This Australian startup seeks to change voting and decision making processes with blockchain

Photo credit: Brendan C.

This has been heavily revised from the original email interview.

Blockchain-based startup Horizon State has an ambitious goal: to change the way voting and collaborative decision making happen across governments and organizations.

The Australia-based company has partnered with information platform MiVote, global community Centre for the Future, and SAP’s Next-Gen network to operate a token-based voting platform that can be scaled globally through mobile and blockchain technology.

In my interview with him, Horizon State co-founder and head of product Jamie Skella talked about the idea for his company, expansion plans in Asia, and how ICOs differ from traditional VC money, among other things.

A photo of Jamie Skella. Photo Credit: Jamie Skella’s Twitter profile.

What was your inspiration behind Horizon State?

It never made sense to me. Voting meant picking between two parties and their packages of policies, but why wasn’t I being asked to vote on the policies I care about?

In 2015, I met Adam Jacoby who founded a democratic movement called MiVote with an ambition to achieve the kind of engagement with people that made much more sense to me. A byproduct of that ambition was a need to think about how we could make voting online convenient and secure.

Having been deeply involved in blockchain and cryptoasset research, the use of blockchain to create a tamper-proof record of votes made immediate sense. So, we set off to build a prototype, which was launched in February 2017. Through MiVote’s activities, an appetite for this tech from a broad range of companies became obvious even outside of political use cases. This is when Horizon State was born.

What were the biggest challenges and perks of launching an ICO?

I would say that the biggest perks are connecting, inspiring, and starting meaningful conversations with people who want to help make the world a better place.

In terms of challenges, developing brand-new ideas on new technology—vs improving old ones—and taking those ideas to market is certainly a challenge. The promise of the technology must also come with education about it. Blockchain is still an unknown concept to most people. Thankfully, governments and companies are quickly starting to recognize the profound things it can enable.