The global adoption of cryptocurrency will hinge on the ease of use and accessibility of its technology. Dr. Kristian Haehndel, CEO and founder of DQR, joined CoinGeek.com’s Becky Liggero to talk about his company’s recent partnership with Genesis Mining to do just that, and why DQR has chosen to set up shop in Malta.
The story of how DQR and Genesis Mining decided to team up goes far back. “It’s a very interesting story actually,” Haehndel explained. “We were originally purchasing Bitcoins directly from the founders of Genesis Mining. And this was before they even created the company. And then, it was at such a frequency that they said, ‘Why don’t you join and mine with us?’ It was a group of friends; it was actually quite interesting.”
The reason they ultimately decided on a partnership had to do with ease of use, and an idea to scale that to the greater market. “Years later we approached them and said, ‘You know what, you guys made mining so accessible, why don’t we look at trying to make cryptocurrency, the exchanges, much more accessible,’” he told us. “So we founded DQR. DQR stands for Digital Quantitative Research. It aims to make it as simple as possible to get access to the cryptocurrency space.”
DQR’s commitment to increasing the adoption of Bitcoin has a lot to do with Satoshi’s Vision, and it forms the foundation of what the company is trying to do. “So we have four different pillars in our organization,” Haehndel said. He explained further:
“We’re trying to make it easy to understand what it means to be in the blockchain space. What does blockchain mean? What does cryptocurrencies mean? So we have education, we have research. We then make it very accessible to get into the space by creating simplified products. We look at trying to make the market more efficient and then we have a foundation in the end. So all of our subsidiaries donate a percentage of their profit to this decentralized foundation. And that is how we’re trying to fulfill the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto to try and make a more inclusive economy.”
DQR has set their headquarters in Malta, and they did so because they feel the island provides unique opportunities for a blockchain company. “So we came to the island in December last year, and we immediately engaged with the government, and we spoke about the regulation topics, we went through what blockchain means to the people of Malta, how that can elevate their presence in Europe,” DQR’s founder explained. “We also took a lot of our experience from Germany and Switzerland and brought that also on board. And then at the same time, we said we are going to create a kind of education curriculum that we can work with the University of Malta, or even in Germany, and we have information on our website, we have articles, we have videos, so it really makes it easy to understand about this space.”
Part of the reason they chose Malta was because of its storied history and culture. “I think, just like the Maltese knights, blockchain has a certain property there,” Haehndel said. “I know that they refer to the blockchain pioneers as kind of knights, protectors of the industry. There are certain values between the knights and the culture of Malta, as well as in the blockchain space. We are trying to reach out to those that are less fortunate. We’re trying to build an economy that is much more inclusive, and serve the underbanked or unbanked populations. And that’s very similar to the Maltese knights, right?”
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