its recent work with Animoca Brands, Blockpass is developing the ability to provide KYC where the delivery of the verification result is provably sent and shown on a blockchain without sharing the underlying data. This represents a significant step towards the future Blockpass hopes to bring about where identity verification can be proved without revealing any personal information at all.