Tell us about how the idea for LTO Network originated.

In 2014, I met Rick and Martijn, who just started Firm24, a company for incorporating businesses online. A revolution back then, now doing 15% of the Dutch market. LTO Network started as a spin-off of the workflow engine we build for Firm24. Initially, it was a fully centralized solution, with a unique selling point that organizations would own and could host their own data.

We ran into issues when organizations wanted us to guarantee data integrity. This was difficult as we didn’t control the data. As a solution, we looked at what the blockchain could bring and started anchoring everything on Bitcoin in 2016. This was a soft introduction for many of our clients to the blockchain.

But we wanted more and started exploring smart contracts, only to find out that these weren’t particularly useful for our use cases.

As we dove deeper into the fundaments of blockchain technology, we discovered we could use these principles to adapt our workflow engine to run decentralized processes.

So we did not focus on inventing use cases: we had a use case, and that required blockchain technology to solve the old problems and keep growing.