ShareRing AMA Livestream with Tim Bos Recap – 29th April 2020

On Wednesday 29th April 2020, ShareRing’s CEO Tim Bos hosted a live YouTube AMA; below is a full recap of everything ShareRing has been up to since the last AMA + community questions at the end.

Introduction

“First of all, we’ve got a huge roadmap as part of the ShareRing ecosystem. We’ve really been holding off sharing the roadmap recently because the focus before the lockdowns was very much on travel and then some side projects that we’re working on directly for a number of companies.”

“But we’ve always had this larger sort of ecosystem that we’ve been developing our products and technology for, and we haven’t really been sharing it with everyone.”

“However, now is the opportunity for you to actually see what we’ve been working on, which is quite extensive.”

ShareRing Shop Update

“First things first, we did announce a couple of weeks ago something called the ShareRing Shop. The status of that now is we are currently loading products into it.”

“We’re setting up a trial area around Melbourne to basically pilot the ShareRing Shop. The concept behind it is anyone can go online, order a product and have that product delivered within two hours to them.”

“At the moment, the only real competition is Amazon. With Amazon in Australia, you order something, and even with Amazon Prime, you’re generally waiting for a two to three days to get that. Therefore, the whole idea with what we’re doing with ShareRing Shop is we’re bringing businesses to the local community.”

“This means that when I buy something, say, from the local pet shop or from the local butchers or something like that, and have it delivered within two hours, every time I order something, that order only comes from local suppliers. So suppliers that are actually local to my current location.”

ShareRing Shop Upcoming Launch Locations

“We’re launching the ShareRing Shop in Melbourne first; after that, we are launching in Sydney, then we’ll be launching in Thailand and then London after that. So please stay tuned.”

“We do have a huge number of supplies onboard already at the moment. We’ve got pharmacy products, fruit and veg, meat, seafood, office supplies, computers, clothing, shoes, you name it. Essentially, any shops that are around you within about a five-kilometre radius will be online.”

“It’s a seamless experience, you don’t have to go into the system, select to shop and then select a product, it’s very product-focused. You just select the products you want, put them in your shopping bag and then our drivers will go and pick the products up and deliver them to you.”

“We’re using ShareRing ID for all of the drivers sign-ups, so the drivers will sign up using our identity management product and they’ll essentially receive jobs and go out and pick the products up and then deliver them to you.”

Scaling the ShareRing Shop

“We’ve got some really good plans on how we can scale that, and how we can partner with some large shops. As that progresses, what we can see starting to happen is people might create a home-grown business where instead of having a shopfront, they might have warehouse space and stock their own products to sell through the platform.”

“We’re expecting to see these little sorts of areas where people start specialising or buying products and then distributing them out to the local community.”

Introducing ShareRing Services

“ShareRing Services is another product we’ve been working on, so the idea behind ShareRing Services is that it’s a similar concept to Uber, but for services.”

“The idea is where you can jump on the ShareRing app and let’s say you need a plumber, you go into the app and say, I need a plumber. You select what you want them to do (maybe install a new tap or something like that), then we’ll broadcast out to plumbers within a certain radius of where you currently are to offer them the job, then to come and do that job for you.”

Utilising ShareRing ID for Services

“Once again, they will use the ShareRing ID system to sign up and then also things like their certifications and all those sorts of things will be stored in their ShareRing ID wallet as well.”

“We can eliminate any fraudulent actors out of the system to make sure that people with proper certificates can only do work within it; we also provide that extra level of security that’s offered through the ShareRing Ecosystem.”

SharePay Discount & Predictive Pricing

“Payments are obviously done through SharePay. We’ll give discounts to people that pay with SharePay versus say credit card, as well as predictive pricing. As part of this service, what we do is, instead of the plumber giving a price/quote, based on whatever their pricing is, we’re taking the average price across all these services and actually giving a fixed hourly rate based on the level of experience to the customer.”

“It’s sort of like Uber, where you have Uber Black or Uber Standard and you pay based on that sort of level of service. That’s what we’re looking to launch in the third or fourth quarter of this year.”

ShareRing Travel Destinations Update

“The next thing is ShareRing Travel. A lot of you have seen the ShareRing Travel product before. We’re still working very, very hard on that product. Obviously, we were hit we delayed the launch of it because a number of our partners weren’t taking any bookings; so obviously it was just ridiculous to launch it at the time.”

“We have transformed the product a little bit to be much more destination-focused. Instead of just being a generic travel app where you could just book for anywhere, we’re very much focusing on the destination.”

“At the moment, say if we’re in places like Thailand, we won’t just say, hey, book a hotel or an activity. We’re curating different activities, we’re curating hotels, we’re curating things like cafes and restaurants to go to, blogs, little videos. All of that stuff is part of what we’re relaunching with the new ShareRing Travel Destinations program.”

“The other thing we’re doing is we’re working with some cities or travel destinations to white-label it. For example, you might see a Phuket (Thailand) travel app and you download that, then you’ve got stuff that is very specific to Phuket that helps you live like a local.”

New ShareRing Travel App Features

Liveness Detection

“One of the things that the app does now is something called a liveness detection, to detect your face. One of the things we found in just taking a selfie photo was that it’s too easy to hack. Instead, what we basically do is we make you move your face, one of our partners who we are working very closely with basically does that.”

Introducing Activities into the Travel App!

“Anyone that’s seen the app before noticed that the only thing that we previously had in there were was accommodation. But now we also have a new thing, activities.”

“This is through a new partnership that we have, it allows for things like tours and activities; all the pricing can be seen in SharePay or I can choose to go in and change it to another currency.”

“We support all sorts of fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies and so on through our partners. We can go into a midnight food tour and have a look at information about that, as well as any ratings associated with it as well, and then check availability and book it.”

Accommodation Update

“Hotels are similar, with hotels we can say choose a location that we’re going to, the number of people staying etc. This is all working live, using real data and real servers etc.”

“It’s very fast in terms of sort of getting search results, also, searches can be set to things like the radius of how far you want to search, as well as heaps of different filters that you can add into the search results.”

ShareRing Wallet and Token Swap Update

“Another thing that we’ve added to the app, that we’ll be releasing another core app with is the new wallet functionality.”

“In the wallet itself, we’ve got your balance for SharePay, the other thing we’ve now added is very quick, very automated transfers between the different SHR tokens, so SHR token on ERC-20, as well as BEP2.”

“You can also receive SHR tokens into your wallet. Let’s say I want to transfer, what it would do is ask me for which ERC-20 or BEP2 address I want to transfer it to, it can be anyone and it would happen instantly. Within a couple of minutes, you’ll get the transfers to ERC-20 or BEP2. Additionally, you can perform your SHR swap through here as well.”

“We’re going to release the core app that will allow you to do this very, very shortly. There are heaps of other functions in the app that I won’t go through into much detail at the moment.”

“If you want to receive payments from somebody, you could, for example, just give them your QR code and they can send you payments that way as well. All of that, as I said, is currently ready and finished waiting for release.”

SharePay Update

“I’ve spoken a little bit about SharePay before. The idea behind SharePay is that it’s the currency of our ecosystem. Instead of having to separately handle all these fiat currencies, we’ve created SharePay as effectively a central currency.”

“It really allows us to use that as the stable coin that will allow us to transfer between, say, BNB to USD for some of our supplies that cant receive crypto.”

“It’s really used as the currency for the system, so every time you pay, regardless of what currency it is, it’ll get transferred to SharePay in our system and then paid out in that other currency.”

Benefits of SharePay

“One of the things that we will be doing is offering discounts for anyone that uses SharePay. For example, if a merchant receives SharePay for payments that they receive, instead of cashing out to their local currency if they use that SharePay to buy other things, maybe supplies for their hotel or things for a ShareRing Shop around them, then they’ll get a discount for using that and holding onto the SharePay.”

“The other thing that we’ll do after we start getting a larger balance of SharePay is offering loans off the back of that. Then, things such-as allowing them to do interest-free payments over a certain period of time on products that they want to purchase. We’ll be offering all of that probably Q4 or Q1 next year.”

ShareRing ID Rebrand and Update

“What we were calling ‘OneID’ is now being rebranded to be ShareRing ID. This is part of our rebranding to keep the ShareRing name and make that pervasive through all of our products. You’ll start seeing some our branding with ShareRing ID soon.”

“ShareRing ID has evolved to be a lot more than just an identity management system; it’s not just about confirming your ID, getting the photos, getting the passport photo for sign-ups and things like that. We are doing some side projects at the moment that utilise the ShareRing ID in a number of different areas.”

ShareRing ID in the Insurance Industry

“A couple of examples that I can give you now is for the insurance industry. As well as being able to use the ID process to sign up and perform OCR on your ID or passport, what we’re also doing is storing things like in insurance policies in your ID file.”

“We’ll do an OCR on the policy, but we’ll also do a digital copy of that policy and then make a hash of it; then we watermark that and store that against your identity management files in an encrypted file.”

“What that means is when maybe you’re going to do an insurance claim or something like that, you can have that policy with you and automatically submit that from your ID, same with insurance claims.”

ShareRing ID in the Transport Industry

“We’re also using ShareRing ID for the transport industry, for things like truck drivers when they sign up to show their truck driver’s licence, but also to do logging of their trips that they’ve done in the heavy transport industry.”

ShareRing ID Liveness Detection

“We’re also doing, as I mentioned before, liveness detection. This means that instead of just face matching, we’re doing liveness detection. The partner who we’re working on that is working on some PR at the moment to announce us as a partner, It’s a huge partner so we’re looking forward to getting that info out.”

“The other thing is to simplify the process, we will be supporting Google login and Facebook login, instead of having a separate log in and password. So we will sort of bring those systems together a bit more as well.”

Introducing ShareRing Rentals

“ShareRing Rentals, this is something we’ve had on the back burner for quite some time. One of the things with ShareRing Rentals is using our ecosystem for apartment rentals, house rentals and even office rentals.”

“There are a few core benefits behind that, one is obviously it’s easy to use the ShareRing ID for sign-ups, then also for the history of your rental and for payments using SharePay as well.”

Enhanced Experience for Property Owners Overseas

“The other thing is, let’s say you have somebody overseas that owns some apartments in Australia, the current issue that they have is they need to set up a bank account in Australia, even though they are located overseas. They also need to receive local rental payments and then go to the Foreign Exchange (FX) to get the payments back to wherever they are.”

“What we’ll be offering is the ability for, say, the customer to pay with either a bank transfer a credit card or through the ShareRing app, then the owner of that property to be able to receive the money directly into their bank account, wherever they are around the world without any significant FX fees. Therefore, it makes it a much, much easier, smoother and faster experience.”

An Ecosystem for Real Estate Agents

“The process for us to do this isn’t to make ourselves a real estate agent and to compete with them. The process is to partner with some existing real estate agents and for them to use our ecosystem as an option for doing rentals.”

“We will offer a white-label product and we may also offer an app directly to some people that might have larger numbers of properties, or want to rent out directly instead of going through an agent.”

Upcoming

“The other things upcoming that we’re working on now is obviously utilising ShareLedger, ShareRing ID and also SharePay in a number of other different industries, just as sort of ongoing projects that we do directly for clients.”

“Part of the reason why is to get things like the ShareLedger ecosystem and the ShareRing ID out to more people, this also means that they have access to all of ShareRing’s other products, like the travel app, ShareRing Shop and everything as well.”

“This way, the customers of the ShareRing Shop may become ShareRing Travel customers and vice versa. Customers that use the rental system might also become shop customers. So it’s quite a lot of things that we’re doing.”

“We also have and I’ve mentioned before, three major program projects underway, they are pushing transactions throughout our Testnet.”

“On top of this, I’ve got the marketing team working on the new website, which has less focus on travel and more focus on the whole ecosystem. So all of those products that I mentioned before and more.”

Technical Updates

“We’ve got a whole list of technical updates that have been going into the system over the last couple of months, we will also be doing updates in three phases.”

“For the main phase, we’ve just finished testing on the updated bank module and an updated module for the transaction fees, which we needed to enhance and an exchange module to basically get the US dollar exchange rates.”

Upcoming Live Transactions on ShareLedger

“They’re in testing at the moment and we’re expecting to release those on Monday into production. Once we’ve done that, we will start seeing some live transaction through because there it was critical that we updated those because what we found was the distribution mechanism out to the node holders wasn’t working exactly as we expected or exactly as we saw in the Testnet.”

Updates to Staking and Distribution Models

“The next phase we’re updating is our staking model to the newer version of the Cosmos SDK. After that, the distribution and slashing model is getting a little bit more of an update, then finally ID creation in the blockchain.”

“So we’re basically looking at doing major production updates every three weeks for the next two phases. The last one will probably be around the 20th of June. One update next week, an update on the 23rd of May, and then one more update on the 20th of June. But we will start seeing live transactions from next week on the platform.”

The Current Progress of the ShareRing Shop

“We will have a demo of the ShareRing Shop soon, however, we are currently in the process of loading products at the moment. We have just loaded about 2000 pet products, a couple of major meat suppliers near us, pharmacies are also going in today, cosmetics are going in. There are a few other supplies that we’re bringing in at the moment as well.”

Questions from the Community

Question 1: When will we see staking?

“In terms of staking, the next update of the app that I’ll demonstrate we’ll have staking in. You’ll be able to see how we do staking from within the app, we’re just doing a little bit of user experience updates on that there to sort of see how that will work.”

Question 2: Is there a role for the community?

“Yes. There’s actually a much more expanded role for the community. So in terms of how we need help in every area.”

Community Role for ShareRing ID

“In terms of things like ShareRing ID, we are creating a bit of a pack which has information about how ShareRing ID can go into companies and how it can be sold. Therefore, the community can definitely be part of helping to get ShareRing ID out there. It was created to be something that’s easy to bolt into existing ecosystems, existing apps and things like that, so look forward to info about that.”

Community Role for ShareRing Shop

“For ShareRing shop, what we will do is take any proposals for anyone that wants to start their own ShareRing Shop area. For example, say someone in the Netherlands wants to start a sharing shop in Amsterdam, we’ll provide any of the information that you need to be able to start one there, you’ll also earn money from running that there.”

“You can use all of our software, ecosystem, apps and effectively launch your own ShareRing shop in any location around the world. That’s one of the ways we can get it out really fast and really easily.”

Community Role for ShareRing Travel Destinations

“The same thing goes with travel as a destination, what we will be doing is taking proposals from people of new destinations to add. To do that, though, there’s a lot required.”

“I mean, we need to find local bloggers, we need to be able to have people that can curate right things locally, as well as help travellers to be able to get access to things that only locals know about, like cafes and good restaurants and things like that. Also, help us partner with local suppliers so we can integrate with them.”

“For example, in Thailand, we’re going to be adding a food delivery service for people that that don’t want to sort of getting hotel food or want something a little bit more convenient as well.”

“So definitely a lot of help from the community in growing that, Elvin and the team will start putting some information together about how we can bring that out there as well.”

Question 3: When do we expect to launch the app?

ShareRing Travel Destinations App

“As you can see, there are actually four apps now. The ShareRing Travel Destinations is going to launch when we see the market start opening up again. The downtimes being good for us because, as we’ve seen, it’s giving us a chance to really polish the app a lot more add more features and functionality in there, so really happy with that. We’ve got car rentals going in there as well now. So that’s coming soon.”

The ShareRing Shop App

“For the ShareRing Shop, we are doing a launch this week to a limited invite-only audience in the area where I am, and that’s really just to start testing it, we have the shops onboard already.”

“Then we’ve also got a few drivers that are going to get the app on their phone. So if all looks good on that, then then we’ve got a number of ads that will start blasting out to social media to get local people on board buying.”

Question 4: You said before that selling Keaz is good for ShareRing, can you go into this?

“I mean, we sold Keaz to a very, very well-funded, large mobility company. Whilst Keaz had some really good partnerships with companies like Toyota and a number of other companies, I guess Wunder takes it to the next level.”

“So in the short term, there’s not really much change. But in the long term, through our contacts and partnership with Wunder, it now gives access to a much larger ecosystem as well.”

“The discussions around ShareRing and Wunder haven’t occurred yet. We obviously have a transition to go through before we can start bringing those conversations up. But on the whole, I think it’s very good for ShareRing that one of its partners, Keaz, is now part of a much, much larger, very well-funded organisation.”

Question 5: Any update on a new exchange next to Bitmart & Binance Dex?

“Not at the moment. It hasn’t really been a core focus. I know a few people want us to list on other exchanges.”

“I think it’s something that our listing team will look at and see what we do. I think at the moment, part of it’s really to make sure that we’ve got transactions going through ShareLedger to make sure that the ecosystem is working. My core focus is really being on product and customer development.”

Question 6: How much interest has there been in ShareRing Shop from a business perspective? Any projection on transaction numbers?

“No projection on transaction numbers yet. We need to launch the pilot so we can get some idea of feedback.”

“A lot of this has been developed in a bubble, with an understanding of the market, but not a huge understanding of what the demand will be.”

“However, there has been interest from shops, It’s been interesting, it’s really about our messaging. For example, if we go into a shop and say, hey, we’re launching a new online shop, would you like to be part of it?”

“Some of these shops say, well, we’ve already got an online shop, and we do our own deliveries, and they don’t really appreciate that what we’re able to do is increase that market share that they’ve got through say someone that is shopping at a pharmacy and might want to also shop for toys or something. Once we start explaining that to them they really start to understand that more.”

Question 7: Assuming that ShareRing Shop has been built on the back of B2B partnerships. Can you tell us how this partnership came to be? Also, has ShareRing Shop always been part of the team’s plan and now has been pushed forward due to COVID-19?

“Yes. ShareRing shop has been part of our long term plan. We’ve always had that as part of the plan moving forward. It was definitely moved ahead as part of COVID-19. We hadn’t done a lot of development of it.”

“What we decided to do was buy the IP off another company to accelerate the development ShareRing Shop. Therefore, what we are launching is definitely MVP. It does need some updates in terms of the user experience and user interface. But we’re happy we’ve launched what we’ve got now.”

Question 8: For what reason was Keaz sold?

“The discussions to sell Keaz had been going on since last year, so it wasn’t sold due to things like the economic downturn or anything like that. It did help us make that decision, though.”

“We did forecast two very, very big drops in terms of revenue for Keaz, and that did help us influence the decision to pull the trigger. I think part of the reason why we sold was we’d always looked at sort of not building Keaz and keeping it forever.”

“Keaz was started in 2013, so it is 7 years old. We did feel that it was the right time to either look towards getting more investment in it and growing the company or bringing it in to be part of a much stronger company. It was definitely not a decision taken lightly, but we’re very happy with that decision.”

Question 9: Dhipaya Insurance MOU and the POC with a large insurance company that results in 44 million transactions, are they still going ahead?

“Dhipaya Insurance was focused very much on travel insurance, obviously, that’s not really going ahead until the travel insurance picks up a bit. But we will discuss with them some other non-travel related opportunities.”

“In terms of the other insurance one, yes. We’ve been working with them to look at some low hanging fruit that they can implement to their systems in terms of onboarding customers, getting insurance policies in place.”

“Last week, we did a video demo for them for a proof of concept that we’ve done, in terms of using QR codes on a website to initiate the ShareRing ID process for them to upload their ID and then send it through the website to the insurance company.”

“Part of the reason why is because at the moment the customers can’t going to their office to sign up for insurance. So this actually creates a bigger opportunity for us there.”

Question 10: Have the queue competition winners been announced?

“I don’t know. I’ll check with marketing on whether or not they’ve been an. Don’t think they have been announced. Perhaps a rethink of the prizes is in order considering no one can travel at the moment. Or we say that it’s just delayed because of the travel delays.”

Question 11: Will ShareRing still receive transactions from Keaz?

“Yes, we will still see transactions from Keaz through ShareLedger so don’t