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Jeremy Hague

Bionic Reading

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ShareRing AMA with CEO Tim Bos & ProBit Exchange Transcript

August 27, 2020

April 13, 2023

In this ShareRing AMA hosted by ProBit Exchange, Tim Bos talks about what’s next for ShareRing, major goals and much more!

Introduction:

At ShareRing, we’re developing an ecosystem for the sharing economy and circular economies.. that encompasses traditional rentals, travel, ecommerce, and the services that also connect them together.

We are primarily focused on the technology/platform side of things by growing through partnerships where our partners utilise our platform, or where we form a JV where they handle the operations, and we handle the technology side of things.

I’ve been working with crypto for about 10 years (staring by mining Bitcoin, just because I was interested in the tech), but I’ve been more heavily involved since 2016 after the ethereum whitepaper was released.

I’ve created and successfully sold 3 start-ups before, and I feel that they were all learning experiences that have lead to the creation of ShareRing, which is probably the most exciting venture I’ve ever been involved in.

Community Questions:

How important is the community to ShareToken? and how can we collaborate or help share token for the development of the project?

Very important… one of the reasons why we select exchanges to list on is so that we can help build our community. We need users for our platform, and more involvement in bringing new partners to us, more people developing products on the ledger, etc.

Staking will be available within 6-8 weeks from now.. maybe sooner. The backend is ready, we just need to add the UI to the app.

One of the main problems with this type of project is attracting people, also many people are not used to making payments with cryptocurrencies and are limited to paying with traditional methods.

How does ShareRing think to stand out and differentiate itself from other projects in the face of this problem? Will the ShareRing app have solutions for this type of problem?

You’re right.. but we have a few secret weapons.

1. Because we are providing the platform, and our growth is focused on providing that platform to our partners, we leverage their existing communities and marketing budget to bring users into the ecosystem. Once someone signs up with them, they will then have visibility and access to all the other partners and products that we bring on board.

2. We’re not just about crypto payments. If you don’t understand crypto, that’s fine.. just pay with credit card (or wechat pay, line pay, bank transfer as we add that functionality).

Our products are designed to be easily used by anyone, regardless of crypto knowledge or experience, and especially catering to those with zero interest in blockchain.

In terms of user acquisition, a vast majority of users brought into our network will be from our B2B partners and their whitelabeled products. There will be lots of joint-marketing efforts, as well as acquisition efforts on our side for products like our app. Also, when users create a SHR ID for a partner’s product or service, they gain access to our entire ecosystem as well.

ShareApp, Shop, Pay, Ledger, token… You have everything 🙂 what don’t you have of crypto, in other words, what is next? What is prior target coming on the way?

What’s next? Well now that we’ve built the blockchain, the protocols and some apps, the next step is to commercialise it. We are ready to go on that front, but we’re working on final testing with our partners.

In fact, one of our largest partners came to me this morning with a new opportunity that they want to work together on, so our pipeline of projects is very healthy at the moment.

What’s the difference between ShareRing ID AND 2FA

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.

How is trust built between buyers and sellers in the sharing economy and for each industry in our ShareRing ecosystem?

There is essentially no ‘trust’ required. Transactions are facilitated on the ShareLedger, and any concerns about identity are solved with our SHR ID solution. We designed our products and tech with security and privacy in mind.

IoT devices will be a significant part of the ShareRing platform. The team was looking to interface with some devices natively on ShareLedger. Can you give us an update on this topic?

Yes, IoT is one component of the ShareRing platform. As we are part of MOBI, we are working with them to adopt the Vehicle ID solution to more closely align with industry standards. We will have some really cool stuff coming out of that project soon.

Why are you built on distributed ledger technology, and how does this solve the problem of interoperability, security and scalability?

My previous company, Keaz (which was sold in April this year), was created in 2012 with the intention of creating a platform for the sharing economy, where any provider could sign up and use the platform to build their own sharing business (sound familiar??).

One of the issues we found with a monolithic system like that (ie. one set of API’s to solve all the problems) is that it doesn’t scale and wasn’t flexible enough to cater to all types of sharing economy businesses… so we focused only on car sharing.

Fast forward 4-5 years and the birth of ‘smart contracts’ and immutable data, this allowed us to look at the problem in a different manner and start building protocols that would solve some of the hardest problems for creating trust between the customer and supplier, creating a flexible payment system that crosses borders without crazy fees, and also scaling across many different industries (not just sharing economy).

What we are doing with ShareRing can’t be achieved easily without distributed ledger technology.

This is a broad question. We chose to use DLT due to all the benefits it provides versus traditional technology. Micropayments, interoperability, security, and more. This allows us to provide unique features and vastly lower costs to our users and B2B customers.

How is trust built between buyers and sellers in the sharing economy and for each industry in our ShareRing ecosystem?

ShareRing ID is a large part of this trust. It’s a trusted identity protocol that gets stronger with every rental or purchase you make. Basically, reputation is attached to the identity. This also goes for merchants.. they follow the same sign-up process to add their identity to the platform.

Explain more about ShareRing’s multi-merchant market place, as an entrepreneur, can I buy and sell through it and do I need KYC?

Merchants/sellers must register, but users do not need to perform KYC (via our SHR ID) to purchase from them. There are benefits and incentives if they do, but it’s open to anyone with a web browser to place orders.

What are your major goals to achieve in the next 3-4 years? What are your plans to expand and gain more adoption?

The next 3-4 years will be focused on, 50% scale our partner and customer-base and improvement of existing products, 30% new products, and 20% R&D.

The new products we will focus on next are: ShareRing Rewards (that’s our reward system to tie all the ecosystem together across the partners, Liquidity pools (our DeFI product that’s already in development), and our federated AI platform (whitepaper finished, development scheduled).

What types of benefits does LPoS (Proof-Of-Stake) offer to ShareRing compared to others? why did you choose LPoS instead of others like DPoS, PoS, PoW etc.?

LPoS has some pro’s and con’s.. one of the main things is that we wanted a consensus model that allows us to more effectively involve our whole community, whilst also providing good velocity and a balance of scarcity for the token.

LPoS on Tendermint framework is also more than fast enough and scalable to meet our long term requirements, particularly with the way that ABCI layers are developed.

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?

Yes, we have curators. Actually, that’s our partner’s job (they run the product allocation and operations), but everything is curated.

Can you provide some information for your CHARITY project? Unfortunately, we don’t hear too much of charities in the sector.

Good question.. both Jane and Timothy (marketing) are working together on the next phase of our charity rollout. You’ll hear some things around that soon. It’s an area we are all passionate about.

Explain more about ShareRing’s multi-merchant market place, as an entrepreneur, can I buy and sell through it and do I need KYC

For the marketplace, you can use a Lite version of ShareRing ID.. that means that you don’t need to go through the whole drivers license/passport verification process to sign up and buy something. In our market tests, we found that to be a blocker.

What is the vision and mission of the ShareRing team to make this SHR token have very high demand during Covid-19?

We grow through strong partnerships, particularly through governments and partnerships with NGO’s such as the WEF, and others.

Our travel products are obviously on hold, but our ShareRing ID is being integrated into multiple partners, our ShareRing Shop is gearing up to scale fast, particularly in Bangkok, a mega-city with a huge appetite for this product, and other projects such as our Open World COVID passport.

What is the difference between ShareToken (SHR) and SharePay (SHRP)

SHR is the utility token. Customers and merchants pay for transactions on our system with FIAT (because most of them don’t understand crypto enough to buy SHR on an exchange), and then we convert that FIAT to SHR (via market purchases and swaps on exchanges and liquidity pools) and provide that to the masternode holders as payment for their staking.

We already have about 22,000,000 tokens in reserve from the partner testing we’ve done. 🙂

The idea of using blockchain technology is not something that is viable to reach all kinds of people in the world. How does Sharering plan to solve this problem?

We solve the problem by providing a solution that solves real business and consumer needs. The blockchain technology isn’t something that we ‘lead’ with in our sales process. It’s the foundation of what we built, but it’s not the ‘end product’ that we advertise.

Why do you need dual Token of SHR and (SHRP), how can I get SHRP and what’s the UTILITY and real-life use case of the application?

SHRP is something you won’t buy on exchanges. It’s our stable coin that’s used as a reconciliation and auditing mechanism for our payment system.

If you pay in AUD, we convert to SHRP as the USD/AUD rate, then if the merchant receives THB, we convert the SHRP to the merchant at the THB/USD rate and send the fiat to them.

This allows us to have very fast, constant reconciliation of all payments in our system.

The inherent problem of gaining access is significant. What are problems in the present state of the sharing economy and how can ShareRing provide the solution?

1. Slow and cumbersome sign up for sharing services.

2. Very defragmented industry, with no set of standards or system that can bring them together.

Imagine being able to use your ShareRing ID to instantly rent a car, or walk into a co-working space, or rent an apartment.

We aim to take down the barriers that slow the sharing economy down, whilst also utilising our technology across a number of other industries (banking, insurance, travel, etc).

Also, can you name a few partnerships? and what benefits do they bring?

In terms of partnerships.. we have a few more lined up for announcement between now and the 2nd week of October. most of these are very significant partnerships.

Where can we expect to see the SHR branding this year? Hotel lobbies? Airports? Shared cars? Insurance forms?

ShareRing branding will be across a number of areas.. hotels, experience providers, some banks, some insurance providers, airlines, airports, most of those are ‘in the bag’ already.

What happened to the original Sharering plans to launch a Sharing economy app where people could lend tools, chairs and services to each other? I recall there was a lot of interest and signups from providers. When can we expect to see that?

That’s still on the cards, but we realised that it needs to be more of a self-service solution.

We’ve made the merchant dashboard for that already, but I decided that we would also need to open up the API to allow developers to plug in their own add-ons.

Regarding the ShareRing app, what are the digital currencies available to make a payment? What are the other accepted payment methods?

and more to come. We will offer staking and liquidity pools for each of those too.. keep an eye out for when we announce this.

How to attract more users to use the ShareRing platform? Are there any special incentives?

We’ll have some incentives.. ie. rewards, discounted travel, free membership to streaming services, etc.

How can value be created for the SHR token? Is SharePay going to be pegged to the USD or EURO or any other currency? What made you decide to partner with Probit exchange to list SHR?

SharePay is currently pegged to the USD. When we launch the liquidty project, we will also have a stablecoin that’s pegged to the average of the other fiat and crypto’s that we support.

If you google SDR and World Bank, then you’ll understand the mechanism that we’ll use.

Are their still plans to implement true sharing economy businesses within the ecosystem, such as renting clothing like wedding dresses, or high-end video equipment to shoot a one-off promo video, or tool hire etc?

That’ll be up to our merchants that come on board. We’re not interested in launching peer-to-peer by ourselves.. but if a partner wants to launch that, then they can build that on our platform.

Would you say, what makes ShareRing first product better than other travel apps is the “All in one” idea?

I think it’s the fact that we go well beyond just ‘payments’. We aim to make the experience better for the consumer and the provider.

Have the team found that there have been more issues than expected to implement Tendermint / Cosmos with Shareledger?

Yes, we have. When we started development back in early 2018, we used the base mint build of Tendermint, but that had a huge number of issues.. so we had to basically rebuild the system early this year to remove a lot of the legacy issues.

It’s a lot better now (we’re just updating from 0.33 to 0.39 version now and finding that better, particularly the new modules that allow for easier upgrades without having to do a fork).

What is big innovation from ShareRing to play a role in the future of blockchain technology in real life?

Good question… we’re pushing the boundaries a bit, and that’s being noticed, plus we are playing a big part in developing blockchain technologies that solve a ‘real world’ problem.

This is why I get invited to do keynote speeches and panel sessions at industry conferences that don’t necessarily have a blockchain focus.

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 use some tried and tested FIAT onramps to reduce the risk for us and the consumer, so we’re confident in the security of it. No point reinventing some things that already work well.

Does ShareRing feel pressure from this on the race of global payment solutions?

No, not at all… there’s room for more than one solution, and ours is quite targeted towards certain industries and customers.

Why does ShareRing being a decentralized industry have partners who are not crypto experts? Isn’t the development of ShareRing limited by them?

Quite the opposite.. the fact that we can work with partners who aren’t involved in crypto demonstrates the real world viability and scale of our solution.