2017 has been an incredible year in terms of evolution of smart contracts security, upgradeability and standards. People are starting to see smart contract protocols as a valuable complement to traditional centralized architectures.

Blockchain protocols are getting institutional recognition, with notable names in the field of venture capital, who have already made themselves a reputation in the crypto space, supporting the evolution of this new ecosystem. Such phenomenon is particular healthy for the market, as if brings professional skill-sets into the startups promoting blockchain projects. Professional money manager selection also results in the funds be used more effectively, increasing the speed of technological evolution of the sector.

During 2018, we are going to see much more activity in blockchain applications and decentralized exchanges in particular. This is also true onRigoBlock’s side, where we are getting ready to launch an advanced-alpha platform. The amount of innovation in blockchain is so big it is becoming more challenging to keep an eye on all new products and startups.

Asset management on the Ethereum blockchain is quickly becoming a profession: the number of ERC20 tokens increases; the number of ICOs increases; the complexity of token models increases.

That is why a protocol for asset management, or how we call it, a protocol for decentralized fund infrastructure, is much needed now.

What does this mean in practice?

During the last two years we have been building an abstracted and upgradeable set of rules which enables users to deploy and run their own funds. One of the coolest features is that, over time, the protocol will be owned by the managers on the platform and the developers, as we have implemented a rewards mechanism which distributes tokens among such parties. This will make it possible to make RigoBlock a completely decentralized oraganization over time.

Our first two applications

Our first application is called “Vault” and is a decentralized version of Xapo, for the Ethereum community. This allows creating funds of pooled Ether for the scope of creating a component which, when integrated to any Ethereum wallet, makes the life of Ether “hodlers” easier. Users can create as many vaults as they like.

Our second application is called “Drago”. Dragos are similar to vaults, and are connected to hybrid and fully decentralized exchanges, enabling the creation of investment strategies for pooled funds, plus the creation of a track record which will be beneficial to almost any trader on earth looking for a way to show her awesome trading skills!

RigoBlock as a standard for next generation asset management

Vaults and Dragos are only our first applications of the RigoBlock protocol, and many more can be created by external developers. That is why the protocol will allow approved decentralized asset management applications to be plugged in the protocol, making it easier for developers to create their own “version” and leveraging on the incentives mechanism offered by the Rigo token. You can read more on our Proof-of-Performance algorithm here:

If you do not want to go through the whole article, we can say, in short, that:

our Proof-of-Performance algorithm is not a substitute for Proof-of-Work, as it is not intended to be an algorithm for securing the network;

2. rather, it is an algorithm which rewards the traders on the platform for running their funds and the developers for their work on the protocol;

3. the algorithm is built in a similar fashion as protocol security algorithms, with the scope of rewarding participants of a network for their contribution to executing some fundamental task within said network;

4. Proof-of-Performance makes it possible to create a better alignment of interests between managers and investors

This results in the funds having no management or performance fee, eliminating the need for an administrator to calculate and charge the fees to the funds.

Our rewards mechanism, based on the Rigo token, will give our protocol an edge, as even external protocols will be able to plug-into ours and leverage on our incentives structure. Front-end asset management platforms, therefore, will be able to benefit from a solid back-end and will be able to be developed on top of RigoBlock with minimal knowledge of blockchain or smart contracts.

This is why our system also rewards the developers for maintaining, improving and extending the RigoBlock protocol and its applications.

The next applications? If you can think of one and you can encode one, yours might be added.

We hope you like reading our progress as much as we like developing our products; if you have any questions do not hesitate to come on our reddit channel or our gitter channel.