May 04, 2020: The Tezos Foundation first entered into a strategic cooperation with the Taurus SA in Q4 of 2019 to grow the Tezos ecosystem and provide secure access to the Tezos blockchain to potential issuers of security tokens. The collaboration has steadily progressed since then, with Taurus announcing in February that it had successfully integrated the Tezos protocol into its digital asset infrastructure.

Last week, Managing Partner Lamine Brahimi, answered questions on what Taurus is working on, what needs to be done to bolster institutional adoption of blockchain protocols, and the future of the Tezos Foundation – Taurus SA collaboration. Check out the Q&A below.

Taurus has an impressive product suite. Who are your products designed for?

Taurus has developed an infrastructure geared towards regulated financial institutions i.e., banks, exchanges and institutional investors.

We are privileged to be entrusted by the full spectrum of financial institutions: investment banks, private banks, crypto-banks, universal banks, marketplaces. We also serve technology companies that are integrating our technology in full or part.

What does “enterprise-grade” mean in your opinion? What are institutional investors looking for in technology?

If I focus on the most sophisticated clients i.e., banks or exchanges, they look at three things:

• One, secure storage of private keys which is necessary but far from being sufficient requirement.

• Two, embedded “banking-grade” processes that integrate compliance, risk management, fraud detection, treasury management, reconciliation and reporting.

• Last, future-proof technology able to quickly evolve and adapt to technological evolutions. Concretely, some banks that made a choice 2 years ago have recently come to us because their technology partner was unable to cope with the pace of technological progress and requirements.

Taurus managed to build one of the few engineering teams in the world that master the full technology stack (software, hardware, cryptography, distributed systems, devOps). They work hand-in-hand with the founding team that knows financial services pretty well. This is a quite powerful combination and sought-after by institutional clients.

There are many blockchains and cryptocurrencies out there. Why did Taurus choose to integrate Tezos?

The protocol is robust with its formal verification of smart contracts. Clients were asking for it too.

What’s also interesting is that we share a similar vision with the Tezos Foundation in relation to driving institutional adoption by working on concrete real-asset or private markets use cases.

How will Taurus help drive institutional adoption of Tezos?

Opening our network of banking clients: some of our clients are onboarding Tezos. Other projects are also in the pipeline.

What is the Taurus team focused on right now?

On the product side, continue to build the most complete platform in the market from issuance, to custody, to transfer of digital assets incl. Tezos smart contracts.

On the client side, collaborating with financial institutions on concrete private markets use cases and winning new clients!