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Blockchain Industry Review
NFTS, STABLECOINS AND BLOCKCHAIN CERTIFICATES- MEET ZILLIQA with Colin, JG, Miles, by Jillian Godsil
Colin, JG, Miles is English originally but has lived in Singapore for 27 years. He is a serial entrepreneur with a number of successful exits in his recent past, most notably in i-POP. He holds industry positions in mobile, including Chair Emeritus of the MEF, Mobile Ecosystem Forum. He has moved from the dot.com to the mobile to blockchain with ease – all signposts lead this way. His focus is the intersection of technology and media, this is the zenith of his career and he views blockchain as the 1000 times multiplier. “My introduction to blockchain was via Bitcoin – back in 2013 there was a bitcoin ATM at a conference. I was told I could buy a coffee with this new currency. So I put in $50 and the machine spat out a QR code.” Colin was advised to open a wallet which he did and promptly forgot about it for a couple of years. Then a chance checkup showed him the value had grown to $450 and this got his attention. The coming years saw Colin mingle with anarchists and early adopters, watching from the side-lines with interest. He was invited to invest in a self-sovereign, decentralised ID project and he moved a bit closer. Then a headhunter out of the blue approached him to join Zilliqa as the head of marketing. “I felt it was right time, right place, right company.” Zilliqa arose out of an academic project. It sought to solve a clear issue in the blockchain world – number of transactions per second. Bitcoin was crippled at 6, Ethereum was not much better at 15 and CryptoKitties highlighted the bottleneck in a dramatic fashion. Zilliqa aimed to solve this speed issue with sharding. A team was brought in and a TGE raised $22 million in 2018. It
was the world’s first public blockchain built entirely on a sharded architecture. The Zilliqa mainnet went live in January 2019 demonstrating sharding was effective and viable. An early and engaged community was complimented by active recruitment of partners now numbering 70 plus different entities. Colin came on board in February 2020 but six months later was chief commercial officer and co-CEO. Some highlights around the project that caught the eye include Social Pay. This is an inhouse product which, in Colin’s words, literally destroys Twitter when engaged. “We have run it three times. It’s effectively social commerce where people are rewarded for taking action online. We pay people in $Zil. The first time we used the project to promote Zilliqa itself we generated in excess of 72 million social engagements over a 72 hour period – literally a million interactions an hour with people hitting Twitter and then forwarding the links to their friends and claiming $Zil.” The second time they unleashed the Social Pay kraken was in aid of the Red Cross. “We added in some bells and whistles, allowing people to issue a blockchain certificate thanking a health care worker or a volunteer. This way we helped raise money for the charity which we also matched in corporate funding.” The third outing was to celebrate Zilliqa’s third anniversary in July of last year. Again, the Zilliqa community crushed Twitter with an 80% dominance at one stage. These experiences demonstrate the engagement of the community which numbers about 200,000 active people spread across Twitter, Telegram and Discord.
