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Alina Aseeva is a chartered scientist, an experienced business consultant, a successful blockchain entrepreneur, and a talented developer with the Ethereum Global Denver Hackathon first prize under her belt.

In 2020, she co-founded Idavoll Network: a Polkadot-based platform for creating, managing, and governing DAOs in just a few mouse clicks. A proud winner of the Web3 Foundation grant, Idavoll contributes to the development of Web 3.0 – and the adoption of decentralized ledger technology by companies worldwide.

In this interview, Alina told us about Idavoll’s mission and its plans, shared the benefits of switching to a DAO, and also reflected on the future of decentralized governance.

Q: Can you tell us more about yourself, your previous experience, and your role in the project?

My name is Alina. I’m 29 years old, and I come from Russia. I started my career as a scientist: having graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2013, I did research work in Switzerland, Denmark, Russia, Japan, and the US. Before going into crypto, I worked for several years in Zurich as a strategy consultant for McKinsey – and then as a corporate development manager for 3 Plus TV Network.

In 2019, I joined the world of crypto as a co-founder of Smartmatter (now Mixorio) and won the Ethereum Global Denver Hackathon with confidential transactions for POA Network. After that, I built Unidao – the first DeFi hedge fund structured as a DAO – and worked as a biz dev for Equilibrium, another great Polkadot project.

In September 2020, my co-founder Abhilash and I started building the Idavoll Network. Here I’m responsible for the technical development of the protocol (both frontend and backend), user experience, and PR efforts.

Q: Let’s talk about Idavoll. What is your mission?

Idavoll Network is a DAO platform based on Polkadot Substrate 2.0. Our main goal is to solve two fundamental problems: the lack of interoperability between different blockchains and the high technological barrier in transition to decentralized governance. So how do we achieve it?

First, we are a cross-chain protocol – which means that different blockchain ecosystems can meet and interact with each other on Idavoll. For example, any Ethereum-based DeFi can run its heavy governance process on the Idavoll Network through the Polkadot bridge chain.

And second, we provide our users with a set of basic templates to create custom DAOs with just a few mouse clicks. There’s no need to be a developer: with Idavoll, virtually anyone can resolve disputes and build governing bodies.

Q: Why did you choose Polkadot as your base technology?

Building on Polkadot is trendy this year – for us, though, it also means staying relevant in the long term. Being a parachain gives Idavoll almost limitless opportunities for development and growth. One is top-notch interoperability that allows us to work across different blockchain networks; another is unprecedented scalability, as parachains can run many transactions in parallel to one another.

Vitalik Buterin outlined the cause for DAOs seven years ago – and since that time, many great organizations (Aragon, MetaCartel, Moloch Dao, Gitcoin, Compound Governance Alpha, Snapshot) have been working hard on bringing this technology to life.

Q: Talking about trendiness, which features separate Idavoll from the growing competition?

For one, we were one of the first projects to start building DAOs on Polkadot ahead of its mainnet launch in 2021 – which means we will also be the first to roll out our product when the parachains go live.

We were also the first to tackle the long-standing problem of DAO interoperability. Thanks to Polkadot, we can welcome new members from Ethereum, Cosmos, or any other blockchain on our platform. Just imagine: now, for the first time in the history of Web3, you can have the DAO voting going on one chain and the results executed on another chain. It’s a significant breakthrough.

Besides that, we were among the few projects to secure a Web3 Foundation grant in 2020. And lastly, we have the support of solid partners, such as Equilibrium, Huawei Cloud International, UNIDAO, xDAO, Chain Security, and DEIP.

Q: Do you think DAOs can become a part of the global financial system in the future?

We believe that DAOs will soon be the new norm of managing organizations, both on blockchain and outside the crypto space. This is because they have many advantages over the traditional governance process: transparency, scalability, useful tools for easy voting and asset management, and many more.

Q: Can you tell us more about those advantages? Why would a traditional organization want to switch to DAO?

In crypto, infrastructure and decentralized applications are reliable because they are open source. Blockchains don’t forget. Every decision taken in a DAO will be audible and transparent even years from when voting occurs.

Besides that, DAOs offer unprecedented scaling opportunities. You see, you can’t just add new 10.000 members to the voting of Facebook shareholders. But should it choose to adopt the DAO model, every user would be able to participate in the decision-making process.

Q: Did the 2020/2021 bull run in the crypto markets impact the project’s development in any way?

We could definitely benefit from the price of IDV tokens rising during the bull run, but we are happy with the bear market, too: it allows us to cut costs on development, listings, and marketing. And as far as development is concerned, be it crypto winter or summer, we will deliver everything we promised on time – regardless of the season.

Q: What are your goals for the rest of 2021 and further ahead?

First and foremost, we’ve scheduled our big launch as a parathread of Polkadot for this summer. In addition, our upcoming partnerships (we’ll reveal more on that soon) will let us expand the DAO toolkit for Idavoll users and offer them new handy features.

We also plan to grow and strengthen our community, help them transition to DAO as easily as possible, and organize exciting events for them. And lastly, we’ve applied for the next round of Web3 grants: looking forward to winning that one too.

So stay tuned for the updates in our community channels, and you are welcome to check out our platform.