Status of the Agrello Project

Agrello is rapidly expanding on the development of its platform for a variety of use cases. It has 19 full time developers working on different parallel project tracks.

The first product to be released by December is the Digital Identity engine that is vital for any legally binding smart contract. Agrello has partnered with Veriff, a startup whose tech has been vetted and endorsed by the Estonian Government. Veriff uses video analysis algorithms to automate user identification very quickly and accurately, and is currently being used by banks in Estonia and even by Uber to validate the identity of the drivers. Agrello takes that tech and creates secure digital identities over the blockchain. Agrello Digital identity mobile app is close to be released and will be used by various business clients.

The second aspect of agrello is creation of customised contract templates for a variety of different clients in different industry domains. Agrello has already announced the following partnerships, in the following industries:

Fintech — Cashaa and Blockhive will use agrello contract templates for P2P loans. Industrial Human Resource Management — Incap, an electronics manufacturer will use Agrello contract templates for automating Human resource allocations and employment contracts.

Other use cases being explored include contracts for mergers and aquisitions, supply chain, and rental agreements. It is pursuing partnerships with numerous business clients, including large publically listed companies, the details of which will be revealed in due course.

With the success of these customised industrial use cases, Agrello will finally release by mid 2018, the main smart contract template creator and marketplace, so that legal experts around the world can create and sell smart contracts for different use cases, for different jurisdictions and in different languages. These templates will have two components: the human readable interface, and an xml based syntax that is machine readable. DLT token will be the basis for use of this platform.

Why Agrello makes for a compelling Blockchain Use Case?

Smart contracts are the main and most studied use case for blockchain. Currently we are seeing a move to push all current centralised compute services onto the blockchain. There are all sorts of projects doing this including airbnb on blockchain, music industry on blockchain, etc. The point that is being missed by most investors is that just by “block chaining” a service you don’t make it better. This is particularly true with trying to recreate a service that is currently centralised and using cheap cloud compute.

You currently see many ICOs creating exchanges, blockchain market place, etc etc. You must always ask “how does moving this service off cheap cloud compute to the blockchain add value?”. You will find in most cases you may struggle to find this new value. In the case of an exchange you might create something slower, less reliable with stale market data. Yes it’s now decentralised, but what improvement and value has it created? You may find that through the process of decentralising you took a fast reliable thing and made it slow and unreliable. You did not add value. Although you may have reduced cost slightly, you also reduced the level of good service. This is where I move to Agrello. Agrello is creating an open and legally binding smart contract platform.

Currently law and agreement/contract execution is mainly still carried out in an exhaustive, human resource intensive, expensive and manual way. What value do you get through computerising and automating in a blockchain over a traditional compute or centralised model? You gain the value of automation with both compute models. Indeed with cheap cloud compute some of what Agrello is doing is indeed possible. The problems you face with the centralised model are those of privacy, ownership, jurisdiction and consensus on the state of any given contract. If you centralise the process how can you be sure the central body can’t be bought off or biased in some way? How can you be sure your contract wasn’t tampered with or changed? Well this is exactly what blockchain was invented for, the distributed consensus across the decentralised peers who all own the picture without any centralised body being held accountable or able to skew the true state or picture. You could create a version of Agrello off chain and run it in Amazon AWS across all regions. Another problem with this model is the sheer expense of doing so, and you still have the problems of privacy, ownership and the spectre of other entities or third parties being able to gain access to the data within a contract or agreement and to change or tamper with the result.

Blockchain solves all of these problems while removing the power from any single entity or organisation. It has privacy built in, and creates the ability for discreet and verifiable light weight digital IDs to be enabled end to end to establish legally binding identity. It creates a highly automated consensus compute model that is extremely difficult to tamper with or attack, perfect for agreements and contracts to be executed and verified upon.

There have been very localised attempts to computise small parts of contract law with some success. These attempts have been very localised and centralised. By leap frogging the centralised compute model and by taking automated contracts directly to the blockchain, Agrello are creating something truly disruptive and ground breaking. By taking automated law and agreements to the blockchain instead of a centralised model you solve the inherent problems of security and tampering. You also gain the huge cost efficiencies of blockchain as well as built in identity and privacy. You can also use side chains and oracle providers where legacy data access and computer heavy lifting are required. The very base essential components of contracts are light weight so lend themselves perfectly to blockchain. The value propositions it brings are obvious. In terms of execution speed Agrello aims to take something very slow, expensive and labour intensive and turn it into something fast, accurate, repeatable, cheap and highly automated.

Investment Advantage

Agrello received funding of around 7000 bitcoins through its ICO in July. At current BTC prices, this means over 40 million dollars in funding available. The project is extremely well funded, and the funds well planned for project development, business partnerships, and marketing at appropriate project stages. With a team of established legal professionals and tech partners, the project has all the resources needed to succeed and market itself very well post product launches.

Compared to ICO investors, current prices provide a huge discount for new investors, making it one of the sweetest deals currently available. With the recent listing in Binance, the future for Agrello looks bright.

Acknowledgements

I thank Tonka, an active member of the Agrello community for the technical inputs for writing this article.

You can read more info about Agrello in my previous blog:

At the time of writing this article, Agrello is due for a revamped business focussed website at www.agrello.org next week, which will shed more info on some of the roadmap mentioned in this article. Also a sneak preview of their mobile app is expected next week.

Agrello DLT tokens are currently being traded in Binance and Hitbtc.

You can also join an active telegram community here https://t.me/agrello