Velas DeFi Blockchain company opens regional headquarters in UAE
In a recent interview in Entrepeneur magazine, The Founders of Velas Blockchain announced that they are setting up in Dubai UAE. During the interview Alex Alexandrov and Farkhad Shagulyamov expressed their views on how they got started into crypto and why Crypto and blockchain are here to stay. Alexandrov declares. “It is going to be embedded seamlessly into your digital and physical life, and the sooner you take the time to learn more about it today, the more you will benefit in the future.”
Alexandrov is also the CEO of CoinPayments, which has been billed as “the largest altcoin payment processor and wallet solution in the world.” As he stated, “If you are an entrepreneur, you must do it, he says. “If you are a business owner, you must do it too. Sooner or later, people won’t be able to avoid it. Everything that connects us globally will be heavily reliant on the blockchain. There is already talk about biometric passports running on the blockchain specifically due to the COVID-19 pandemic; it’s just another example of how the tech is being used other than through payment systems.”
He came across bitcoin very early on in 2012 as he started mining and then later on went int the bitcoin mining equipment market and later on CoinPayments. he states, “We entered the sector in 2013 with the pursuit and goal of becoming the dominant payment processor across the planet, and to make life easier for everyone to store, send, and receive payments in digital currencies that we envisioned were the future.” CoinPayments has grown tenfold per year since 2016, with the enterprise stating it currently processes over $2 billion a month in total volume. With more than three million users in total (of which one million are active users), the platform currently accepts 2,095 different kinds of cryptocurrencies, with its offerings used by more than 70,000 merchants in over 200 countries around the world. But for all the success the platform is seeing today, it’s good for the entrepreneurs reading this to remember how Alexandrov got started on this enterprise in the first place.
Much like Alexandrov, Shagulyamov has had quite an entrepreneurial bent of mind as well. Shagulyamov started his career by building a payment and technology company in China, of which he was Chairman for three years. In 2016, he became acquainted with cryptocurrency, and he soon made his first investments into the space. Shortly after, he decided to make this into a business, where he and his partners in the wealth management sector in Zurich, Switzerland, created the first crypto international security identification number (ISIN). Later that same year, Shagulyamov set up a regulated crypto brokerage firm in the country (which is still active today), and he then went on to organize a large-scale crypto event during the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017, which brought leaders in the industry together with global leaders and economic powerhouses. This gathering happened through the first major bull run for the sector, and this event took the entire crypto realm to a newfound global platform.
Alexandrov explains that Velas came into being after he and his team identified a need in the industry for a fast, scalable blockchain on which many services can be built on top of, while also integrating cross-chain, which refers to the interoperability between two relatively independent blockchains. Velas has thus been built on the idea of decentralized finance (or DeFi, as it’s more popularly known), with Alexandrov saying that its open-sourced blockchain ecosystem of products and services is an enabler for any kind of tokenization project. “We also have built something called a ‘container system,’ which allows for the cross-chain deposit and withdrawal of funds from other blockchains,” he adds. “There are other projects working on this, but we differentiate ourselves based on our speed and low transaction costs. Fastest, cheapest, bestin- class: it’s how we do things at Velas.”
According to the interview , Alexandrov is now planning to continue his entrepreneurial pursuits based out of the Middle East. He is currently residing in Dubai UAE and the headquarters of Velas Blockchain. As he explains, “The Middle East is a very forwardthinking part of the world that wants to be the definitive global financial and technological hub. Dubai and Abu Dhabi want entrepreneurs to view this part of the world as the new Silicon Valley, and they have provided the legal and financial basis to make this possible. It is literally the single best place for any entrepreneur to be, even those outside of the crypto sector.”
Shagulyamov adds, “The the best is yet to come! Velas is going to be a major part of the future of blockchain, and we are here to stay.”
