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BLOCKCHAIN STANDS TO BRING ABOUT WIDESPREAD SOCIETAL CHANGE. DR. KRISTIAN HAEHNDEL IS LEADING THE CHARGE ON APPLYING THE TECHNOLOGY FOR GOOD, AND SPEAKS TO THE BLOCK IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW.

What is DQR’s genesis?

Strangely enough, part of my answer is in your question because Genesis Mining, the world’s leading crypto mining company, cofounded DQR.

Marco Streng, Dr. Marco Krohn – Genesis Mining’s founders – our other partners, and I share a common dream of bringing back the blockchain ecosystem closer to Satoshi Nakamoto’s original philosophy.

The idea behind Bitcoin was formed following the 2008 crisis. It became obvious that letting a few hundred people – those running the central banks and the biggest financial institutions – decide the future of more than 7 billion individuals did not make sense. The decentralised technology known as the blockchain that was invented to support one of the first cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, holds in its DNA the promise of redistributing power to everyone.

But like with the Internet, a few actors tried to take advantage of this technology for pure personal gain. We, therefore, felt that the market was in need of a group whose goal is to return to the core ethos of blockchain and its original vision of decentralisation and egalitarianism.

How is DQR bringing something new to the crypto ecosystem?

Offering a cryptocurrency exchange is an essential piece of this puzzle as it is the one that generates income, and we need to create wealth before we can redistribute it. But if our vision is to empower people, we also need two other critical pillars: education and a foundation.

Education is our first mission. We want to explain how decentralised technology may shift power back to the people and allow a more inclusive financial system. Giving back is more than a second mission for us – it is the heart of our project and the main reason why we launched the DQR group.

It is true that extreme poverty has been radically reduced in 200 years. We have gone from 94% of the worldwide population living in extreme poverty to only 10%, but we still have so much left to do. We will, therefore, dedicate a significant part of our revenue towards reducing global poverty thanks to our blockchain-based foundation. Powered by decentralised technology, our foundation won’t be under our control, but under that of our customers, who will decide and vote on how to allocate the funds to the humanitarian projects they support.

Where does your name come from?

DQR means Digital Quantitative Research. The company was originally conceived by Dr Anthony Jefferies, Dr Torsten Frank and I to research cryptocurrencies and related technologies. We then broadened the scope of the company but the roots of our project are still deeply ingrained in this original company.

I am fully aware that this name is not the most appealing one, but it is the name that explains who we are in the most honest way. And this is what counts for us. Honesty and transparency are part of our core values. It would, therefore, feel strange to take an appealing name simply because people would remember it more easily. We are German PhDs and engineers, so you can trust us on one point: DQR has a name which guarantees you a win at Scrabble! More seriously, we have great expectations for our services. To use Geoffrey Moore’s analogy, our sector is starting to cross the chasm of technology adoption between the early adopters and the early majority. This means that customers’ expectations are rapidly changing and we see a gap between the current market offer and what the general public is likely to expect from a trading platform. We intend to answer that need by offering a product that will empower everyone.