Manas.Tech is kicking-off the development of the entire Sikoba platform for peer-to-peer credit-based transactions

You know how at Manas.Tech, we love digging into projects that are a bit unusual? Well, we have done it again. Also, have you ever heard of the blockchain-based “IOU economy”? That is exactly what our friends at Sikoba are up to, and it makes us very proud and happy to announce that they have chosen Manas to be their technology partner.

So, what is Sikoba?

Sikoba is an IOU (“I owe you”) platform which automates the creation, tracking and finally clearing of debt between its users. While Sikoba can be used in a wide array of settings, like business to business contracts and clearings, its design is a great fit for small communities with struggling economies. In many situations where there is a shortage of money, Sikoba can help re-activate local economies. Alex Kampa, founder of Sikoba, puts it in very compelling terms: “there is a lot you can do without money, as long as you have credit”.

Aleksander Kampa

Aleksander Kampa is an expert in credit economies theory, financial tech, and blockchain. He is the Co-Founder and Director of Sikoba, a former advisor for the European Commission and a Researcher at New Money Hub.

The main advantage of the Sikoba platform is that it reduces the amount of money needed to transact, and guess what? It’s not even new: this is the way human societies transacted for ages! Sikoba brings back to life thousands of years of an economic model that we need to re-learn, married with modern technology to enable trust-based networks at a scale that was impossible before.

Due to the combination of its high performance and clarity of code, the Crystal programming language is a perfect fit for developing the underlying infrastructure for the Sikoba platform. With that in mind, Sikoba reached out to Manas.Tech, creators of Crystal, to partner in the creation of the Sikoba network and app.

Manas will be developing the blockchain infrastructure and mobile app to bring the Sikoba vision to life. The main challenge in this endeavour is to bridge the complexity that powers the trust-based economic models to a simple and usable user experience. Manas brings to the table over 15 years of complex, unconventional, high-tech software development in scientific and mathematical domains, and human-centered user experience design.

In addition, the work Manas.Tech and Sikoba will be doing to develop this platform will result in the development of many blockchain and cryptocurrency libraries done in Crystal. Most of those libraries will be released as open-source, so that will be an important contribution to the Crystal community as well.

To kick things off to a great start, Alex Kampa flew in from Luxembourg to visit Manas’ offices in Buenos Aires, and to work with the Manas team on the product roadmap, designs of the first prototypes and planning for the release of the MVP.

The enormous potential of Sikoba lies in the promise of getting the world to rely less and less on money for the exchange of goods and services, reviving an ancient economic model based on leveraging existing trust networks (in small communities, in business networks), now backed by high end technology to an unprecedented scale -thank you, blockchain.

How awesome would that be?

We can’t wait to hear your thoughts about it.