Vignesh: My name is Vignesh Sundaresan.

Can you still hear me?

Laura: Yes, I can still hear you. Perfect. (Laughs) Alright.

So, to get started, could you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background and what inspired you to start Lendroid?

[0:22]

V: Sure. So, yeah, as I said my name is Vignesh Sundaresan. I’ve been in the space, the crypto space, since 2012. Before 2012, I was always an entrepreneur; wanted to build interesting stuff but that people would love to use. And by 2012, when I first discovered Bitcoin, it was so exciting because now I can code money! That is what excited me into Bitcoin.

And when I started looking into Bitcoin, it was really exciting because I didn’t understand the politics of it, the other aspects of it which totally grew on me. And by 2013, I wanted to do a nice startup with Bitcoin. We started a company called BitAccess back in 2013, did that for a couple of years. We still have ATM’s all over the world.

That is one of my, how do you say, it’s very close to my heart, the company. It got me into the industry, that is how I met the founder of Keep, Matt, back in 2014. But after that, slowly I started learning a lot about Ethereum and how open blockchains and open financial protocols are the future of this world, and I always wanted to be a major building block of this.

So, I really, really believe in financial systems which don’t have brokers and middlemans [middlemen] who start seeking rent or bitactions. So, I wanted to build something which would help people across the world get access to credit, get loans, just make it easy for people and accessible to everyone across the world. So, that is what inspired me to start Lendroid.

So Lendroid is more of a — it’s not a lending company. It’s more of a protocol which allows lending. But we figure out various use cases as we go. Today we might not be lending to the retail. We just do margin trading and this kind of stuff. So, we start with this, and let’s see how it goes. It’s a protocol. And we want to travel with it.

L: So, could you tell me a little bit more about what Lendroid does and who your customers are now? And who you see your customers being in the future?

V: Sure. So Lendroid — the definition is it’s a non-rent-seeking open protocol that enables lenders and borrowers to discover each other and to do a few things which we want to expand.

But the initial first things would be margin trading. So, margin trading is a classic example of where lending is very useful. You need a lender from which you can borrow some additional funds and then go and leverage your trade positions. So, if you have $100 and you want to have $400 worth of Bitcoins, you have to get that hundred dollars from someone else. And that’s a lender.

And to make sure that you’re going to repay, you have to put up a collateral. And all this has to be managed in a way that the lenders always get repaid, and you stay within the rules of the system, etc. So, that’s the protocol. So Lendroid protocol basically enables this discovery process of lenders and borrowers, and then it enforces the contracts that the lenders and the borrowers agree. But thereby enabling margin trading on top of a decentralized system, without a central company, without a central counterparty, the smart contract takes care of all the… being the custodian of the funds so there is no additional risk of say, central company trading of something. It’s all on chain.

L: And who are your initial customers, who are you serving?

[4:28]

V: If you look at crypto, there’s not a lot of applications that are being used by people outside the industry right now. So, it’s early days. Most of the are people involved in crypto are just traders, speculators or people who are holding long positions for a long period of time. These are the major people who are in crypto right now. So, that’s exactly our market. Our market is people who are trading, but who are either scared of central exchanges or the hackers, etc. Or actually there are tokens which might not get it listed on central exchanges, that are really easy to be listed on decentralized exchanges because they don’t come with the same regulatory burden or custodian burden. So these are our initial markets and our initial users so. Traders, Crypto traders especially.

L: Well tell me a little bit about the team that you’ve put together to build this?

V: Yeah, so I’m very happy with what’s going on with the team when I started this. I started it in December of last year, December 2016, when I started solidifying this idea. I was back then just alone, just me. I spent a couple of months and I’ve gone into my list of people I know from my previous experiences in life and I thought, “Okay, this guy. If I hire this person, it’d be awesome.” And so, I identified each person from my life. So, everyone on my team, I actually know them for five, six years. And they’re really good at what they do. So, I have good — great — developers, security-minded people, bloggers and everyone.

But everyone is someone who I’ve met five years ago, or ten years ago. And I thought this was a great time for us to be working together. We are not in the same place, we are a decentralized team. We are in Canada, we are in India, we are in Estonia. And our company is actually based in Singapore, so it’s a truly global company, I guess, from the get-go. But the team works beautifully together because everyone knows each other for a time. We are more of friends than just colleagues. So yeah, that’s the kind of team we put together.

L: And tell me a little bit about who’s on the team and what they do.

V: Yeah, so, that is myself. I can actually code, that was how I started in the industry. So, I was the CTO of BitAccess, too. I used to do the smart contract out of development when I started. Now I made sure that we have another couple of people.

There’s another Vignesh on my team. It always confuses people. Actually, he goes by the name “V” so it’s just easier. And that is another person called Vivek; who they go together to take care of the smart contact development and the testing part. That’s two of them.

We have Paul, who’s helping us with the UI and the UX, so designing the branding. These things will come up in the next few months, but he’s just starting. And we have Franca who’s based in Singapore; she does our legal… she’s a legal person who goes through everything that’s legal. She’s figuring out the foundation, how to structure the company, the tax, everything. And there is Kevin, who’s running our operations based in Singapore. So, he’s a great friend, he’s an awesome person to work with.

And we have Supriya and Anand, who are taking care of communicating with people. They do a great job. I am really bad at that, so they really come in as a great addition to the team.

L: Excellent, yeah! And we’re really excited about the recent announcement about the Lendroid and Keep partnership. And I would love to know how do you envision using Keep at Lendroid?

[8:51]

V: Sure. So, Keep, when I first started reading the whitepaper of Keep, I was really at a point, where we are at a point with development where we have to start at a point where smart contacts cannot hold any private data. So, we can look at a smart contract and a normal user; they both look the same to the Ethereum blockchain, but they cannot function the same. A user will have a private key. A smart contract cannot have a private key. A smart contract is always operated by a user. Especially not keys where a smart contract has to do a lot of things on behalf of the user. We are not able to do those things.

So, a single smart contract can have 4,000 users at the same time. Now, if you want to execute a trade on behalf of say, User Number 402, that’s not possible to do it. So, that’s where Keep really came in. So, with Keep what we plan to use Keep for is that we still have some private keys and private data that’s delivered to each user in Keep. And then whenever some specific user wants to do something with another smart contract or another dApp, we use this information and we mimic — the smart contract mimics — being the user and interacts with another smart contract. So, that’s the kind of use case we are looking at.

L: That’s very interesting. And in what ways do you feel Keep will be a specific benefit to your customers?

V: Yep. So, for our customers there some features before Keep that were not possible [edited for clarity]. But huge additions… look, obviously without Keep, what would have happened is, we would have gone around it and built something, but it would have been more clumsier, and probably would’ve had some difficulties. Like saying, “Oh yeah, we are building on Ethereum.” People say, “Yeah, it’s going to take ten seconds.” It just… we learn to live with that difficulty.

But now with Keep, what happens is we don’t have to live with that difficulty. We have a nice way to do this, like mimicking the user. I can give you a small example. For a decentralized order, we have off-chain order, meaning that we have to sign an order and then put it on an order book that’s not on-chain. So, because there is no interaction with the Ethereum blockchain, the smart contract cannot do anything there. So, it cannot initiate an off-chain order, no!

If the smart contract can mimic a user, it can sign the order and give it to the user or someone who else can submit to the order book. So, to put it really technically, with Keep, we can enable “maker orders” in our system. Orders we’d just have to stuck with “taker orders”; that’s a technical term for orders. So it’s like who places the order and who fills the order? Without Keep, we can only share other people’s orders. Now we can also place new orders. That’s the difference.

L: Excellent.

V: I think it’s a little bit technical but that’s all it is. It’s a very interesting aspect of Keep and Lendroid, because we can do this, and it’s very technical, but we love it.

L: Well, I’m looking forward to the partnership as well. (Laughs) And so what’s next for Lendroid?

[12:41]

V: So Lendroid — we are wrapping up towards a token launch. We are in the process of making us more visible, building the community. As I said, this startup has not been the traditional startup route. So, it’s been hard, lessons all the way.

So, we’re trying to make sure that we do… like most of the time, we’re taking our time. That’s the major thing. We’re done with the legal structuring, we’re done with creating our own foundation, thinking about the project for the next four years, five years.

And then we come back and say, “Okay, in the next two, three months, we’re going to launch a small prototype.” It’s not a prototype, but it’ll be on the main net; it’ll perform something that’s basic. And then we’ll have a token launch by, say, we estimate it to be around the end of December or January. And then we’ll want to go full-swing on integrations from then on. So, starting February, we’ll want to do integrations with various people who are already doing decentralized exchanges and then be everywhere.

L: Exciting stuff. And is there anything else that you’d like to add?

V: I think for Keep, sometimes people underestimate, for example, what a dApp can be useful for. Keep is one of those products in the sense that it’s very simple. What I think in the future is going to happen, is that we are going to discover something that is very interesting that we have not discovered yet. That’s going to be a very important use case for Keep. So, there are products like that… I’m looking forward to looking at that kind of a use case for Keep. So, that was what was in my mind. When I read the whitepaper, I was like, “Okay, something’s going to happen, but I don’t know what.” But it works for us; I’m very happy. Let’s take this one step at a time and then it’s going to be exciting.

L: Well, thank you again for sitting down with me and for chatting with me about Lendroid, about Keep. We’re obviously really excited about this partnership and announcing this partnership with you, and we’ll definitely, you know, keep in touch and keep talking about how we can work together, and what’s next for Keep and what’s next for Lendroid. So, thank you so much.

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