The Manetu team is not short on blockchain know-how, with its mix of ex-State Street DLT builders and Hyperledger maintainers: the CTO is Greg Haskins, former State Street senior vice president; Conor Allen, Manetu’s head of product, was previously State Street’s SVP of enterprise data; and chief scientist Binh Nguyen was managing director at the Boston-based custodian.
A group of former State Street blockchain builders are now launching their own company – but with distributed ledgers playing only a minor role.
“We could have retrofitted Hyperledger or any other blockchain project to do the management of consumers’ personally identifiable information, but it would have just added so much unnecessary burden on the platform that we felt that wasn’t necessary”, Kohari, the firm’s CEO, said.
But when it comes to defining the best way to manage personally identifiable information (PII), Manetu is light on blockchain, opting for an agile blend of machine-learning algorithms and an encrypted “self-service portal” that’s connected to “target systems” like Oracle and Salesforce, where sensitive data is being maintained.
The team is looking to tackle business challenges spurred by a slew of tough data privacy rules, such as Europe’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Manetu is designed to ease the headache these strictures can cause for any firms that hold personal data about customers (Manetu said it is currently testing with a large U.S. bank).
“Privacy acts are being introduced across the planet: Canada, Australia, Japan”, said Kohari. “Any consumer can request what data a service provider holds on them and also request to edit that data, and revoke certain parts or all of that data.”
The existing big players in data-privacy compliance mostly came out of the consulting space and have designed rather cumbersome solutions, Kohari said. Typically, this involves consumers filling out a request form that goes to a global privacy officer which is routed to individual business units and then back again.
“It’s a highly manual process and very onerous for the organization. On average, about 20 hours is spent on each request”, he said. “That might be manageable for 100 or so requests a month, but it simply does not scale going forward.”
The only part of Manetu’s system where an actual blockchain is useful is its “regulatory data vault”, which maintains certain data and allows it to be shared with regulators.
“The regulatory vault part of the solution is leveraging blockchain, but we didn’t need it for the core of the business”, said Kohari.
Ex-Cinnober Blockchain Lead Joins Nordic Crypto Fund to Bet Big on Bitcoin
Since NASDAQ acquired Cinnober last year, blockchain lead Eric Wall has left the exchange business for a bitcoin investment fund, joining the Oslo, Norway-based Arcane Crypto, he told CoinDesk.
Aimed at high net worth Scandinavians and institutional investors globally, the fund is an investment branch of Arcane, a crypto firm running a technology team, trading arm and a crypto news portal Kryptografen.com.
Arcane Crypto CEO Torbjorn Bull Jenssen is a widely cited crypto expert in Norway and a white paper published earlier this year shows their team is watching the industry closely, but doesn’t provide any clues to the investment strategy.
Wall said that he could not disclose precisely which assets will be Arcane’s focus, but that outperformance separate from the revaluation of bitcoin would be the metric:
“I expect that the metric that really matters is how funds perform against bitcoin. Once the dust starts to settle on that, it’s going to be clear who’s been swimming naked.”
Some altcoin could also make it into Arcane’s portfolio, Wall hinted, but only those strictly selected:
“We are seeing a maturing trend in the altcoin market. It’s already very different now than it was a few years ago. It’s becoming harder and harder for technically inept projects to fake-it-til-you-make-it. There’s only in a very few, select areas in the cryptocurrency design space that has merit to compete against bitcoin.”
Rather than measuring performance against fiat, the goal is to trade digital currencies to increase the size of the portfolio, in bitcoin.
Arcane Crypto was founded by Norwegian investors Ketil Skorstad and Kristian G. Lundqvist, and also funded by Morten Klein, a poker player and chairman of the Swedish casinos company Cherry, in an undisclosed round this April.
All three investors are from Norway, hence the Scandinavian slant of the fund.
Wall had spent more than three years at Cinnober, a company selling tech solutions for stock and crypto exchanges, and was used to explaining crypto to people in traditional finance, but in English, not in Norwegian
“We will have a special focus on the Nordics, but it’s not exclusive”, Wall added.
