This 30-year-old Serial Entrepreneur is Building the Plaid of DeFi

ZILHive Accelerator

This 30-year-old Serial Entrepreneur is Building the Plaid of DeFi

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27 Oct 2021


Founded in 2013, $13 billion fintech giant Plaid revolutionized open banking. The company was one of the first to enable applications like Robinhood and Coinbase to connect with users’ bank accounts through open APIs.

Serial entrepreneur Tengku Muhammad Shah, who goes by the moniker “Moe”, hopes his latest venture can bring that same concept to the world of decentralized finance or DeFi.

Following the successful exit of a previous startup in Malaysia, Moe saw an opportunity to bring open banking to the region. Sensing a gap in the Southeast Asian fintech landscape, he started HeyAlfred in 2019 with the hopes of introducing the open banking concept pioneered by Plaid to local banks. Drawing inspiration from the billionaire vigilante’s butler, he hoped that HeyAlfred would become the go-to personal finance platform.

The startup initially secured seed funding from a few angel investors and a venture fund in Amsterdam to bring the idea to life. But after a year of trying to woo traditional banks, Moe quickly realized that banks in the region were less enthusiastic about the prospect of transparency. Moreover, they balked at the cost of having to revamp their legacy systems to support open APIs.

Moe and his team decided to rebrand to HeyAlfie last year, focusing on serving the needs of DeFi communities and platforms instead. Despite being a rapidly growing asset class built around openness and transparency, Moe saw few tools for people like him to manage their digital assets easily.

“I found it difficult to manage my assets across various DeFi platforms, wallets, and exchanges. That’s when I thought to myself: why don’t we apply the same principles of open banking to the DeFi space?” said Moe.

Today, HeyAlfie is on a mission to make DeFi easy to access by retail investors unfamiliar with decentralized exchanges or liquidity pools by providing a one-stop gateway to interact with smart contract platforms, as well as crypto exchanges.

HeyAlfie hopes to allow users to go beyond just helping users visualize and manage their portfolios. Moe explains that the team is working on features that will help users compare and find the best rates on different decentralized exchanges like Uniswap or ZILSwap.

Though the platform is still in its pilot stage, Moe is eager to see the team bring the product to market through the ZILHive Accelerator programme.

To learn more about ZILHive’s programmes, visit https://zilhive.org/.

Meet Two College Kids Using NFTs to Fight $1b in Ticketing Fraud

ZILHive Accelerator

Meet Two College Kids Using NFTs to Fight $1b in Ticketing Fraud

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27 Oct 2021

 

From flights to music festivals, having a ticket gets you on a plane to your holiday destination or into a concert hall with your favorite bands. Tickets are representations of temporary, exclusive access rights to services and events.

As a rationing device, tickets are scarce by design. There are only so many passenger seats on an airplane and only so many people that can fit into an entertainment venue. Once sold out, people desperate for access must turn to resale markets in hopes of paying a premium to acquire a ticket for themselves.

All this makes ticketing a lucrative industry – especially for scalpers and fraudsters. Scalpers artificially inflate ticket prices using bots or networks of bidders to purchase tickets en masse to resell for profit, leaving genuine customers waiting in line empty-handed. Worse, resale tickets may not even be authentic. In 2018, as many as 11 million people were victims of concert ticket scams alone. Interpol estimated that the airline industry’s losses from the fraudulent online purchases of flight tickets had reached close to USD 1 billion per year.

Two college students from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) think blockchain technology can change that. Krithik Roshan and Mihir Mohan hope that their startup, Access, can help event organizers combat fraud and prevent ticket scalping by issuing tickets as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“Tokenized tickets can allow buyers to authenticate genuine tickets before they are purchased and make it possible to flag suspicious activities from fraudsters’ wallets. We can also flag scalpers whose wallets engage in the persistent reselling of tickets”, said Mihir.

The idea for Access was born when they both joined ZILHive. Through design sprints with the ZILHive team and advice from experienced professionals they met during the incubator, the pair saw how NFTs could transform ticketing. Senior executives at large nightclubs and integrated resorts they spoke with helped to expand the idea for Access beyond just fighting fraud and scalpers.

“Tickets can be so much more than just an access pass with an expiry date. Like a well-stamped passport of a frequent flier or fans flexing their concert tickets on social media – tickets can also serve as identity markers. That makes them excellent tools for building brand loyalty”, Mihir explained.

Despite the global pandemic, which has dealt a devastating blow to the travel, events, and entertainment industries, Krithik and Mihir remain undeterred. “Thankfully, we were not operating when the global shutdown hit. That has allowed us to focus on collaborating with potential customers to refine the product, so we are poised to launch when the situation recovers”, Mihir said. The team is currently developing the NFT infrastructure for a large-scale event with over 100,000 attendees, which will occur in late 2022.

To learn more about ZILHive’s programmes, visit https://zilhive.org/.