People in the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities come from many different walks of life, but we all started our journey in a similar fashion: we heard about the upcoming revolution somewhere.

For us, it was in May 2016, when Edouard (Galion CEO) started working as a cyber security consultant in a small firm specialized in blockchain consulting. As we talked about Edouard’s new job, we started to imagine it: the tokenized economy, a decentralized future with fast, secure and safe value exchanges, the problem of trust solved.

We have immersed ourselves in this new ecosystem for several months and when we thought it was already well developed, we decided to jump into the token sale venture and to acquire our first coins. We started to build our first portfolios, and bought Ledger wallets to secure them.

This is when our problems started.

Values were evolving fast. Transferring coins from exchanges to safe storage cost us, and it altered the round amounts we had bought. New projects were emerging, and after investing in them we had tokens which values were changing rapidly. Simply knowing what we had and how much it was worth became a hassle. Existing solutions did not meet our needs. Every transaction had to be manually inputted in the most widely used portfolio tracking apps, and the user experience was lacking.

Emilien (Galion CTO) started to develop a simple tool that sent us an automatic email every two hours with the up to date value of our crypto assets. It was not perfect: only a couple of widely used exchanges were supported, as well as some of the most well-known blockchains. But in spite of those imperfections it had one immediate effect: we stopped using other existing apps.

We are long term investors. At first, not knowing the price in real time was not too big of a problem. But we started to realize what we had started to build had a lot of value:

A great proof of concept, addressing a currently existing issue in the ecosystem

Ideas to make it better and turn it into something truly great

We were already a team with complementary skills and talents

We pushed on the original idea, and realized it was hiding a larger vision. Arguably, the logical conclusion to the mass adoption of crypto assets will be a new society, where they will be used alongside traditional fiat currencies. In order to navigate this new world, people will need a platform they can trust, to help them manage their personal finances.

In addition, we strongly believe that the atomicity of this market and the sheer number of assets involved will frighten a part of the crypto-newcomers and eventually may be an obstacle to the mass adoption. That is why a marketplace where ordinary people can get tailored financial advice from top market experts seems to be mandatory.

We had to build the company providing these services to share it with the world. We decided to found Galion.

In an ecosystem where dishonest people can be found in large numbers, we wanted to do this the right way. We registered the company in France, with the help of a lawyer working in one of the top firms in Paris. We teamed up with the CEO of the leading Blockchain consulting firm in France who advised us from the very start and sought the advice and services of Arnaud Grünthaler, a partner at Fieldfisher, another prominent law firm with ties to the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF, French equivalent of the SEC). We also worked with experts in cybersecurity, data analytics and blockchain technologies to ensure our users’ experience would be safe, and seamless.

We spent months developing our MVP. Our personal experience had convinced us that the community needed it, and we wanted it to be a proof of our commitment at building great things. All along the product creation, we have faced challenges and adjusted our development agenda to build the best possible product, resulting in robust technical foundations. For instance, we want Galion to be an automatic tool, so we already started to look beyond the already implemented automatic tracking of assets and added to our roadmap the implementation of an AI assistant. To ensure the mass adoption of our platform, we also really want to ensure its user-friendliness: it has to be cross-platform, to allow users to be able to initiate transactions and to subscribe to third-party financial services without leaving the Galion interface.

Our vision of the future is now clear as we took the first steps in our journey towards our final goal: we want to help bridge the gap between fiat and crypto, by creating the best personal financial management platform, integrating a revolutionary decentralized marketplace, where people can buy financial services from the world’s top experts.

Galion is now live and we need your feedback and support, please test it and help us make it better. We are committed to a demanding roadmap that will eventually make Galion the ultimate financial platform.