Behind every great product, there is a great underlying technology platform.
In recent Community Updates, we have explained how the HOLD brand and product vision has evolved based on listening to our Early Supporters and the wider market. This has resulted in a focus on making HOLD the “hub” for receiving, converting, sending and spending crypto.
We have also explained that strong Compliance is core to HOLD’s operating model so we will always apply the strongest KYC, AML and Fraud checks.
To deliver on the product vision, and give our the best user experience possible, it’s critical that HOLD builds a robust, modern and scalable platform.
The HOLD Platform
HOLD platform continues to evolve at a great pace and we’d like to recap on HOLD’s technological principles and choices covered in a .
For those of you who like to geek-out here is some good geek-out material for you… if not, feel free to jump to the next section with exciting about our technology partners.
At HOLD we’ve adopted a microservices-oriented architecture and event-driven design for our platform and API’s development. As for the tech stack, core services are built in Java, leveraging the Spring Boot framework and TypeScript on Node.js. On the mobile development front, React Native is the framework of choice, enabling Android and iOS apps whilst maintaining the native look and feel.
The financial industry has seen mass of Python for tasks such as quantitative and qualitative analysis and at HOLD Python is at the center of the HOLD engine. Python and its ecosystem provide specialized and battle-tested libraries leveraging techniques such as statistics, artificial intelligence and machine learning which have been fundamental for our analysis and strategies development.
From an infrastructure perspective, HOLD has its rails on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a highly scalable & available, PCI DSS compliant solution. From a containers management perspective the choice was Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. End-to-end, our delivery pipelines are orchestrated using Jenkins, from code pushed to the repositories up until production environment deployments.
We hope that provided a good geek-out!
Best in Class Technology Partners
To deliver a great platform, it’s critical that the best technology partners are used to deliver core components of the product. HOLD has been focused most recently on integrations with three key partners.
HOLD Debit Card
The HOLD debit card is central to unlocking the value of the HOLD platform. Finding and delivering on a card program that will meet the needs of HOLD’s , has not been easy to achieve. As shared in , HOLD has signed with our card program provider and we are super happy.
It provides a fully proprietary end-to-end banking and payments solutions platform. PCI DSS Level 1 compliant and E-Money licensed. The technical integration is well underway, leveraging an extensive set of APIs which will turn the use of the HOLD app and card into a delightful experience.
Customer Identity Verification
The integration delivers on two essential objectives for HOLD:
- Fully automated state of the art Identity Verification & AML technology
- Providing a smooth UX to ease HOLD journey through the process
Onfido include Square, Revolut, Indiegogo and Zipcar.
Tech-wise, the integration leverages Onfido’s mobile native SDK to guide the user through the ID document upload process making it extremely easy. It also includes a Proof-of-Life step which consists of an automated video validation — very straightforward as it completes in a few seconds and an overall much stronger and proof step.
These checks, coupled with PEP (politically exposed person) and Sanctions checks and other proprietary risk assessment logic means that HOLD has super-strong identity verification and AML checks to keep the bad guys out.
Crypto Anti-Money Laundering
HOLD chose as a leading solution to keep dirty crypto out of the HOLD platform.
Chainalysis is an industry-leading tool used for detecting, preventing and investigating money laundering and fraud violations with . It enables financial institutions and exchanges in providing an additional layer of security to crypto related services and businesses.
This partnership allows HOLD to leverage Chainalysis’s APIs to prevent illicit funds to reach the HOLD network and its users, such as crypto sourced from major hacks or with associations with terrorism.
Next Update
In the next Community Update, to be published on May 30th, 2019, we will be revealing more about the evolution of the HOLD brand and designs so you get a feel for what to expect when you see the new mobile app in the closed-beta launch at the end of Q2 2019, or full launch in Q3 2019.
Stay Tuned,
HOLD Team
Published at Fri, 26 Apr 2019 14:07:39 +0000
