Auctus, a smart contracts-based blockchain platform, is targeting the $36.4 trillion pension market using the Ethereum network and its immutable ledger.
For the vast majority of workers and lifelong professionals, pensions are a vital component of their retirement savings. Over the past decade, with record low interest rates and more regulation, pension funds have become significantly more advanced by outsourcing asset management and concentrating risk in a minor part of their investment portfolio, while otherwise aiming for low-risk and secure investments.
But, despite being a multi-trillion dollar market, the pension industry has struggled to deal with pension frauds, scams, and bankruptcy. According to the Auctus team, many pension fund operators, still work with opaque and outdated information technology (IT) systems, databases, and technologies to process large sums of money and manage trillions of dollars worth of assets.One major issue with traditional and conventional database and data processing technologies is their centralized nature. If sensitive financial and personal information is stored within a centralized ecosystem administered by a limited group of entities, the probability of vulnerability, security breaches, and data manipulation increases.
Auctus is introducing an Ethereum-based smart contract platform, that autonomously handles pension funds in a secure and decentralized environment. Since blockchain technology is immutable and decentralized, Auctus provides a completely transparent ecosystem wherein both, pension fund operators and their clients, can easily access their investments and track their pension savings.
“With the ability to manage operations with more transparency, lower costs and easier auditing/control, the adoption of a unified platform for pension funds would be of great advantage for employers, employees, managers and regulators alike. However, it would require a transparency mechanism to prevent the platform from being controlled by an individual party for their own individual interest. This risk can be circumvented with the use of blockchain technology,” read the whitepaper of Auctus.
Through a distributed platform, the Auctus blockchain-based pension fund network solves four of the main problems within the global pension industry, which are fraud, poor governance, contribution collection, data management, and hidden costs.
Issues of the current pension fund industry and investment infrastructures offered by traditional financial service providers are demonstrated in the infographic shown below:
Ultimately, the Auctus development team emphasizes that the usage of smart contracts and a fully automated blockchain platform to pension funds “leads to massive operational cost advantages, which significantly increases the low returns that pension funds currently experience. Needless to say, better returns lead to faster achievement of pension saving targets.”
PRE-SALE WITH WHITELIST CLOSING ON SEPTEMBER 30TH
The official pre-sale of Auctus begins on October 3rd at 14:00 UTC. However, in order to participate, investors need to register for the whitelist before September 30th at auctus.org
Auctus is aligning interests with their investors by having strict vesting rules. This means tokens will not be immediately tradable for Auctus team members. However, investors will be able to transfer tokens right after the ICO (which is expected to start on November 14th, 2017).
ICObench.com rated the Auctus project and token sale with a very strong 4.7 out of 5 and low risk