Let no one fault VELIC for lacking ambition.

“We hope that VELIC can become the JP Morgan of the digital currency industry in that we can provide a multitude of services to VELIC’s users on a single platform,” says Timothy Yang, the Chief Strategy Officer of the crypto financial services project. “Interestingly, many of the established financial institutions are interested in the digital asset business – they will be terrible competitors, but perhaps it shows that we are on the right path.”

To help achieve its goal of becoming the go-to DApp to manage your crypto assets, VELIC entered into two major partnerships this month – one with blockchain accelerator Deblock, the other with ICON. With these partnerships, VELIC can avail itself of ICON’s cutting-edge blockchain technology and wealth of experience working with enterprises, including financial institutions. ICON, meanwhile, hopes its strategic partnership with the crypto asset management project will help expand the former’s ecosystem. “VELIC has the unfair advantage as being one of the first total financial services ranging from asset management to loans,” said ICON Foundation member J.H. Kim when the partnership was announced. “As a global exchange VELIC can introduce ICON to a new global user base.”

Comprehensive, secure, accessible

VELIC takes what are currently separate services – vaults, loans, exchanges, investment and so on – and unifies them into a single “Digital Asset Financial Service.” It is a comprehensive financial ecosystem service platform, an entity Yang likens to universal banks such as the aforementioned JP Morgan, which engage in not only commercial banking but also investment banking services such as asset management, custody and financial advice.

Yang sees a need for such a comprehensive service platform in today’s crypto space. “Although there are various types of service providers on the market that offer different types of products and services to digital currency investors, the synergies between products are often overlooked,” he says. “On the VELIC platform, users can seamlessly use products and services with the same account, greatly improving the utility and user experience of financial digital asset management.”

VELIC literally spells out its vision in its name, an acronym of the services it offers: V for Vault, E for Exchange, L for Loan, I for Investment and C for Crypto. The Vault securely stores access to crypto assets, while the Exchange offers safe, transparent crypto asset trading. You can borrow or lend crypto assets at preferential rates using the Loan service, or make use of a wide range of investment products – including ETF-like investment solutions –  with the Investment service. And needless to say, all these services are based on crypto assets.

A platform offering diverse services needs a team just as diverse to build it. And that’s what VELIC affirms to have, with experts from a wide range of fields, including the finance and legal sectors. “Our core team consists of experienced quantitative, financial consulting, derivatives, and trading system development engineers and professionals,” says Yang. “We needed a team with such diverse professional backgrounds to ensure that we can implement the entire suite of financial services which we envision.”

The platform is built upon an innovative storage infrastructure that is highly secure and very accessible, two qualities commonly considered mutually exclusive. It owes its security in large part to the secret sharing protocol, in which the fragmented clues of private keys are stored separately across different nodes, eliminating a single point of failure. VELIC lays atop this an additional layer of encryption.

With a little help from my friends

VELIC will be busy in 2019. The project expects to release its full suite of services by the end of the year. In the short term, it will launch its Exchange in February, followed by its Loans and Investment products.

The two recently signed partnerships may make things easier.

Deblock is helping VELIC as an investor and accelerator. Its extensive network could allow VELIC to promote its brand on a global scale and identify even more strategic partnerships. The accelerator is helping the team develop its platform, too. “We support every detail of VELIC’s IEO journey, from very little things such as PR and marketing to big things like building strategy,” says Hyun Oh, the CEO of Deblock. “We also help in building business partnerships in Korea.” 

For its part, Deblock sees VELIC as a potentially important addition to the crypto space. “VELIC will be a bank in the crypto ecosystem, especially the ICON ecosystem,” says Oh. “This entity will add liquidity to the ecosystem. By providing a variety of financial services, VELIC will revitalize the ecosystem in a variety of ways.”

The partnership with ICON, meanwhile, opens up to VELIC a world of technical support, especially for smart contracts, a function in which VELIC has a keen interest. “We have a couple areas in our financial platform in which we envision using smart contracts, and we wanted to find a platform that has the requisite specifications as well as technical support in implementing the smart contracts,” says Yang. “We expect to leverage ICON’s expertise in smart contracts to implement our decentralized asset storage solution – and in doing so, we expect to generate ample transactions on ICON’s loopchain, thereby creating a commercial use case.”

VELIC reviewed several other smart contract platforms such as Ethereum, EOS, Hyperledger and Qtum before settling on ICON. The team was impressed not only by ICON’s technical accomplishments, but also with its experience. “ICON not only has already worked on numerous projects over the past years but also have worked specifically with financial institutions,” says Yang. “We needed someone with the necessary experience and mutual growth potential in furthering our vision, and found ICON to be the right partner.”