Gabriel Dusil Blockchain plus Adel is a technology incubator for blockchain innovation. Not unusual these days, but thereâ€™s a twist. Adelâ€™s approach seems to be pulling in the FX industry. â€œA majority of registered users in our ecosystem are FX and crypto traders,â€ says Gabriel Dusil, general manager and co-founder, Adel.Â William Essex went to talk to him.

William Essex: First of all, please describe your operating model.

Gabriel Dusil: Our community collaborates on ideas and uses the AdelWiki collectively to create business plans. Users who own over 32,000 ADLs – we call them “founders” – vote on projects and can become profit participants when they are launched. Expertise within the community brings mentoring, learning, and employment opportunities.

WE: But you need to buy ADLs before you can get involved?

GD: No. Anyone with a registered account can submit an idea for incubation, even if they have a zero ADL balance. We welcome FX traders, given that fintech is currently considered the highest opportunity for cryptocurrencies in the short term. When users submit their first idea they receive an “Innovator" badge…

WE: …they’re innovators…

GD: …but only founders – with 32,000-plus ADLs in their wallet – can see all ideas and projects in the portal. This visibility gives founders editing rights to help improve an innovator's idea.

WE: So innovators can only incubate their own idea, but they can incubate all ideas if they have more than 32,000 ADLs.

GD: Successful projects are re-invested for further growth or issued as rewards to funding participants. Our projects progress through a structured process (idea stage, planning stage, and execution stage, or I2P2E2) to ensure the best possibility of project success. Adel is blockchain-agnostic and harnesses the features of any open-ledger platform to showcase its potential. Our mission is to incubate projects that will positively change the world.

WE: How many so far?

GD: Adel launched the portal on 1st November 2018. We now have 50 ideas and 2 projects progressing. Our first launched project is still on the horizon but we have since launched an alpha release of AdelPoint, our decentralized file sharing service.

WE: What does “blockchain-agnostic” mean?

GD: Adel has architected a democratic process to allow the community’s founders to establish their voice. For example, when Adel proposed moving our ADL coin from the Nxt blockchain to Ethereum, the community collectively chose to migrate. Adel’s idea-incubation process ensures that the ecosystem is self-sustaining.

WE: What's the biggest single focus for innovation these days? Identity? Data?

GD: If we were to pick one, then the hottest ticket we are witnessing in innovation today is Artificial Intelligence. Separate yet related is Big Data. The challenge to society is how to utilize AI to help analyse an exponential increase in data, and making sense of it all. Blockchain is the third part of this big picture because it has the potential for enabling a truly global, multi-stakeholder and distributed database of information that will help to progress humanity.

AI, Big Data, and Blockchain are all transformative to society. Any secondary innovation leveraging these three are auxiliary, even if they are instrumental at a macro-level to the industries they effect.

WE: Do you see "blockchain-plus" proposals? I wonder whether the current "set" of innovations might work best in combination - blockchain plus AI, for example.

GD: The notion of “blockchain-plus” projects is dominating the market at the moment. This is both a threat and an opportunity. The threat lies in a tendency to replace incumbent databases with blockchain to capitalise on the crypto buzz.

WE: That’s just unloading legacy systems, surely, and inevitable?

GD: Blockchain has specific benefits in terms of immutability, decentralized trust, and data sharing. But blockchain also has its limitations compared to traditional databases, such as slow latency (transactions per second), blockchain bloat, and other challenges. For this reason, many “blockchain-plus” project will fail if they do not showcase blockchain’s strengths.

WE: But the successes…

GD: But the projects that survive the proof-of-concept stage will be the flagships that will generate new innovation and evolve the technology further.

WE: We've been talking about blockchain and innovation for so long - when is the world going to change?

GD: It may be argued that the world has already begun to change, because of blockchain. In less than ten years Bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies have been a disruptive force to the global economy. 32 million Bitcoin wallets in existence may be considered relatively small in the FX trading space, but a sizable 32% annual growth rate in 2018 is a reflection of crypto’s growth potential into the next decade.

WE: Final question. Are you in the ideas business, or the finance business, or both?

GD: Adel offers an idea incubator that spans many different industries and verticals. The goal in Adel is to bring blockchain into the mainstream. To create projects that will positively change the world.

WE: Sounds like a plan. Gabriel Dusil, thank you very much.