ShareRing AMA with CEO Tim Bos & Atomic Wallet Transcript
In this ShareRing Telegram AMA hosted by Atomic Wallet, Tim Bos talks about reward points, the pain points ShareRing solves and much more!
Questions from Atomic Wallet
DeFi has been a very popular movement in crypto, does ShareRing have any plans to integrate this into your ecosystem?
Yes, we’re already working on a few things. We have been testing a DeFi model with liquidity pools for quite some time, and we’re in the process of developing the smart contracts, etc behind it. SHR will be an integral part of it, as well as some other surprises.
The DeFi product will be used by ShareRing, as well as other suppliers and partners that use our platform. It’ll be one of the first DeFi projects that have a real-world and highly scalable use case.
Tim Bos, CEO
ShareRing utilises a dual-token mechanism, what made you decide to go with this approach?
Our main utility token is ShareToken (SHR), this it used for transaction fee’s, etc on the platform. We also have another token, which is SHRP (SharePay), that is used as our stable-coin/payment token within the network. It’s not tradeable at all, except within the ecosystem.
We will have other tokens, with other functions/benefits, that we introduce on ShareLegder too.
Tim Bos, CEO
Fascinating! Is there an ETA when you want to launch more tokens?
No, not yet, it’ll be for some specific projects/partners that we are working with.
In all cases, SHR will still be the transaction and governance token on ShareLedger.
Tim Bos, CEO
In regards to potential adoption of your blockchain, what would you say ShareRing’s main use cases are?
ShareRing was started for the purpose of developing a platform and ecosystem to support the circular economies, including sharing economy, travel industry and e-commerce.
We have introduced our foundation products on our ShareLedger blockchain, which include our identity management system (ShareRing ID), our payment system (ShareRing Pay) and a number of other protocols and products to support it.
Our first go-to-market products are ShareRing Travel, ShareRing Shop, Open World COVID Passport, and ShareRing ID as a standalone SDK for many other industries.
Tim Bos, CEO
Questions from Twitter
Any plans to integrate with airline and hotel chain reward programs and such as Emirates Skywards or Royal Orchid Plus? Plans for creating a debit card to use while travelling? Earning points through the app will be great!!
1. Plans to integrate with reward programs – yes.. interoperability to other rewards programs is something we’ll introduce with ShareRing Rewards.
2. Plans of creating a debit card to use – no at this stage.. We’ve considered it, but our approach is to use the app to facilitate payments in the short and medium term.
Tim Bos, CEO
ShareRing aim is promoting the adoption of blockchain on a global http://scale.so which technology and mechanism are used by ShareRing to achieve your objective?
Our blockchain is based on the Tendermint Framework and Cosmos SDK. We chose this as it offers one of the best levels of scalability and flexibility of anything we’ve come across.
We also use some traditional development environments for easy integration with our partners.
Tim Bos, CEO
What’s special of your planing about travel? You know many projects about travel but it’s no interest other investors.
Good question. Instead of just saying that we’re a blockchain project that does travel.. and then doing little more than letting people use crypto to pay for travel, we’re taking a completely different approach. When we started ShareRing, we started from the perspective of the users and looked at what was broken in the fragmented travel industry.
Things like:
Hotel check-ins are slow
Booking flights can be slow and frustrating
Trust between customers and experience providers can be a headache.
We all hate lining up for 30 minutes at the car rental place to get our car.
These are the problems we are solving with ShareRing. We’re not just providing this as an app for people to book travel. We’re offering it as a platform for other online travel agents, airlines, hotels, experience providers, etc to integrate with and white label for their own usage.
Tim Bos, CEO
Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market and most projects are competing campaigns here to entice users and grow, with @ShareRingGlobal you see how Southeast Asia is and do you plan to develop & expanding here?
A lot of our expansion will be via our partners. We can’t expect to compete with Expedia and Booking.com, etc, so we have a great plan that basically leverages either our partners existing (huge) networks, or by offering ‘must have’ services to travellers such as eVisa On Arrival, COVID-19 pass, etc and use those as a way to upsell the other travel products.
We’ve tested this already through some of our partners, and the results are excellent.
Tim Bos, CEO
Questions from the Telegram Chat
What is the plan to ensure sufficient liquidity on exchanges to fill market orders, especially as adoption increases and clients begin multiplying year-over-year?
There’s a few angles to this..
1. We need to make sure we leverage the user-base of those new exchanges to ensure we have additional people trading.
2. We also target the exchanges that are operating within the geographies that we want to expand into. Plus the usual market making, etc that’s done to help stimulate the exchange.
Tim Bos, CEO
Charity fund donation is one of your use cases, transparency remains a problem in this situation, how will it be solved using ShareLedger?
We’re going to create a wallet that’s dedicated to the foundation. This wallet will be public, as will our accounts for the foundation. It’s very important to be transparent here!
Tim Bos, CEO
Verifying product authenticity could be a herculean task, so how do you ensure that only legitimate products come into ShareRing’s multi-merchant shop, do you have QUALITY CONTROL Measures or CURATORS
For the ShareRing Shop, we are running the platform, and our partners in each region run the operations, commercial aspects, customers, etc. These partners have curators that will manage the merchant onboarding and product quality.
If we did the operations ourselves, there’s no way we would scale quickly. This approach will give us more customers and more transactions on the blockchain.
Tim Bos, CEO
ShareRing value proposition is how it can improve user travel experience through services such as KYC checks, eVisa application, flights and hotel bookings. How does it establish trust between customers and the industry that offers these services in the sharing economy?
There’s multiple ways we do this.. one is through ShareRing ID.. the more you use it, the higher your ‘authority/trust’ with providers and partners. We’re going to introduce a review mechanism too, but our view is that if we introduce it too early (before we hit criticial mass), then it’s too open to manipulation.
There’s also going to be a governance mechanism to remove suppliers that don’t meet the minimum standards of our community.
Tim Bos, CEO
We establish and maintain trust with our ShareRing ID module. This allows users of our platform and services to KYC without the fear of personal data misuse or theft by encrypting their ID documents and proving their accuracy without sending them to third party servers where they may be vulnerable
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
How did your team deal with the technical challenges of the initial launch of this product? What is some milestone to look forward to what may be the challenges in the future and how do you plan to answer them?
We have had our fair share of challenges! What we are doing isn’t simple.. we’re breaking new ground with a lot of the technology we’ve developed, so it’s been constant R&D, trial and error, and some pivots in how we approach a few problems.
I’m extremely proud of our team and what we’ve achieved. We’ve had a few times where we felt we were ready to launch, but we felt that we were still a bit short of where we wanted to be in terms of user experience. I’m happy that we’re finally at the stage where we can launch a product that I’m happy with.
Tim Bos, CEO
We have several products, and have only trialed our Shop product so far. Many are on the verge of releasing. The biggest challenge we faced that interrupted our initial roadmap was the COVID lockdowns which forced us to delay our app launch.
However, this allowed us to further build our products and begin with an even stronger launch. Some of the bigger immediate milestones include the release of our app, and (Shop) rollout in Thailand within the coming weeks!
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
DeFi is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain space right now. Can $SHR share your opinions on DeFi with us? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system?
I think DeFi will disrupt some components of financial systems.. it has some create promise! There’s also the opportunity for a lot of scams, but I hope the good projects rise up above the rest!
Tim Bos, CEO
Which market are you targeting for 2020? What strategies do you have to attract users, and keep them stay with your platform for longterm?
Our primary markets for 2020 are Thailand, Vietnam, HK, Australia, China and a couple of others for travel and shop.
But we are also talking to partners in the US, UK, Dubai, India, and other countries for our ShareRing ID products.
Tim Bos, CEO
We’re initially targeting Southeast Asia, starting with Thailand and followed by Vietnam soon after. We’re also piloting our Shop in Australia with plans to expand to the rest of the country. More will follow after this.
Many users will be onboarded into our ecosystem via our partners and other services. When they register for ShareRing ID once to use any service, they’ll have full access to the rest of our products. So our B2B partners and customers will help enormously with this.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
As the SHR swap app is intended to provide a 3way swap between erc20-mainnet-bep2 does this mean sharering has decided to keep the erc20 version alive?
Yes, we have.. it doesn’t make sense to stop it.
Tim Bos, CEO
Yes, we are keeping the ERC-20 version and currently have not announced plans on changing this anytime soon. This gives our users more flexibility in their choice of exchanges.
The app will have built-in instant 3-way swap to give our users as much freedom as possible to manage their tokens as they see fit.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
SHR platform is safe for the user? especially at the present time hacking problem or DDoS attack, these problems are going to be heard a little more. how does SHR deal with these problems?
Yes, it’s very safe.. you control your identity, we don’t store it on any of our servers or blockchain, plus our ShareLedger has DDoS protection in place through sentry nodes, IP protection and other methods.
Tim Bos, CEO
It has been mentioned that with ShareRing shop delivery fee would be AU$ 10 equivalent paid for by the customer but orders over $50 would be free delivery. As the drivers would still expect to be paid, does the delivery fee move to the shops instead of the customers?
When will people be able to get their hands on the basic app with SHR wallet?
No.. the delivery fee just comes from a mix of our margin and the shop. We generally make a 10% margin on products purchased on the shop.
That margin is fed back into product development and marketing.
Tim Bos, CEO
Why did you choose Tendermint Framework for ShareRing blockchain? What features did ShareRing get using Tendermint?
We started the development in early 2018.. we had a number of requirements:
Don’t be held ransom by gas/fees on other chains.
It needed to be fast enough to handle the scale of transactions that we forecast on the platform for payments, identity checks, asset management/iot, and bookings.
It need to be environmentally sustainable (ie. not PoW)
This eliminated 90% of the blockchain platforms out there.. so we tested the remainder and Tendermint ticked all the boxes.
The only issue was that it was still in its infancy at the time, so we needed to commit a lot of development effort to make it work for us.
Tim Bos, CEO
Do I understand correctly that the user’s data in the ShareRing ID is stored on the user’s device? What happens if the device is lost or damaged?
When the users signs up, they have the option to backup the ‘identity file’ to their cloud drive or offline. If they replace or lose their phone, they can restore it from that.
The user needs their private key to gain access to it though. Otherwise, they can just do another identity check.
Tim Bos, CEO
What fascinates me about ShareRing project are its flowbacks, low supply and holding incentives which I need more understanding.
Can you throw more light on the non-inflationary nature of SHR flowbacks and how does it benefit long term holders?
Yes, sure. Most of our transactions are denominated in Fiat. We have an exchange module on shareledger that will take the Fiat we receive from our partners/users for transactions and then purchases the associated SHR on the exchanges and distributes it to the node holders.
This process is known as a ‘flowback’. The benefit is that it maintains a good velocity for the token, whilst creating demand on the exchanges, and scarcity of the token by distributing them to the node holders.
Tim Bos, CEO
What’s the difference between ShareRing ID AND 2FA?
2FA is basically the use of a token/sms to log into a service. ShareRing ID is your whole identity and other important documents that are in your (extremely secure) control and used for very easy sign-up and access to many services, such as hotel bookings, hotel express check-in, flight bookings and check in, bank sign-up, insurance policy registration, etc.
Tim Bos, CEO
2FA is simply a way to login to a centralised service by using a token or SMS. ShareRing ID is a self sovereign identity protocol where you have total control over all forms of your ID.
The blockchain is used to take a digital fingerprint of your ID so that you can’t change it after it’s confirmed. Then you can use the ShareRing ID to sign up for any services that are partnered with ShareRing
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
What is “ShareRing? Where does “ShareRing” name come from?
What does it stand for?
We came up with the name after a very long brainstorming session in San Diego with my co-founders. We had a lot of possible names, and this one just seemed to stick.
I imagined a ring of people/communities/governments/etc working together to share, etc. The logo is a ring, but with 2 hands holding each other.
Tim Bos, CEO
The crypto world is becoming overcrowded with blockchain projects and tokens, what makes #SHR different from other projects?
SHR is a business first. Our products and solutions are designed for everyone to use, not limited to those who are crypto-savvy. They’re also modular and whitelabelable, which means they can be incorporated into other apps or nearly any back-end infrastructure to reduce costs and provide additional features.
The more you look into us, you’ll see why we are different than most crypto projects for many reasons. I could provide a very long answer to this, but I need to get to some more questions for now.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
When will corporations stop being afraid to use blockchain? ShareRing want to be a leader in the distribution of this technology?
Many corporations are racing to implement blockchain solutions, it’s only gaining popularity.
And yes, our product offerings are perfectly suited for both small and especially large-scale businesses.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
To me, adoption is the most important for a project. How will ShareRing get enough adoption and attract more users?
Our B2B partners incorporating our technology and advertising for their new products powered by our tech will bring millions of new users to our ecosystem quickly.
Previous estimates from individual partners are in the tens of millions annually. We will do our own marketing for our own products as well.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
The biggest barrier for newcomers in the crypto space today is buying and withdraw with FIAT, how secure and robust is your FIAT GATEWAY and what currencies are currently available for me in local?
We have minimal FX fees and our app will allow you to convert them to local currencies.
Participating hotels will allow you to pick up cash in local currency at the desk, saving you the hassle and high fees of using traditional foreign exchange kiosks.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
What are the main differences between ShareRing and other travel services? Why is ShareRing better than these services? How will ShareRing plan to dominate the market?
Travel competitors in the crypto space focus less on the technology services to businesses and customers and more on providing rewards and payment methods for travel.
You could build hundreds of these on top of our ShareLedger
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
Do you think that the sharing economy will continue to grow in the coming years? How is ShareRing preparing to compete and excel against similar projects?
The Sharering economy is expanding rapidly with no signs of slowing, and we are at the forefront of this trend.
And as far as similar projects go, I haven’t seen anything like ours, so that’s a tough one for me to answer accurately.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
Do you have a plan to BURN or Buyback $SHR tokens to increase it’s value?
There was a burn already. And there are some aspects of our tokenomics that may interest you along these lines.
I’ll have to invite you to check out our telegram community for further discussion on this, they’d be more than happy to explain at length.
Timothy Kingery, Communications Manager
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Recent News:
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CEO’s AMA Transcript: ShareRing’s CEO Tim Bos speaks with BlockchainBrad
Alpha Sigma Capital Invests in ShareRing
Where do I purchase ShareRing tokens?
Interested in purchasing SHR tokens? Then you can do so from the following exchanges:
ProBit: SHR BTC & SHR KRW
Bithumb Global: SHR BTC & SHR USDT
Bitmart: SHR BTC
Binance Dex: SHR BEP2 & SHR BUSD
LBank: SHR BTC & SHR USDT
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