Modulus, a software development company active since 1997, is working on a new venture which aims to grant new start-ups the ability to quickly move to market with their own Blockchain solutions.
The firm plans within only a couple months to release a new distributed ledger platform, leveraging its years of experience in high-frequency trading and high-performance computing to produce state-of-the-art, full source code which Modulus will then license, saving start-ups and existing firms thousands of hours of engineering costs and months of time in their race to market.
Modulus is known for its diverse experience from trading A.I. development to working with NASA to provide charting technology for the International Space Station. We talked with Richard Gardner, the founder and CEO of Modulus Global, about the newest venture.
What exactly is the nature of the platform that you will offer?
We developed a customizable online distributed financial grade ledger system to give institutions the ability design their own blockchain networks that they can deploy and operate on their own hardware or in the Cloud . Our solution features ultra-high performance C++ code that is not based on open source. Potential clients can test and benchmark our blockchain technology against competing solutions before buying.
Who are the potential clients of such a platform?
Our biggest clients will be financial institutions but there are many other uses. Intellectual property can be time stamped and recorded, digital certificates of authenticity and proof of ownership can be guaranteed, titles can be transferred instantly and much more. There are many applications for blockchain technology.
How do you decide if a service is better on a blockchain than a traditional database?
A blockchain is a public decentralized transaction ledger. Imagine that a car and a van crash in the middle of an intersection and 94 of 100 witnesses say that the car ran a red light. A few witnesses couldn’t be contacted. Two witnesses lied and said the van ran the light. Is there any doubt that the car ran the light? This is the principle behind blockchain, which is essentially a ledger of digital transactions that are all shared between many different computers to arrive at a consensus. Once the data has been entered, there is a prohibitively high cost to attempt to rewrite or alter the transaction history. It is essentially a zero trust consensus network. Any system that needs this kind of security should use blockchain.
Is your platform suitable for designing smart contracts?
Smart contracts are computer protocols that create a type of unbreakable escrow that eliminates the risk of others not following through on their commitments. Blockchain makes this more secure. Our solution handles smart contracts that control assets via a scripting language. Users can encode arbitrary state transition functions by writing logic in a few lines of code. The scripting language allows users to write logic for contract terms and events that occur when there is success or failure and so forth.
When should we expect the service to be live?
We’re expecting to deliver our first solution by the beginning of May.
Back in May 2015 the group launched Modulus VC – a seed stage venture capital fund for companies at the intersection of finance and technology, investing between $100k and $10 million in each FinTech project. The venture capital fund’s offices are located in Scottsdale, Arizona.
