Finance Feeds was at iFX EXPO Dubai 2022, one of the most popular finance and fintech B2B conferences in the world.
The event, which took place at the Dubai World Trade Centre from 22-24 February 2022, brought together FX industry leaders from across the globe looking to engage with their peers, grow their business, and have fun.
Not only was there an incredible speaker lineup, but also in-depth public discussions between industry leaders and thousands of visitors.
As such, the event is where brokers go for more opportunities to grow their business, check on technology providers, spot the trends in the financial technology and digital asset industry, amongst others.
On that note, Finance Feeds had the chance to set up an interview with Michael Pearl from Kirobo, a developer of decentralized applications for a safer experience in crypto.
Pearl, who spent nearly five years leading intelligence and content at Finance Magnates, has been Chief Operating Officer at Kirobo since May 2021 and sounds very excited about what the fintech firm is bringing to the fore.
“Kirobo is a super innovative company that is creating the infrastructure for Web3. Once I heard the idea behind Kirobo and once I took a glimpse of the technology, I wanted to be part of it”, said Michael Pearl, who further explained the role of the firm within the ecosystem.
“Kirobo is a DeFi tech company creating the infrastructure for Web3 – whether DeFi, the metaverse, etc. We see so much innovation now in the DeFi space and the metaverse is now the new buzzword, but it’s lacking the basic safety net and infrastructure to make it grow in an organic way.
“For example, we have pay-to-earn, but you keep your seed phrase on a piece of paper. It makes no sense. When you’re sending a transaction, you have that feeling in your stomach that it’s not going to reach its destination. Those are the types of things we are trying and succeeding to fix. We need that to push forward to mass adoption”.
Kirobo has identified three main problems in the DeFI space, which have spilled over to the metaverse as well.
Transactions: if you send money and it reaches the wrong address, the money is gone.
Ability to back up your assets: to know assets are safe even if you lost your wallet, hard wallet or access to the warm wallet.
What happens if someone dies?: In the US, people are trading 401K and IRA with crypto. What happens when they’re gone?
“Those things we needed to address before we move to anything else”, Pearl continued, as he enumerated the solutions for each problem developed by Kirobo.
“We created the undo button, the safe transfer that allows us to send money safely. If you sent it to the wrong address, you can retrieve the funds as if nothing happened.
“In December, we launched the liquid vault: an on-chain wallet, non-custodial, fully decentralized, that allows you to store your money, to fully back up your assets without needing to remember your seed phrase and other manual practices, and allows to inherit crypto in case of need.
“That’s only the beginning because we have a very long roadmap for 2022 and we’re planning to add a lot of other things. For the time being, those are the capabilities and they are super innovative as you can imagine”.
Kirobo has no intentions of stopping there as the very infrastructure behind Kirobo’s liquid vault operates under a “conditional transactions” model.
“On the front end side, you can pre-plan transactions for the future and to condition them on many different things. The backend is a timer based condition. When the timer lapses, the smart contract understands there is inactivity in the wallet, and it switches ownership to an alternative wallet”.
It is that principle that is the basis of the Liquid Vault platform and can be applied to all sorts of solutions, many different use cases.
One can use Kirobo to set up a trust fund, using the abovementioned “conditional transactions” principle. An example used was a trust fund that can only be accessed if the grandson finishes Harvard, on the condition he presents an NFT of the diploma.
“What we’re doing is working with companies to create a whole new set of tools that are basically non-existent in the crypto space as of now”, he concluded.
The interview grazed the momentum in the cryptocurrency markets and talks of entering a new crypto winter, which led Michael Pearl to admit the markets “definitely need some correction”.
“I think for the long run, only the strong will survive. only the projects with viable tech behind them. NFTs are huge right now, but there’s a caveat. I think they started off from a very different angle than they should have. It’s all about cool pictures, videos, and what have you. I don’t want to name drop but you know what I’m talking about.
“I think the next use cases of NFTs are the real exciting ones. I think they will have a huge impact on our lives. I mentioned the NFT of Harvard diplomas. Soon enough we’ll have our IDs and diplomas NFT’d, ownership…”
Kirobo will be there, tapping into the real NFT revolution and facilitating mass adoption in order to create a viable ecosystem for Web3.
