ShareRing AMA Livestream September 2020

In this AMA Livestream, Tim Bos walks through the BSN partnership, company updates, additions to the team and more!

Introduction

Today, we’re going to go through quite a few things. The first thing I will be going through is the BSN opportunity or partnership that we’ve recently made. Then after that, I’ll be talking a little bit about our updates to the team.

There’s been quite a lot of updates since we last did a Livestream. I’m going to talk a little bit about our opportunities, then I’m going to be sharing a presentation that we generally share with customers.

A lot of people might be new to ShareRing, they might not have seen us before so it’ll be good to actually show that presentation and then we might do a bit of a sneak preview of some new app screens that we’ve been working on.

BSN Partnership Walkthrough

Thanks for joining everyone, looks like we got quite a lot of people today, which is great. First of all, I think a lot of you would have seen the recent news about us joining the Blockchain Services Network (BSN).

Effectively it was started with sponsorship from the Chinese government in China to start with and then the main company that’s been working on it, Redshift technologies worked with the government to create an international version and a mainland China version.

We joined the international version of it and we are the seventh partner to join. What does that mean for ShareRing? It means a few things, one is it means it gives us a lot of access to potential partners that we didn’t have access to before.

It effectively opens the door for us for a lot of partners such as some banking partners, infrastructure partners, you name it. I mean if you go on their website the list of partners that they’re working with, in terms of commercial partners is huge.

The other thing it does is it gives us access to a larger number of developers or people to work on the ShareRing platform. In terms of building the community and building the development community, you’ll see over the next 6 to 12 months that’s going to be huge.

Another thing it gives us is a very secure, and low-cost way to effectively host a lot of nodes for ShareLedger itself. We’ve already built out a few nodes with BSN so they are running right now on the BSN network, this isn’t something that’s happening in a week or a month or a year, this is happening now.

I think more importantly, and this is what a lot of people want to hear, is it gives a lot of companies, project developers and communities access to the ShareLedger platform to build products on top of our platform and build products utilizing our API that we’ve already recently published.

They’ll have direct access to ShareLedger to build their protocols on top of it and the net result of that is a lot more transactions on our network. That’s a great thing about it, they’ll also have access to things like ShareRing ID, they’ll have access to a lot of our rental protocols and all of the things that we’ve spent a lot of time building on our platform. So super excited about that.

Additions to the ShareRing Team

In terms of an update to our team, there’s been a huge number of things happening to our team over the last six months. We’ve doubled the size of our development team, we announced a few months ago that we opened a development center in China.

We’ve got eight full-time developers working for us there now, that’s a mixture of back-end staff, front-end user interface staff and some blockchain developers as well. It’s very, very exciting what’s happening there.

Our Vietnam team has also been growing, we’ve got a number of people there as well. We opened an office in Thailand, we’ve got three staff working for us in Thailand as well now, they’re mainly focused on the ShareRing Shop project and some sales-related things.

In Melbourne, we’ve also hired another person and also our new sales director, Jonathan, he’s based out of United Arab Emirates and he’s in Moscow at the moment. We’ve got Faris and Chelsea working with us, who are working specifically on the Open World Passport, ShareRing ID, and related projects as well.

I mean it’s now quite a large team. I think we’re about 30 plus people in the team and we are still actively hiring. Elvin in marketing has brought on three or four more people to help with marketing and communications too. Everything’s very, very good on that front.

Opportunities and Things We’re Working On

In terms of opportunities and things we’re working on, I know we’ve been quite evasive or secretive about a number of our partners, and one of the things is with partnerships part of our approach is we want to make sure that we tick all the boxes and dot the I’s and cross the T’s and have everything in place properly before we can announce any type of partnership.

That includes things like any announcements will go through legal to make sure that they’re approved, we’re not saying stuff we can’t. Most of the partnership announcements we work with the partner to drive that announcement.

We work with our partners to make sure that they are part of the announcement. We don’t simply say, “Hey, we’re a partner with this company.” We need to make sure that they’re helping to drive that announcement, that the PR is approved from them, and more often than not they write the PR with us.

That’s why sometimes we might say, “Hey, we’ve got a new partner coming up” and we don’t announce it for a few weeks afterward. We do have a backlog of announcements that we’re working on that should be coming out soon. Hopefully, we’ll be able to announce some of those in the very, very near future.

In terms of opportunities that we’ve been working on, there are a huge number of opportunities that we’re working on. For example, we’re talking directly to a couple of governments at the moment and they’re in relation to our projects that are either related to COVID passport, related to Visa on arrival, or they may also be related to things like national digital identity and things like that, it’s quite extensive in terms of those opportunities.

We are also talking to a number of companies in terms of hotels, resorts, airlines as well as financial institutions, you name it. There’s a huge number of companies that have approached us or we’ve approached them and we’re in some good, strong discussions with them. We’re very, very excited to see what’s coming through in those there.

Pitch Deck for Customers

What I’m going to do is show you a presentation that shows you what we show our customers. A lot of people come to us and ask me what are we demonstrating to customers? What’s our value proposition? What are we showing them?

All right, so this presentation here that I’m showing talks about some of the main parts of the ShareRing ecosystem. This is a brief presentation, when we present to our clients and partners it’s about a 20-minute presentation and then 10 minutes for questions. Overwhelmingly it’s very positive, most clients come back and give us very positive responses.

Our tagline has been updated to the first global sharing ecosystem that makes services and goods more accessible for everyone. That’s quite broad, we look at the Sharing ecosystem as not just say the sharing economy where I’m renting something to someone else or things like that.

We look at the sharing ecosystem as very inclusive of things like the travel industry obviously, and the sharing of services, the sharing of certain technologies, but then also the circular economy and distributed commerce or dCommerce.

This is a bit of a founder overview so the six people you see on the screen here are our original founders. They’re all still heavily involved in the organization. All very seasoned business executives with a lot of experience either running businesses or working in finance or accounting.

We also welcomed a new director to our team, he’s an ex-lawyer and also an ex-director of Hutch Communications. So a very, very welcome addition to the team.

In terms of where we are and who we’ve got basically at the moment we’re up to about 21 developers, and with the majority of those developers based in Vietnam and also China. On top of that, we’ve got about 15 different associates. The associates are mixed between marketing, sales, operations, legal, and finance.

Every role that we hire for we look at that role and we say, “how does that grow our business? How does that help our business?” We don’t just hire to expand the team so we can say that we’ve got a big team. It’s very, very important that we look at each role on its own merits and how it helps the team itself.

In terms of the technologies that we have on offer, these four items are the main sort of technologies that underpin what we’re building, including ShareRing ID, our self-sovereign identity platform.

The idea behind ShareRing ID is it’s a digital ID that you control completely, once you sign up for it we take a digital fingerprint of things like your passport, your name, and other information. We store that digital fingerprint on the ShareLedger blockchain.

Then you can store that identity on either your phone or a cloud drive. What you then do is you use that ShareRing ID to sign up for other services that are supported by ShareRing ID. It might be hotels, it might be a number of other things.

ShareRing Pay, which is our payment system. ShareRing Pay is used for payments of any services, the transfer of payments to other users in the system.

What we do is in our system we accept both Crypto and Fiat,
when someone pays in Fiat we effectively tokenize that Fiat into something called SharePay and that tokenized Fiat can be transferred when you pay for a merchant and they can transfer it to their own Fiat currency.

We have very, very low FX fees, probably one of the lowest in the industry. We also accept different crypto as well for payment of most of the services. You can dynamically look at the process in different crypto and different Fiat currencies when you use a product.

Then dCommerce, which is a distributed commerce platform, that’s the ShareRing Shop platform. That’s currently in very, very late-stage testing in Thailand at the moment and also Melbourne Australia.

We’ve learned a huge amount through this process, and I think a lot of things around the logistics side, we’ve got a very, very strong logistics partner that’s been working with us on that there. But I think the important thing that everyone should know is that we are not a logistics company, we’re not doing the feet on the ground, we’re not doing the deliveries and all of that.

We did a little bit in Melbourne so we could learn the process and we could learn the mistakes that are made, but first and foremost we are a technology company, so we develop the platform and then we partner with companies that utilize our apps and our payment system to roll out their own systems.

For us in the end our focus is how do we get more transactions on the platform? How do we get more users on the platform? How do we get more people to be a part of this whole larger ecosystem? And then obviously everything is underpinned by the blockchain technology.

In terms of the products that are built on top of that technology, there are hotel bookings with express check-in. That means you can sign up, book a hotel, and then your ShareRing ID or the important portions of the ShareRing ID are sent directly to the hotel, meaning they can check you in ahead of time.

Then when you get up to the hotel you can either go straight to your room or go to the front desk get the card and go straight up to your room. So super fast, seamless access. The idea of everything that we’re building is how can we make the customer’s experience better than what they’ve got today?

I think our flight bookings are a very similar process, experiences and tours also, except we creating that trust between you as a customer and the provider of that experience as well.

Car sharing, if you look on our YouTube channel you’ll see an old video that we made where we scanned a QR code on the windscreen of the car, and immediately my ID was sent to the car rental company and I could unlock the vehicle and take it away.

Electronic Visa on arrival, so similar process using certain parts of ShareRing ID plus the ability to scan things like your flight booking, your hotel booking, other information, and then send that off to the government for a very, very quick approval.

Then our COVID-19 Pass, which utilizes ShareRing ID and then it adds some additional COVID related things like have you had a test in the last 24 hours and things like that. Then distributed commerce platform.

In terms of ShareRing ID, the experience is quite straightforward. Basically what we do is they take photos of ID, they do a liveness detection, which is moving your head up and down, and then we do a digital fingerprint of that and store that on the blockchain. I’ve explained that a little bit, and I’ve got some other screens that I can show you as well.

Some of the benefits are it’s a very simple solution, catered towards travelers but also things like sign-ups to financial institutions, insurance and things like that.

It takes less than two minutes to go from the start to the finish of that whole process, you do it once and then you don’t really need to do it again. It can also be used to store other documents that need to be immutable, so stuff that shouldn’t change.

It could be things like your graduation certificates, insurance policies, banking information, or other things that you need to have secured but also ready and available in case you need to share that information with someone else.

Some coverage that we’ve had recently, obviously the Forbes article is quite a big one. There’s been a huge number of other press releases and things like that as well. That’s pretty much what we show to any potential partners and clients when we go into meetings with them. I do get a lot of questions all the time about what do we show those sorts of things. So it’s pretty cool to share that with you.

New ShareRing ID UI Sneak Peak

What I’m also going to share with you now is because of during the testing and things like that that we’ve been doing with ShareRing Shop we’ve taken advantage of some of that extra testing time to work on and build a new sort of user interface for the ShareRing App and the identity sign up.

What I’m going to do is share that with you so you guys can have a bit of a sneak preview. No one outside of ShareRing has seen this so far, I’m not going to show you all the screens, I’ll just show you a few of the screens. I guess the important thing for this is it gives a solid example of how easy it is to take that underlying technology we’ve developed and white label that.

This is very much targeted to the consumer market, whereas if we’re dealing with something like a bank or insurance company we would take a very different approach and look at a less fun look and feel.

Let me switch over to that. This is the login screen, the first step would be to set up your ID or log in if you already have one. Then you get started to set up your ID, upload your government document, things like that. Agree to some legals. Do your security, which is your recovery phrase.

Don’t bother with that QR because it doesn’t do anything, so don’t worry about that. Scan your government ID which is this one. Select the country, Australia. Have your proof of identity photo, so scan your passport. And then say cheese by recording a selfie. Then you review the information.

This is a bit of a sneak preview of that, I’ve done quite a few videos before which show what the app looks like. That app has always been considered to be a bit of a draft in terms of what the look and feel is. We’ve been working on releasing a much more polished and modern look and feel and we’re very excited to get that out the door very soon.

Community Questions

I’ve gone through a huge amount of things, what I might do is jump to the community and see if any questions are popping up.

Question 1

Someone saw the bloody river, mate.
Haha yeah, our designer’s got a bit of a sense of humor, we’re looking at maybe having some custom messaging for each country that you choose.

Question 2

Question about flowbacks.
As a lot of you know we were holding the transactions or the ShareToken from a lot of the testing that we did. We do have a huge number of transactions that went through and a huge number of ShareToken that’s in an escrow account. That will start flowing back to the node holders now that the ShareLedger is up and running and most of the validators are registered.

We did a hard fork of ShareLedger a few weeks ago and almost all of the node holders have updated. I think there’s about 38 or 39 of the 50 validators that are running, then there is a large number of nodes that are running on our infrastructure and then also of course BSN.

I would expect the flowbacks to start coming through in the next week, they’ll start being distributed out to the node holders.

Question 3

How did the presentation to the CIO of a very exciting partner go today?”
That went extremely well. In fact, the presentation that I showed you was a cut-down version of what we actually demonstrated to that prospective partner. We’re just looking forward to follow-ups with them and doing some demos with them and talking about how we integrate.

I think another thing that I didn’t mention is when we talk to some of these prospective partners we don’t go in there hoping to sell development and make money off of development and consulting. As I mentioned before our focus is on how do we drive transactions on the platform.

We go in there and say, “how can we integrate this or implement this for either the lowest cost possible or in some cases free, with that strategic view of driving a lot of transactions on the platform?”

Question 4

Have I talked about BSN?
I have, happy to mention it quickly again. In terms of BSN the main benefits that we see out of it, number one it gives us access to a very large network of corporate partners and infrastructure partners.

Number two, it gives a very low cost and very secure way to grow the ShareLedger network in terms of more nodes and more access points onto it.

Number three, it gives us access to a very large community and growing community of developers who will build additional products and leverage things like ShareRing ID and our other protocols for their own projects.

Then finally and most importantly, is that it will drive a very, very large number of transactions into ShareLedger as more and more people will leverage some of these protocols and products that we’ve got and their API to grow that out.

In terms of benefits for us, they’re huge. BSN is the single largest infrastructure project that’s focused purely on blockchain globally and to be one of the first seven or eight companies part of it is a huge privilege for us. Kudos to our team for making it happen and working with the BSN team to get everything running so quickly.

Question 5

Can you give a possible estimate on the number of transactions in a year’s time?
I was hoping what I would be able to do is look at our partners and the opportunities and see if we can add up the potential number of transactions but if we looked at the potential number of transactions it’s huge.

I’m not in a position to give that information because we don’t want to make promises that either we can’t keep or that we could fall short of them or we could blow them away and increases them etc.

Hopefully over the next few weeks as we announce some of these newer partners you’ll understand the size and scale of what we’re doing.

Question 6

When do you expect new exchanges?
We’ve signed a couple of contracts for new exchanges, we are going through a new legal opinion review for one of them and as soon as that’s done, hopefully over the next week, we’ll be able to go through the listing process. Best case I would say two and a half to three weeks.

Question 7

When are you going to release the app?
We’re going into user acceptance testing for the app and we’ve penciled in the date of the second week of October at the moment for the app.

Question 8

Does ShareRing already have partners in China and can you say how many and which sector?
Yes, we do. Unfortunately, I can’t give you information about how many and which sectors.

Question 9

Is Europe a future market?
Yes, Europe is definitely a future market. Our market is global so as we grow we’re keeping a tight reign on which opportunities we go for and which integrations we do first. However, as we scale we open up the platform more so our companies can effectively integrate themselves, and we’ll have SDKs out and be able to very much scale and take on many, many projects at the same time.

Question 10

Are you thinking of expanding up Latin America in the future?
Yeah, as I mentioned we’re a global company. We’ve had inquiries from all over the world.

We had an inquiry from the Caribbean a couple of days ago, we had an inquiry from Argentina last week, we’ve had interest from even places as far as Afghanistan. You name it, there are opportunities for our product everywhere.

Question 11

Is the Bangkok ShareRing shop testing still ongoing?
Yeah, effectively we have come to the end of the first stage of operational testing. Operational testing with our partner was really about making sure that we could do the deliveries and the milk runs on time, do the drop-offs on time, and all of that.

The process now is to integrate with their API more closely to push the delivery schedules through so the drivers know where to pick up. Then we’ve also got two other apps that we’re releasing as part of Shop, one of them is a merchant app.

Let’s have a look. The merchant app is this here, that’s a running app where the customer can go in here, it’s very difficult to see on this screen, but they can add products in the system, take photos of the products, and things like that.

Then the other app that we’ve got is one called the sort and deliver app, the sort and deliver app is this app here, which you can’t see very well again. On this app here it allows for the drivers to see where they’re picking products up from, once they pick the products up they then sort it, and then they know which customers the products are going to as well. All of that is integrated with the ShareLedger ecosystem and the blockchain.

Question 12

What will users have to do when their passport expires?
Within the app what you can do is if your passport expires or you need to add a new identity, you can simply go in the app itself and there’s a plus button over here that allows me to simply add different types of ID.

It means that if my passport expires I just add a new passport. If my driver’s license expires I just add a new driver’s license and so on.

Question 13

Can everyone benefit from flowbacks?
Yes, I mean, I guess that some of the benefits from flow backs are number one, is it creates scarcity for the token.

Number two, it creates volume for the token on things like the exchanges and it effectively manages a very good velocity for the token as well. The other one is the ability to stake with the existing node holders, you’ll be able to stake with them and share in some of the benefits of that there.

Question 14

Do you see any challenge given the recent political situation and trade war with China?
Listen, we try to be as agnostic as possible with those things, we do have our eye on what’s happening and we do have some plans around that if things become out of control. It’s definitely something that we’re thinking about.

Question 15

What made you think of the name ShareRing, is there a reason behind the name?
We had a workshop in San Diego at the start of 2017 where we came up with the name and we kept going around in circles about it.

I thought of this idea of okay, we are called ShareRing, it’s all about the sharing economy and what we do. Then we thought of this concept of a ring, where it’s a ring of people sharing amongst each other, then it’s not just people, it’s communities and things like that.

Even this logo here, if you look at it carefully the logo is two hands holding each other. Everything is around that whole circular economy, working together, sharing, and things like that.

Question 16

When will staking go live?
As soon as the app is released, staking is going to be part of that. Technically speaking with the validators running you can stake with those, so we could look at a way for us to allow some staking with that in the meantime.

Question 17

What can you tell us about the tier-one exchange?
Not much beyond the fact that it’s a tier-one exchange or maybe two tier-one exchanges.

Question 18

When can you release billion-dollar company partnerships?
I mentioned before a lot of that information