Marcus Richards
Aventus is a scalable, sustainable and interoperable blockchain that makes building on Polkadot, Ethereum and beyond accessible for companies in any ecosystem.
To date, our’ enterprise-grade modular architecture has supported use cases including NFTs, video games, loyalty schemes, event ticketing, supply chain provenance and cargo management with over 17 million transactions and 8 million active wallets.
Tell us about yourself?
The idea for Aventus originated while I was completing my Master’s in Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London.
I approached Professor William Knottenbelt, Director of the Cryptocurrency Research Centre at Imperial, with my ideas to apply certain Artificial Intelligence algorithms to Bitcoin price prediction. Ethereum had just launched, and he told me Bitcoin is old news, and that I should look to the future and explore Ethereum.
I spent the subsequent year researching and completing my Master’s thesis on Ethereum and specifically its potential application to film rights distribution with BAFTA and the UK’s Film Network. It was then that I conceived the idea for the technology underpinning the Aventus Network.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Prioritise maintaining discipline and (perhaps more importantly) continuously reigniting your passion for what you do. Remind yourself of your ‘why’. When you’re a start-up, you don’t always have the luxury as CEO of taking a step back. You’re tech, marketing, product and HR – sometimes all at the same time.
And it’s easy to get sucked into the day-to-day monotony of ensuring the business runs smoothly. But it’s also your job to make sure the business is moving in the right direction towards the high level vision you’ve set, and that everyone who has chosen to become part of your team has bought into.
What problem does your business solve?
We solve two problems.
The first is a lack of interoperability. Currently, the blockchain industry is rolling out much like the internet did, where there was siloed value in various intranets which, when connected up by the internet, led to an explosion in value through the network effect.
Blockchain is the same today. Various blockchains all need to be connected so value can seamlessly transfer everywhere.
Aventus’ focus on interoperability aims to solve this issue. We’re interoperable with Ethereum, Polkadot and beyond – so anyone who builds on Aventus can ‘talk’ to other blockchains operating on these systems.
We’re also hoping to become a parachain on Polkadot this year – which would mean that Aventus would be interoperable with all the other parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem.
The second problem is user experience. The siloed value problem and the immaturity of the industry in general are leading to a poor user & developer experience, which is slowing down blockchain adoption. Our approach at Aventus is one of simplicity and ease of use.
We have created building blocks that make leveraging the benefits of blockchain as easy as possible, such as our Gateway API, which provides a familiar web API entry point to the Network for integrating third-party applications and building new Aventus Network-native products.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
The entertainment industry had been plagued with scalpers and fraudulent tickets, among other issues for which blockchain technology was more than apt for.
So Aventus, at its inception, was an open-source, decentralised Ethereum-based ticketing protocol designed to alleviate fraud and touting in the event ticketing industry.
We quickly realised that the applications of our technology extended far beyond ticketing. So we extended and adapted it to solve problems ingrained within other aspects of commerce including loyalty, vouchers, financial assets and virtual goods – essentially any industry or supply chain focused on digital assets.
Blockchain, when applied intelligently, can solve problems around efficiency, security, standardisation, transparency and cost for all of these industries, and that’s what Aventus aims to do.
What is your magic sauce?
The crypto and blockchain industry has developed somewhat of a bad reputation, because a number of players have built their communities up largely based on hype, relying on the power of the internet to spread the word and get people involved without the robust tech to back it up. We’ve always put fundamentals first over hype.
While others were spending all their dollars on marketing, we were working on building tech that added real-world value, and letting our products and their applications speak for themselves – trusting that our community would grow organically as those involved in the space saw our utility.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our ultimate goal is to ensure widespread blockchain adoption, and that the most effective way to do that is to do that is on the public markets. So the goal for the next five years is to IPO and take the company public, to bring our vision to as many people as possible.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Because of our philosophy of prioritising fundamentals over hype, the vast majority of our team (including myself!) come from very technical backgrounds.
But with the goal of bringing blockchain to enterprise, most of the people we’re speaking to are CEOs, who need to understand the value that blockchain can bring to their business from a commercial perspective, not just a technical one – so finding the bridge between technical world and commercial world and learning the language that will resonate with our target audience has probably been the biggest challenge.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Those that believe in our vision and want to support the growth, functionality and security of the Aventus Network can become part of the community by joining our Telegram (https://t.me/Aventus_Official).
They can also follow our blog (https://www.aventus.io/blog/) for the latest updates from our team.
