Interview with Matthias Klees, CEO/Maintainer of Europecoin, Localcrypto, Financecloud API

Bitcoin Garden interviewed Matthias Klees who is CEO/Maintainer of Europecoin, Localcrypto, Financecloud API (Federated Blockchains). Being financially independent, he devotes his entire time to Internet, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency projects. His passion is driven by his deep political and social believes in a decentralized, open, autonomous and self-organizing society. He contributes, among others, articles and interviews to Coin Telegraph, Bitcoin Garden and Altcoin Today.

BG) Tell us about EuropeCoin – what do you guys do? 

MK) We are building a global oriented currency, that has an extended agenda, to make it easier, to deal with Europe, without the needs of trade agreements.

We are building an expert advisor board around our coin, that works as grassroots lobbyists, to educate decision makers in Brussels. As a registered and listed advisor group of the European Union we are currently working with the EIF (European Investment Fund), to launch a side-chain on Europecoin as official payment method for startup micro-funding.

We are dedicated to reduce social, economical and political borders to connect between people, businesses, countries, blockchains and currencies. On the technical level, we are running a hardware and two software labs to keep innovating towards these goals. Our two major products are the Europecoin cryptocurrency itself and a finance service-bus protocol, that emerges from a mesh-network of hardware encrypted user devices called “The Financecloud”.

BG) Where did the inspiration for EuropeCoin come from?

MK) I have been working for five years as an advisor for members of the European Parliament and for some connected CSR organizations. In this time I was able to experience the systemic problems, as well as the chances of the concept and structure of the European Union. I never got rid of the desire, to do something about that, but I did not want to be political restricted to any party’s policy.

Europecoin has been launched in 2014 as an insane and spectacular financial fraud. It was dead for over half a year, after the founder vanished, when I started to see an opportunity. So in 2015 I rebooted the network, notified the shareholders, who already had lost hope and announced a takeover of the project.

BG) Apart from as an investment, who would receive the most value by investing in your ICO? 

MK) Everybody, involved, I would like to hope. The project is related to a cause. It will just be able to achieve its goals, when we manage to be profitable for our shareholders, our users and for our own economic independence. For now, we are planning an ICO as a backup plan, in case we are not able to acquire an investor, who shares our vision. We prefer an investor, because it reduces the amount of opinions and expectations to a manageable amount of parties.

BG) How does EuropeCoin differentiate itself from its competitors (if there are any)?

Besides the fact, that we are the only coin, that is directly convertible into physical Gold, we are setting apart, through:

Europecoin as a wallet (beware, this is getting slightly technical):

1. Unique, effective and power saving algorithm, “AES Patternsearch” that, by locking the memory, is bound to CPU-mining.
2. “Bitbreak Blockchain Shield”, an in-house development, that prevents the blockchain from stopping in case of low mining rate. In fact the coin is able to move itself without any help.
3. DK3 diff retargeting, an in-house development, that has, other than usually one retargeting thread, two threads. Theyare checking against each other and are leveraging the mining difficulty in nearly real-time, to prevent attacks.
4. “Termdeposit” a method, to generate 5% interests, without any energy consumption. This is why we are the only cryptocurrency, that can even generate interests on your smart phone, without touching the battery. For the user this process feels like something, he is used to, from his banking experience. He simply locks his coins for a chosen period, so, that he can’t move them, and he receives the interests, as a reward, for reducing the supply of coins on the market.

The Financecloud API:

Besides our unique agenda, we are following the paradigm, that features shall not be located inside the boundaries of a blockchain, but in a protocol, just like it is done on the Internet. We are having a technology for that, that is called the “Internet-of-Coins”, that enables cross coin transactions and connections. In fact, the Financecloud API is able, to even connect and transact to blockchains, that are totally unknown to our network.

The Financecloud Device:

This product follows, as I mentioned our idea, that functions should be placed best, into an “inter blockchain” protocol, rather than into any currencies core. The protocol should be as open, universal and accessible, as possible, for any service, person or blockchain and should be working invisible for the user. This is why Financecloud API results in an easy device for your home network. When plugged into your router, it can provide a hardware-encrypted, secure interface. The interface should be easy, but powerful. To be able to do so, it should provide an “user”, a “merchant” and a “professional” mode. The user finds under a single unified dashboard, everything he needs for any form of transaction, function or service without the need to search find or visit a website. He can simply choose it from an app-store (wallets, banking, merchant tools, b2b federation, exchange client, trading intelligence, FOREX gateway, payment gateway, point-of-sales and more). First developer devices are planned, to be delivered at the end of June and our goal is to finish the final product in December 2018.

BG) How have you grown EuropeCoin presence in the market?

MK) When I started, there was just this idea, to build an expert group around this coin. I was about three months in the cryptocurrency space and had not the slightest idea about what I was doing. The Financecloud API is a concept, that emerged from a nearly two year thought process. The need to maintain trust in the meantime gave my project a culture, to communicate every thought, every success and every failure to the community in real-time, without any exception. Because there hasn’t been an ICO or pre-mine, I also had to deal with limited resources and did not make any commercial or paid advertisement. Instead, I remembered my 12 years experience in social guerrilla marketing tactics and started building a twitter network, that today has a reach of 2 million users per Tweet. I mixed this potential with a more than daily reporting behavior across different social network channels, managed to engage users and to build up a network of collaborations.

BG) How is your team structured? What benefits do you believe that brings?

MK) The first year I started I have been a lonely one-man show. Because of the need to collaborate, I found a coin, that has been in a similar position. It was also the result of a takeover. While I was in the need of a developer, he was missing a networking and marketing expert. So we joined our projects. This was such a success, that two other coin teams and then users, which have been experts in different fields, felt the need to join. Today, about 18 months later, we are a networked structure of four leaders, seven development teams, a hardware lab with 3-d printing and prototyping and a printing studio, managing five coins with totally different use cases, concepts and agendas. Every single coin Bitsend/BSD, Europecoin/ERC, Diamond/DMD, Bitcloud/BTCX and Bitcore/BTX is the embodiment of the vision of one of our members. They are all managed individually, but are sharing the common power of shared resources and collaboration. We are having a shared team fund, but there has never been exchanged a single penny for any service we needed. This created such an abundance of possibilities, that we even helped countless foreign projects across the community, to rescue themselves and to fix their technical and structural problems.

BG) What are the biggest challenges in the industry you have had to overcome?

MK) Explaining my vision. Sounds funny today, but this has been the longest and most painful learning process: How to make things, that are complex, simple to understand. But this process was at the same time the force, that pushed me towards defining my goals and to focus my actions. I am today a person, that is completely different from the person I was, when starting this project. In that sense it is a journey of personal development.

BG) How have you found starting a cryptocurrency and trying to take your company global?

MK) Very simple. Being global is the new normal. It makes absolutely no sense, to plan a business with geographical, social or economical borders in mind. In modern times, this is true for most businesses that exist. Since currencies have started to separate themselves from states, they are facing the same reality: Be global or die, the most connected wins.

BG) What’s next for EuropeCoin? Do you have plans to grow, expand or diversify?

MK) Some are focusing technical innovation, or they are working, to be connected to as may services as possible, while again others are collecting features. There are very few, that are aware, that only those will survive, that are able to do it all and to do it perfectly. Luckily the real race, did not even start. When it will start, it will start with slaughtering projects. Yes we will diversify. We will do so, by building upon the Financecloud API network. We will integrate every service, product and currency one by one. Because as I said: The winner is the most connected one.

BG) Where would you ideally like to be in 5 years?

MK) Alive? Seriously, after two years of creating, planning and completing the idea of the Financecloud, this year, 2018, is the one, we are bringing it into existence. Our goal is to have a consumer ready device around the end of this year. There are still some challenges in our way, like funding. But we are having a road map, the people, and we are having successful first investor contacts. We will get there and despite from never rejecting good opportunities, to expand our reach and our portfolio, this product, is all I have in mind. Everything else will come, while we are progressing. Despite from knowing what I will do this year, in “crypto”, it sometimes just needs a single night, to wake up and to find out, that nothing will be, as it has been before.

BG) If you had to give one piece of advice to an up and coming blockchain entrepreneur, what would it be?

MK) To improve your project, always start with improving yourself. Your project always mirrors your state of personal development. Never blame the market, the user or your partners for anything you dislike, because they are, as they are. You can not change them. Make yourself aware, that in every market, there are project around you, that are dealing with the same conditions, but are not having the same problems. Therefor you are the only part of your project, that possibly can be wrong and that has to be improved. Own and love your failures, they are the only source of information, that never lie.

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