By Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO and Co-Owner at INSART
Website: | https://www.hydrogenplatform.com/ |
Established: | 2017 |
Value proposition: | Building sophisticated FinTech products from one API platform |
Hydrogen’s very first product was a two-factor authentication security layer called Raindrop, and a mobile app will be out soon. Clients will be able to download or integrate the services into the mobile app, and then use Hydrogen for two-factor authentication. There is an obvious benefit to this: clients can more seamlessly secure their log-ins and payment or transaction portals by using Raindrop, which is built on top of Ethereum. The team is carrying out some truly innovative work to provide more security and transparency and are using some newer technologies from which clients can benefit. Since Hydrogen uses public blockchain and its contracts are open-source, clients can take these connectors from GitHub and actually connect them to their apps outside of Hydrogen. They can then set those to any other APIs they want. Hydrogen is aiming to build a very clean API set focused on the product, and not seeing a lot of heavy backend infrastructure. Hydrogen has an auto-issue-learning API. Similar products require a lot of data science people on the team, but it doesn’t really have to be that way. This is why Hydrogen is creating more auto machine learning. For instance, if a client wants to make his or her application more intelligent, such as a risk profiling or alert system, he or she needs a data science team to understand what kind of data is needed and what algorithms should be used. Hydrogen’s library will automate this process. It’s very similar to the work going on the blockchain side.“The blockchain part is built on Ethereum, so Hydrogen is basically using a lot of the Ethereum infrastructure and condensing it.”
Most of the blockchain is in the hands of the developers, and there are very few products that use blockchain because to make the most of it one needs to have a very broad, fundamental understanding of this technology to be able to program on top of it. The same is true for machine learning: there are probably 100,000 real data scientists in the US, so it makes it very hard to use a lot of these functions and products. Hydrogen brings innovative technology to the masses, allowing non-blockchain developers to use the technology.“We’re just trying to make the AI more usable, so if you’re building the actual applications, you can now use blockchain with just an API call, and you could use machine learning with an API call.”
You need a very small data science to go forward with the Hydrogen Ion API.“We’re trying to be a little bit ahead of the market by assuming that product and business people are going to use our APIs.”
Formal partnership program
At this point, Hydrogen has relationships with several consulting firms. The solution focuses on customization and control for the clients unlike many of the more white-label approaches on the market. Hydrogen has carried out work with clients in India, Chile, and Canada. To enable clients to get to know the product better, Hydrogen conducts workshops, product requirement gatherings, and training on the APIs. Once a client is ready to start building and implementing, Hydrogen provides some support. If more in-depth implementations are required, one of the consulting firms is brought in. The market needs someone who wants to build something faster, lighter, and cheaper. Hydrogen has all the necessary resources to transform the way companies use cloud-connected APIs to scale their business.Interviewed by Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO and co-owner at INSART, FinTech & Java engineering company. Vasyl is also the author of WealthTech Club, which conducts research into Fortune and Startup Robo-advisor and Wealth Management companies in terms of the technology ecosystem.