Taurus Integrates Tezos: a Q&A with Taurus Group Managing Partner Lamine Brahimi
This week, we caught up with the Taurus team, which recently raised $10M in series A funding. We spoke with Managing Partner Lamine Brahimi, who answered questions on what Taurus is working on, what needs to be done to bolster institutional adoption of blockchain protocols, and the future of the Tezos Foundation - Taurus Group collaboration.
The Tezos Foundation first entered into a strategic cooperation with the Taurus Group in Q4 of 2019 to grow the Tezos ecosystem and provide secure access to the Tezos blockchain to potential issuers of security tokens. The collaboration has steadily progressed since then, with Taurus announcing in February that it had successfully integrated the Tezos protocol into its digital asset infrastructure.
This week, we caught up with the Taurus team, which recently raised $10M in series A funding. We spoke with Managing Partner Lamine Brahimi, who answered questions on what Taurus is working on, what needs to be done to bolster institutional adoption of blockchain protocols, and the future of the Tezos Foundation – Taurus Group collaboration. Check out the Q&A below.
Taurus has an impressive product suite. Who are your products designed for?
Taurus has developed an infrastructure geared towards regulated financial institutions i.e., banks, exchanges and institutional investors.
We are privileged to be entrusted by the full spectrum of financial institutions: investment banks, private banks, crypto-banks, universal banks, marketplaces. We also serve technology companies that are integrating our technology in full or part.
What does “enterprise-grade” mean in your opinion? What are institutional investors looking for in technology?
If I focus on the most sophisticated clients i.e., banks or exchanges, they look at three things.
- One, secure storage of private keys which is necessary but far from being sufficient requirement
- Two, embedded “banking-grade” processes that integrate compliance, risk management, fraud detection, treasury management, reconciliation and reporting
- Last, future-proof technology able to quickly evolve and adapt to technological evolutions. Concretely, some banks that made a choice 2 years ago have recently come to us because their technology partner was unable to cope with the pace of technological progress and requirements.
Taurus managed to build one of the few engineering teams in the world that master the full technology stack (software, hardware, cryptography, distributed systems, devOps). They work hand-in-hand with the founding team that knows financial services pretty well. This is a quite powerful combination and sought-after by institutional clients.
There are many blockchains and cryptocurrencies out there. Why did Taurus choose to integrate Tezos?
The protocol is robust with its formal verification of smart contracts. Clients were asking for it too.
What’s also interesting is that we share a similar vision with the Tezos Foundation in relation to driving institutional adoption by working on concrete real-asset or private markets use cases.
How will Taurus help drive institutional adoption of Tezos?
Opening our network of banking clients: some of our clients are onboarding Tezos. Other projects are also in the pipeline.
What is the Taurus team focused on right now?
On the product side, continue to build the most complete platform in the market from issuance, to custody, to transfer of digital assets incl. Tezos smart contracts.
On the client side, collaborating with financial institutions on concrete private markets use cases and winning new clients!
Additional Ecosystem Updates:
This section provides some key highlights and updates from around the Tezos ecosystem in the past week.
- Madfish Solutions announced the first Beta release of its wallet, ThanosWallet.
- Nomadic Labs published a blog post highlighting how it uses the pytest-regtest regression testing tool to ensure software quality.
- SimpleStaking published a blog post on the TezEdge Debugger, a tool that records messages sent and received by a Tezos node, decrypts and deserializes them, and then provides them in a human-readable format.
- SmartPy and Cryptonomic collaborated with Chainlink to make Chainlink oracles natively available to all developers building on Tezos.
- The Taurus Group announced that it has raised $10 million in series A funding.
- Tezos Commons published issue #20 of the Baking Sheet with news and insights from across the Tezos ecosystem.
- Tezsure released version 2.0 of its Tezster-CLI.
FAQs
Do you have something equivalent to ERC721 as a sample to build upon?
Yes. Just last month, the team at TQ Tezos announced the release of FA2 (TZIP-12), a proposal for a unified token contract interface, supporting both a wide range of token types (e.g. fungible, non-fungible, non-transferrable, etc.) as well as multi-asset contracts. TQ initiated a request for community comment on the proposal on Agora, and multiple teams are working to move the interface from proposal to implementation.
This aspect is kinda tricky but, we have seen that not only you are funding via grants, you also participate early seed in round table, which seems interesting as an approach. Are you planning to keep doing it? Are you only targeting the STO start-ups?
The Tezos Foundation’s mission is to foster the growth and evolution of the Tezos project and ecosystem. The Tezos Foundation does this through grants and other capital deployment vehicles, and will continue to sustainably deploy resources that support the long-term success of Tezos.
To clarify, however, we are not only targeting STO projects. While digital securities emerged as an initial strategic area of focus for the Foundation, they by no means define our belief of what Tezos is. Many other use-cases can and will be built on Tezos, and we are focused on DeFi, CBDC, payments, and gaming use-cases, and have already supported a number of projects building many of the tools necessary to attract more builders and entrepreneurs across these verticals.
How are you planning to develop community engagement (in all its form, speaking, developing, organising, etc.)?
The Tezos Foundation funds a number of entities that promote community engagement like Tezos Commons Foundation (TCF), Tocqueville Group (TQ), Tezos Southeast Asia (TSA), Tezos Japan, Tezos Korea Foundation, and others. The Tezos Foundation’s primary role is to sustainably deploy resources to promote the growth and evolution of the Tezos project. That role encompasses fostering community engagement, and we will continue to fund entities that build community engagement in a variety of ways.
What are the next steps, now we do have 1000+ Devs and now what? Are we planning to push further in this direction? Do we have a plan?
The Tezos Foundation funds a number of entities that provide Tezos developer training courses. After successfully training 1,338 new developers in 2019, we are committed to building on that momentum in 2020. We plan on covering education and training in an upcoming feature of this weekly update so be on the look out for more information.
Any possibility for multi-ownership bakeries?
The Tezos Foundation does not determine how bakeries are set up – that is up to the community. We suggest that you start a discussion about the idea with the wider Tezos community on Tezos Agora.
Are there any NFT projects running on Tezos yet?
There are NFT projects on Tezos that are in development. Some of them may or may not be live on the Tezos mainnet. For more information on NFTs and assets on Tezos, check out TQ Tezos’ blog post on FA2, a multi-asset interface for Tezos.