Introducing the Auctus Project

A smart contract powered pension funds platform — by Yule Andrade (Auctus Business Developer)

My partners and I live in a third world country. For years we’ve been ruled by a government that is well known to be corrupt and exploitation is underneath every institution, private companies and everything we do. It is in our state spending, in our transportation agencies, in company investment contracts and in every day life when paying taxes.

Although corruption and misrepresentation is not only a third world problem, think about the many cases you’ve heard about fraud involving investment banking, insurance companies or pension fund administration.

The problem is that society’s lack of openness and transparency often creates fertile ground for mistrust and mushrooming of misconceptions and negative perceptions that are dangerous to the governance of any ecosystem. The process of governance is incomplete without upholding transparency.

Take for example pension fund management: despite being heavily regulated, there are still numerous cases of fraud in pension funds around the globe be it in the UK or Brazil.

The main problems related to fraud in a pension fund include: employer not paying contributions, misappropriation of investment assets, improper payment for services, abuse of position providing of pension benefits or payments, rejection of pension benefits, hidden fees and financial statements manipulation.

When an institution is able to lay bare its operational activities for open scrutiny by the public, it allows its citizen to participate, getting involved and engage in a meaningful way, such that it can protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt, making it much harder of acting in secrecy and conceal practices to take advantage from system inefficiencies. That’s why we believe that radical transparency is the most potent strategy of battling corruption and misrepresentation.

For that reason, we, the Auctus team, are among those dreaming of a way to enforce transparency in everyday interaction.

Blockchain technology is all over the press these days, mostly because of cryptocurrency price rallies, volatility and ironically due to the dark side of the industry, surrounding frauds like global hack attacks. While the mainstream media has been busy speculating about prices and black market intrigues, they’ve been missing the fact that beneath of it all, by creating the right system, with the right guarantees, you can fix bad incentives. You can eliminate corrupt middlemen and rent-seekers.

Using Ethereum as a platform for blockchain you can create a smart contract, which is an agreement, in the form of a computer program, that is executed automatically once certain pre-programmed conditions are satisfied.

Let’s illustrate the major story behind blockchain here by what we’re doing at Auctus Project. Each part is simple. How they come together is illustrated in the figure below:

For a more complete chart click here.

The Auctus Platform will be a global smart contract-based platform for pension funds designed to adapt to different legal and regulatory standards. Through smart contract auditable code the platform will ensure full transparency and compliance to the fund rules.

Smart contracts will be developed to calculate contributions, employer match and benefits and other features such as investment profiles, beneficiaries designation (in case of death), administration fees calculations and portability between funds.

What’s Next?

The first step in our roadmap is to create a demo pension fund, using smart contracts that will work as a Proof-of-Concept for our platform and help us validate the project. The demo smart contract-based pension fund will consist of digital assets as we chase solutions to also invest in traditional assets and enable adoption by traditional funds.

To keep yourself updated about our development progress and new ideas in our mission and also provide feedback and share your thoughts, please join us on Slack and Bitcointalk, and follow us on Twitter!

Get to Know Auctus

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