Andrey Zhulin, CEO

Panama Crypto

Oct 10, 2019·6 min read

CEO’s intro:

Andrey Zhulin — experienced tech entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of Insolar.

Before Insolar Andrey co-founded Instamart, one of the largest venture backed delivery services in Eastern Europe which continue growing 3x year-on-year, and has a team of over 600 employees.

Before Instamart, Andrey worked as Vice President at Siguler Guff, one of the largest private equity and venture capital funds headquartered in New York, investing in dozens of technology companies in the US, Europe and China. He holds a Master’s degree in Engineering from Bauman State Technical University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Quantitative Finance from the University of London.

At Insolar, Andrey focuses mostly on vision, strategy, product and software development.

1. So many blockchains projects are focused on business, why Insolar is the answer?

The Insolar platform is enterprise-grade and, as such, solves the main challenges which blockchain technology otherwise faces. It is scalable, with fast transaction throughput, while compatible with legacy IT, and easy to use. It is DLT as a service and does not require inhouse IT skills or hardware for implementation. Insolar’s platform architecture is based on three main elements:

• Domains allow for flexible, custom-designed governance.
• Smart contracts guarantee full compliance with the rules established by Domains.
• The cloud system based on blockchain technology is a set of computing and storage nodes, which allows for scalability and flexible consensus mechanisms.

2. Insolar specs and how this compares to top competition?

Key advantages of the platform:

• Multi-level governance models. There can be many interacting authority structures at work. Every Domain or business ecosystem can establish its own procedures and policies of governance, settlement, legal, payment, etc.
• Linear scalability. The Insolar platform enables near-linear scaling. This simplifies costs — expenses are proportional to the hardware, the hardware is proportional to the amount of transactions, and transactions are proportional to the size of the business.
• A company can start small and rapidly add multiple nodes to the same Domain, eliminating the cost and hassle of building new Domains in order to accommodate scale-out.
• Alternatively, a company can contribute computing power in exchange for a discount on services.
• Modularity. The Insolar platform offers a modular structure to tailor to the specific needs of a company or an industry, while enabling seamless communication with other Insolar networks if allowed by local policy.

3. How will Insolar simplify the usage of crypto for mass adoption?

From our side, we aim at disrupting interactions in the enterprise sector by making them more efficient and transparent. Our desire is to make the world better by implementing cutting-edge technology. Therefore we are designing user-friendly solutions that are simple on the outside, complex on the inside. One of our advantages is that companies don’t have to spend a lot on their in-house devs for launching and maintaining solutions built on Insolar.

4. Why Insolar is unique, better than the other coins and why it will thrive?

First of all, I’d like to mention that I’m really proud of the team we’ve managed to gather here at Insolar. We have 80 professionals in our team, with over 50 of them being engineers and researchers, led by CTO Pavel Schrebinin and Chief Architect Kirill Ivkushkin.

We also have a very strong sales team, led by Insolar’s Co-founder Peter Fedchenkov, who serves as the Chief Revenue Officer at Insolar.

Another key factor is our outstanding technology. Insolar Blockchain Platform offers many industry-first features, including near-linear scalability, cloud-based nodes, hybrid private-public networks, and interoperability with other DLT technologies and existing enterprise systems.

5. Who is behind Insolar? Backgrounds?

Insolar’s team consists of professionals who combine extensive industrial experience with best-in-class knowledge in the blockchain space. We possess an intimate understanding of how, where and why blockchain technologies can be applied in real life to take advantage of the real value out there.

Other than myself, our core team is made up of:

Peter Fedchenkov, Chief Revenue Officer, Founder.
Brings a wealth of retail and technology experience. Previously with Goldman Sachs and IBM. Teaches a class on retail at the Stockholm School of Economics. Harvard Business School MBA.

Dmitry Zhulin, Chief Operating Officer, Founder.
Experienced technology entrepreneur with a successful track record, previously founded Instamart. Prior experience in private equity and investment banking at VTBC Private Equity and Rothschild. PgD in Quantitative Finance, University of London. Master of Engineering, Bauman State Technical University.

Pavel Scherbinin, CTO.
Experienced engineer with great passion for security and cryptography and 10+ years’ experience in the development of large scale high-load systems. Likes to tackle hard distributed problems and turn potential technologies into practical applications. Previously was CTO at Mail.Ru Group (largest IT company in Russia).

Kirill Ivkushkin, Chief Architect.
Versatile IT architect with 20+ years of IT experience in designing, building and running different kinds of enterprise solutions, incl. various logistic systems, high-load and high-scale systems, and large corporate IT landscapes (500+ systems). 6+ years in blockchain technologies with deep hands-on exposure. Keynote speaker at major blockchain events and meetups. Previously was Head of Blockchain at Sberbank (in top-3 largest European banks).

Outside of the core team we have an experienced team of dedicated professionals, with the number of engineers in the team totaling over 50. We are all focused on the task at hand and endeavor to bring about wide-scale blockchain adoption.

6. How is/was Insolar funded?

Insolar raised $42 million via the token sale in December 2017.

7. Plans for exchanges?

We are planning to keep XNS listed on existing exchanges (Binance, Bithumb, KuCoin, Okex, Bithumb Global) and add more exchanges from the top-10 CoinMarketCap list.

8. What the governance of Insolar will be like by 2020?

Mainnet 1.0 will become operational on November 1, 2019. Mainnet is a network launched using the Insolar Platform’s code.

At more advanced stages of platform development, versions will be released in which domain structure will enable different governance models. Domains define policies for data and contracts, such as to allow public or permissioned models, or to apply national or industry security standards.

9. What current partnerships Insolar has and what will be its purpose?

At the moment we have announced collaborations with:

Microsoft and Oracle — to make Insolar available on Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud marketplaces.

Innosuisse — Swiss Innovation Agency — and UC Berkeley for accelerator program and joint projects.

BiTA — Blockchain in transport alliance.

But of course, these are not the only organizations interested in our solution. We are currently in discussions with over 30 companies with annual revenue over a billion USD.

10. Please explain Insolar products.

Insolar has two main products:

1. The Insolar Blockchain Platform: Built from scratch to optimize the technology in terms of features and performance to serve business better than the existing market contenders. We are optimally positioned to do this and have created the most cutting edge architecture since we have one of the biggest and most experienced blockchain teams worldwide — our 50 engineers have experience building on IBM’s HLF, Ethereum, and Corda — with this in mind, we have learned from the best practices and shortcomings of all the key players to create the most advanced DLT that the market has to offer, and fill in the blanks to make use widely accessible and valuable.
2. dApps — Distributed applications built on top of the platform:
   These serve a range of use cases to improve business operations. In addition to dApps created by Insolar, they can be built by external devs on our platform, since it is designed for ease of use and no knowledge of blockchain is required to build on the ‘business layer’, you can write in Java. The dApps which Insolar itself offers focus on applications of Supply Chain, Energy, Retail & Consumer Goods.

Chromia Resources

• Website: https://insolar.io/

Social Media

• Official Telegram: https://t.me/InsolarAnnouncements
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/insolario
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/insolario
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/insolar/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/insolario/
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/insolar

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This is not a financial advise and you should do your own research before investing, and understand if you are willing to lose this investment, as there is always risk in innovative markets as technology, fintech, and cryptocurrencies, due to regulations, geopolitical issues, and what not. That being said, besides being invested in Insolar, I am being compensated for my time writing this article.