Updated on:11/26/2025 01:48 PM 
Lior Yaffe, the Co-Founder and Director of Jelurida, brings over two decades of expertise in designing, developing, and deploying enterprise applications for large organizations. He holds a Bachelor's degree in computer science from the prestigious Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
Prior to establishing Jelurida, Yaffe led the development and production process of a leading mainframe consortium product at Cipher AG.
CryptoSlate had the privilege of speaking with Lior about various topics including the current state of Jelurida's blockchain technology and why developers should consider Ardor over Ethereum.
Could you share your professional background and how you got involved in cryptocurrency?
Lior Yaffe (LY): Since childhood, I've always been passionate about mathematics and computers. While my peers were working on assignments or solving problems, I was busy writing computer programs to automate these tasks. I spent many years as a software developer and in various technical leadership roles for startups and large software vendors developing enterprise software.
Back in 2013, I first learned about Bitcoin from a random post on slashdot.org, but it wasn't until Bitcoin's price surged to $1000 that I decided to study the technology more seriously. I looked for something interesting to work with, examined BitcoinJ and various wallets, but quickly realized that the most significant innovations were happening in altcoins, not Bitcoin itself. I became fascinated with Nxt – a small open-source project that represented the first pure proof-of-stake blockchain and featured several technological innovations that were way ahead of their time.
What motivated you to establish Jelurida?
LY: The main challenges with the Nxt project, like many other open-source projects, were lack of funding and intellectual property protection. Over the years, people either directly cloned Nxt multiple times or created competing products such as Nem, Waves, and Lisk based on ideas introduced by the Nxt developers and community. Some of these projects managed to raise funding beyond their wildest dreams. It became clear that we, the Nxt developers, needed to take action to compete and protect our legal rights, which led to the establishment of Jelurida.
Where is your team located and why did you choose that location?
LY: The Jelurida headquarters is based in Lugano, Switzerland. We incorporated the company in Switzerland to support our 2017 crowdfunding campaign.
What are some of Jelurida's notable achievements or milestones?
LY: Jelurida was founded by the developers of Nxt, the first pure proof-of-stake blockchain, which is still operational today after more than six years. Ardor, the first multichain system on mainnet, was built based on Nxt technology. The Ardor mainnet was launched in January 2018, and together with its first child chain Ignis and additional child chains, represents the first hybrid open/permissioned blockchain technology to date.
What are the advantages of using Ardor compared to Ethereum or other blockchain platforms?
LY: Let's face it, the single blockchain single token model introduced by Bitcoin cannot scale on-chain. However, almost all of our competitors, Ethereum being one example, including those not yet on mainnet (Cardano, Algorand), rely on this same architecture, making them practically obsolete even before they were launched. Ardor is the first implementation to introduce an effective model of sharding per application.
Its parent/child chain architecture provides several breakthroughs in blockchain technology including child chain transaction pruning, sponsored transaction fees using a modern bundling system, and a straightforward, flexible, and user-friendly smart contracts language. All of our functionality is supported by a message-based wallet UI that reduces command-line usage and makes our products much simpler to understand.
Can you tell us about Ardor's/Jelurida's product roadmap? What upcoming features are you most excited about launching?
LY: We are currently working on our 2020 roadmap which will be published soon. Our roadmap is full of technical innovations from scaling solutions to cryptographic tricks to user experience magic. However, our main focus in the roadmap is to listen to our community and customers and develop what they need. This is how we came up with our multichain architecture and the hybrid open/permissioned framework.
What are the significant challenges of building a blockchain solution for enterprises?
LY: One notable challenge is finding the right balance between transparency and privacy. In the original model of blockchain, all data is transparent so that miners can validate it. Using our products, you can encrypt and store data on the blockchain and even share it securely with a third party, but you cannot base your consensus on encrypted data. For blockchain to reach its full potential as a business application, more research should be conducted to enable consensus over encrypted data.
What other projects and/or blockchain developments are you most excited about?
LY: I'm really excited about some of the projects building their applications on the Ardor platform. Triffic is working on an augmented reality use case for tokenization to promote commercial activity in the physical world. Max Property Group (MPG), which has a child chain on Ardor, is going through the final steps of getting regulatory approval from the Netherlands Financial Markets Authority (AFM) to launch their international real estate crowdfunding platform on blockchain technology. In the broader crypto ecosystem, the Lightning Network is certainly one of the most exciting developments. I'm also closely monitoring Facebook's Libra since they are the first major corporation to make a bold move into the open blockchain space.
Do you have any blockchain and/or crypto predictions for 2020 and beyond?
LY: Predictions are for fools, but let me try to embarrass myself!
Facebook will spend another frustrating year trying to convince global regulators to give a chance to its Libra project.
Telegram will finally launch a blockchain product that won't come close to the visionary product they described in their whitepaper.
I can only predict that Ethereum 2.0 will be delayed again, given the magnitude of the challenges they are facing.
I expect some scandals around staking as a service when staking pools do not share their profits with their stakers. In my opinion, this whole trend is bad for the industry since it goes against the decentralization principle. I also don't think it makes sense to pay interest on a proof-of-stake token which is trivial to stake as it only makes the wealthy richer.
What are the major obstacles for the mainstream adoption of crypto?
LY: To begin with, crypto is already enjoying mainstream adoption with Bitcoin worth $9000 a coin and being used as a payment method for almost every possible goods and services. Additionally, it's safe to say the 2017 ICO boom was definitely a sign of mainstream adoption.
Having said that, there are still very strong forces working against blockchain adoption by resisting any addition to the established fiat system and the power and control it brings with it. These forces are trying to split the crypto ecosystem into difficult-to-regulate but hard to use "good" crypto and everything else labeled "bad" crypto. While there are legitimate reasons for doing so, I feel most of the fears about crypto are greatly exaggerated. It reminds me of the times when regulators did not allow using a credit card for online shopping.
How will your company fare if there isn't another crypto bull run in the next decade?
LY: Our focus at Jelurida is on building great user experience for our users and customers, and by doing so, I'd like to think we are somewhat shielded from the wild fluctuations of the crypto market. We think long-term and have enough funding for the time being.
What is your most controversial opinion relating to blockchain and/or cryptocurrency?
LY: I'm a big proponent of proof-of-work and a big fan of proof-of-stake. I believe the simple and battle-tested Nxt/Ardor staking mechanism is sufficiently secure. Nothing at stake is not a practical threat, and all these newer PoS algorithms are less secure due to their complexity and potential bugs in their implementation.
While L2 products such as Lightning offer an alternative scaling solution, I still believe scaling is better done on-chain and that we can still improve a lot the on-chain scaling of existing products.
For a blockchain protocol to achieve mainstream adoption, it has to be designed with multichain in mind. I think any team not currently working on a multichain solution is risking that their blockchain becomes obsolete.
Terrorists, criminals, and money launderers would be foolish to use a public ledger to record their business transactions, and the risks from this are largely exaggerated. On the contrary, the KYC/AML craze sweeping the financial world and the crypto industry is devastating because sooner or later ordinary people discover when their real-world identities leak to the dark web while criminals easily adopt fake identities.
