How two blockchain projects are working in tandem towards the same goal
LightLink is a brand new Layer 2 Solution building on Ethereum and Elektrik is the very first decentralised application building on its blockchain. Elektrik is an innovative decentralised exchange focusing on providing an unrivalled trading experience with minimal fees, advanced tools and improved capital efficiency via a unique AI-driven machine learning model. The teams are remarkably aligned, to the extent where team members are shared.
It doesn’t get much more interesting than when two companies decide to cooperate together over their ideas, combine team players and share ambitions. Especially when there is a relationship built on trust, ambition and respect. This is the LightLink / Elektrik journey and it’s signposted for success.
Roy Hui may be considered the grey hair in this partnership and he has worked in the tech industry for the past 22 years. He is also a long-term gamer and set up a Silicon Beach organisation in his native Melbourne. Holding a computer science degree, he is passionate about coding.
“When I started off there wasn’t a support system for technology entrepreneurs,” Hui says.
“We listened to podcasts and after a while I suggested to some similarly inclined friends that we should set up our own meetup – and Silicon Beach Melbourne was born.
“This was before Web3, and when I first heard about blockchain I wondered if it might be a scam as portrayed it is, until I started looking at the code. I realised there was something here and I wanted to be part of it.”
Accordingly, in 2017, Hui set up a Blockchain Technology business. He was fascinated by the transformational power of the technology. He was all in.
Nathan Lenga wasn’t even born when Hui started his career. He was a crypto native from the getgo and so the early activities are not listed on his CV – he was anonymous for the early part of his career- and when we say early, we mean in his early teens.
Lenga was into Minecraft as a child and learnt to code as a result. From there it was a quick descent into the rabbit hole.
“I started mining Ethereum just for fun because I believed I was too late for Bitcoin,” Lenga explains.
“The decentralised applications on Ethereum were still very basic so I concentrated on the trading side of things where there was an opportunity for arbitrage.
“I set up an anonymous profile and Twitter and discovered I had a talent for both coding and trading – and I used this to find more work in building blockchains.”
Lenga pulled together a team of talented developers to build blockchains in return for tokens. He was very successful, so much so that he was doxxed and decided it was time to work under his own name, not a pseudonym. This was okay for a while but soon he was bored in the institutional landscape given that corporate structures often resulted in stagnation – a severe plague in the crypto industry.
“I was living in Australia, but crypto is borderless and so I decided to move to London where I very quickly found a new team and funding,” he said.
“This allowed me to step in and build a network state of companies all building protocols. Then I would create companies to service those protocols until I had created a mini empire of companies that all work together using network effects.”
The first project is Elektrik, a decentralised exchange.
Hui then takes up the story: “We’ve been building enterprise blockchains for a very long time under our blockchain solutions business. We’d evaluated a lot of blockchains but they all had issues with lack of transparency or interoperability and scalability.
“We could see there was a need for a layer two blockchain offering all the benefits of blockchain but with the high performance expected by enterprise.”
Hui and his team are grappling with the desire to help more people get onboard with this revolutionary technology.
“As entrepreneurs we knew we had to roll up our sleeves and make it happen,” he adds.
The result is LightLink, a layer 2, EVM compatible blockchain. The EVM component is vital for Hui as it is compatible with a lot of the existing code and taps into the largest developer base available, accessing the largest crypto economy in the world.
Hui is taking a new route to solve the issue of mass adoption, and he believes there’s a need to eradicate the complexity.
“For example, if you have an NFT ticket and you want to use it as a ticket to enter a sports stadium, you probably will need to get another currency, buy that on an exchange and go through a KYC process and all to use the NFT on your device,” he explains.
“That becomes a difficult exercise.”
Hui and his team partner with many enterprise companies including public transport bodies and sporting organisations, providing the best decentralised DeFi environments in the enterprise world. And this is where Lenga and Elektrik enter the picture.
As Lenga outlines, there is always a decentralised exchange (DEX) on every network to support retail traders and give value to tokens. Otherwise, there is no liquidity and no value.
“We had a bit of a light bulb moment,” he smiles.
“If LightLink has multiple enterprises on the chain then we can add value. We can build the DEX in such a way that enterprise institutions can reward traders by way of token rebates thereby creating liquidity. The more liquidity means lower slippage which in turn is better for traders.”
The aim of Elektrik is to build a positive cycle that keeps on going if there is traction and the enterprise bodies create traction by bringing new users onboard.
“Most DEXs don’t have the opportunity of tapping into enterprises in a one-stop-shop,” Lenga continues.
“We’ve also used Machine Learning to create a new level of capital efficiency where we’ve trained a dynamic machine learning model to prune historical data, learning all the time about new market conditions.”
Elektrik uses a MetaAI to differentiate between different market volatility environments, picking the most applicable data, and then making predictions based on this data to facilitate price discovery. Weightings are given to each of these predictions across the different liquidity pools on the DEX.
“What makes us unique is that LightLink supports gasless transactions. We could not have built this if we had to factor in fluctuating gas prices,” says Lenga.
Hui is very complimentary about the impact Elektrik and Lenga have made on his work.
“Originally enterprise mode was a way to remove a barrier for entry for users and enterprise customers but Nathan made us see that it actually unlocks innovation,” Hui says.
“Now we have a new set of tools to play around with a new economic model – and we don’t need the other baggage that stifles innovation.
“It’s not just the fee model but a way to introduce predictability and unlock innovation.”
The current roadmap is to migrate Hui’s existing enterprise customers to the new network where they will find new tools, features and value. He stresses it’s not a linear growth when working with enterprise customers, as once you onboard an enterprise customer you actually increase the user base by up to millions.
“I see so much potential under the hood,” Hui enthuses.
“For example, maybe you have a mobile app that is doing payment services which might purchase a train ticket, but what if that same app could also offer microlending through a DeFi service also on the device or a saving option. If it’s seamless for the user then I believe this is where we can onboard millions and millions of people into the Web3 ecosystem.”
Lenga points out the partnership is more than technology.
“The true arbitrage are the friends you make along the way,” he says.
“Roy is a rare person who sees how crypto can tap into enterprises. He has a profound talent. DeFi is built to offer permissionless, democratised finance – and he has the vision to unite the two ecosystems.”
About the two projects:
Elektrik is a capital-efficient decentralised exchange that aims to supercharge on-chain trading. Leveraging the power of the LightLink network, Elektrik is striving to provide an unrivalled trading experience with minimal fees, advanced tools, access to pool data within the platform’s UI and our Dynamic Liquidity Provision model.
LightLink is a Layer 2 blockchain secured by Ethereum, purposefully built for Metaverse, NFT and Gaming applications. LightLink is aiming to build the infrastructure for the new internet through their unique approach to gasless transactions and application of real world partnerships.