CIOInsider India Magazine
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Arpan Jain
Partner
BitHyve is a Fintech product company based in London, UK with a presence in Pune, Hyderabad and Singapore. The company seeks to create simple alternate financial platforms based on open blockchains. The company prides itself in creating noncustodial products, with an aim to allow end users to have complete control over their financial assets. The company cares deeply about the privacy and security of its users, something that is rare in today’s world where an individual’s credit card usage and spending patterns are used as a rich source of data used in invasive customer profiling. Arpan Jain further elaborates on the workings of his unique venture in the Blockchain domain in details below.
In conversation with Arpan Jain, Partner, BitHyve
Blockchain technology which can be recognized as public distributed ledger, promises to revolutionize the financial world. What inspired the founders to venture into such a niche domain of the Information Technology and Services industry? Kindly narrate the inception story.
Our journey started in the UK in 2015, as a lab experimenting in Blockchain tech, DLT, and helping organizations make sense of the technology. In a nutshell, the Blockchain technology allows for decentralization, immutability, security, and transparency. The current financial systems lack these basic tenets making them highly vulnerable to inflation, scams, and laundering. Due to our backgrounds in Fintech, we could see the implications of deploying the Blockchain technology across various aspects of business, one of the foremost being research, development
and adoption of cryptocurrencies. The more we researched & analysed DLT and cryptocurrencies, the more we realized that Bitcoin Tech not only plugs the gaps of the current financial and monetary systems, but it also lays down very secure algorithmic and provable principles that can form the backbone of a sound financial platform.
Today, with around 40 central banks around the world experimenting with CBDC & DLT to increase financial inclusion, operational efficiency & resilience, the space is getting hotter by the day. BitHyve being an early starter has gained quite an edge in this domain.
Our flagship product, the Hexa Wallet, is a Secure, Smart and a Simple non-custodial Wallet
Brief us about the services and products rendered by the company that you would like to highlight in the profile.
At present, we are building a Wallet and an entire eco-system of services and technologies harnessing the power of Blockchain tech. Our flagship product, the Hexa Wallet, is a Secure, Smart and a Simple non-custodial Wallet. Even with DLT at its core, the implementation hides the complexity and makes it look like any day to day banking app. An enterprise and a more feature-rich version of the wallet are also in the works.
Apart from the products being developed at BitHyve, mention a few services/ areas where BiyHyve has helped organisations in Blockchain management and Crypto- currency technology?
We have been experimenting with cutting-edge technologies in this space since inception. We have done a lot of research on protocol layer technologies and extension protocols like lightning networks and side-chains, smart contracts and exchange integration feasibility.
We have specifically helped big financial organizations in Europe and North
America lay down their technology roadmaps, identified the best geographies for them, researched compliance and customer on-boarding requirements in these geographies and helped them integrate with banking layers like payments and open banking APIs.
Provide us with a success story in which the client’s requirements were successfully met by BitHyve.
Recently, Team Bithyve was invited to present a White Paper on Distributed Wallet Security at the Blockchain village at Defcon 2019 in Las Vegas. The feedback we received was highly positive and significantly validated our hypotheses and efforts we’ve been making in the space, i.e., the need of a secure, non-custodial but easy to use financial app. The timing of the event was great as it happened to be exactly when we launched the beta version of Hexa Wallet. It was quite an exciting month as we were invited to apply for the bootcamp(s) and accelerator program(s) like LibraCamp, Y-Combinator, etc.
In the IT Industry, companies tend to be facing some unique challenges. Share with us some of the persistent hurdles in your domain. What strategies are you adopting to deal with such challenges?
Blockchain as a technology has a lot of use cases, but when it comes to financial implementations the biggest hurdles that companies face are around rules, regulations, taxations and legal hurdles in the space. Also, with this being a relatively new space but a fast- moving one, hiring the right candidate is always a challenge. Another area is education. There is a need to educate everyday citizens, NGOs, and governments about the positive changes that blockchain technology can create in society, something that we actively plan to pursue this year.
What is the road map that lies ahead? What has Bithyve envisioned for its future?
We aim to help Financial Institutes & Governments take informed decisions on DLT, and digital currencies. We are planning to build a community of students, self-motivated individuals, groups and institutions, who have a common goal to learn the technology and contribute to DLT and public Blockchain implementations.
