Our guiding principle is to never act as a one-man show but rather as a community of users, say Crown founder Jan Brody and communications lead Jose Herranz.

The blockchain and cryptocurrency landscape is constantly shifting, with new platforms, products and services vying for attention. What is your strategy to make your voice heard?

Jose Herranz: Crown has witnessed this shift and transformation, as our blockchain just turned four years old in October. Crown‘s vision and goals are long-term. We stand on solid foundations and work hard towards achieving our mission: releasing version 1.0 of the Crown Platform, an ecosystem that will give host to multiple sources and forms of digital economic activity ranging from mobile applications for end users to professional services for businesses that wish to explore the benefits of distributed ledger technologies.

Jose Herranz

This philosophy is shared by a community that supports and activelly works on the development and expansion of Crown, as well as on creating businesses attached to the ecosystem that offer digital products and services, while core development remains a distributed organisation governed by the community of stakeholders and voters.

Mass-marketing techniques are flooding the market and disabling smaller projects from having access to a public, but Crown is a great example of how an organic distributed community can trespass the echo chambers that prevent many projects from being visible. Once new individuals join our discussion channels, they discover a thriving community eager to help and learn. This retains newcomers, driven by curiosity and interest in participating.

On what guiding principles did you build the Crown platform?

Jan Brody

Jan Brody: Crown was first imagined by four Bitcoin enthusiasts back in 2013. While they were talking about the Bitcoin phenomenon to several people in their business circles at that time, the main concern of a “regular Joe” was that Bitcoin does not have a backing ­­value behind it, and that it somehow looks “empty”.

We wanted to change that perception. We came with the name Crown, since it is a unifying symbol understood by billions in the entire planet. Everybody from Australia to America knows its meaning. It is a worldwide symbol which represents order, unity, strength, and rule of law (code). We took this symbol and connected it with blockchain technology, using part of the Bitcoin code, but also Namecoin, Dash, and other leading cryptographic tools into our blockchain, which showed the Crown community can think outside of the box, be open to new ideas.

Our guiding principle is to never act as a one-man show but rather a community of users. The idea behind our motto “Build your kingdom” means that we want to enable the users of Crown Platform to engage with blockchain technology and build their own use cases and kingdoms on Crown.

Everyone is welcome, whether you are a developer, merchant, a small business owner, or looking to exchange value through instant transactions.

What are the Crown platform’s unique selling propositions?

JB: Its essential that people back the value of the blockchain with their own ideas and projects. We can now see that the future of blockchain is to empower users to build real world applications. Furthermore, we believe that a truly credible and reliable blockchain will be an independent, self-sustainable, self-fundable blockchain, powered and governed by the community of users.

We are trying to achieve both by building a model called blockchain-as-a-service where the community builds a robust generalist blockchain, which anybody can use at his will. We don’t want to focus on a specific use case segment of the blockchain sector, we want the end users to be free to decide and to build their own kingdoms. This means that the community can build new economy applications, host existing applications, use a decentralised cloud platform for storage, timestamp documents to prove ownership or any other use cases imaginable from the set of tools that the ecosystem provides.

There is a high degree of democracy in your platform. How does this ‘democracy’ translate into action?

JH: The factor of democracy that comes into play at Crown Platform is articulated through the Decentralised Governance and Proposal System (DGPS). The DGPS gives voting rights to every stakeholder that runs a Masternode. Anyone can submit proposals to the network in order to receiv funding for their Crown related projects. The stakeholders have the ability to vote on these proposals and decide the future of the platform by allocating the resources that the blockchain produces with each mined block. While 90 per cent of the block reward goes to stakers and miners, 10 per cent goes towards the DGPS, making Crown an open to participate, self-funded, and self-sustainable distributed organisation.

Who is the team giving energy to this platform?

JH: Like in every distributed project, also at Crown there is a set of individuals who work with a higher intensity towards achieving vision and goals. This core team is composed of a changing and heterogeneous group of developers, communicators, community managers, tinkerers, and business strategists. The central part of the core team is the professional software development team, which is employed by the community through the DGPS and works full-time on the project, coordinated by Artem, our tech lead. He works with Ashot and Volodymyr, two blockchain developers who know the Crown code inside and out. Surrounding and supporting the development team we find for example Jan, founder of Crown and tireless active supporter of the project, Jacob, who administrates the system and makes sure all the development and community servers and resources are up to date, Olya, international ambassador, Luke, business developer, Alex, community manager, or Alexander, support lead. I include myself in this group and I currently take care of the communications.

Our goal is that these opportunities will become clear to everyone

There are many more strategic community members who give energy to the project. We are only here thanks to everyone‘s effort. The list of contributors would be endless.

What are your short- to mid-term plans?

JH: Our short-term plans include switching the consensus mechanism to Proof of Stake in order to become an ecologically sustainable platform. Likewise, we are going to increase the decentralised budget in order to activate further participation and make the platform economically sustainable as the project grows. Furthermore, new functionality frameworks will be released in Q4 2018, such as a timestamping API and a framework for non-fungible tokens (NFT) in order to register unique assets on the blockchain and a cryptographic mechanism to prove ownership over these.

Mid-term we want to engage more businesses with the ecosystem and find added ways of onboarding these and explaining what Crown platform can be used for by individuals, businesses, and institutions. A complex system requires a lot of ability to communicate in order to explain its almost endless possibilities. Our goal is that these opportunities will become clear to everyone so as to have a maximum usability by anyone interested in enhancing their global transaction capabilities.

Within this context, what is Malta’s attraction to you?

JB: Malta is an amazing country with a strong history of resistance. We are thrilled by the fact that Maltese people went through such huge pressure throughout their history and still, here they are, standing firm. It is an inspiration that has many parallels with the turbulences that Crown has had to go through, and one of the reasons why we are working at basing the Crown foundation in Malta.

We were searching for a partner country that we could trust, and we found that trust in Malta. Of course the digital asset and blockchain strategy of the government, expressed by the coming into force of new laws on November 1, is a very clear signal, which helped us during this important decision. That is why we seek to collaborate with local businesses and institutions in order to enhance the Maltese economy through the use of blockchain, a technology that this visionary country is embracing like no other.

You will be present at the Malta Blockchain Summit. How do you plan to engage with attendees?

JH: The Crown Core Team will be almost entirely present at the Malta Blockchain Summit. All eyes are on Malta and this is why we have decided to attend the summit with such intensity.

Crown will have a booth at the conference, stand 196, and will take part in discussion panels. We have already made appointments with projects that share our vision and goals, and we are looking forward to forging new exciting and fruitful cooperations with other attendees. Our team is very experienced we have been present at conferences in Central America, UK, Germany, India, The Emirates, just to cite some.

We plan to engage with the attendees through a set of materials that we have prepared and of course through our presence. The team at the venue breaths for Crown and knows very well what our platform has to offer. As we are not selling a product but rather offering an open infrastructure to use, it is very easy to be interesting for the visitors. We have experienced this before and will confirm it once more. Crown is simply a unique project that draws the interest of any blockchain enthusiast and business.

Furthermore, we will be hosting a free Crown Community Meetup on Saturday November 3 at dSPACE³.

If you want to meet us in person and learn more about our project, come join us from 6pm on for informal talks and drinks and find out by yourself how a digital distributed organisation sets foot in the physical world.