CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with founder of Newrl, Mr. Swapnil Pawar.
- Tell us about launching Newrl. What problem does the company aspire to solve?
Newrl is a layer-1 blockchain built as a ‘Trust Network’ for mainstream DeFi – focused on financial inclusion. Newrl’s mission is to have DeFi for mass adoption, which is hard on the current blockchain infrastructure due to anonymity and lack of accountability.
2. At Newrl, what is your unique selling proposition? How is your partnership with MOVEM going to benefit consumers?
Newrl is a decentralized trust network – a social graph of identifiable real individuals and small businesses. It is like: WhatsApp meets Ethereum meets Credit bureau
- a decentralized social network that enables you to transact value
- as well as collaborate in decentralized manner and
- alters your trust score based on honesty of your behaviour
- Newrl’s key differentiators –
a. Identity
b. Compliance
c. Social graph
d. No-code DAOs, DEXes and Liquidity Pools
On our partnership with MOVEM –
With this partnership, Newrl aims to increase the number of users and transactions through the chain. With the total market size for remittance being $100 billion and 90% of transactions happening from the US to India, NRIs working abroad would be able to save a significant amount of the money they send back home; the expectation for every 1000 INR is a saving of a minimum INR 40. Thus, this will not only regularize the intermittent trend of money flowing into the country but also smoothen the FDI flow curve, in turn stabilizing the economic cycle in the Indian market. Furthermore, the solution is KYC-based and all the parties are known to the application and available for verification by the regulators if the need arises. The entire process is digital and people need to maintain basic security practices while using any internet-banking application.
3. Tell us about your recently launched KYC solutions. How is it expected to remove anonymity and enable compliance on public blockchains?
The solution is built in a manner where businesses don’t have to necessarily integrate the KYC solution within their own application which relieves them from any security concerns. Users themselves will be responsible for keeping KYC records and information in their database for frequent and easy access.
The information is readily available for existing and new businesses, by requesting users to provide temporary “view-only” access. Even from the consumer perspective, the process has been simplified where they don’t have to verify their KYC multiple times. No other blockchain at present enforces KYC norms at the chain level. Owing to their libertarian foundation starting with Bitcoin, most public blockchains are built on the premise of anonymity. While this avoids the censorship, it also opens these chains to abuse by money launderers and terrorist financiers.
Newrl addresses concerns by incorporating digital fingerprints of KYC documents (called “hashes”) for each wallet on it, along with information about the jurisdiction of the owner. The wallet owner is required to either use a centralised authentication service or use a non-custodial wallet application to ensure authenticity of the KYC documents. Actual documents, and information like name and tax-id, however, are not public. In this way, Newrl manages to maintain privacy while still ensuring adherence to KYC/AML norms.
4. There are reports of India to finalize its stance on the legality of cryptocurrency by Q1 2023. What are your thoughts on the subject?
We think of it as a welcome change for the entire community that has been tiptoeing in the grey area for a while. Whatever the consensus, as long as it defines the structure properly and allows for changes via feedback mechanisms post a trial market run, we believe it can propel India into one of the leaders in global cryptocurrency/blockchain domains.
To ensure that the markets are not shocked into a hard landing, it is necessary to have some though leaders in the panel who understand the new age development and can develop a proper law structure around it. Apart from this, we are also eagerly awaiting the final stance from government of India, and as we have talked about earlier, Newrl is already ahead of the curve in terms of compliance with its KYC on chain and other AML features.
5. What role does technology play in your business?
Newrl as a layer-1 blockchain is heavily dependent on new age technology and we embrace change. But we also keep in mind the real world applications of these technologies and how to connect the to our traditional use cases such that maximum number of people can make use of these advantages. This is what sets Newrl apart from its competition. We do not blindly race for an upgrade but want the entire community to benefit from each incremental upgrade.
