Hassan Khan Todaq Finance, Co-Founder
Hassan is CEO of TODAQ Financial and Quantius. TODAQ Financial is a platform that allows P2P value transfer and individually managed asset possession, enabled by TODA blockchain protocol. Previously in the Army, he developed entrepreneurial technology solutions for new digital capabilities needed in conflict regions like the Former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan; created integrated communications capabilities for security and emergency response agencies to cooperate for events like the G8 and BC forest fires; as well as new software applications platforms to handle increased capacity and virtual training needs for the Canadian forces. In 2005, he was recognized for his performance as the #1 ranked Signals Captain in the Army and promoted to Major. He later joined McKinsey & Company where he served the leadership of emerging market companies and countries achieve growth in their technology related sectors.
1. Tell us about your role in TODAQ?
I’m a co-founder and the CEO of TODAQ.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
I was originally an computer engineer and served in the Canadian Army for over a decade as a senior officer. I specialized in telecommunications, cryptography and cyber. During the MBS global financial crisis, I retired from military and became a consultant with McKinsey, doing tech and finance work all around the world. About four years ago I left and started building businesses. Quantius was my first fintech business which lends to growing tech business and gives value to their intellectual property. TODAQ is my second.
3. Can you briefly describe what TODAQ is?
TODAQ is a fintech bank of the future that offers a secure and distributed digital asset ownership management system for municipal and national governments, enterprise businesses, and financial institutions. It is powered by the TODA Protocol, which enables distributed management of ownership for any digital entity ensuring there can only be one unique owner of any digital asset at a given time, and allows for near frictionless peer to peer settlement of value in under a minute.
The name TODAQ is an abbreviation of three names. Toufi Saliba (‘TO’) and Dann Toliver (‘DA’) are TODAQ co-founders and the principal co-authors of the TODA protocol, and I’m ‘Q’ as it is from my first company.
4. What inspired you to start a digital asset management firm?
Telecom and the internet commoditized communications so it is near free to communicate with anyone on earth.
The rise in our population and quantity of data has led to growing trust and efficiency problems in our markets and societies.
What we need is a secure, efficient, confidential, scalable and interoperable ‘internet of value’ that allows for individual ownership of data and settlement of value.
5. How do you think TODAQ distinguishes itself from other digital asset management and financial services companies?
With TODAQ, our clients and their customers own their own digital assets and never pay transaction fees, as well as save on most intermediary costs required in industrial and commercial trade. They also receive end-to-end data traceability and ability provide immutable authenticity for every aspect of their products and services.
6. Can you give us some more information about your partnership with gratomic?
We are working with Gratomic, along with almost twenty other global institutions, to put their end-to-end supply chains and customer environments on to the TODA protocol using our TODA-as-a-service (‘TaaS’) platform. The TODA protocol provides disruptive trust and efficiency benefits, and through the TaaS platform, TODAQ allows enterprises to harness that power securely so they can easily and safely put their assets, people and money onto the protocol.
We’re extremely excited to work with Gratomic as a partner. Commercial graphene as an industry has a tremendous future and being able to efficiently and secure track the value chain from the graphite ore in the mine to a tire product in the hands of an end customer is tremendous.
7. What are the major developments you are planning, in the recent times?
Other major development projects are being implemented this year in mining, agriculture, energy, infrastructure & construction, pharmaceuticals, education, retail and digital media across a dozen countries. We are also launching the TODA Note (‘TDN’) decentralized and universal loyalty program with all of our partners. TDN is an asset backstopped digital note designed to be used for commercial and industrial transactions and can be transacted peer to peer with anyone on earth in under a minute with no transaction fees.
8. Can you tell us the goal behind sponsoring Silicon Valley hackathon?
It’s about global capability building. TODA is a completed decentralized data protocol that disrupts any industry involved in digital asset management or any kind of settlements of value, which covers pretty much every sector on earth. Over 2019 and 2020, TODAQ will release the technology and base protocol software to a non-profit foundation and open source it to the world. TODAQ, its customers and partners, and the global community with need more talent that can build decentralized solutions on the TODA protocol. The Silicon Valley hackathon was just the first of many for this year that will take place around the world. The really compelling part is that they will come complete with corporate and real world challenges for participants that have immediate opportunities for commercial use.
9. What are the benefits you think, Todaq will be able to provide to its customers?
Massive cost reductions; an ability to eliminate corruption, leakage, counterfeits and forgeries; as well as provide a growth enabler through speeding time to market, securing and efficiently fractionalizing assets to gain liquidity and providing frictionless interoperability with customer, suppliers and partners.
10. For the better understanding of our audience, can you tell us about the products TODAQ offers and how they function?
Sure, there is the TAZ platform that I mentioned for our enterprise and government clients. In Q2 we will launch a mobile TDN wallet available on Android and IOS that will put TODA Notes in the hands of anyone, not just our enterprise customer ecosystems. Over time we will also be adding credit, finance and insurance solutions on TODA where it is valuable to accelerate or de-risk trade.
11. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
I’m extremely grateful for the calibre and global scope of the team that has come together over the last months to create and push the TODAQ vision. We’ve got everyone from cryptographers, technologists, software development and product experts, actuarial economists, investment bankers and traders as well as business development leaders. Apart from an essential core team where we are focused on really scaling the engineering and product development capabilities right now, we’ve also bee fortunate to have a great set of international partners and investors across half a dozen countries where we are also seeing a lot of help to push commercialization.
12. What is the vision, on which you and Todaq are working on?
Simple, build a true bank of the future. That means more than achieving open, mobile banking which I would call the icing on the cake. We are talking about fundamentally transforming the bank model. What if a bank didn’t take deposits; didn’t function on a fractional reserve, money as debt model; never charged for transactions; and provided a platform for massive scale P2P and crowd sourced financial services? That vision also fits directly with our shared values, and our primary value of is ‘to promote liberty tightly coupled with accountability’.
13. Which is the book you are reading these days?
Fighting for time to read is always a challenge, but I’m going through The Summit by Ed Conway on those fateful days coming out of the Second World War. Bretton Woods and our current monetary system has shaped the last seven decades and now we’re are entering the inflection point where we are going to move to the next system. Honestly, if an alien came to earth and studied our current monetary system they would think us insane. Fortunately, technology is now providing us with some alternate paths to take.
14. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
15. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
