PCM Volume 3 - Issue 5: Blockchain - Technology that Changes the World

Vol 3. Issue 5 | May 2017

YOUR GATEWAY TO THE WORLD OF PAYMENTS

BLOCKCHAIN Technology that changes the World

Special Feature with Safwan Zaheer

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Contents STORIES

Amir Abdin Founder & Editor-in-Chief amir@teampcn.com https://nl.linkedin.com/in/amir-abdin-21365683

Duc Dang Production Editor & Head of Creative duc@teampcn.com https://nl.linkedin.com/in/ducdanghh

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How Cryptocurrencies are paving the Future of Payments

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Revolutionizing Global Commerce and Payments by Combining Cutting Edge Technologies

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Innovating the music business with cryptocurrency

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Bringing Blockchain to the World of Finance

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Expert Commentary: Blockchain’s Future

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Start-up Spotlight: Wyre

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The Tale of a Merchant: Introducing the OLX Group

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Special Feature: Using Blockchain to innovate loyalty programs

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Hot Jobs

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Industry Events Calendar

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Thought Leaders Corner

photo by Zach Copley on Flickr

How Cryptocurrencies are paving the Future of Finance

by Eric Larchevêque

I

n October 2015, The Economist ran the headline “Blockchain - The trust machine”. This ignited a strong interest into the technology underlying Bitcoin and started what we could call the “blockchain craze”. Promises of decentralization were sparking everywhere, whilst Bitcoin’s pith and marrow -- the capacity to transfer tokens of values instantly, globally and with a full censorship resistance -- was deemed outdated and almost mocked.

Fast forward 18 months. In April 2017, cryptocurrencies are five times stronger: from $5 billion to a $30 billion global market cap. Bitcoin takes of course the lion share with a whooping two thirds, but Ethereum and its $4.5 billion booming economy is getting closer every day.

So, what happened exactly?

While “Blockchain” was peaking its inflated expectation and began a down slide to the trough of disillusionment, cryptocurrencies were slowly but surely climbing the slope of enlightenment. Many experts discarded Bitcoin as a passing fad, arguing that it didn’t have a killer app. What they fail to understand is that the killer app of Bitcoin is... Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrencies in general are a fully fledged self-sufficient and autonomous finance framework, enabling the faithful recreation of all known business models but in a trustless, secure and decentralized way. They exist in an orthogonal realm, oblivious to the legacy financial system and without the possibility of being muzzled.

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These unique characteristics combined to the dynamism of the ecosystem resulted to the 2016 late Bitcoin price rally and the 2017 massive success of Ethereum. With the exception of the year 2014, Bitcoin had always been the most performing currency in the world. And the first quarter of 2017 already saw a 20% increase. Of course, it hasn’t been without what we could call massive bumps in the road: the hack of Bitfinex (a major cryptocurrency exchange) as well as the DAO debacle reminded everyone how far the road is before achieving real maturity.

All these strong (and repeated) performances didn’t however leave investors indifferent. Individuals and crypto-enthusiasts at first, quickly followed by high net worth individuals, family offices and specialized hedge funds. But there is one catch to this apparent gold rush: Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, are not that easy to invest in. Not only are they not regulated, lacking mainstream investment vehicles, but they are also complex to hold and safeguard. Moreover, their combined cap market is still quite small in the world of finance: taking a large (>100M$) position without strongly moving the market is not really possible.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and fintechs are building solutions to onboard investors in the crypto world with the minimum possible of friction. If the road to institutional investment vehicles such as ETFs (Electronic Traded Fund) seems to be particularly hard, hedge funds are already proposing to hold a mix of cryptocurrencies to their customers.

Thought Leaders Corner The difficulty of safeguarding cryptocurrency assets lies in the foundation of the blockchain digital identity model. When you own bitcoins, what you are really owning are “private keys”, a critical piece of information used to sign transactions spending the funds. Whoever has knowledge of this secret can dispose of the associated bitcoins. As there is no possible way of cancelling a transaction, private keys are akin to non revocable bearer bonds, very close to physical cash. Managing these private keys on an IT infrastructure is highly critical and must rely on secure hardware ensuring a full isolation of the secrets from the outside world. These data fortresses are the modern equivalent of the bank vaults, and are the backbone on which hedge funds or crypto indexes are built.

If the cybersecurity threats are a priority when assessing the risks, assaults and kidnapping are another very important factor to mitigate. Hedge funds managing tens of millions of dollars of assets in the equivalent of easily transportable cash must make sure that an armed gang cannot force the administrators to empty the digital coffers at gunpoint. Multi signature, time locks and rate limiters are now part of the safety models enforced by state of the art security solutions.

If executing a transaction requires by design a delay 72 hours (without any possible recourse), the success probability of an armed robbery tends towards zero.

Little by little, step by step, the new deal of blockchain based cryptocurrency technology is building an alternative finance platform, totally orthogonal to the legacy system. Attracted by the “innovation without permission” paradigm and by the perspective of really disrupting the existing models, developers and entrepreneurs are flocking to this new eldorado. This in turn attracts investors and speculators, unfazed by the risk of implosion of the system but betting high on the massive returns in case of cryptocurrencies’ adoption success. The prospect of a $100 billion market cap is not remote anymore.

Large institutional investors, sovereign funds and even states wouldn’t then have the luxury to pass on owning a chunk of crypto assets for both strategic and competitivity reasons.

So, how the legacy system could empower cryptocurrencies in other ways that being in the backseat, reduced to owning a chunk of assets?

The major issue of cryptocurrencies is that they are not a “real” currency in the legal sense. This prevents mainstream adoption of the technology because no one really wants to hold a volatile currency for an everyday usage. Financial innovations are therefore constrained to a limited scope and the potential of the technology cannot really be fully unlocked. By issuing their national currency through a blockchain (you can think of a cryptodollar or a cryptopound for instance), central banks would create a massive potential for positive financial disruption. As the blockchain would fully be controlled and audited by regulators, there wouldn’t be any energy costs associated to the mining (necessary only to enable censorship resistance, obviously not needed here).

Money over IP, harnessed by an economic power. Endless possibilities.

Eric Larchevêque CEO at Ledger Eric is a serial experienced entrepreneur and he developed several French and European projects in the IT space. Passionate about the high potential of cryptocurrencies, he founded “la Maison du Bitcoin” in 2013. He’s currently CEO of Ledger, a cybersecurity company aiming to unleash the full potential of cryptocurrencies for individuals, enterprises and industrials.

Ledger Ledger leverages encrypted chips technology to build security solutions for cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

Hardware Wallets for consumers, Hardware Security Modules for enterprises and Hardware Oracles for the IoT world.

Its latest product, Ledger Vault, provides multicurrency, multisignature and time locked solutions to secure large assets with custodian possibilities.

The question is not if cryptocurrencies will take over the financial world, nor when they would do it. The real question is who will do it. Will it be Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptos, or will it be China and their already advanced crypto yuan? As we say in French: faites vos jeux, rien ne va plus.

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Thought Leaders Corner

Revolutionizing Global Commerce and Payments by Combining Cutting Edge Technologies

by Brian Hoffman

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here is something both terrifying and beautiful about the concept of a truly digital culture. I mean, of all the incredible changes technology has brought to our lives over the last 30 years expanding our connections our productivity and our knowledge, did you predict the cultural importance of things like multi-billion dollar companies run by early 20-somethings or using the computers that we keep in our pockets to take “selfies?” As a father of two young boys I often think about what life will be like in 20 years and it is always simultaneously exciting and uncomfortable.

Technology is a lot like art in this way, the truly great movements are not marked by creators who stayed in their comfort zones.

A recent arrival on this exciting, uncomfortable digital landscape is a dark horse. Chartering the revolutionary technology of blockchain, built by an anonymous individual (or individuals) and backed by a passionate community of developers, the promise of financial and electronic freedom this has motivated a movement of people who have built something completely new. This computing technology also happens to produce a token of value that relates to payments and transactions. It’s called Bitcoin.

Now that it has arrived, participants often seem to fall into an oversimplified argument of what is good and what is evil about it and how it relates to the incumbent currencies and payment structures. Bitcoiners will describe bankers as “banksters” and point out their exploitation of consumers through sub-prime loans, collection of exorbitant fees or just bad business practice. Banking elites will finger the Bitcoin enthusiasts as drug dealers, child pornographers or havocreekers focused on destroying the sanity of the financial industry.

Who is right? Who will come out on top?

Miguel Ruiz once said “People like to say that the conflict is between good and evil. The real conflict is between truth and lies.”

I argue that this is not a fight of good vs. evil at all, just continued movement into a world we weren’t previously capable of building. We just have a new truth available to us, now.

I am the CEO of my company, OB1, who is leading the development of an ambitious project called OpenBazaar.

Our goal is to revolutionize commerce and trade across the globe leveraging freedom-supporting and privacy-enabling technologies like Bitcoin, Tor and IPFS.

How are we doing that?

By building a marketplace that uses the leading cryptocurrency, whose code is open-source and whose data is decentralized to live among its users--not a centralized, company-owned server.

Unlike marketplace giants like Alibaba, Amazon, or eBay, this new model of online commerce isn’t controlled by any company or organization. Yes, my company is heading up the development but since it is open-source, other developers are able to access, read and contribute to the source code. Opensource development is very collaborative and has the benefits of being transparent while also able to benefit from a wider community of thoughtful contributors who would like to be a part of bringing an idea to life.

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Thought Leaders Corner

Brian Hoffman CEO at OB1 Brian is the CEO of OB1 and the project lead of OpenBazaar. He started OpenBazaar in April 2014 and founded OB1 nearly a year later. Brian is a developer with a background in building encryption software for managing healthcare records.

That’s the developer’s side, but you don’t need to be a programmer to use the application. On the regular user’s side OpenBazaar is a fully peer-to-peer marketplace which means buyers and sellers engage in trade directly with each other, anywhere in the world. Because there are no middlemen in the trade, users don’t pay any fees to use the network, and there are no terms or conditions to accept to get started.

OpenBazaar users can expect the most secure, most private, and most liberating experience of any ecommerce marketplace because it exists without the need for a centralized company or authority to act as a gatekeeper, collect data, or restrict transactions.

What does this mean for payments?

It means that payments are now in the hands of the people, from beginning to end, with no middlemen at any step along the way. Using OpenBazaar, exchanging a Bitcoin payment for goods is as direct as handing someone cash. There are no processors, no centralized marketplaces or any clearinghouses for the payment to pass through or pay fees.

What does this mean for business?

My family, both my immediate and in-laws, understand what it means to run local businesses. My in-laws run a local deli and food truck while my mother and sister run an Etsy and eBay store selling girl’s hair bows. These are modest businesses, but they know just as well as anyone the ins and outs of preparing and selling goods to others.

Other members of our team are familiar with the struggles of other types of individuals, whether it’s a family in Guatemala that could benefit from freedom of trade or women in oppressive countries hoping to bring a little extra income to their families. Regardless of where in the world you hail from there are true benefits from opening up global trade and loosening the restrictions on interacting with your fellow world citizens.

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This means access. This means freedom.

We are here because we believe that people deserve to be free and we apply that from our code base all the way out to our commerce.

We believe in a world where we can write code together.

Where we can sell our homemade goods or our eBooks to each other. Where we can loan money for new endeavors or to start crowdfunding campaigns to get through trying times. And we are building into this world additional freedoms: from unnecessary fees, from censorship, even from cumbersome currency exchanges, timezones and geographical barriers.

What does that mean for innovation?

We’re moving into a period where companies and organizations will not own the payment networks, the commerce platforms, or the data of the people using the networks and platforms. This decentralized digital world will offer plenty of ways for people to create value for others, but not by controlling the infrastructure or data any longer.

Our immediate future will require an entirely new approach to connecting and building value but the prospects are exciting and uncomfortable and we couldn’t be more ready

OB1 OB1 is the venture backed company heading the core development OpenBazaar, the world’s first completely decentralized marketplace that allows anyone in the world to buy and sell anything to anyone else, anywhere, for free. OB1 has raised funds from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, BlueYard and angel investor William Mougayar.

Innovating the Music Industry with Cryptocurrency

by Tatiana Moroz

T

echnology and I haven’t always gotten along. I remember when I went to college, my father wanted to buy me a laptop. I was annoyed at the suggestion that this machine would be more useful than a trip to Europe. Little did I know that I would be attached to my computer every day since getting one, and how useful it has been to me and millions of people around the world (though admittedly still not as fun as a trip to Italy).

Bitcoin and blockchain had the same eye rolling effect. Even though I was introduced to them by some of the best leaders in the industry (Tony Gallippi and Stephen Pair of Bitpay), and I knew the shortcomings of the current banking system, I still practically fell asleep when hearing about this tech. However, I gave a little money toward buying Bitcoin at $11 and after it went up in value, I started to warm up to the idea of a digital currency. However, it wasn’t until I spent time with Jeffrey Tucker in 2013 that it really started to click. Jeffrey had a way with words that would paint a picture of what the blockchain world would look like, and it was beautiful.

I used my talent to create “the Bitcoin Jingle” to spread the deeper ethos of the crypto community. Bitcoin didn’t care about your color, country, class, or language. It had a solution for problems that had plagued mankind for far too long. I imbued the song with these ideas that inspired me, and they resonated with the room full of over 300 Bitcoiners when it debuted at the Latin American Bitcoin Conference in Buenose Aires in December 2013.

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One of my first Bitcoin friends was Andreas Antonopoulos, who I met in Buenos Aires. I was a great admirer of his work, his talks inspired me, and I had listened to him on the podcast “Let’s Talk Bitcoin”. He soon introduced me to Adam B. Levine, the founder of LTB. Adam was a musician and a content creator like me, so naturally, we discussed the state of art in 2014. As a singer-songwriter and after many years of managing top recording studios in NYC, I had experienced first hand the many difficulties in the music industry. There was the advent of streaming, the introduction of social media networks, and the independent artist had more tools than ever, but the record companies still held the power of the purse.

There were strange incentives, and I found music had lost it’s heart over the years.

It was difficult to invest (which is what a lot of labels do) in art. Who decides what’s good? It’s expensive to push an artist, and employees have an ethical obligation to watch out for the investor money. This isn’t a recipe for diversity.

The accounting was notoriously opaque, usually delayed, tedious, and prone to error. The artist was often dealt the short end of the stick. The scene was ripe for disruption with the transparency and efficiency offered with Bitcoin. On a personal level, I wondered how could crypto help artists fund their own music and connect directly to their fans? In a P2P world, did we really NEED a middleman?

Sure we did, just not in between everything. In my experience, the advent of DIY (do it yourself) was an important step toward artistic freedom, but it left a lot of work up to the artist and

Tatiana Moroz CEO & Founder of Crypto Media Hub Tatiana is the creator of Tatiana Coin, the first ever artist cryptocurrency. Tatiana Coin and other artists coins allow for connecting fans directly to artists. A driving force in the industry, she is also the Founder and CEO of Crypto Media Hub, a PR, marketing and advertising agency for the Bitcoin space. “The Tatiana Show” podcast streams on several outlets, including the Let’s Talk Bitcoin network, and is quickly growing with thousands of listeners each week. Tatiana performs and speaks at conferences all over the world, including SXSW, Nasdaq, the National Libertarian Party Convention, Freedom Fest, and Inside Bitcoins. She has appeared on Fox’s Stossel, RT, Infowars, Bitcoin Magazine and many more.

there were only so many hours in the day. What did I care about most? Money and fans. How can I afford to make music (an expensive and time consuming endeavor that could use a paid team), and how do I connect with my fans (and get them to gigs)? Social media was helpful, but by the time Facebook rolled around, it became clear that the platform owned the relationship. When I posted, none of my tribe would even see it anymore unless I paid. My fans and I didn’t have security with our information, the feeds were manipulated, and I was creating value for the platform, not for myself.

will be seamless and effective, with measurable results. Our streaming services will pay artists 20x more than the average streaming platform would, and creating playlists can be profitable for power user fans. It’s invigorating to be able to actually implement possible solutions to these problems I have felt so deeply, and we are just getting started.

So Adam and I set out to create the first ever artist cryptocurrency: Tatiana Coin. TC would allow me to build my own community and a foundation for real growth in my career.

It would be a place to gather my most ardent supporters, my fan base that had been with me since the beginning, and speak to them directly.

“So many times I cried to myself that we didn’t have a chance.

Tatiana Coin and artist coins have varying functions, which are customizable by the artist. Our first one with TC was to help with crowd funding. I had done campaigns before, and they were great, but there were limitations. With TC, you could also send the coin to different friends, or sell it off, it was really flexible! On my end, I could customize pricing and offer new store items whenever I wanted, even neat stuff like hanging in the recording studio with me, or an online performance of a song cover of your choice. The possibilities were endless, and this type of thing could offer artists a hub for all sorts of activity. Keep the Faith is the album I just released, funded with Tatiana Coin.

The idea soon grew into a company Adam founded called Tokenly, that has many different types of digital token use cases from digital gaming to eSports and beyond. The music division is the platform Token.fm, which I think of as a platform for artists, by artists. Not only can you create your own personal brand of currency like Tatiana Coin and a storefront, but you can message directly with your fans, and create real peer to peer communities and marketplaces online.

There’s a line in the Bitcoin Jingle that always chokes me up a bit:

Nakamoto came along with more than a song, gave the labor back to man.”

I have spent my whole life trying to use music to make a difference. Because of this technology, and the journey it has taken me on, I have helped create true artist empowerment.

It’s a joy and it brings me a deep satisfaction, so it’s easy to be passionate about it. I know that artists have the ability to bring messages to the masses, so I leave you with this one though I haven’t quite set it to music. Blockchain has something for everyone. It is the great equalizer. I hope that it allows you to set your passions free, so you too can fulfill your dreams.

Crypto Media Hub Crypto Media Hub is a content creation, marketing, event, advertising, and PR consultancy for the digital currency world. Founded in 2015, their established professional relationships with a variety of media outlets allows them to create a custom advertising experience that will help businesses make connections and find their markets in the crypto and fintech space.

We have created an album token that is a representation of a record, bringing back scarcity to the digital world. Album tokens allow and incentivize fans to become owners again, with the flexibility of the physical world brought to the online space so they can collect, lend, rent, sell, and trade the music. Cross marketing between other coins and brands

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Thought Leaders Corner

Bringing Blockchain to the World of Finance

by Anish Mohammed

T

he story starts a few years back, CTO of a very large organisation was on a panel with me. He presented the case that whatever “Cloud” offered was nothing new, as author being the contributor to many of the thought leadership pieces including “Cloud buyers decision guide”, it was authors turn to respond. Having agreed with the CTO that what he was suggesting was true, however one thing was going to be changed, transparency and ability to take actions.

Until then everything that happened was communicated via the “IT” department. This was disintermediation of one kind, fast-forward time to present, no-one has any doubts that Cloud changed the world of IT. It’s worth billions, and Amazon made a killing out of it, still with an offering which is questionable but not yet enterprise ready.

Recently the author was on a panel with the CTO of one the largest banks in the UK. The topic of discussion was blockchain, the CTO in question described blockchain as “write once read many times”. The author agreed to disagree with him, its far too simplistic a view to take on things. Lets try look at this a bit more detail. The very least blockchain would bring to the world of finance is the following: • • • •

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Improved effciencies New trust models ( and disintermediation) Provenance Ability to attach policies to code ( smart contract)

Improved efficiency - lets look at this with a “cloud” glasses on. When cloud was introduced, everyone understood what efficiency means. One could monitor usage of the cloud and could turn the tap off once the use was over. In the blockchain world, it’s more the case of transactions that did not make economic sense that suddenly becoming viable. This is similiar to how this situation changed for startups doing MVP during the pre-could days and to do one in AWS these days.

New trust models - this is could also be seen as disintermediation, the parties that traditionally controlled access to something getting bypassed. Let’s go back to the cloudy world, in the pre- cloud world the IT departments were the masters of the domain, they controlled who got access to infrastructure and when. Now in the new world order, anyone with a credit card could get access to computational infrastructure on AWS. How does this translate to blockchain?

The pubic blockchain has the decentralised model of trust.

That means, the value that intermediaries bring to the table has been decreased significantly. What does this mean for finance? Entities which traditionally had the ability to do transactions of no value add high overhead intermediaries would find themselves being bypassed.

Provenance - this is something which is harder to explain by cloud paradigm. But it’s easier to explain from a finance perspective, the basic reason behind the financial meltdown in 2008 was CDO’s or collateral debt obligations. This could be thought of as aggregators and wrappers, if one were to wrap

Thought Leaders Corner Anish Mohammed Board of Advisor at Ripple Labs Inc. Anish has been working in the security and cryptography area for the past 15 years, as a researcher and as a consultant. His first brush with payments systems was 15 years ago when he was involved in building a micropayments system for Ericsson. He has spent half his career researching cryptographic algorithms and protocols. He has also worked as a strategy consultant for Accenture and Capgemini. Most recently he has been involved in the Blockchain ecosystem as one of the founding members of UKDCA . He is also on the advisory board for Adjoint, Arteia, Privacy Shell, Ripple Labs and Chain of Things. These days he more focussed on projects that involve security vs scalability vs consensus of Blockchain and using smart contracts for AI safety.

bits of gold and other less precious metals and bundle them together and sell it as gold. This would raise a few eyebrows; doing this in finance is called CDO’s. So ,what would happen if we the world of blockchain becomes reality? Everyone would have the ability to track down the underlying assets, so everyone would have the ability to have a peek under the hood. So, everyone would know if the CDO has all triple A or something else .... and what the aggregated risk is. It would be pretty surprising to think, that if this happens this wouldn’t have any impact on the financial sector.

Smart contracts - Lastly, in a cloudy world, the nearest that one could think of is self-scaling. This implies cloud instances have the ability to scale up and down based on the workload.

This means there is some logic which is hidden somewhere that understands the context and takes action based on the pre-conditions. In the blockchain world this is called smart contracts. This could control transactions, e.g. an insurance, the smart contract would manage the payout when the

pre-conditions are met, with no human intervention. This would be the most disruptive of all influences, without even considering the Distributed Autonomous Organisation (DAO) and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO).

The world of finance would no longer be what it was once blockchain takes roots....

Ripple Labs Inc. Ripple Labs Inc. provides Ripple protocol, an open-source distributed payment network that enables payments to merchants, consumers, and developers. Its payment protocol transforms payments to work like communications.

The company was formerly known as OpenCoin, Inc. and changed its name to Ripple Labs Inc. on September 26, 2013.

Ripple Labs Inc. was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California.

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expert interview

Expert Commentary: Blockchain’s Future Fabian is the Tech Lead of the the Mist Browser project and creator of the Ethereum Wallet. He is a strong advocate of open-source software and has built and contributed to a lot of open-source libraries and projects. Fabian also wrote a book on Meteor.js a open source JavaScript Framework. His interested in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin led him to be part of one of the most ambitious Blockchain projects to date, the Ethereum Project where he works today with the Ethereum Foundation.

by Fabian Vogelsteller

T

wo years ago blockchain technology was being considered the dominating factor for the future of finance. Today most global enterprises are experimenting with Blockchain technology to unleash the cost saving and operational efficiencies value proposition. To get an idea of where we stand now with Blockchain technology and some of the major challenges we’re still facing, we interviewed Fabian Vogelsteller, the Ethereum developer and creator of the Ethereum Wallet and the Mist Browser.

PCM: Tell us about yourself? How did you find yourself as a developer?

Fabian: I’m working since the age of 7 with computers. I started out building websites for myself, which quite quickly lead to people asking me to help them build theirs. This was in the late 90s and I’ve built a portfolio of more than 40 websites for small and medium companies since then.

While building and designing websites I had the need for a Content Management System. But at the time most of them were either large like typo3, and/or ugly and restrictive in their templating system.

So, I decided to build the feindura flat file CMS. This CMS didn’t need a database as all content was stored in files. With this I could build websites and simply deploy them on any webhosting services

with PHP and without the need for an additional database server. Over the years feindura grew quite a lot and based on my client’s needs, I decided to open source it and make it free to use for anybody.

Making open source is hard - as you do not simply publish your code, but you need to take care of it, maintain and ensure it is well documented and presented, otherwise it won’t get any interest or contributors.

This led me deeper into the world of open source where I operate today. Almost all the code I produce is open source and publicly available. You make money by building and you gain reputation by open sourcing.

Over the time my programming preference shifted from PHP to JavaScript, and I later wrote a book about Meteor.js - a reactive JavaScript framework, which caught my attention.

JavaScript grew from in the ‘00s from a funny scripting language for websites, which annoyed people with popup windows, to be the main driver of today’s websites and applications.

In 2013, I discovered Bitcoin and I quickly immersed myself deep into the – back then – smaller cryptocurrency space. This was the time where the first altcoins like Litecoin and colored coins

on top of bitcoin were created, such as the Mastercoin project.

At the time I worked at startups totally unrelated to cryptocurrencies, but my main interest and hobby was following the development in this space.

When Vitalik Buterin wrote the Ethereum whitepaper it caught my attention, but it was 1 year before even the presale started. I followed the updates, but was caught up on other projects and raising my son Joschua at that time. I always wanted to work in this space, but at the time most projects where in their infancy and ICOs where not yet a thing.

All of that changed when the Ethereum project raised 32,000 Bitcoin, which at the time surmounted to around 18M USD. This was the second ever ICO, after the Mastercoin project (which collected 2000 Bitcoin) and allowed Ethereum to be funded after one year of voluntary contribution.

When I heard they were to open an office in Berlin, I was very excited and reached out to them. It took another half a year and a second approach before Alex van de Sande the UX designer of the Mist project within Ethereum contacted me in December 2014. In the first months, I built a chat application that used Gavin Woods whisper communication, a protocol built to broadcast messages

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expert interview where the sender can be unknown for a receiver and messages can be encrypted.

The second app I’ve built was the official Ethereum Wallet, which many people use and store their ether today.

Since then I’ve built the base of the Mist browser – the first browser for the decentralized web 3.0 and worked on many core API’s and libraries used by developers building on Ethereum. I am often invited to events and speaking at congresses while the interest in Blockchain and smart contracts is increasing every day.

PCM: How important is Blockchain in an ever-growing digitalized world?

Fabian: Blockchain technology is the first of its kind since the era of the Internet.

And for society at large it’s the first time that we have a technology that allows to program socioeconomic interactions.

In an ever-digitizing world, it’s a wonder that we don’t have such a technology yet.

With email we learned to digitize our communication, but with money and contracts we still rely on human labor and paper interactions on a large scale.

When you ask about how important Blockchain is in a digital world, I would say it is a wonder that we still have a functioning society on an organizational and structural level given the globalization the Internet brought us.

PCM: There is a lot of hype surrounding the potentialities of what Blockchain can offer. Is this feasible? What issues do you think could arise from this?

Fabian: Blockchain is certainly hyped and every new technology of such a scale goes through these cycles. If a new promising technology arrives, its potential is often huge, but for things to develop and fulfill these promises need time.

We will certainly see a despair phase after the next big bubble, and we saw those already in 2013 and 2014-2016.

Many called Bitcoin dead and the technology as “not so interesting”, but it kept coming back into the attention of the public and is today more interesting than ever. This was mainly due to the potential applications and new ways of financial interactions and economic-

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organizational interactions become possible.

which

Its most groundbreaking feature is the fact that people, companies and even governments can have a shared truth platform. All participants can trust equally, but it’s not owned or controllable by any participant. This “common ground” is what governments, trustees and standardizations archieved in the past and can now be programmed and automated on a trustless platform.

Blockchain technology in its form we know today started with Bitcoin in 2009.

Its newer directions with programming on the Blockchain came with Ethereum in 2015. The current architecture used is mainly the same as in Bitcoin, but the possibilities grew exponentially with Ethereum.

PCM: What is Ethereum?

Fabian: Bitcoin was only about moving money and had a limited, not very used scripting language. Other altcoins introduced new transaction types to allow colored coin creation, or decentralized markets to emerge. The disadvantage here is that every new type of transaction has to be introduced into the core of the Blockchain, requiring all users to update to those changes.

Development is slow and additions can only be done by a core team of contributors.

Ethereum is the first Blockchain to integrate a virtual machine into the core of its Blockchain, to execute arbitrary code using transactions. This allows for so-called “smart contracts” (or code modules) to execute. One benefit of those smart contracts - besides the possibility to move ether and other tokens - is that they can talk to other smart contracts. This allows a whole chain of business logic to be triggered by one transaction. This chain can include smart contracts of different companies and ownership to play a role in a single user’s transaction.

PCM: What are Ethereum’s advantages and what can the technology offer to the wider community?

Fabian: With smart contracts the possibility of transaction types grew

indefinitely, as almost every thinkable case can be programmed without changing the core of the Blockchain.

This allows for all kinds of systems to build on top of Ethereum as well as improve scalability off chain and implement privacy solutions without updating the core Blockchain.

Thinkable solutions are payment channels for faster cheaper transactions, prediction markets, escrow services, registrars, notaries, digital identities, -reputation, decentralized markets, -Uber, -Airbnb, automated insurances, automated industrial production called industry 4.0, IoT payments and authorizations and so much more we don’t even foresee at this point in time.

The more systems are based on Blockchain, the more other systems which can be built on top of this infrastructure - the more we can automate basic economic and governmental functions.

Imagine never needing to fill out forms again, but still maintaining the control of who can see what and when. Never needing to create yet another login for a website or service, because your digital identity can request access without ever revealing your keys and passwords.

Though keep in mind that Ethereum is just the first fully working smart contract Blockchain and interestingly enough other projects base their core infrastructure on Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM), making it always Ethereum compatible. But it is certainly not the last word in this development and we’ve just started to explore this new realm.

PCM: What are the biggest challenges the technology faces?

Fabian: Today’s biggest challenge for Blockchain technology is its limited scalability. As a Blockchain needs to reach consensus between many computers, currently every computer in the network completes the same amount of work to verify each other.

This verification is what creates the properties of a Blockchain: immutability, verifiability and transparency, but at the same time is what slows it down. Adding

expert interview more computers and especially miners, which compete to create new blocks containing transactions increases the security and decentralization of the network, but not its speed.

The current efforts were focused on exploring what and how a Blockchain can be used and extending its features through transaction types and finally virtual machines. The next years will be focused on how to make Blockchains scalable and its content private.

PCM: Where do you see Ethereum as a technology headed for 2017?

Fabian: A lot of work is already done on faster consensus algorithms and scalability by introducing verifier groups (consensus sharding) and offchain computations. Additionally, zero knowledge proofs and state channels are explored to allow for private smart contracts and other means of scalability.

I always compare the current Blockchain to things like LCD displays.

They were also bulky and with little pixels in its early days, today we see 4k displays and screens with pixels the eye can’t distinguish. We will see the same happening with this technology - it’s just a matter of time.

For Ethereum specifically, a roadmap was introduced since the beginning and following its progress since the start of the public chain in 2015. This roadmap was perfectly followed with its “Frontier” network, the following of “Homestead” with a more stable EVM, network and the upcoming “Metropolis”, which introduces many new changes to the EVM and how accounts act in the network.

This next milestone also lays the groundwork for the planned shift to a new consensus algorithm called “Casper” based on the less energy

intensive Proof of Stake algorithm and preparations for scalability solutions like consensus sharding.

Many of the improvements which don’t require core changes did and will come from the community, where state channels and off-chain smart contracts allow for more powerful executions and payment channels like “Raiden” are developed to increase transaction throughput.

This space is moving fast and is full of creative people working on solutions where new kinds of thinking is necessary and the main driver is the potential of possibilities, rather than companies and economic goals.

It is also the first complete open source space, which has no lack of funding, as Blockchains with native tokens and ICOs create many new ways of collecting and increasing funding. This also allows for a less economic, but more creative driven developments.

PCM: Over $1.5billion has been invested into Blockchain startups.

Where do you personally see future developments succeeding in the Blockchain space?

Fabian: This space is creating a complete new way of value collection and distribution. It creates projects that create value from ideas and make it shareable by a broad group of anonymous stakeholders. It’s the first of its kind and impossible in the old world.

In the next years we will likely see Blockchain becoming a major tool in underlying infrastructures to speed up processes, but also make them more accessible and transparent.

The real change though, will come in the form of new decentralized systems, which won’t require single owners to run. Which will be community owned with no real control structure. These projects will create new ways of value

dispersion and business models we can’t imagine today.

Many of those projects will probably be based on game-like incentive systems, where the good and the bad of humans will be used for the greater good of all participants within such systems.

Examples can be wallets with integrated basic income taxes, which auto pay peers. Peer-to-peer lending and incentive systems, which create a decentralized shared economy. This creates ways for minorities to participate in the success of large projects, such as new Blockchains or decentralized startups.

We will see many Blockchains, from corporate owned private chains to consortiums and public Blockchains.

But most likely there will be a lot of consolidations and many failed projects along the way.

Even though many companies think that consortium and private chains are the thing, permissionless Blockchains will be the main driver of innovation and the platform for new business models.

The same way the Internet was always more important than the many corporate intranets.

I’m under the strong belief that businesses that are built on a decentralized infrastructure and not owned by single entities will be of vast greater success than its corporate counter parts. The decentralization of organizations and business models will be the biggest shift in power we’ve seen since the Internet unleashed the freedom of information.

Blockchain is the Internet of value and economic structure, and it is just one new building block in the discovery of networks and its effect on the human kind and society itself. **Disclaimer: Fabian Vogelsteller is expressing his views on Ethereum and Blockchain solely as an expert in his field - They are not necessarily the opinion of the Ethereum Foundation.

Ethereum Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. The Ethereum Foundation, founded in 2014, serves as the backbone for its technology ecosystem.

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Spotlight You think you have what it takes to start a business in a super-hot market?

PCM takes a close look at some of the most innovative and promising startup companies in the payment industry.

startup Spotlight

“OUR GOAL IS TO ADD “MAGIC” TO THE SIMPLEST, YET STILL DISFUNCTIONAL, CORE BUSINESS FUNCTIONS.” Michael Dunworth, Wyre’s Co-Founder & CEO

B

lockchain has become the most sought-after technology in the corporate and financial world, with the world’s largest banks and companies in a mad dash to adopt it. We sat down with Michael Dunworth, Co-Founder & CEO at Wyre whose startup is focused on cross-border payments that are fast as email going bank to bank, and to other payments platforms.

PCM: Why is Wyre needed?

PCM: Tell us about Wyre. How did this idea come to be?

Businesses around the world spend trillions on international money transfers, and a huge proportion are still using bank transfers to get this done. There’s more than 4% baked into the exchange rate on those transfers which means businesses are giving that away. Some businesses run on razor thin margins and removing this 4% fee they’re getting charged with (hidden in the rate), could turn their business upside down for the better. So, I guess you could say we’re really trying to do the latter, but naturally bank distribution is so large, it’s a long game to play. So, we stick to our value proposition and keep our customers happy, over time everything else will fall into place

Michael: Wyre started when we were doing merchant and brokerage services for digital currencies. We saw the way people interacted with these currencies. A lot of people were using them by transferring them internationally and have the recipient sell them on the other end a minute or two later.

So we felt that instead of making the senders and receivers do these hop, skips and jumps, let’s just package it up neatly so that the digital currency component disappears to the background and the senders and recipients still only have to work with their local currencies. Thus, Wyre was born — Leveraging the power of the blockchain, without needing the learning curve to understand it.

PCM: Why is it called Wyre?

Michael: It’s a play on words for wiring money. Spelt differently, because, well… we wouldn’t be a startup if we didn’t find a totally normal word and misspell it.

Michael: Wyre is needed because it creates a free-flowing financial channel for businesses between countries. Currently paying $30 for initiating a wire fee and receiving poor exchange rates is hindering the opportunities for businesses around the globe.

PCM: What makes Wyre different?

Michael: Wyre’s platform is built on top of the blockchain not the correspondent banking model. This means that the mechanism for transferring value is drastically sped up, and significant time reductions can be achieved because there’s only one central party which is the blockchain. Blockchain technology means that transferring “value” is like sending an email. So when you have a value transfer that’s near instant,

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startup spotlight

it leads to amazing things that other payments can’t achieve.

A good example of this is working capital reduction. Right now, payment companies all over the world hold floats of international currencies all around the place to ensure they’ve got enough to pay out to their recipients in a timely manner.

They do this because transferring via bank transfers aren’t efficient enough to get the payment there in a time frame that will keep the customers happy, or the operations smooth

PCM: What were some of your biggest challenges for launching this business?

Michael: It certainly has been compliance related aspects. This is such a tricky piece that you must get right. In the payments space, being compliant is like being the good looking girl at the dance. It’s attractive for other businesses to want to work with a fully compliant company, and have confidence that they’re doing the right things in the right areas.

Blockchain tech is still finding its home in terms of regulatory compliance, but we engage with the regulatory bodies to make sure we’re keeping our Anti-Money Laundering & Know Your Customer procedures in the right direction with things. As a team of non-payments people, this was a big learning curve over the past few years, and we’ve put a very heavy focus on this component.

Another really tough piece is the focus. Blockchain technology offers the ability to change the game with finance, record keeping, money transfer, trade finance, escrow, etc. The list goes on forever. In our company, we’ve got to focus on one thing, and one thing only. There are shiny objects everywhere, but this was a bit of a resistance internally. We only do money

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transfer, and we only do it between USA and China - for now.

But that’s the main thing at the moment, we want to prove our value and execute exceptionally. After that, we will provide more markets the same great experience we have crafted in our first market. It’s important to remember that we’re trying to change money transfer, forever. So it’s not a problem, if we have one market focus for a few years. In 10 years time, we can look back and see we’ve got 90% of currency pairs covered in our network. At that point, that’s an incredible growth of efficiency across the globe.

PCM: Tell us about your expansion plans and how do you go about choosing the next region you expand into?

We like to be focused. So for us right now, solving the problem between USA and China is a big deal. The market is huge, technologically prepared, and has more pain points to work with than most other markets. Doing this, and doing it extremely well is step 1 for us. We’re assessing new geographies to expand too, but we’ve got certain milestones internally we’d like to hit before we’d feel comfortable opening things up.

However, we do think that Mexico and Japan are exciting markets in the future. We open up new markets through a balance of different factors, such as: •

What our current clients asking for

•

What are the technical hurdles of that are

•

What regulatory hurdles

•

What are new clients demanding

Bundling all these together and weighting different areas differently usually helps understand to a certain confidence level, where we should head next!

startup Spotlight

Snapshot of the Wyre Office

PCM: What are the 3 things you want people to know about your company?

PCM: Any exciting news / announcement you would like to share with our community?about your platform?

We are the simplest way to send money to China, with the best pricing, and fastest delivery. All that being said, we’re a great team with fresh ideas on how we believe international payments should work.

We recently made an acquisition of a Chinese startup that is a similar product offering to ours. The company, Remitsy, joins the Wyre family and leads up our office in Beijing.

I actually feel like one of the reasons we’ve been successful so far getting started is because we’re not carrying legacy habits and procedures as there’s not one person at our company who’s worked in international payments before, ever. I feel like that says something about how advantageous this technology really is.

This is a huge deal because it’s brought on AliPay as a payout option for our customers, which we’re absolutely thrilled about!

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Payment Collective To get a more complete view on the all businesses in the payments ecosystem, in this rubric PCM showcases how merchants deal with payments and fintech challenges.

SPECIAL FEATURE

photo by Nick Webb on Flickr

Using Blockchain to Innovate Loyalty Programs

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he last two years we’ve seen a significant shift in consumer expectations and behavior on payments and the overall customer experience. Loyalty programs have proven to be a great tool to enhance the costumer journey across many different industries from retail, travel to financial services. Keeping an overview of all your loyalty points and the various redemption possibilities can become a cumbersome process. We sat down with Safwan Zaheer, Director & Head of FinTech at KPMG US and Member Board of Directors at Loyyal who told us how Loyyal is taking on the loyalty program challenge utilizing blockchain technology.

PCM: How do you use Blockchain for loyalty programs?

Safwan: Blockchain might represent technology that has potential to give rise to the second era of ‘internet’ revolution, where for the first 40-45 years we had “internet of information”, i.e. internet we use today in our daily lives, which has been great but it has a major weakness; you cannot store, move, or transact anything of “value” without a powerful intermediary and that’s what Blockchain solves. Blockchain automates most intermediary functions that exist today by removing friction, such as delays, costs, errors etc., making it easier and faster to transfer anything of “value” between two parties.

If you think what a Bank does; everything it does is centered on “value”, for e.g. banks account for value, store value, protect value, lend value; and points are just another form of “value” like money and currency. By automating the intermediary functions that exist today in the loyalty industry, such as third parties and broker vendors that manage loyalty points, Bockchain has the potential to transform loyalty programs as we know it today. One experience this will enable is:

24

Instantaneous issuance and redemption of rewards and points.

For example, you’ll be able to earn airline points as soon as you board an aircraft and then use these points to pay for a Lyft ride upon arrival at your destination.

PCM: Which problems does Loyyal solve in the marketplace and how?

Safwan: Loyyal issues digital points using the Blockchain ledger (Ethereum) and utilizes smart-contracts to enable instantaneous issuance and redemption of digital points. It removes friction around delay, cost, and poor integration with other payment instruments, enabling financial institutions, brands, and retailers to create “new experiences” for its customers, such as the airline experience mentioned earlier.

PCM: What benefits does Blockchain have compared to other technologies?

Safwan: The greatest benefit is that it automates intermediary functions that are present in today’s financial institution system. The intermediaries slow things down, increase costs, , and place a huge tax on the underlying ecosystem making the entire financial system inefficient. Other benefits include enhanced security and greater transparency between transacting parties.

PCM: What challenges do you see for companies adopting BC based loyalty networks?

Safwan: Like with any new technology or innovation, Blockchain, also faces significant challenges. The primary one is adoption and market scale. The industry is still waiting to see

SPECIAL FEATURE

Safwan Zaheer Director, Financial Services Digital and Head of FinTech at KPMG (US) Safwan is a digital transformation and FinTech innovation executive with demonstrated track-record in building progressive new digital businesses and products that lead to significant market scale and help build new revenue streams. He has more than 18 years of global experience helping clients and former employers address strategic business needs through innovation, disruptive new technologies, and new business models. He is sought out to lead high-impact initiatives and represent company with external clients, often including the Board, CEOs, and executives.

a proven and scalable solution that utilizes Blockchain. Other challenges include: evolving the right standard and platform, difficulty in regulating Blockchain, requiring licenses for crypto or tokens, legal risks, and perceived benefits vs. total cost.

if banks want to stay relevant and meet the needs of digital customers.

PCM: What do you think is most important aspect for financial institutions to do that they’re not doing related to loyalty?

Safwan: With any Board opportunity one needs to consider the value a Board member brings to table. In Loyyal, I saw an opportunity to help shape the direction of the company, help raise venture funds, and help in corporate development activities. I believe Loyyal is a disruptor that’s attempting to solve a 40 year old industry problem and I wanted to do my part in helping solve that problem.

Safwan: I’d like to address the question more broadly, as it applies to any new technology or an innovation. Financial institutions need to embrace innovation and have a well laid out approach to innovation. Innovation is no longer an “option”, certainly not skunk-works, and rather table-stakes,

PCM: Why did you join the Loyyal board and what is your role in it?

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These are the latest job opportunities we have on offer!

For more information please visit www.teampcn.com or check out our international Job Board at www.payment.jobs 26

events

Events Istanbul, Turkey IFINTEC is one of the biggest events in EMEA region on banking solutions and finance technology. Banking Technology, Retail Banking, Digital Banking, Mobile Banking, Core Banking, Universal Banking, Branchless Banking, Next Generation Banking, Payment Systems, Branch Automation, Lending Solutions, Credit and Operational Risk Management, Debt Management, Fraud Prevention, Audit, Compliance, Banking IT, Secure Banking and Finance Technology are key topics of the conference.

9-10

Johannesburg, SA

9-10

Mondato Summit Africa 2017 is the fourth annual digital finance & commerce (DFC) thought leadership conference hosted by Mondato, a boutique advisory firm specializing in DFC. The conference will bring together 100-125 executives across the industry – from telecom and financial services to retail, government and investment representatives – to discuss and evaluate the potential use cases and adoption drivers for the DFC ecosystem.

Munich, Germany The European Identity & Cloud Conference 2017 is Europe’s leading event for Identity and Access Management (IAM), Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), as well as Cloud Security.

For the 11th time the EIC will offer best practices and discussions with more than 700 participants from worldwide companies including most of the leading vendors, end users, thought leaders, visionaries and analysts.

9-12

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events

London, UK

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This annual meeting in its 5th year will be once again a leading platform hosting Security leaders from EU Central banks, as well as UK & US retail and investment banks. The event will discuss the current global economic crime landscape and the impact of the emerging trends of multiple complex incidents, as well as debate preventative responses and solutions. the payments industry.

Santa Clara, U.S. Internet of Things World 2017 is the world’s largest and most comprehensive IoT event with over 11,000 attendees, 400+ industry thought leaders from companies such as Venmo, Mastercard, Visa, Wells Fargo and more! The event focuses on monetizing the IoT revolution through bringing together ecosystem-wide attendees, stakeholders and investors. Visit the website here.

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London, UK Key topics of this year’s Wired Money include RegTech, insurance, security, AI, democratizing, algorithmic trading and the bank of the future. Visit http://wired.uk/money2017 for a full speaker list, which features Arvind Krishna, Director of Research, IBM; John Fawcett, Founder of Quantopian; Andrew Brem, Chief Digital Officer, Aviva; and Charlotte Hogg, Deputy Governor Markets and Banking and Chief Operating Officer, Bank of England.

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16-18

events

Coventry, UK Pay360 Digital Payments brings together delegates from leading companies from around the world to pool their insights about what is driving success in digital payments in their local markets, and to share best practice. This will be a chance for the UK’s emerging payment’s industry to demonstrate their ideas and digital technologies on an international stage. Focusing on the three core themes of Retail, Mobile and Banking we’ll illustrate how the digital technologies we are deploying in the UK are increasingly relevant internationally.

23-24

San Francisco, U.S.

23-25

The Premier Connected Home Conference is the premier connected home event hosting over 700 executives from the connected entertainment, IoT, and smart home industries. The event provides a day of pre-show research workshops highlighting Parks Associates’ consumer data and analysis and two days of conference sessions focused on technology adoption and trends, forecasts for new products and services, evaluation of new business strategies, and recommendations about technology innovations, strategic partnerships, monetization opportunities, and value-added services.

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