VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
BLOK Technologies Inc. ("BLOK Tech" or the "Company") (CSE:BLK) (FRANKFURT:2AD) is pleased to provide an update on the Company’s activities related to its 100% owned subsidiary Greenstream Technologies (“GSX”).
Greenstream has in development a private blockchain enabled distributed ledger application platform to manage the integrity of the supply chain for companies, government agencies and finally the end user in the Canadian cannabis ecosystem. The Greenstream Network will communicate, transfer assets and value while complying with jurisdictional regulations. When completed, the Greenstream platform will have multiple revenue streams. The platform has been in development since the summer of 2017 following a white paper which mapped out five phases bringing to market a minimum viable product (MVP) as early as April of this year. The development team is currently in Phase 3. The Company is pleased to announce that it now has a working proof of concept, built using the IBM Hyperledger fabric. Further testing and development of this proof of concept is underway.
Greenstream was co-founded by an accomplished Blockchain and FinTech development team including Douglas Kukura, Joel Yaffe, Rumi Guzder and Mike Cohen in Montreal, Canada.
The Greenstream team is made up of a combination of platform development professionals and business executives. The Company will be adding sales and marketing expertise as Greenstream gets closer to the MVP.
Douglas Kukura
Mr. Douglas Kukura, co-founder of Greenstream and is the current Chief Operations Officer of the Company. Doug is 36 and has a long track record of sales and business development including FinTech, and has achieved many accomplishments in various roles with leading tech companies such as, Ebay, Paysafe, Pivotal Payments and Kijiji. Doug’s focus is on the day to day operations of Greenstream and will be the lead liaison with the licensed producers during the development period.
Joel Yaffe
Joel Yaffe is a founder of Greenstream and is the current Chief Technology Officer of the Company and a Member of the Board of the parent Company, BLOK Tech. Joel is an established technology professional of the Montreal start-up community, agitating and mentoring tech entrepreneurs while incubating and launching many ventures.
Rumi Guzder
Rumi Guzder is a co-founder of Greenstream and is currently the Chief Information Officer responsible for daily operations and execution of Greenstream’s strategic initiatives to create technology-based solutions which will deliver best-in-class service. Rumi has been an innovator in the technology start-up space, co-founded MobiCow a mobile advertisement network and had been the CFO prior to the successful exit to EvoLeads, a Montréal company. Rumi also brings in experience in Blockchain & Cryptocurrency space with his leading contributions to developing stratum proxy and mining hashrate optimizer.
Mike Cohen
Mike Cohen is a co-founder of Greenstream & Blocksense Coop and actively participates in the blockchain industry as an advisor and system architect for leading industry stakeholders including blockchain development teams and solution providers, regulatory and industry bodies, and enterprise customers. Mike currently serves as a Blockchain Industry Advisor for Chapmans Limited.
Mike has worked directly on a wide range of blockchain applications for physical access control management, digital rights management (DRM) and royalty distribution for the resale of e-books, an online video advertising platform, a self-sovereign identity oracle and ID proofing system. These activities include early hands-on exposure to distributed systems, computational trust models and initial coin offerings.
Manu Varghese, CSM, MCSA
Manu speaks five languages and is a veteran within the software industry, having served in a multitude of successful technology roles across Fortune 500 corporations primarily in the financial services industry including Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland PLC, and Infosys Limited. Manu is responsible for driving Greenstream’s global product vision, design and development, and he will lead product management and all of engineering.
Manu has firsthand experience in all aspects of information technology & business, from product inception, development, and delivery using Agile, Waterfall & DevOps methodologies. Manu holds a Master of Technology (M.Tech.) specializing in Computer Network Engineering and acts as an advisor to start-ups in Blockchain & FinTech space. Manu is also a Certified Scrum Master and holds various technical certifications from Microsoft, IBM, and Splunk.
Jim Anastassiou
Jim Anastassiou had joined Greenstream Technologies as a Blockchain Consultant in October 2017. He is responsible for designing & orchestrating Greenstream’s blockchain network and leading the development team.
Prior to Greenstream, Jim had co-founded Blocksense in late 2015, a consulting firm focused on solving key challenges of bringing blockchain innovation to business and industry. Fascinated by the potential of the technology, he had spent the last few years researching, architecting and developing blockchain based applications for start-ups, local & international NGOs, and the federal government amongst others.
Drew Taylor
Drew Taylor has worked in big data and enterprise class software solutions since 2012. Constantly tackling new programming tools, Drew's journey has led him to master technologies such as JavaScript, Python, Java, Ionic framework, DApp development, Solidity, Scrypt, and LAMP and MEAN technology stacks.
Having worked as lead developer and project manager for projects of all sizes, his experience gives him the ability to understand projects as a whole, foreseeing potential pitfalls down the road. Currently he's tackling internet and financial security, an imminent need in our world today, using blockchain development stacks from big players such as IBM, Intel, and the Ethereum Foundation.
"We are proud to have assembled a top-notch management and blockchain development team in Greenstream,” says BLOK Tech’s CEO Rob Dawson. “With our development plans on track and our team working to achieve its milestones, we are confident we will be providing a compliant, leading-edge platform to manage the rapidly evolving legal recreational and medicinal cannabis industry.”
About BLOK Technologies Inc.
BLOK Technologies Inc. is a public company that invests in and develops emerging companies in the blockchain technology sector. The Company’s approach is to provide capital, technology and management expertise to the companies it develops, starting in the cannabis supply chain management sector. The Company’s process is to identify early-stage technologies with potential to disrupt and innovate within their industry and provide them with the necessary capital, resources and expertise to ensure the success of their projects.
About Greenstream
Greenstream is engaged in the development of a blockchain-enabled supply chain integrity platform for the legalized cannabis industry. The federal government has laid out a roadmap to have cannabis legalized nationwide by July 2018. With this in mind, Greenstream is in the process of developing a technology architecture to address the supply integrity needs for this new regulatory environment, providing the industry the ability to manage from 'seed to sale'. Greenstream’s platform provides a unified secure solution for licensed cannabis producers, merchants, consumers and government entities helping them transact, track, access, share and authenticate the movements of legal cannabis through all levels of the supply chain.
For further information, please contact:
James Hyland, B.Comm.
Vice President Corporate Development, Director
(604) 442-2425
jamie@bloktechinc.com
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
“Robert Dawson”
President & CEO
Statements in this news release may be viewed as forward-looking statements. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. There are no assurances the company can fulfill such forward-looking statements and the company undertakes no obligation to update such statements. Such forward-looking statements are only predictions; actual events or results may differ materially as a result of risks facing the company, some of which are beyond the company’s control.