Akropolis is a new blockchain project about to have its ICO and it is promising an entirely new way of creating a pensions infrastructure utilising the blockchain.
The idea is that using blockchain will address the many faults in the current system including towering deficits between pension funds and liabilities, threatening the future of the pensions system. Proposed improvements include greater transparency, portability and reduced costs.
Below we’ll take a look at what the project is all about, how it will work and details of the ICO.
Akropolis maintains that the pension industry is flawed with the global problem of there being a deficit between its assets and liabilities and that this deficit will snowball in the future leading eventually to a worldwide financial and social crisis. The discrepancy could reach $100 trillion by 2050.
The burden of managing the deficit appears to be shifting from the pension industry to the individual. Pensions funds are also being eroded by complicated and expensive fee structures plus a general lack of transparency.
Akropolis plans to create a portable, transparent pension infrastructure based on blockchain technologies. Targeted users include pension funds and fund managers which will be attracted by reduced overheads and new methods of communicating with clients and promoting their products, while individuals who use the platform will benefit from more transparency and pension portability.
Altogether the system promises that a decentralised blockchain based pension structure can remedy the many faults in the current system while developing a more sustainable future.
Requirements for the Akropolis system include:
· The ability to support the current pensions system
· Ensuring new retirees do not suffer the result of systematic failures
· A pension protocol geared to support growing needs of an ageing population
· Transition to a new sustainable system
· Support of the gig economy and frequent job changes.
· Recognise increasing atomisation of the workforce
· Reputation building and incentivisation
The Akropolis platform will be built on Ethereum blockchain initially with planned future developments including alternative blockchain technologies to create a multichain platform. It will be a hybrid trust and trustless system which will give individual participants control of their own data that they can choose to exchange for cryptocurrency awards.
The various stakeholders and their roles in the ecosystem include:
· Individual users — receive access to pension services and received tokenised rewards
· Pension funds — institutional funds will function in similar ways to individual users
· Fund managers — purchase and acquire assets for individual users and pension funds
· Asset tokenisers- mint and distribute tokens that represent the actual asset
· Developers — build and maintain the platform
There will be two tokens: the Akropolis Internal token (AIT) and the Akropolis External token (AKT):
· AKT — A fixed supply will be minted. They will be used for platform access, purchasing pension services, purchasing platform data, and funding platform incentives.
· AIT — A non-volatile token with a fixed value which will represent represents stakeholders funds and can be exchanged for cryptocurrency and fiat currencies. AITs are decoupled from AKTs, in other words, they are an independent token.
During the latter part of 2017 initial funding was raised from Angel investors and the pre-sale soft cap was achieved. Future milestones include:
· Q2/3 2018: ICO, institutional partnership agreements, finalising technical architecture, and trial deployment of MVP.
· Q3/4 2018: B2B and B2C products completed
· Q4 2018: Platform integration, launch B2B pilot service, selection of pension fund asset managers, B2C trial, mobile app development.
· 2019 — Smart contracts audit, launch the final version of the platform, eternal API available for developers, Hardware wallets developed.
The ICO is scheduled to commence in June with the goal of raising $25 million, however, at the time of writing a date has not been announced. There are signs this could be delayed. However, the soft cap has already been achieved.
· Token: AKT
· Token type: ERC20
· Total Tokens: 900,000,000
· Available tokens: 360 million (40% of total)
· Price: 1 AKT = 0.0690 USD
· Fundraising Goal: 25,000,000 USD
Strangely this ICO has not received any rating yet from the ICO rating sites. Hopefully some of them will pick it up before the main sale starts.
The pension system is in dire need of reform as many countries face a huge deficit in the funding of their pensions.
Inevitably there will need to be changes if system are to be sustainable in the long term, particularly as societies age and people live much longer. Indeed, scientists predict that babies born today in industrialised nations will live to 130 years old.
So the solution of Akropolis to offer an option that is more transparent, open, efficient and portable is to be commended. Any savings and efficiencies that can be achieved will be of much benefit to societies.
It is an ambitious project but one I will be watching with interest and wishing it every success.
You can check out the Akropolis ICO here.
