FintekNews is pleased to offer our weekly feature column "3 Questions". Each week, we feature a thought leader within a unique sector of fintech and ask them to answer just 3 questions for our audience in their vernacular. This week we are pleased to introduce you to Stephanie Kent, Founder of Krypton, a startup Blockchain-as-a-Service corporation, which will specialize in coding custom blockchains and distributed applications.
Stephanie Kent
Founder
Krypton
http://krypton.rocks
What is your role within your firm and what do you do there on any given day?
As Krypton’s founder, I do it all. There is no part of Krypton’s business that I don’t have a hand in: soliciting VC’s for Tier 1 funding, programming and pushing code updates, notifying social media, updating Krypton’s website, answering press questions, speaking at conferences and keeping the open KR community together via Krypton’s Slack and irc channels. I’m quite busy, normally 14 hours per day. Startups! lol
What are the greatest areas of growth, and the greatest challenges, for fintech in the coming 5 years?
I’m most excited about the growing prospects for micro-lending and extending more financial services to the currently unbanked. However, I believe that the $500 billion remittance market will have that largest impact within fintech in the coming years. (The biggest challenge for fintech is) (s)ecurity. This year’s $80 million cyber theft from the SWIFT financial messaging system has proven the current system of banking in need of a new business model for money transfers.
What has been the biggest failure in your firm and how did you adapt?
Krypton created a blockchain project based on the Ethereum platform as part of Krypton’s
commitment to maintaining an open-source and public chain. Some of the chain’s tokens, KR, were stolen from a coin exchange by hackers employing a newly discovered and novel type of 51% attack, specific to Ethereum-based chains.
Employing the Ethereum protocol has has proven impossible to secure KR against further attacks and Krypton was forced to swap the KR proof-of-work blockchain to a more stable Bitcoin-based proof-of-stake blockchain in order to protect investors and keep KR tokens trading. Krypton’s first project, upon receiving an initial round of funding, will be to rewrite its original platform entirely, making it more secure and once again capable of providing the technologies of smart contracts and distributed applications.
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Stephanie Kent is the Founder of Krypton, a new public distributed ledger technology platform that features smart contract functionality and decentralized applications using the digital currency, KR.