Blockchain beyond crypto (DigiFinex & Friends Crypto Night Singapor...

First of all we would like to thank PayPal Innovation Lab for sponsoring the amazing venue. PayPal Innovation Lab is the first-of-its-kind collaboration between PayPal and the Singapore FinTech ecosystem including government agencies, industry associations, small medium businesses and universities. And we would like to thank all the guidance and help YY has given to us. Please check out PayPal Innovation Lab at https://www.paypal-innovationlab.com/

4th Sep is a significant date for crypto community especially Chinese crypto community. On 4th Sep, 2017, People’s Bank of China (PBoC) issued a formal statement to ban ICO. Over the past year, Chinese regulators have become stricter and stricter on cryptocurrency business. Moreover, China banned some crypto medias on WeChat and did an online sweep last month. So, on this special date, DigiFinex, a world leading cryptocurrency exchange, hosted a crypto night with friends at PayPal innovation lab in Singapore to discuss blockchain beyond crypto.

There were over 50 blockchain influencers attended the event including some blockchain startup founders, educators, investors, enthusiasts.

The first speaker, Adriel Ho, the founder of GrainSource, gave an introduction of Blockchain sse cases. In this new wild west, many people create an ICO with a concept only, yet trying to get funded. In fact, there is neither development nor realization on what they have promised. But Adriel took us to the core of blockchain technology — use cases. How blockchain technology is used in real life and how close it is to us. Go back the technology itself and look at blockchain beyond cryptocurrency.

Victor Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Alpha Wallet did a deep analysis on “Lessons Learned from Tokenizing the FIFA World Cup Tickets on Ethereum — Building a Regulated Free Market”. Victor and his team started AlphaWallet in Jan 2018 and released AlphaWallet 1.0 in May 2018. Jun 2018, they were working on FIFA World Cup 2018 Blockchain ticket with Shankai. And now Victor and his team are working on the first use case of attestation with Nervos.

Blockchain ticket for FIFA World Cup 2018

Alpha Wallet CEO and founder Victor sharing

Michael Ran, engineering partner of Stellar Lumens shed some light on “How Stellar Build a Universal Value Exchange Protocol”. Stellar is an open protocol for payments with below key advantages.

Ned Kee, founder of DigiFinex exchange, shared DigiFinex’s story: 0 to 10 in 1 Year with 0 Marketing. How did DigiFinex, starting from 0, become one of the world top 10 exchanges within 1 year with 0 marketing?

DigiFinex performance

Some people may ask, “why we have never heard about DigiFinex?”. Ned shared that instead of spending money on marketing, DigiFinex keeps 100% reserve. They never use any money from users to do other business. DigiFinex spends most of its budget on security which is the core business of an exchange. In blockchain world, if we don’t take care of our security then we are working for hackers. DigiFinex is one of the only few exchanges in the world that follow Sarbanes-Oxley Act Auditing Standard. The list below shows in detail what DigiFinex does and focuses on. Besides, Ned told us that sometimes when customer’s token withdrawal needs to go through manual verification, after the customer service officer calls the user, it might be himself to proceed the withdrawal for some cases. He was not joking. Sometimes the founder of DigiFinex works as a part-time customer service officer in our community, in order to stay close to the users. He often says “we come from community and it is our core. We will also return to the community and share growth with it.”

DigiFinex founder Ned sharing

In the panel discussion session, we were very honored to have Dunstan (Chief Consultant & Founder of KryptoIA), Jack Hua (CEO & Co-founder of AlphaXLab), Kiana (Co-Founder of DigiFinex), Zheng Rong (Managing Partner of Merkle Tree Venture) to join in as panelists. The panel was moderated by Cathy Zhu (VP of DigiFinex). During the discussion, panelists shared a lot of deep insights about the industry and gave sincere advices to investors and enthusiasts. On this special anniversary, regulation of blockchain industry became one of the most concerned topics naturally. As is known to all that regulations are very different among China, Japan, Korea and ASEAN countries. We wonder how it will shape the Asian blockchain industry in the future.

Last year, the word blockchain made a business idea sound hot and sexy. To make it even hotter and sexier, the key would be ICO. After a long winter, ICO is gradually getting cold and fading out. While some people say that ICO will disappear sooner or later, we would like to believe that it is going to evolve! As a new invention, ICO did bring innovation to the market, though disruption and chaos even crime happened later due to lack of regulation. Therefore, Regulated ICO might commence and replace the current one. The bar is going to be raised. The game is going to be on and hot again. But the players are going to be changed.

According to research, in 2014, 460 million USD were lost in blockchain industry due to security compromise. But on the first half of 2018 there were 2.7 billion USD lost in blockchain industry. Out of the 2.7 billion, 1.1 billion loss is due to stolen tokens. Over 300k hackers keep their eyes on cryptocurrency, treating it as their ATM. Blockchain is supposed to be safe but it turns out that the loss is actually growing over the years. How do we educate and protect ourselves? As Victor shared that, there is always bad technology and bad people in the world. As time goes by, technology can be developed and improved, but right now how to protect us from bad people is very important. Some staff working in an exchange may hack user’s account from internal. Some project engineer may purposely leave a backdoor on the code. For some projects, the business concept only lives in whitepaper and the whole team abandons the project after getting funded from ICO. Therefore, in this market, what we need most now are proper regulations so that compliance practitioners like us will follow the rules and violators will not be able to get away. Only in this way, blockchain industry can be secure and trustworthy.

The crypto night was a night for thought leaders to gather together and share their thoughts. No one was trying to sell anything or promote any project. Nobody discussed about crypto price. It is just a group of enthusiasts and thought leaders see blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrency price and shared their passion with us.

We would like to thank all the speakers, guests joined us on this beautiful night. Thanks for PayPal Innovation Lab for the venue.