The idea for WandX first came to me in early January. I moved on from my earlier project (Dtalk), and I was looking into how we can help the environment through Anivark. wanted to use gamification to enable communities to work together toward the common goal of preventing environmental degradation — this included reducing plastics usage and water conservation. I stumbled onto the idea of how personal carbon credits could be issued, tracked, traded, and hence valued by people. Exploring the creation and trade of carbon credits, I decided to shadow a large agritech company to see if I could trace their products from source to shelf, and see if I could crack the carbon credit scheme for a business as well as the end customer. Through carbon credit trading, I got the idea of building a system to create, trade, and settle any crypto-asset on a blockchain.

Create and trade in simple financial instruments such as portfolios on ERC20 Tokens on WandX.

After enquiring with some colleagues on how I could go about doing this, I met Sridhar and Dinesh. Both of them work at Honeywell and they decided to help me out in building out this platform. We worked with freelancers — Amit (who co-founded Dtalk with me), Inder (who helped me design Dtalk and it’s mobile applications), and quite a few others to help out with the front-end website and the portfolio trading Dapp front-end. In parallel, we chalked out our whitepaper, and spoke with people in the energy, finance, retail, music, and art industry to highlight the various applications of our platform.

Then the team and I connected with colleagues who have spent over 20 years in management consulting, banking, and financial services to receive feedback on our application, our vision, and most importantly our business model. Needless to say, after months of sleepless nights and uncertainty, we’re now on the home straight to release our application on the Rinkelby testnet.

Our prototype that we’ll release on the Ethereum testnet.

I’ve received quite a few emails/messages asking me who are on the WandX team. Since we’re doing a token sale wherein we’re asking users to believe in our platform and vision, it’s only logical that we disclose as much as needed on our team. Half the people in our team are still working in their respective jobs, but have been kind enough to moonlight for us. Being a platform for creating financial instruments (most of which are instruments to reduce risk), it just doesn’t make financial sense for everyone in the team to quit their jobs. We are bootstrapped so far, and we’ve already built out our portfolio trading Dapp that we’ll have out on the Rinkelby test net in the next few days.

“You know, I didn’t set out to create a company or anything like that. I had a day job. “ — Pierre Omidyar

Though our application is based on the 0x concept, we’ve modified quite a few aspects to suite trading in portfolios as well as being browser agnostic (no dependency on Metamask). Sign up at our Prototype with your email address and stay tuned to our blog for instructions on how you can use the application!