A Pioneer in the Blockchain Industry

Around five years ago, Alexi Lane, the Co-founder and CEO of Everex, and Alexander Kakunov, the Co-founder and CTO, came across the terms ‘cryptocurrencies’ and ‘blockchain’. The technology, in particular, intrigued them beyond any measure, making them believe in the real potential of it. Over the period of time, their curiosity saw the light of the day as they implemented the blockchain technology to provide real-world solutions for financial transactions and financial inclusion. Today, they strongly believe that this technology is more real, already transforming industries and impacting lives in innumerable ways. This strong belief in the blockchain technology, and further on, the implementation of it, led to the foundation of Everex in the year 2015. Featured as the “Top 10 Blockchain Companies Beyond Disruption,” Beyond Exclamation proudly looks at the story, the journey, and the vision of Everex that has propelled them to achieve unmatched success in the Blockchain industry. Delivering Services and Solutions that Matters Everex is a financial technology company that deploys blockchain-powered digital remittance solutions, thus accelerating financial inclusion and providing access to capital in developing markets. The company offers cross-border money transfers and currency exchange solutions on the blockchain technology to help billions of underbanked and unbanked population to send money back home to their families – making it faster and cheaper compared to traditional money transfers. In other words, Everex brings individuals and SMEs, with or without bank accounts, into the new global economy. Everex enables real-time fiat payments powered by the distributed ledger technology, hence eliminating huge amounts of transaction fees. With the aim of banking the underbanked, the Everex team has developed a number of products. The most notable among these products is the Everex e-wallet that allows users to store, buy, sell, or undertake money transfer in different fiat currencies. As a seamless multi-currency wallet, Everex’s e-wallet can be managed by institutions, governments, and corporates with an all-time availability of financing for small and medium enterprises around the world. “Everything Exchangeable” The inception of the company name came from its promise “Everything Exchangeable.” The company strongly believes that the future of FinTech is going to be all about tokenizing assets on the blockchain. Today, fiat currency is being replaced by blockchain for trades and business transactions. This is just the beginning; the next step will be to tokenize gold, equity, other financial assets or even non-financial assets including real estate. This will benefit local communities in an unfathomable fashion, thus making blockchain more accessible than ever. At present, Everex is growing its Everex Payment Network globally, opening new markets for banks, financial institutions, SMEs and individuals to facilitate cross-border money transfers on the blockchain. Banks that decide to join the Everex Payment Network get the opportunity to capitalize on lucrative new market opportunities. For SMEs and individuals, Everex payment network helps smoothen the transitional process, cutting-down high transfer costs, improving the speed of money transfer, adding additional visibility, and tracking facility to all their transactions for further peace of mind. Everex’s mission is to accelerate financial inclusion and provide access to unbanked/underbanked individuals and SMEs worldwide. As such, Everex is oriented towards a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model. The company deploys its solution on the public Ethereum blockchain, coding smart contracts, which makes it possible to transact via a stable coin feature, eliminating inherent volatilities. Edging Past the Challenges Everex was one of the most successfully-executed ICO back in 2017. “We raised $26 million in the initial coin offering (ICO). The token sale ended on 31st August 2017,” mentions Alexi. The major challenge that the company had to overcome while it launched its ICO was to create the brand’s awareness globally. Everex had a great functional product for which it had executed a successful pilot, allowing Myanmar migrant workers living in Thailand to send money back home. “Our main objective was to tell the world how we are impacting lives, and build a solid supporter base that would support, join and follow us in our journey,” recalls Alexi. One of the other major challenges for Everex was to make sure the security system was at the top of its game, capable of desisting any hack attempts. During our ICO phase, Everex faced multiple hack attempts. “Hackers can get very creative when it comes to moving supporters’ investments to alternative addresses, as complicated as copying our website. It was our topmost priority to build a robust hack-proof system.” Finally, the biggest challenge on the business development side was to work with the right banking partners with Everex’s payment ecosystem. Parallelly, this challenge was interlinked to the educational standpoint of third parties since the understanding and benefits of the blockchain technology still need empowerment and widespread awareness. However, Alexi adds “We are very proud to say that we are already successfully working with banking partners in order to make blockchain payments possible, and without a strong collaboration on that end, this would not be possible. For now, as an emerging technology disruptor, the company embraces the challenges to educate, inform, and comply with the global regulators. Building a strong foundation is the key to a stronger continuation of the business. Needless to say, Everex is building its foundation for long-term sustainability and the company is here to stay. The Brain Behind Everex According to the company, Alexi Lane is the brains behind Everex – a FintTech company which saw the light in 2015. Being a FinTech entrepreneur, investor, and executive with over fifteen years of experience within the capital markets, financial services, and payments industries, he understands the nitpicks of the industry and, together with Alexander Kakunov. Alexi has shouldered the company towards success. Currently, he is involved in the blockchain development for more than 3 years, and is a former Morgan Stanley banker, having graduated from the University of Tennessee. Today, he is one of the pioneers of financial payments in the blockchain industry. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning, that Alexi has been featured as one of the Top Blockchain Influencers within the FinTech industry. The Vision Going Forward The vision of Everex is to enable different mobile wallets to offer customers multi-currency and person-to-person (P2P) transactions, building a bridge between fiat and cryptocurrencies over the blockchain technology. Everex’s goal is to create a financial ecosystem in which most digital wallets are powered by Everex technology, providing blockchain-powered interoperability between thousands of global digital wallets that currently do not communicate with each other. “Our solution will empower both domestic and cross-border payments for individuals and SMEs, bringing economic growth to regions underserved by banks,” concludes Alexi.