Rigoblock (GRG)

What is Rigoblock

The asset management industry is dominated by fund distribution networks and big players. It is difficult and cumbersome for emerging managers to startup their own fund unless they have many years of experience, assets from investors and proprietary money. Yet big hedge funds scout for talent and delegate risk to very young professionals, targeting exceptional returns by exploiting the most recent research and data analysis techniques. Light operational structures exist (managed accounts) but they are burdensome to manage, require wasting a lot of time managing and rebalancing the portfolios.

Blockchain provides the ideal technology for setting up funds in a short period of time, with low setup costs and with innovations of processes which could only be imagined before. We provide the technological framework for emerging managers to set up their own investment vehicle. We discuss its design, vision of implementation and Proof-of-Concepts, the opportunities it provides in giving more transparency, efficiency to operations and innovating processes. We also propose an alternative paradigm for rewarding talent and hard work.

The Iconomi project aims at being a platform for crypto-related-assets trading, digitizing processes of share issuance, subscriptions and redemptions with a centralized server-base approach. They provide a front-end userfriendly platform which does not require interaction from Blockchain browsers. They are the funds’ custodian (now did partner with a regulated UK asset manager in order to provide the technology and liquidity stack only) as they manage a users private key, thus requiring some level of trust in their infrastructure. The platform is aimed at professional managers. The RigoBlock technology, in the context of companies like Iconomi, can be seen as a decentralized engine which could be easily plugged-in in order to create the funds on-chain.

The first attempt to formalize a decentralized approach to private banking has been proposed by a project named EtherPlan. Still the idea required a high level of trust and substituted many of the existing frictions with new, more technologically advanced ones, thus not being able to pose the fundamentals for a radical change, at least in these early stages of the development of the technology. The project is currently on stand-by.

The project is currently on stand-by. The first attempt of using Blockchain technology in a completely decentralized form is Melonport, a project which was chronologically born at the same time as our first concept Drago the decentralized hedge fund, now RigoBlock Drago. Both our protocols aim at solving the same problem, but with different methodologies; they can be seen as our closest competitor, even though at such early stage of technology they might be also seen as complimentary one another. Melonport also provided the very first formal specification for the technological framework and the concept of an open protocol for decentralized asset management, leveraging and relying on external developers to deliver some of the ”modules”. RigoBlock, by contrast, is touring complete with no discretion for the users on which modules to use.