ShareRing AMA with Tim Bos and KuCoin Exchange Telegram, Full Transcript
In this SHRAMA with KuCoin Exchange, Tim Bos discusses ShareRing’s core features, NFTs, products, use-cases, DeFi and more!
Q&A from KuCoin
Q: For anyone who doesn’t know, what is ShareRing and what do you do for them?
At ShareRing, we’re developing the backbone of the next generation sharing economy and circular economies.
That encompasses traditional rentals, travel, e-commerce, and the services that connect them together, and a number of other areas too.
Our plan is to be more focused on the technology side of things and grow 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.
My role is as CEO, but I wear a few hats. I’m mostly focused on the overall strategy and technical direction of the company. I also handle all of our strategic partnerships and joint venture opportunities.
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: Can you provide some background information for the Founders and Team of ShareRing?
“The founders, myself, Rohan, Peter, Neville, and Jane, are very, very business focused. They’re not tech — I’m the tech guy in the founding team, but I’ve also had experience building businesses and consulting for fortune 500s. What’s important is that 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, it’s going to be very difficult. 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 drawing from my experience living in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan 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 great team in Vietnam, we’ve got a bunch of developers in China that do work with us, we’ve got our marketing team 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.”
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: Please explain in more detail some of the products you are developing?
Yes, sure. First, I’ll outline the technologies we’re developing that will support the products.
Our blockchain-based technology includes:
– Identification
– Document storage/verification
– On-demand access services
– Peer-to-peer marketplace
– Micro payments
In terms of our products, we operate across a number of industries, but I’ll go into detail for a few of them.
ShareRing Travel — we’ve built a platform that connects with our partners (either hotel chains, aggregators, activity providers, airlines, etc) to offer travel products. To push that out to market, we have the ShareRing Travel app, but our main plan with this is to work with travel agents so they can leverage our APIs, blockchain, etc and offer the travel services to their own clients.
ShareRing Shop — is an e-commerce platform that allows people to buy products from shops within a 5-km (varies based on region) radius of them and have it delivered on the same day (kind of like Amazon, except all the purchases are from local small businesses in your area, so you’re supporting the local economy more effectively).
Both of those products are underpinned by the protocols and services that I mentioned above, including:
ShareRing ID — our self-sovereign identity model. This is quite unique, as it’s more than just a portable KYC tool on the blockchain. When someone signs up for a ShareRing ID, we take their photo, video selfie, name, DOB, address, etc and store it in an encrypted file. We also take a ‘fingerprint’ of the data and documentation and store that on the blockchain. The file is encrypted with your public key, so only you can access it. You can also back it up to your Google Drive, or other cloud storage.
When you use one of our services, the app will send the bits of your ID that our partner requires to them so that you can use their services (ie car rental service), and we’ll also watermark the image so that if it’s ever hacked, we know where the leak is from. As well as that, we can also store things like insurance policies, etc in your ShareRing ID file.
ShareRing Pay — this is our payment system. It’s supported by our own stablecoin — SharePay (SHRP), but the biggest benefit (other than allowing for immediate reconciliation via the blockchain) is that we run liquidity pools across various currencies (fiat and crypto) to allow for instant and almost zero fee currency exchange. So you could be in Thailand and pay for something with BTC, and the merchant would receive Thai Baht instantly into their bank account.
We also have a number of other protocols we’ve developed, but haven’t launched yet around rewards, reviews, reputation, etc. but we don’t want to release everything at once.
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: When will your products go live?
We have a few products scheduled to go live in December.
The ShareRing App will be launched in the coming weeks. We’ll have a waiting-list promotion for our users to kickstart the signups with some special rewards that will only be available to our early adopters. With the app, users will be able to book travel, perform one-click sign-ups and registrations, create their ShareRing ID, swap our tokens, and more.
Then we have our ShareRing Shop launch scheduled for December as well. This will be a joint-launch with a major partner in Thailand we have yet to reveal.
We also have a one-click registration and login module that works with our ShareRing ID, which can be integrated into any website with as little as 10 lines of code that should be available soon after our app is live.
We also have our DeFi products to launch afterward, powered by our own liquidity pools which we use for our currency conversion service. Users will be able to earn by contributing to these pools, which we use to accept and pay out in any currency for users, retailers, and businesses on our network.
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: In regards to the 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 the 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.”
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: ShareRing utilizes a dual-token mechanism. What made you decide to go with this approach?
“Our main utility token is ShareToken (SHR), which is used for transaction fees, etc on the platform. We also have another token, which is SHRP (SharePay). That is used as our stablecoin/payment token within the network. It’s not tradeable at all, except within the ecosystem as a way for the platform to immediately reconcile all of the payments and avoid things like double-spending, etc.
In the future, we will have other tokens, with other functions/benefits, that we introduce on ShareLegder too.”
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: DeFi has been a very popular movement in crypto. Can you tell us about your 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 has a real-world and highly scalable use case outside of simple crypto lending and swaps.”
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: How have you dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic?
“In February, we were faced with a difficult decision. Do we slow down and try to draw out our travel app and bootstrap until the travel industry comes back, or do we increase our investment in our technology and accelerate the roadmap around our other products such as Shop, etc, and also put more effort into building the travel partnerships so we can launch with a stronger product when the travel industry opens again?
We chose the latter, and we are much much stronger for it. We’ve now got some partnerships in place that I would’ve only dreamt about back in February, and we are also working with a few travel behemoths that were previously inaccessible to us. Having the new funds onboard has certainly helped us too, and I’m grateful for their confidence in our vision.
I was in China when COVID hit, and I experienced lockdown quite early in the pandemic, so I had a feeling that this would go on for a long long time. Based on that feeling, I felt that there was no way we’d survive for the long haul if we just went into semi-hibernation.”
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: How many users do you expect to have on the www.sharering.network by the end of the year?
“We’re estimating somewhere around 100,000 registrations for our travel application within a few months of launching.
The bulk of the projected users on our network will be those of our major partners using our whitelabeled solutions. They will enjoy the benefits of cheaper services, better security and privacy, and new features without ever being forced to learn about blockchain or cryptocurrency.
Yet each transaction they make will benefit our network, carrying fees of $0.02-$0.05 which become masternode and staking rewards for our ecosystem supporters.
Some of our partners project to add tens of millions of users to the www.sharering.network once they roll out our products in the coming months.”
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: Please can you explain the user process in the ShareRing app? Will it be easy to use for regular users outside of crypto to use?
“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 then 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. 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 also 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 they ask, 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.”
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Community Questions
Q: A lot of people will want to know what the strength of your project is but I want to know the weaknesses and problems your project faces? How do you plan to solve it? What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
“Good question. Actually, we are always looking for ‘edge cases’ in our designs and user stories when we create our products. One example is with ShareRing ID.
We recently identified that ShareRing is a potential bottleneck in the ‘validation’ of the identities, so we changed the model significantly to allow for external providers to validate identities independent of ShareRing.
This is a major change that allows the product to be a lot more flexible and scalable. We’re always looking for weaknesses that we can improve on like this.“
ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: If I am a manager from a local hotel from my country, how can I make a partnership and put my hotel booking on the ShareRing service?
There are many bad third-party sellers that sell and advertise a service with way more expensive price than the real price for their own profit. How does the ShareRing team handle this issue?
“Thanks for asking. Actually, this is exactly one of the problems we are trying to solve. Whilst we’re not eliminating the ‘middleman’ in all situations, we are hoping to create a better and more profitable experience for the hotels and smaller operators.“ ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: Why does the crypto token SHR still use the Ethereum blockchain when it’s slow and has high gas volume? Do you plan to run mainnet or convert to another blockchain in the future?
“We run our mainnet for the utility of the ShareRing infrastructure. The SHR on Ethereum is used purely to support easier and more flexible trading on the exchanges.” ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: 1- Increasing Token price
2- Making the Token Valuable
3- Building Community Trust
From the 3 aspects above, I want to ask, which one is the most important for you?
If all above are important for you, which one will you do first?
“#3 is the most important. With that, the rest will follow. I’d add a #4 too: building transaction volumes through our B2B2C community.“ ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: Will there be any plans to create projects such as NFTs or smart chains?
“NFTs are really interesting to us. We’ve been looking at it for quite some time in a number of areas. In fact, I spent about 2 hours discussing NFTs with a well-known art gallery for an interesting project. It might be on the future roadmap, so watch this space!“ ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
Q: I saw RMB, USD and EURO in your whitepaper. Do you have any plans to add other countries’ currencies to the ShareRing App?
“Yes, absolutely. HKD, EUR, AUD, THB, USD, and GBP are the initial currencies that we’ll support.“ ShareRing CEO Tim Bos
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Where do I purchase ShareRing tokens?
Interested in purchasing SHR tokens? You can do so from the following exchanges:
KuCoin: SHR BTC & SHR USDT
Uniswap: SHR ETH
ProBit: SHR BTC & SHR KRW
Bithumb Global: SHR BTC & SHR USDT & SHR ETH
Bitmart: SHR BTC
Binance Dex: SHR BEP2 & SHR BUSD
LBank: SHR BTC & SHR USDT
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