Q&A: Peter Stein, CEO, Agreement Solutions

With
the current uncertain climate around COVID-19, many people have been looking towards
more bankable assets and investments; a difficult job as the global markets plummet.
It is fair to say that the history of blockchain technologies – ICO boom in
2017, crash in 2018, consolidation thereafter – would not mark it out right
now, despite what one may read from the Bitcoin press. Yet some companies are
trying to change that.

Agreement Solutions,
based in Germany, is aiming to create a ‘blockchain simulator’ to help
organisations better understand their initiatives – and The Block
spoke with co-founder and CEO Peter Stein (centre) about what the
company is setting out to achieve, as well as the challenges and
opportunities presented.

TB: Hi Peter. Tell me about your career to date – the companies
you have founded/co-founded and how Agreement Solutions was founded?

PS: I have successfully co-founded companies in digital health and
the Internet of Things before starting Agreement Solutions. My two
co-founders Colin (left) and Marius (right) laid the foundation for the
company working in academia. Colin and I met last year in Indonesia,
where we discussed the potential of a simulation tool for the DLT market
and decided together with Marius to start Agreement Solutions.

TB: What does Agreement Solutions do and what problem is the company trying to solve in the blockchain market?

PS: Designing and operating distributed ledger systems bears a
variety of uncertainties which prevent stakeholders from investing. We
can answer questions like: where are major bottlenecks in my DLT system?
How does it scale? What’s the best consensus algorithm for my use case?
How will the system behave in critical events? With that we reduce
uncertainties in the whole lifecycle of DLT systems.

TB: As more organisations are looking to undertake blockchain
projects how important is this need for consultancy? Does it play into a
wider theme of blockchain/DLTs maturing?

PS: It is very important that DLT systems become more predictable to
increase the trust and willingness to invest in this technology. Sharing
experience from successful projects will help the ecosystem as well as
approaches like the one from Agreement Solutions, by supporting with
quantitative predictions of outcomes.

TB: What have customers and prospects been saying – what do they want from companies such as yourself?

PS: Besides the support in design space exploration, many customers
are interested in understanding the behaviour of their system in
critical events. We can analyse such scenarios with high throughput and
generate data to highlight potential limitations or problems with the
deployment.

TB: You work with various stakeholders, from platform providers,
to developers, to investors. How important is this collaboration between
all parties? Are we achieving a situation where all parties are moving
in the right direction?

PS: The collaboration across the value chain seems to become more and
more efficient. On the platform level, I see a lot of competition, with
each platform fighting for their own niche. For good use cases there is
still sufficient funding in the system. One very good sign: new
organisations are constantly entering the space, taking on real-world
challenges with the help of DLT systems.

TB: What can we expect from Agreement Solutions for the rest of 2020 as the company scales out?

PS: We have integrated a number of consensus algorithms and are
currently focusing on integrating platforms, like Hyperledger Fabric,
which Colin discussed at the Hyperledger Global Forum in Phoenix. You
can expect from us to contribute our expertise to help realising
challenging and complex, large-scale infrastructure projects.

Picture credit: Agreement Solutions

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