CEO’s AMA Transcript: ShareRing’s CEO Tim Bos speaks with BlockchainBrad about building the infra & dApps for the Sharing Economy, COVID passports on the blockchain and more!

April 13, 2023

In this interview, Brad Laurie speaks with Tim Bos concerning everything ShareRing stands for, building the ShareRing infrastructure/apps for the sharing economy, ShareRing’s future and much more!

BlockchainBrad speaks with Tim Bos about building the infrastructure and apps for the sharing economy.

Intro & Non-Payment Disclosure

Brad Laurie: Hello It’s Brad Laurie, Blockchain Brad. Today we’re talking about all things apps and all things travel, to do that we have the CEO and co-founder of ShareRing to explain all the updates for you exclusively. His name is Tim Bos. Thank you very much Tim for being here to really let us understand what ShareRing is all about.

Thanks, Brad. It’s great to be here.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Likewise mate, now for transparency and for the non BS approach, this is not paid in any way at all for me. But, I also want to make it very clear that the team at ShareRing have offered to support the editing aspect of this, which is a small donation to pay for the editing costs. Again, not required, but I appreciate that support. Also, in transparency as well I have not invested in this project and it’s important that the community do know that.

Tim Bos’s Background

Brad Laurie: Now, as the CEO thank you for being here to let us know all about ShareRing, I appreciate your time Tim. Do you want to just start with a little tiny bit of a rundown on your experience and your background, particularly with regard to your entrepreneurial background and your engineering?

My background back into the nineties has always been focused around technology. I worked for a video game company that was bought out by Atari, called Melbourne House in 1994. I moved into consulting as a consultant to Evernote, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture.

I wrote one of Microsoft’s operations manuals, which is a global offering they had, I worked for an investment bank doing strategy for a while. My first company that I started was actually 1996, I moonlighted while I was working full time doing network installs and I.T services for a bunch of small businesses, I gave that away a couple of years later.

I quit my work in 2004 to start my own company with a partner who invested in it, that was a focus around GPS tracking. We started a telematics business and I sold that in 2008, then we licensed the technology to an Australian company which I sold in 2010.

In 2012 we got into the car-sharing business. Initially, when we started that company we wanted to develop a platform for the sharing and rental of anything, like Amazon for sharing economy. One of the things that we realized very quickly was to try to build a platform that can allow companies to come on and rent anything was Insurmountable.

We focused very quickly into car-sharing and we’d built a world-leading platform in car-sharing, called Keaz. I sold that at the start of this year. I moved away from working full time on that the year before we started ShareRing.

The reason why we started ShareRing was really to help me achieve that dream that I had to build a platform that allows you to share anything, blockchain technology really allowed us to do that.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: We’re going to talk about that more in more detail as we move across and it’s interesting, you say sharing was part of that business background. I felt the same as I was researching you, thinking that your agenda is very much geared around that shared economy or the sharing economy. I want to sort of unpack how that correlates with the blockchain through ShareRing.

The Sharing Economy – One-Stop-Shop

Brad Laurie: Now I want to touch very directly on the gateway aspect of the whole ShareRing concept. It’s regarded perhaps by you guys and based on literature as a one-stop-shop. You’re talking about statements like no more juggling handling, when it comes to things like passports, travel documents, bank cards, in the sense that it’s all linked to one sort of service and facility and one app. Can you just tell us a bit more about the value add of it all being bound together?

To give you a bit of background information in terms of the platform that we’ve developed, we’ve taken a very modular approach to the platform. We’ve got effectively a blockchain platform that’s got a bunch of modules that sit on top of it that’s developed on Tendermint.

Two of the core modules that we’ve developed, one is a self sovereign identity platform. One of the things that we realized in terms of sharing, rental, travel and this whole ecosystem, identity is absolutely key to that process.

A lot of gaps in companies such as Airbnb and other rental companies is when Airbnb owns and holds your identity, they’re putting you at risk.

What we did is basically created a self sovereign identity model where us as a company ShareRing do not hold your ID when you sign up for our platform. You still own and hold your ID and any other information that goes in as part of your ID.

When you sign up for a rental service that is integrated with us, that ID goes directly to that rental service provider for the duration of your rental, if it’s bookings for flights, flats and things like that.

There is a rental platform, which we use smart contracts to basically lock in payments for that rental platform. Our payment system, which we use a stable coin, but we don’t actually offer that for sale anywhere.

That sort of sits in the background to allow us to do things like very quick and instant currency exchange at the actual currency value, because we hold multiple fiat currencies. Also, the stable coin actually helps us do instant reconciliation of that and so on. There’s a bunch of modules that basically helped us facilitate that.

We’re not saying one app is going to do that. What we’re saying is we’re releasing an app that allows you to sign up for ShareRing ID and do a bunch of functions that we will offer to consumers.

But we have partner companies that are now building systems on top of our blockchain where they will offer it in their own apps and stuff like that as well.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

The Relationship with Tendermint and ShareRing: ShareLedger

Brad Laurie: Well let’s explore that because I hadn’t heard before in any interview you’ve done previously about the nature of your blockchain, as you said, because my understanding was utilizing Tendermint and certainly capitalizing on even other networks with the way in which different tokens are set up like your own token for example, as I understand, it interconnects with other platforms, In terms of how it’s used.

Let’s talk about Tendermint, let’s talk about your choices there. Let’s talk about the blockchain, why utilize Tendermint especially when you’ve had problems with Tendermint as you’ve discussed in the past, let’s unpack this and get real about It.

We did a bit of exercise in 2018, around do we build our own blockchain and spend ridiculous amounts of money and ridiculous amounts of time doing that, or do we look for one that we can build on top of?

Ethereum was the obvious choice, we looked at that and said, if we want to get to the scale that we need to get in terms of number of rentals, number of transactions and all of that, Ethereum’s not going to cut it.

We knew their roadmap was to increase scalability, transactions, lower the cost and move to proof of stake but it wasn’t in a timeline that we could trust.

We looked at Waves, EOS and NEO, we looked at all of them and the one that really stood out for us at the time was Tendermint. Some of the reasons why were we didn’t have to build products/smart contracts on top of an existing platform that we had zero control over.

What we could do is effectively take the open source Tendermint code, improve upon that and build something that solves our problem without any additional overheads, we could create a very efficient result that is made for us.

We started building on Tendermint and realized very quickly that the stage that Tendermint was at in that point in time was a lot of bugs that limited what we could do with it.

We spent more time than we expected we would improving the platform. We’ve made contributions to the open source code of Tendermint and even now we’re still improving it, there’s an issue with it now where it’s mining empty blocks, which is completely unnecessary.

We’ve just done an update that actually stops mining empty blocks. We’ve moved from compiling into C-level DB and also improved the efficiency of it. There’s a bunch of things that we do to improve it.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

The Future Collaboration with Tendermint: Tech Talk

Brad Laurie; So essentially Tim, it’s been a bit of a headache in the sense of trying to integrate. What I really liked firstly is the transparency about this. Secondly, is that with Tendermint there is finality built into this. It is certainly a pro-business in many respects because of the way it’s designed.

Also, on top of that you’re agnostic, so whilst you’re decided on Tendermint now there’s the potential in the future to look at POA or beyond. What I’m hearing from you is you’re really focused on that kind of consensus that melds well with your enterprise and entrepreneurial vision.

That’s right, we look at the outcome, the solution and the benefits that we can provide to our customers, partners and our community. We’re not married to any platform, if something better comes along that allows us to migrate to, for us thats fine, as long as we can still provide the minimum services that we’re providing to our clients.

When we build our self sovereign identity model, and all of the modules on top of that, we built them in a way that allows us to pick it up and move it over to another foundation if we have to. Obviously it would require a lot of work but it’s something that we always kept in mind.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Right and it’s good that we’re talking about this because as you become more known, for what you essentially are, which is that suite and that tooling in services and products.

Many people won’t know about Tendermint, they shouldn’t, and they won’t know about the underlying blockchain layer, but what is important that we talk about in this context as people listen is that you’re certainly working and successfully, and I guess reciprocally with these parties, like Tendermint so that we know that the efficiencies or the inefficiencies are addressed as you continue to build.

What Does ShareRing Stand For?

Brad Laurie Let’s go back a little bit, we’ll touch on the blockchain more but let’s discuss a little bit more about you, with regard to the products. I want to touch on that because the most important part we understand so far is that the app is a core focus, but it’s not just one app, one-stop-shop, it’s really a whole suite. I really want to try and expand on this with you and understand exactly what ShareRing stands for.

What we’ve done is on top of the blockchain, and you’re a hundred percent right, we don’t go out there saying we’re doing this on Tendermint or we’re a blockchain/crypto company.

We focus very much on the solutions that we provide to our clients and our partners. What we’ve done is we’ve built an API layer, if you’re talking to traditional companies, traditional developers and all of that, they understand APIs.

They understand how to integrate with those. We wanted to make a very easy on-ramp for our partners to integrate with our platform. We’ve got a few examples in the travel sector, we’ve got companies that are now building on top of our API to add things like activities, ferry bookings, luggage services and things like that.

They are not learning about blockchain, what they know is we’ve got an API, we’ve got an ability to pass identity information and we’ve got transaction fees, those transaction fees are done in fiat to whatever their currency is.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Revenue and Transaction Fees

Brad Laurie: So just to jump in there, surely that’s a good thing for you in terms of revenue, because if you’re able to capitalize on the value add of blockchain in your own system, then talking through it in the context of APIs with other partners, clients and even other business parties in the future.

Surely that’s a value add for you because you’ve once again taken the time to build out your own ecosystem utilizing the blockchain underneath.

Most of the revenue comes through is transaction fees and all those transaction fees are fed through as Sharetoken. While it’s good for us because we hold a number of the nodes and we’ll make transaction fees on that.

We do have consulting fees that we do charge and development fees that we do charge and that just goes towards paying our developers and building our ecosystem, everything that we do feeds back into that ecosystem that we’re building.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Got it and it’s good to hear that you do have some other streams of revenue, not just solely and wholly relying on those transaction fees, even if it’s a small amount to have that roll back into the ecosystem, build it further and arguably make the team bigger as you grow.

The Fundamentals of ShareRing

Brad Laurie: So let’s pull it back a bit. Let’s talk about the fundamentals once again. You’re a business, I wanted to clarify because we hear a lot about decentralization and DeFi as you know, but you’re fundamentally a company isn’t that right?

Yes we’re a company, we’ve got shareholders, , we’ve got investors and then we also have token holders. What we do is we sit on the fence where we have to basically think about both our shareholders and our token holders with every decision that we make in the business, and everywhere we sort of develop new products, grow and bring clients on.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Security Aspects

Brad Laurie: Got it. So in turn, obviously you being Ozzy, is there any consideration for being listed with regards to the sort of security aspects? I’m not talking about tokens here. Do you want to lead in that direction where eventually become a nationally listed, for example on one of the…

On a stock exchange like ISX or NASDAQ? We don’t have a short term or even a medium term goal to do that at all. I think that’s something that we have sort of discussed and that discussion was always pushed back and said, `let’s not work towards any goals like that.

I think it’s a decision that will be made In one or two years, to see whether it’s in our roadmap, but it’s definitely not something that I want to focus on at the moment.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Right. It sounds like you’ve got your plate full with the sort of the blockchain side and also building out.

Let’s just build haha.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: and hopefully mate that becomes a side effect of your success.

The Founders and Team of ShareRing

Brad Laurie: Let’s pull it back again to some of the other things, like your team. Now, one of the things that was interesting as I was researching you is that you have a differentiation between founders and team.

I wanted to understand firstly your comment on founders because you definitely have a lot of business savvy people in that founding group. Then the team itself was very much conditioned it seemed in certain regions of the globe, particularly in Thailand. Can you just touch on the two and what they represent?

The founders myself, Ron, Peter, Neville, Jane are like you said very, very business focused, they’re not tech, I’m the tech guy in the founding team. What’s important is you need to focus on building a sustainable business first.

If you’ve got a team that’s just tech people that have never run a business before, God help you. With our founders we’ve got a very good cross section of skills that allow us to actually focus on the governance of the company and building a company that is sustainable and can grow.

In terms of the team, being in Australia and also my experience living in Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand, I’ve got a very large network of partners, customers and teams that we’ve been able to leverage in those places.

It’s better to have the team where a lot of your clients and your partners are going to be, we’ve got a good team in Vietnam, we’ve got a bunch of developers in China that do work with us, we’ve got a couple of people in Hong Kong.

In Thailand, we’ve got four staff members that are focused on partnership management, we’ve got some insane and incredible stuff that we’re doing in Thailand at the moment.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about that. I heard you talk about that in a recent interview. So what’s good to know is that the founders are still part of the team, from what you’re saying, it’s just they have that business savvy and that’s why they are distinguished because I didn’t want to send a message that it was anything but that, and get that clarification from you because people may suppose there is some sort of difference but really it’s just showing the business level and then showing the builder level.

Okay so let’s talk a little bit more about that then in regard to the team being diverse, I mean a lot of it’s based in Asia. So what kind of things are happening in terms of the building going on right now for ShareRing?

The team until now has been very, very focused on development. It’s almost a hundred percent tech focused team. Now what we’re doing is we’re expanding both our marketing side, in terms of marketing to partners and then also our partner management and sales side.

Some of the stuff we’re doing in Thailand, we’ve hired two new junior sales people that are focusing on some stuff in there. Now that we’ve got technology that we can show something you can touch and use. It’s now going towards sales to bring on more clients as well and also manage these partners a bit more effectively.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

ShareRing’s Operations – Logistics & Retail

Brad Laurie: Just breaking that down again also into different areas and verticals that you focus on. For example, the operations, logistics, retail and then the tech as well.

It seems like you’re really addressing a lot of different verticals in the process of building this out from those teams. So do you want to give us a bit of a breakdown on how you do this?

My approach is if when we see an opportunity in an area where we don’t currently have a partner in that area, we build it out we prove that it works amd we hire the right people to sort of manage that area and then we partner and let our partners handle the operations side.

First and foremost, we are always a technology company and we’re always a public platform company. What that means is, in terms of doing the operations side of things, we will partner to handle those operations.

ShareRing Shop is a perfect example. We had this great idea, we needed to capitalize on a crisis that was happening at that point in time to try to help the communities with being able to buy stuff online, same day delivery, all that sort of stuff that we do through our platform.

But we had no partner to do it, we quickly hired a logistics and operations manager and a product manager to get up and running very quickly. But now we’ve partnered with two companies overseas that are handling all of the operations side, all of the marketing side and using their backing and their name behind it to grow that, from us we are just technology people.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: So in that sense, really it is about forging genuine partnerships where your value add when we’re talking about the tech is obviously vital to the basis of everything you’re doing or the crux of everything. But those partners do real work.

It’s the same when we talk about some of the top tech teams from around the world, and we were talking about this pre-interview, they also look for partners that do real things and value add, so that it’s not just the tech that speaks but it’s also the business side of it.

What’s in the ShareRing Pipeline?

Brad Laurie: It’s good to know and it sounds like there are plans in the pipeline also for other partnerships of this nature to continue to strengthen the ties between the tech and operations.

You wont see an announcement from us of a partnership that is simply we’re using their services. When we talk about partnerships, every time we have a partner, it’s genuinely a partner.

It’s someone that if a solution requires this, this and this, we will provide this and our partners will provide these other parts of that solution.

More often than not, it’s either technology that we don’t have and we will partner to connect our technologies, or it’s operations, logistics or marketing that they’re doing on our part.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Got it, so a no BS approach and no announcements of announcements as well.

You wont hear us saying we’re partnered with Amazon because we use Amazon web services haha.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Yeah and let’s be frank as well Tim, we see a lot of that BS in crypto, where we see those superficial announcements to pump prices. So it’s really great to hear that this is about legit partnerships. This is about you building your team, tech and focus on that core agenda, which essentially is to make sure that ShareRing evolves into a global network.

ShareRing’s Product Offerings

Brad Laurie: Let’s look at this in terms of the products and the product offering, because they are slightly different in the explanations that are provided and I wanted to try and better understand that.

Because as you’ve made it very clear with regard to the value add of ID especially as a product, that’s unique because it gives us autonomy and changes the game. But then there are also discussions about product offerings which is slightly different. So do you want to just touch on that and explain the difference?

What we do is we’ve got the underpinning technology of ID and all that sort of stuff like you just mentioned. When we create a product offering, our whole long term plan in terms of that product offering is we won’t run that product offering forever.

It’ll either get a life of its own or it will be a partner that takes on that product offering and has it as their offering. Travel is a perfect example, what we expect in the long term from travel is we’re not going to go into having a support center, dealing with consumers buying travel and flight tickets and all that sort of stuff. That’s not our business.

What we’re basically offering is for existing travel providers to take on that platform and take on the services that we’ve created and make it their own and we will provide the technology for that.

We spin out these product offerings as examples of what you can do with the platform and then let it have a life of their own.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

The Utility & Usability of the Platform

Brad Laurie: I think that’s the exciting part for me when I was researching is that people perhaps had this misconception that you’re all travel, but when you look at it deeply, it’s actually that core structure of the sovereign ID that could potentially broaden into, or be utilized in different verticals, not just those that are obviously logically connected.

We’re about to release very soon a new website that explains that more effectively. It explains the different modules that are available. It talks about our API, which way we’re releasing the API documentation next week as well and it doesn’t just talk about travel, it talks about travel as an example and not a means to an end.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: In the beginning, I did mention travel so do apologize, really It’s not about that travel it’s about that core technology that’s really driving the potential in different verticals and travel just happens to be a very strong use case right now.

We talked about travel as well previously because what we found was there’s a couple of other ‘blockchain’ or let’s call them crypto companies that say ‘we’re in the travel industry’ but all they do is become a middleman for people being able to pay for travel with Bitcoin, Ethereum or tokens.

They dont provide any value add to the travel industry in terms of making it easier for consumers to travel. We focused on saying how do we have an offering that makes it easier for people to buy their flight tickets, get their visas, check into hotels, have some trust between activity service providers and their customers, and how do we leverage what we’ve developed to do that.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: And to be honest with you as a consumer and also someone who understands blockchain, that was imperative that whole point you just said, there had to be something more than just simply offering a service that was just going to be essentially a travel agency that utilized options including multiple cryptos, it had to be more than that.

So that’s the self-sovereign agency that was on another level of discussion and that’s what you’re really explaining. So that’s where that one-stop-shop comes from it’s literally underneath that.

The User Process Explained

Brad Laurie: Let’s discuss a little bit more about the user process now because that’s important we understand the simplicity of it, from registration, selection, payment and then the enjoy part. How easy is this going to be? What’s the UI, the UX, that sort of question.

Can you imagine someone going online or downloading an app to purchase Bitcoin now? It’s still complex. You’re teaching them about private key storage, wallets and all that sort of stuff.

We didn’t want to be a product that only allows people that understand blockchain and private keys to use. What we’ve done is in terms of signing up for the app, there’s only one point in time where we ask you to save a phrase or a QR code.

But someone can say, ah I want to save that into my Google account, Apple account, WeChat account or Line Account, so they can actually save that into one other account and then from then on they can log into their ShareRing ID account with any of those platforms and not have to worry about a private key.

We don’t even need to teach people how to use blockchain. It’s just a foundation layer. So they sign up, take a photo of their ID, say passport and they do a liveness detection, which is like a selfie but they have to move their heads so we actually tell them to nod and then shake your head or say a word or something like that and then we do OCR with one of our partners on the passport, we do a face match on their face to the passport.

We then fingerprint those bits of information and store that fingerprint on the blockchain, then we encrypt that information into a single file and that file is stored on your phone.

There’s an option to say, I want to back this up to my Google drive, my iCloud, my Tencent personal drive. So there’s an option for that and then they’re ready to go.

Let’s say there’s a random car sharing company and it says, do you have a ShareRing ID? I say yes and you can say download it from my Google drive and instantly they’ve got their ID that’s available within that app, so it makes it completely portable across different platforms and different apps as well.

Tim Bos, ShareRing CEO

Brad Laurie: Yes and once again, that’s the value proposition that you really do offer and you see how the blockchain startups are doing something similar in terms of the ID focus and actually quite a few big platforms. For example, I remember talking about Ontology some years ago who were experimenting with the ID in their vast platform then.

Self Sovereignty – How ShareRing get People to Care?

Brad Laurie: The big question I did want to ask you is how do you get people to care about self-sovereignty in the sense of ID? Because obviously, that’s encountered by many people in crypto when we understand it, but more broadly how do you convince people to utilize the service and thus the apps and the products with sovereignty and autonomy in mi