Catching up with Catallact: Making Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies More Transparent
By: Frank Yu
Tags: Catallact, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin

In the coming months, we expect to see an increasing number of legacy financial institutions and more traditional funds entering the cryptocurrency space. One of the most important elements they will need to consider in order to keep their shareholders and regulators satisfied will be insight and intelligence on capital flows, KYC (know your customer), AML (anti-money laundering) and transaction surveillance in blockchains. Today, one can get segmented and disparate transaction data from exchanges, but getting better visibility on what actually happens in crypto transactions and flows remains a challenge. One of the companies that has set out to solve this problem is Catallact.

A few months ago, Catallact attended the dlab blockchain accelerator as part of the inaugural cohort. One of dlab’s partners, Emurgo, wrote a great background on the company here explaining who they were and their entry into the accelerator program.

Paul Lewis (l) and Dan McGinn (r)

I caught up with Paul Lewis from Catallact and asked him several questions about life after dlab and what new developments has emerged since they graduated from program a few months ago.

Paul: “We have been pretty busy these last few weeks building up our demo to be more of a product that we can give to our early customers to try and evaluate. When we were in the accelerator, we met and listened to what customers wanted and the features that they would like to see implemented. We heard them and we are in the process of putting those features into the current build. Our goal has always been to build in a modular way based on the feedback that we heard and getting these new features into the hands of the traders and analyst so we can iterate on what works for them and improve it more.”

I asked Paul to outline the core value that they want to provide to their customers and to the industry that they will support.

“It is very simple really. We know that cryptocurrencies will emerge as a standard asset class in the future to be held in institutional portfolios as well as used as a medium of exchange for buying and selling other assets both crypto and non-crypto. If you look at other asset classes such as fiat currencies, equities and fixed income, we see many options for tracking, charting and analyzing these assets. However, in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, we still need more in-depth analysis of data not just from the exchanges but from the blockchains themselves. We can use the data in the blockchain to provide more transparency on the transactions but also provide more insight rather than just signals on what is happening on the blockchain itself. We will take that mass of data and process it into knowledge and insight for our customers in an automated scalable way. We will look at the large transaction, find trends in capital flow and provide insights that customers can compare with historical data to help them better manage their portfolios.”

Catallact has spent time in New York and London meeting with people in the blockchain/crypto industry, so I wanted know what things he thought were the most exciting in the blockchain or cryptocurrency space?

“I may be biased but we will be seeing more adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain by financial institutions in futures and investment funds. Moreover, we will see more family offices and corporates continue to enter this space as that wild west mentality fades. The regulations are also getting clearer and better defined and we see this trend to continue. The concept of #Defi (Decentralized Finance) will continue to drive the use of crypto in finance and all these people will need analytics in this space. That is exciting!”

Finally, what is next for Catallact in the next few months?

“Well, we will continue to build the product and that means coding, crunching and iterating. We are also on the lookout for great developers and data scientists. In addition, we will be building up the Catallact community which means we will find the audience that is just as excited as we are for this space and find ways to keep them updated on what we are doing and also to collect their opinions and feedback as we release more features and expand on the product. As we build this community we will grow and adapt to both the market but also the various features that we want to implement and release. Very exciting times but there are only 24 hours in a day right?”

Thank you very much Paul and Dan for your time and we look forward to hearing more about Catallact in the coming months!