How Co-Founder & COO at Brickken, Yassir Haouati, Tokenizes Businesses Bringing Equity On-chain

Yassir Haouati, COO & Co-Founder of Brickken, tells us about living in a tokenized world.

Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded Brickken.

Yassir Haouati: A digital entrepreneur and digital systems engineer, I started my career by bootstrapping a number of small businesses in the E-commerce and Mobile Development industries. As a full-stack developer, I became passionate about blockchain technology because of the decentralization benefits that are changing the world for the better. I saw an opportunity to bring real-world assets into its digital format, where innovation could thrive and new business models could erupt.

How does Brickken innovate?

Yassir Haouati: Since our inception, Brickken has realized that both real assets and digital assets each suffer from a similar pain point, their management. Thus, we have come to understand that tokenization, the breaking down of assets into smaller parts called tokens, with equal rights and value, is just part of the larger issue that needs to be solved – the management of assets in the blockchain.

Coming to solve this, Brickken is a management solution that brings any type of asset, but especially equity, into the blockchain. The company also provides a solution where this can be managed fully on-chain, from crowdfunding to decision making, from shareholder / tokenholder management to distribution of dividends/interests. We want tokenization to be an add-on in a manner of speaking and are continuously developing a solution where a tokenized company can be fully managed in the blockchain. To this end, Brickken is on the verge of creating both the infrastructure where companies that are on-chain can thrive, as well as an infrastructure catering to DAOs and their functionality – which is what we are tackling next. 

How did the coronavirus pandemic affect your business?

Yassir Haouati: Brickken was born at the beginning of the pandemic. The founders started putting ideas together, building into setting up the concept for Brickken, and we decided to go all in into our vision. As we progressed, we understood that the world was about to undergo a process of hyper digitization; while nearly everyone was isolated/quarantined, the world still needed to function. This became evident as Zoom turned into a core part of businesses, and many new forms of digital interactions began to form. This is where we saw the opportunity, in the new reality, where real and digital ecosystems blended together. 

What are the current trends in the tokenization industry, and how fast is it changing?

Yassir Haouati: One of the most common verticals in the tokenization business is real estate, given its simplistic ease to understand; you have one building, and you divide that building into thousands of pieces. Yet, this was only scratching the surface, the beginning of understanding the possibilities that tokenization could bring. It started spreading to other verticals like art, scarce and valuable resources, or renewable energies, but it has always been understood that tokenization lies in the asset. At Brickken, our approach is to go to the base and foundation of things. We see the true tokenization lying directly in the company’s equity, and once you tokenize it, you can tokenize anything you want. We want to provide companies a solution for them to tokenize themselves, and be able to manage their new reality, an on-chain reality.

Who is the target audience of Brickken? Do you have any interesting partnerships?

Yassir Haouati: We focus on SMEs, especially ones with a digital product or service. We believe it is easier for them to understand what it is that Brickken provides. Additionally, we are focused on providing new engagement channels to their investors. For example, a token can represent equity and, at the same time, represent a discount on the product or service of the tokenized SMEs, or an entrance to a VIP group, etc. At Brickken, we aim to provide utility to the token itself. 

We have grown very fast in the last year and formed numerous partnerships. Most interesting among them is our partnership to get into the regulatory sandbox of the Spanish Securities Commissioner to test a secondary market for Security Tokens. Our approach to how we see the space evolving, and utmost compliance with the law, has allowed us to target institutional players to amplify further our vision for the world to be tokenized. 

Tell us more about your platform/technology.

Yassir Haouati: We currently have a platform of a centralized nature, where Brickken provides the end-to-end tokenization solution to clients. Yet, we are very excited to be testing our decentralized platform, a dApp, where we provide companies the technology for them to tokenize themselves without our intervention or direct involvement. If you are in a decentralized space, the product you are supplying must be of the same nature. We want to scale by allowing anybody to use our technology and become frictionless by reducing intermediaries in the process. 

For the dApp, our own utility token, BKN, is of the utmost importance. We are generating an entire ecosystem around the token for it to become the form of payment of the dApp to third parties inside the ecosystem. We aim for it to even take on the form of a governance token through the Brickken’s DAO, which we aim to create before year’s end.

How do you see the future of Brickken? What are the next steps for the company?

Yassir Haouati: We are listing our token in a centralized exchange (CEX) and afterward in a decentralized exchange (DEX). This, on its own, is a huge milestone for the deployment of our new technology and will further strengthen the token for when it is connected to the Brickken dApp.

In parallel, we will be tokenizing ourselves and transforming our equity into tokens to invite people to join us at the shareholding level and become part of our journey. Our roadshow will be unique, as we will be inviting VCs and retail to coexist in the same environment through our equity token, so this is an exciting time.

The future of Brickken lies in how fast we can position ourselves within space. When people think of tokenization, we want them to think of Brickken and eventually for the words to blend together and become synonymous. Once we achieve this, then success is in reach. 

Your final thoughts? 

Yassir Haouati: Yes of course! We will soon be living in a fully digital world, and already many new formats and conversations are happening around the blockchain space, tokenization, NFTs, and metaverse, yet, for some, it sounds too distant. I would suggest that everybody grab a newspaper and try to find a day where news of the space is not provided.

Mass adoption is already happening, and we will be living in a tokenized world sooner than we think. 

Your website?

www.brickken.com