"Help Developers Connect Blockchains to the Off-Chain World" Alan Durnev, CTO at PARSIQ

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Hello Hackernoon, I’m Alan, blockchain enthusiast, 'Ethereum Guru', software engineer, and CTO at PARSIQ.

I was always into science. This is how I got into physics initially, then computer science, computer engineering, and eventually blockchain.

Science and Informatics are my personal favorite combination, but not the only one. Science is great from any possible perspective.

What's your company called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

PARSIQ is a platform where absolutely anyone (coder or non-coder, individual, team or enterprise) can build and deploy blockchain to off-chain connections with just a few clicks or a few lines of code, saving on infrastructure costs.

What is the origin story?

PARSIQ was founded in 2018 by Tom Tirman, Andre Kalinowski and Anatoly Ressin. Development work started in 2019 with a free beta. The token went live in 2019 with a full platform commercial release in May 2020.

Most of the team are professional blockchain engineers who have built numerous blockchain systems and backends for crypto exchanges, etc.

Each time we faced the same issue – we had to build something to connect blockchain activity to centralized applications, devices, user-facing front-ends, legacy systems, and other off-chain networks.

So that’s when the decision was made to build a platform available for everyone to bridge the gap between blockchains and real-world apps like Google Sheets, Telegram, Discord, Salesforce, and so on.

The objective was to build a system with:

• No need to host nodes or server infrastructure,
• No need to build narrow non-scalable solutions in-house,
• No need to spend funds and development resources and
• No need to face the complexity of tracking blockchains in real-time at scale.

PARSIQ standardizes all chains for users into one easily consumable system to build blockchain to off-chain automation workflows.

What do you love about your team?

Our team is fantastic. Every single person I work with is full into tech, praises geekness and loves solving complex & mind-breaking challenges, especially in the Blockchain (which I personally call as a “Heaven for geeks”)

Our communication never ends on the topic of projects we built together, but also goes beyond the work.

Top-notch people. Respect.

If you weren’t working at your company, what would you be doing?

Can’t and don’t even want to imagine that :) But if we imagine for a second that Blockchain does not exist, most probably I would be into complex engineering and science anyway.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

After the recent launch of IQ Protocol, an open-source DeFi framework to tokenize SaaS, our company started to work in two directions: supporting the PARSIQ monitoring platform growth and accelerating the adoption of IQ Protocol, which is able to solve a project’s weak tokenomic model by building a circular token economy through risk-free renting pools.

PARSIQ Monitoring. Our primary clientele for monitoring solutions are crypto/blockchain projects and businesses leveraging blockchain technology.

Regarding the monitoring platform, we measure the success of our corporate clients’ success. We have 80+ companies using our platform for different purposes, such as: end-user notifications delivery, real-time on-chain data incorporation, compliance/risk management, different sorts of finance & accounting, IDO analytics, and much more.

IQ Protocol. Before IQ, crypto didn't have a subscription model. Now, almost any company can utilize this solution for making their business even better. IQ solves the crypto’s old “Token Not Needed” problem: thus crypto projects with weak tokenomics can build a circular economy and make everyone happy - traders, hodlers, users.

Our next step is to introduce IQ Protocol for NFT renting so that projects can build marketplaces for trustless renting of NFTs without risk or collateral.

Now the team is working with a pipeline for IQ implementation for 20+ different companies, though it can be utilized on its own without any help. The success of IQ Protocol means helping crypto projects solve their tokenomics concerns and allowing traditional companies to adopt the tokenized SaaS model for the sake of getting the market advantage.

What’s most exciting about your company traction to date?

The most exciting thing we have figured out during the journey so far is that we can operate as a business-focused company providing real value to our customers, while still remaining a crypto project.

Our business development team meets amazing people both in the blockchain and traditional space and we know how to help them save on costs and even raise revenue. At the same time, our community department works closely with the crypto community.

The PARSIQ community is brilliant, meaning we have real fans of the company and we manage to meet super-talented people here. We recently launched the SWARM program so that our community members actually help us grow by contributing with their skills and ideas; and we now have Tech, Content, Community, and Hunter swarms.

After the launch of IQ Protocol, we are now able to align the interests of all the types of PARSIQ shareholders: product users, HODLers, and traders. This helps us stay focused on the B2B side without sacrificing the community’s needs. Our PRQ token, which has grown in price more than 150x, is now completely embedded into the circular company economy and has become an essential part for B2B business development.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I would say that there is no such top list. It is the same for me as with movies. When I am asked about my favorite movies - I can name a lot, as they are all beautiful & a favorite in their own category.

But I can hint that for Blockchain - the challenges that Solana brings to us are astonishing.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

After we got the opportunity to build the Brand-as-Author profile, we opted to share quality tech-related insights with this fascinating audience on Hackernoon. We know that our own community loves to read us on Hackernoon, and it’s a really unique place of user-generated content of super-high value.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Such advice just does not work, they have a chance to cause a butterfly effect that I do not want my “alternative me” to go through.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Holding actually works.