Velo Labs 2021: vision, priorities and roadmap

Dear Velo Labs community,

In March 2021, we announced that Velo Labs and Interstellar joined forces to revolutionize financial services with the power of blockchain, starting with cross-border payments in Southeast Asia. As a result, I became Velo Labs’ Chief Executive Officer, and all the other Interstellar’s team members joined me.

As the new CEO, surrounded by a combination of former Velo and former Interstellar executives, I came with a strong vision for Velo Labs. That said, I also wanted to take the time to meet the team, learn from them, and assess the amazing work that had been done so far, before laying out our consolidated plan for 2021.

The past quarter has been extremely busy for the entire Velo Labs team, and I could not thank the teams enough for their warm welcome, as well as Velo Labs’ Chairman and Vice-chairman, Chatchaval Jiaravanon and Tridbodi Arunanondchai, for their continued support.

So now, I want to take the opportunity of this post to share with you what we have been up to, and how we will take Velo Labs to its next level. Below I have laid out an overview of my vision for Velo Labs, our strategic priorities for 2021, and our roadmap for the future.

Velo Labs new CEO’s vision

Today, international payments are still slow and costly. My vision for Velo Labs is to address this extraordinarily large and fragmented market, by building the most efficient settlement network in the world.

I want businesses and individuals to be able to send money globally, faster, cheaper, and more reliably than ever before. It is about time to move international payments infrastructure into a “post-internet” era by replacing the outdated technologies currently in use.

My vision for Velo Labs draws a lot of parallels from my previous experience as a co-founder and CEO of the Zelle Network — the largest person to person payments network in the US, processing over $300 billion transaction annually. Similar to Zelle, Velo Labs’ is providing a better infrastructure for financial institutions to move money. Only this time, my goal is not limited to help them better serve the US, but support the billions of people who send and receive money across the globe every day.

Since I started, a recurring question I have been asked has been, “what makes you confident that Velo Labs will succeed?”. The truth is, there are hundreds of reasons why I believe Velo Labs is best positioned to make that vision happen. But let me share here 3 critical value propositions of the Velo Labs network:

• It has a unique ability to scale and reach mass adoption thanks to our current customers and partners including some of the largest conglomerates and financial institutions in the market;
• It offers unmatched efficiency in terms of reduced costs and increased speed;
• It combines centralized and decentralized finance (DeFi) with a compliance-first approach unique in the market.

Velo Labs strategic priorities for 2021

As we drive through 2021, my team and I have set our strategic priorities for 2021:

• Launch new and enhanced products and services: delivering against our roadmap to enable a global, compliant, and interoperable settlement network;
• Increase our market impact: focusing on our priority use case, improving international payments, to increase Velo Labs’ impact in the market;
• Grow Velo Labs’ project awareness: positioning Velo Labs technology as the most trustworthy solution to bridge centralized and decentralized finance by engaging with our growing ecosystem.

These priorities have guided how we structured our go-to-market, our growing organization, and the development of our products and services. They are the north stars for our work ahead. To that point, let me tell you how our teams are concretely delivering against these priorities by sharing an overview of our product and technology roadmap for 2021 and beyond.

Velo Labs Product and Technology roadmap

Velo Labs product and technology roadmap is focused on developing the technical solutions and integration resources that will power a growing network of financial institutions (aka “anchors”) bridging local payments rails and a global, decentralized settlement network — where money moves securely in a few seconds.

Our roadmap will therefore include:

• Building an “Anchor” technology — interoperable with other networks (like the Stellar network) — to make it simple, efficient, and safe for licensed financial institutions (eg banks, MTOs, fintechs) to:
  ▹ access price-stable Velo digital credits;
  ▹ ​manage digital credits;
  ▹ ​exchange digital credits against other tokenized assets;
  ​▹ send digital credits to authorized counterparties anywhere in the world;
  ​▹ convert digital credits from and to their local currency, or any currency in the world;
  ▹ ​Integrate with other licensed entities (“anchors”) supporting similar on-and-off ramping services.
• Improving our Federated Credit Exchange to enable Liquidity aggregation from Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) and Liquidity pools, based on automated market makers (AMM). We are also exploring adding other sources of liquidity.
• Building tools and processes to uniquely support the compliant use of Digital Credits and Velo Tokens over centralized and decentralized exchanges in a regulatory friendly way.
• As a reminder, Velo Digital Credits are tokenized representations of any local currency, backed 1:1 by both fiat and Velo Tokens to ensure proper collateralization, and allowing low-cost, low-friction transfer of value over blockchain.
• Continuing to develop the interoperability and performance of our blockchain infrastructure by bridging the most popular blockchains with the Velo Protocol and the Warp protocol which allow cross-chain transfer of assets.

As a result, businesses can seamlessly access, manage, and move value around the world.

Keeping track of Velo Labs progress

Moving forward, we want to continue sharing Velo Labs’ progress and upcoming announcements with our community via our existing communications channels, particularly our social media (eg twitter, linkedin, medium, telegram). We also value the feedback from our community, so please share any questions or suggestions you may have by using these channels.

Lastly, I’ve listened to the feedback from our community, and in order to keep everyone updated on our progress and insights, I’m planning to write a blog post every quarter which will be shared across the aforementioned channels.

I hope you are as excited as we are for the future,

Mike