Company Name: Yetta
Leadership Team: Darrell Hubbard (Founder and Chief Innovation Officer), Marco Sachy, PhD (Chief Digital Officer), and Denis ‘Jaromil’ Roio, PhD (Chief Scientific Officer)
Website/Social Platforms: Yetta.io / Twitter (@yettaBlockchain)
Company Overview:
Yetta is a global monetary innovation and a next generation Blockchain and cryptocurrency for the FinTech Smart Economy. Yetta improves the state of the art and offers a faster, cheaper, and more enhanced electronic cash system than Bitcoin. And similar to Ethereum, Yetta also has its own virtual machine for developing and deploying smart contracts and decentralized applications (DAPPS). Our focus is on building and deploying decentralized applications (DAPPS) and Smart Contracts marketplaces for the financial, investment, and money servicing industries, and spanning public, private, social and civic sectors. A DAPP on yetta Blockchain is similar to an APP on a smart phone, but more specialized toward financial transactions, such as transferring money (think Venmo) and other applications. The distinction is Mobile Apps run and store data on a local mobile device, whereas DAPPS run and store data over a decentralized Blockchain. We are collaborating with progressive product owners and web portals to migrate their existing FinTech applications to the yetta Blockchain.
How do you collaborate with existing FinTech applications and help them move to the yetta Blockchain?
We start by getting to know their business and exploring areas where Blockchain or cryptocurrency offer a compelling business case to improve their business performance. Our work can narrowly focus on a single service, process or function or be transformative across many aspects of their business and customers. We’re just getting started and excited about partnership opportunities.
Here are examples of ways we may help a partner: automate the way they manage and pay vendors, issue financing, collect loan payments, distribute benefits, pay dividends, track the movement and ownership of goods within their supply chain, etc. Any kind of conditional contract such as an “if you do this, I’ll pay you that” understanding can be automated with smart contracts and executed automatically over the Blockchain. Adopting Blockchain and cryptocurrency into a product offering can totally reshape how the stakeholders, systems, and business processes interact.
What progress has Yetta made so far?
We have started to develop Killer Apps to build up our offerings. Killer Apps are the bread and butter applications for a company. They are generally the initial portfolio of applications a company launches to gain use and traction in their platform or business. Examples of our current list of Killer Apps include Trade Finance, Private Placements, Lending, Charitable Contributions, and Tax Payments.
The same way Microsoft and Apple developed and deployed Killer Applications, such as Word, Power Point, and iTunes to increase relevance and use of their operating systems, Yetta is building Killer Apps with specific use cases for the yetta Blockchain and Smart Contracts Virtual Machine. Once we gain significant market traction with our own Killer Apps, we will open our APIs to outside developers to build additional DAPPS on the yetta Blockchain.
What is the inspiration for your company?
Yetta is a next generation Blockchain and cryptocurrency with global capitalistic appeal and a social conscience. It is inspired and designed to accelerate capitalism and commerce and to improve the quality and well-being of life for citizens around the globe. I asked myself “what could poorer striving economies have achieved had they had been among the early Bitcoin buyers. Perhaps Bitcoin could have stamped out world hunger.” That’s when I decided to create an advanced, next generation Blockchain that was faster, cheaper, and better than Bitcoin and accessible to people from all over the world.
Sustainability is a fundamental strategic objective of Yetta and we elected to align Yetta with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As such we are implementing a technical architecture, monetization model and governance structure that ensures Yetta is economically, socially, environmentally, and politically sustainable by design.
How is yetta more sustainable than other Blockchains?
This is our plan for sustainability.
1) Economic sustainability: We generate use and demand for yetta through our DAPPS and limit yetta supply to create scarcity and potential for value accretion. DAPPS are designed to handle millions of transactions per day with specific uses cases for businesses, governments and citizens. DAPPS make it easy, fast and affordable to transact in yetta and spread use and ubiquity of yetta.
2) Social Sustainability: We adopt monetary policies that support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). For example, one of these SDGs is “Reduced Inequalities”. Yetta helps achieve this goal by making financial services, such as sending money home to family members and micro-lending, more accessible and affordable in poorer countries. Yetta helps achieve these goals through money transfer apps and an affordable pricing structure.
3) Environmental Sustainability: Yetta helps achieve environmental sustainability by providing economic incentives for our Cyphernodes to operate in clean energy data centers. Also our technical architecture drastically reduces the power required to maintain the integrity of the Blockchain by using Proof of Stake and Proof of Trust algorithms instead of the power hungry Proof of Work algorithms of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
4) Political Sustainability: Yetta achieves political sustainability through its decentralized governance model, which allows the yetta Blockchain to be continuously fine-tuned over generations of time to meet the evolving needs of our the global community.
When did the company start? How did the team come together?
Yetta is a spinout of research and development funded by the European Union dating back to 2014. However, we did not officially form Yetta until 2017.
When I conceived my vision described above I started researching the history of money, social currencies, and the ecology of money. Then I started researching which organizations where the most progressive in using digital currencies for social good; and I learned of Dyne.org.
Dyne had already received millions of dollars from the European Union to research and develop a more robust Blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptocurrency technology more suitable for large governments and private sector adoption.
When I approached Dyne with my vision to deploy a next generation cryptocurrency with global capitalistic appeal yet with a social conscience, they were quite eager and excited to align with me on this mission.
As such, much of the Dyne team has elected to join the Yetta family, including their Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer, Denis ‘Jaromil’ Roio.
Who is your competition and how do you distinguish your company?
Bitcoin and Ripple are our competition for digital Blockchain-based payments.
Yetta is faster, cheaper, and better than Bitcoin with enhanced privacy and security. With yetta, users can pay merchants in yetta or cash. The ability to shield merchants from the volatility of cryptocurrency when accepting yetta make us very attractive to retail channels.
Ethereum is also competition as a Smart Contracts development platform. The same Bitcoin advantages are also applicable to Ethereum. Our most compelling advantage over Ethereum is our enhanced privacy and security architecture. Yetta enforces privacy by design and is the only Blockchain that is EU GDPR Compliant.
Ethereum has captured over ninety percent (90%) of the Smart Contracts Platform market share with their ERC-20 token standard for creating and deploying new virtual currencies.
What’s missing with Ethereum’s ERC-20 token is governance and regulatory compliance. We believe our new token standard for issuing regulatory compliant Security Token Offerings (STOs) and Utility Token Offerings (UTOs) will capture a significant share of this market. Yetta is a spinout of European Union funded Research and Development and is the only private sector cryptocurrency to garner such major governmental support.
Why is governance and regulatory compliance important?
Bitcoin and the onslaught of follow-on cryptocurrencies viewed themselves as unregulated virtual technologies unbound to government and banking regulations, oversight, and control.
Yetta took quite the opposite view and embraced banking and governmental regulations from the start. We are convinced our path to global dominance will be integrating yetta into the real-world of fiat currencies. As such, we are working with banks to provide a frictionless use case where stakeholders of yetta can seamlessly use their yetta to make fiat purchases.
The European Union really likes our yetta-to-Euro cash solution and as such has recommended yetta as a digital currency to all 28 Member States.
What is your connection to the Carolinas and why do you operate here?
I grew up in North Carolina from the 3rd grade through college. I received my Bachelors from NC Wesleyan College and my Masters from NC State University. I simply decided to stay in NC to contribute back to the State that gave me my start in the world.
Why are the Carolinas a good place to do business? Given the amount of traction that Yetta has gotten in the EU, is it difficult to operate in NC? How do you overcome that?
The Carolinas is becoming a more progressive region when it comes to FinTech and technology startups. NC is one of the few States to recently enact virtual currency laws and recognizes virtual currency is a viable payment method for money remittance service providers.
Yetta is a global initiative and will have offices around the world as we continue to grow. Although I am located in North Carolina that has not prohibited growing our team in Europe and Switzerland. I believe all technology companies should conduct business in a manner that is conducive to global localization.
The majority of my team is in Europe and they are empowered to handle business in that region as required. To date I have not experienced any difficulties other than the enjoyment of frequent international travel.
What have been your recent Accomplishments and Challenges?
The European Commission voted to adopt yetta as a solution for their 28 Member States for their social currency initiatives, such as Universal Basic Income. The EU recently published an article advocating their support for yetta. The EU studied Bitcoin and Ethereum quite intently given they were the market leaders. However, the EU wanted a cryptocurrency that considered both social and economic ethos in their design. They wanted a cryptocurrency with progressive monetary policies that would be long-term affordable and attractive to all countries, not just the most developed countries.
Yetta is the only cryptocurrency on the market that has such an aggressive capitalistic mission that is also socially, economically, environmentally, and politically sustainable by design.
We were also recognized by the World Economic Forum for our innovation and leadership.
How have being recognized by the European Commission and the World Economic Forum changed Yetta?
Being officially embraced and supported by the European Commission is very encouraging. They have been proactive in involving Yetta in many of the EU Blockchain initiatives. We look forward to our continued productive relationship with the European Union. And further, we also look forward to other governments and private sector industries embracing Yetta.
Being recognized by the EU and the World Economic Forum have really set our brand apart from the crowd. It has opened the pathway for the industry to take a closer look at what we are doing. It’s quite exciting.
Are there any challenges in operating in an industry that is very “hot” right?
Absolutely. There are general market risks in every industry. And regardless of how your company is positioned, investors and industry participants may weigh the general market conditions more heavily than your favorable position.
As a seasoned entrepreneur, I get excited when I enter an industry that has lots of uncertainty, or is engulfed in turmoil and confusion. For me those are the most exciting and lucrative opportunities – at least for those who embrace the right side of it.
What is Next? For you, the industry, the next 5 years?
The technology underlying yetta has been in development since 2014. We have aligned ourselves with strategic development partners. We are now looking forward to introducing yetta to the marketplace in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to secure the funding needed to scale and deploy our technology globally.
We look forward to providing leadership in applying regulatory compliance to Blockchain-based applications. We see many opportunities to lead and shape the industry in how to embrace regulatory requirements in a decentralized technological environment.
We also seek to establish more strategic development partners to establish yetta as the global Blockchain for FinTech applications across the public, private, and social and civic sectors.
What challenges do you anticipate Yetta will face?
Bitcoin has fundamentally changed the world and deserves all the applause for being a disruptive and transformative digital currency. Nonetheless, in all of my years of experience in technology and innovation, I understand the first-mover’s disadvantage.
We are excited by the opportunity to build an extensive global network of users, Cyphernodes and partners who are as passionate as we are about Yetta’s values, mission and brand.
