When the financial crisis of 2008 hit Wall Street, the repercussions reverberated throughout the world. Among the most adversely affected were individuals — particularly the elderly — with pension funds.
Anastasia Andrianova, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Akropolis, was keenly aware of the painful consequences on a personal level. Not only was she working as a financial analyst at Lehman Brothers of London when the investment bank crashed, but her parents, who lived in Lithuania, were directly impacted.
“Because of the structure of the inter-bank lending system, when a bank collapses in New York, ordinary people, and the most vulnerable people specifically, find themselves in situations where they can’t access their accounts,” says Andrianova. “Their long-term savings are raided, as typically public funds are the first pot of money the government reaches into during a financial crisis.”
The experience became the impetus for founding Akropolis, a company with a mission to shield vulnerable populations from the domino effects of future economic meltdowns. In fact, the company name comes from the word “acropolis,” which refers to a fort-like structure built in ancient times to protect inhabitants from external attacks.
“What we’re trying to do is to create an unraidable fund that doesn’t depend on the inter-bank lending system,” says Andrianova. “One that is architected as a peer-to-peer financial network and delivers a trifecta of basic services: access to reliable savings, credit and insurance.”
To that end, Akropolis is building a protocol and domain-specific chain to provide blockchain-based infrastructure for a decentralized financial network. The purpose of the network is to enable the formation, operation and interlinking of informal autonomous financial organizations, such as digital co-ops, guilds and mutuals.
The immutable characteristics of a blockchain ledger make it resilient in the face of fluctuations of the global market. Since each block of information (such as a set of transaction details) in the blockchain is recorded in the subsequent block, changes cannot be made without detection. This makes it possible for two parties to exchange funds directly using blockchain, without the need for a bank or other entity to process or track the transaction.
After initial testing of its blockchain protocol running on a cloud platform, Akropolis came to the conclusion it needed a more robust and resilient solution — a secure, sustainable, distributed cloud infrastructure that could scale globally and handle high volumes of transactions.