OpenLedger CEO Ronny Boesing on BitShares Future and Platform’s Links in Belarus

18.06.2018

Ronny Boesing, founder and chief executive of OpenLedger, a Denmark-based decentralized conglomerate offering a cryptocurrency trading platform and a number of other blockchain-based services, nurses big ambitions regarding the future of the company saying that one day it will be a household name along the lines of Amazon, Alibaba, Google and Apple.

Boesing’s predictions, whom ForkLog met on the sidelines of the recent BlockShow Europe 2018 conference in Berlin, are quite specific.

“OpenLedger Decentralized Trading Platform (DTP) will be among the top five exchanges in the world within three years. With our constantly increasing recruitment of skilled IT professionals, our blockchain as a service business will be among the top five providers in the world within five years and named frequently as the service provider used in major projects worldwide within 10 years,” he says.

Moreover, as Ronny Boesing firmly believes, within two years OpenLedger Decentralized Business Solutions Platform (DBP) will have established multi-lingual, multi-currency, multi-business, multi-signature platform using the company’s own blockchain solution.

“It will be scalable to accept practically any challenge and will be the one blockchain built for global acceptance,” he added.

ForkLog: How did it all start with OpenLedger? Many people remember that at some point you were working under CCEDK name.

Ronny Boesing: Indeed, we started back in May 2014 as CCEDK which stood for Crypto Coins Exchange Denmark. CCEDK managed to attract close to 8,000 registered users trading an average daily volume of some $1m before it changed its name to OpenLedger DEX in October 2015. At that stage our revenues were mainly based on the transaction fees as well as our consultancy work. All this is changing fast now because of the radical technology involved.

ForkLog: What is today’s situation with OpenLedger? Do you have any announcement to make?

Ronny Boesing: I think when it comes to OpenLedger DEX, a decentralized trading platform that we are operating, it’s mostly about stabilizing what we achieved last year and adding a lot of new features. We did it in recent months and will be doing in the coming months. For example, we will see a ShapeShift-like bridge connecting all the gateways OpenLedger is operating and a mobile application. We will also see a fiat gateway added, initially in the form of fiat entering OpenLedger user account as BTC. After that it will be up to the user to convert BTC to Bitshares, Ether or any other asset.

In terms of our Blockchain-as-a-Service offering we have a white label solution for the trading platform, that’s a new service for us and it will be added in June.

ForkLog: A few months ago a formal partnership between OpenLedger and Aetsoft, a blockchain company from Minsk, Belarus, was announced, with your company moving to the Hi-Tech Park in Minsk. How did that link materialize in the first place?

Ronny Boesing: Joining the Minsk Hi-Tech Park is a very important development for us. The technology development behind OpenLedger was originally outsourced to Minsk in Belarus where an old friend of mine Nick Grebenkine already had a small team of developers in his company, Aetsoft. CCEDK, and then OpenLedger, was a major client for Aetsoft but earlier this year, after a successful collaboration, OpenLedger became Aetsoft’s part-owner.

Now, the legal, business development and finances for OpenLedger remain in Denmark, while all the tech staff and marketing and sales roles are run though Aetsoft in Minsk. We now have over 65 of our IT-professionals based over there working on BaaS, and being official partners with Minsk Hi-Tech Park puts us in a very strong position to offer easy access to all blockchain solutions.

ForkLog: What’s your overall impression with today’s regulatory environment in Belarus after they signed a decree aimed at further developing the digital economy.

Ronny Boesing: The bill was designed to create conditions under which world-class IT companies would come to Belarus to work on developing new products and technologies that would be in demand worldwide. It also provided clear support for blockchain development and created a favourable tax regime for income generated by blockchain and cryptocurrencies. These legal certainties, in an otherwise uncertain world, added to the attractiveness of Belarus.

I think it’s only the beginning and by the end of the year we will probably see a lot of ICO’s coming out from Belarus.

ForkLog: Apart from OpenLedger DEX, what other projects you are currently working on?

Ronny Boesing: We also plan to be an accelerator and an incubator for many projects. The decentralized business platform that we expect to introduce to the world around October this year will be a combination of our own blockchain solution and a Dapp store, and these two things will allow us to offer any business worldwide to actually enter into the blockchain space on their own using all these features and options. So basically anything you can imagine in terms of decentralized trading platform, smart contracts and the rest.

I want people to move from being ‘I know nothing about blockchain’ – to becoming the generation that says ‘I don’t know much about blockchain, but I do use it every day.’

OpenLedger’s marketing team has also helped more than 10 initial coin offerings (ICOs) successfully complete their crowdfunding campaigns, raising in excess of $90m. Some successful ICOs included Crypviser, Karma, Scorum, and Sola Foundation.

ForkLog: Why did OpenLedger DEX choose BitShares?

Ronny Boesing: The main reason was BitShares market pegged assets (MPA), also called smartcoins or stablecoins, and user issued assets (UIA) – bespoke tokens that can be traded. These were considered an important part of the future growth of ecosystems working entirely on the blockchain and of the monetary system as we know it.

I believe there was, and still is no alternative established trading platform to BitShares network, with its Graphene Blockchain technology able to handle a scalable demand with collateralised assets backed by the core token of the network.

ForkLog: BitShares and Graphene technology creator Daniel Larimer is also known as a creator of the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus algorithm, co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit, and CTO of the “smart contract” blockchain EOS. How strong the latter two are BitShares’ competitors from the performance point view?

Ronny Boesing: Daniel is in many ways the Einstein of crypto. I said that back in 2015, and I believe my admiration of his technical skills has only increased since then.

However, what we are trying to do is a fully established and a fully usable blockchain solution in form of BitShares, and this solution has worked since 2015. I also want to point to the fact that BitShares blockchain is the one producing the most blocks of all blockchains, 25 million so far, and the one producing the most transactions per day, 1.5 million transactions a day.

As for the competition, Steemit could be considered our rival number one. There are also other Graphene blockchains competing in terms of number of transactions per day. However, BitShares is also the quickest of all blockchains to produce transactions.

In the development of our future trading platform we combine EOS features and options as well since EOS can be considered an upgrade of the Bitshares technology and Graphene in general.

ForkLog: So what does the future hold for BitShares?

Ronny Boesing: I firmly believe that BitShares will be one of the first due to their already tested financial trading platform, as well as any offspring from that same technology.

I see many blockchains with great potential. The biggest challenge is to get that potential to real life use, though, and blockchain able to deliver a product, to make a difference to global sustainability, will be revolutionary. We will see some of the first proofs of these in 2018 and 2019, so it is an exciting time we live in.

Andrew Asmakov

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Tags: Belarus, BitShares, OpenLedger, Ronny Boesing, trading