“New Infrastructure, New Opportunity” and ZB’s 7th Anniversary Online Summit — Forum 5
In June 2013, CHBTC (predecessor of ZB) was established.In the following 7 years of safe and steady development, ZB has grown into a top global trading platform with more than 10 million registered users, creating a real and safe trading environment for users from more than 189 countries and bringing more professional and efficient trading experience.
This activity is organized by ZB and held from June 28 to 30. It will be held twice a day in ZB APP hot chat group and ZAPP (Q TV).
Here are the highlights：
Host: Aurora Wong, Vice President and CMO of ZB Group
Guests：
Roger Ver, Bitcoin.com CEO,
Jose Macedo, 01 Capital Founding Partner & Head of Advisory of Amazix ,
Grace Wong, CoFounder and CMO of LivenPay,
and Vadim, CTC Chinese CEO&Co-Founder.
Q&A content:
HOST asks Roger Ver(Bitcoin.com CEO): Roger, you are one of the people who have the longest experience working in the blockchain space, what recent developments have made you the most excited?
Roger Ver: Something else that is really exciting is seeing blockchain projects that are actually entering the real world and being used by people, I agree with Grace that this is the right direction for the industry to move in and I’ve been following Liven closely and working towards this and seeing how they’ve been growing their network of partners and users.
The future of cryptocurrencies relies on the practical application that allows real people to use cryptocurrency on a day-to-day basis, not as a speculative investment vehicle. Liven is a functional, practical application of blockchain technology that provides users with real value, accelerating cryptocurrency adoption and demonstrating the power of blockchain technology in everyday life.
The holy grail of the crypto world has been mass adoption for a very long time, and a lot of people in the industry have definitely had the mindset of “build it and they will come”, but this is not really enough, people need a reason to use these currencies.
In order to make crypto more accessible to businesses looking to leverage the technology, the Bitcoin Cash team created the SLP protocol which allows people to create tokens on top of the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain. These tokens can be made quickly and easily.
HOST asks Grace(LivenPay co-founder, CMO)：What is unique about Liven, how are you different to other crypto projects?
Grace：How many existing companies, not new ‘projects’, are actively working to show traction? How many have always been in it for the speculation value? It seems 95% of ICO projects from the boom are all gone now, and out of 5 to 10 thousand cryptocurrencies that have been created, apart from a few select coins, most have zero real world value.
It has been so bad that we have actually developed an aversion to being associated with the crypto space sometimes, just because there were so many scams and unrealistic projects in the space bringing a bad name to what is, at its heart, an amazing and powerful technology.
What makes Liven very different from most blockchain projects is that Liven is a real business, we run Liven like a business, like a start-up, and we view every part of our operation through this lens.
We judge our performance based on real metrics, and at a level of scrutiny that is very high as we have to regularly report to our board of directors, our venture capital investors, and they expect to see real growth that is happening in the real world, it is not enough to talk about money raised in an ICO and then never actually achieve anything after that like 95% of crypto projects in the past couple of years, Liven is growing all the time and taking a business first approach to cryptocurrency.
It’s because of this business first, crypto second approach that we were actually featured by Apple as their national App of the day in the Appstore,something that is generally considered impossible for any app that is even remotely connected to cryptocurrency in any way.
The compelling offering that we have for users and restaurants is able to easily capture the attention of everyday people and even media outlets, with Liven being featured on national breakfast TV shows in Australia on multiple occasions, and seen by millions of people.
With Liven every month we have more users downloading and spending on the app and more restaurants who are accepting payment, and we will soon be launching in new international markets to fuel that growth once this annoying virus goes away!
HOST asks Jose Macedo(Partner & Head of Advisory at AmaZix)：What other directions are suitable for investment in the second half of the year?
Jose Macedo: Very interested in DeFi, particularly in the automated market maker space as I think this one of the core pieces of infrastructure the industry needs is decentralised exchanges. There are quite a few projects following different, interesting approaches like BAL, RUNE, BNC, CRV, etc. We’re also very interested in the gaming space and what’s happening there. I think in general the areas that happen first will be the ones that don’t require.
HOST asks Vadim(CEO of Cointelegraph China)：From the perspective of media, which blockchain circuit do you like best?
Vadim:Exchanges.
The Internet is built on the HTTP protocol. HTTP is centralized, inefficient, and costly. Centralization limits the growth of the network. With the maturity of 5G network and the imminent large-scale application, we will enter an era of information explosion and a sharp increase in storage demand.
Traditional limited centralized storage can no longer meet the needs of 5G, and Filecoin can be a solution of the storage technology problems in the market. It will open the gate and lead the development of Web3.0.
Filecoin is necessary for the blockchain industry, in which many blockchains are currently experiencing bottlenecks in storage capacity. For public chains, how to store a large amount of data on chain is an urgent problem, while Filecoin is efficiently capable to solve it.
The great changes brought by Filecoin distributed storage to the entire data storage sector mainly include the following three points:
1. More secure data storage
2. Faster on both upload and download speed
3. Lower data storage costs
No doubt, Filecoin is currently the hottest project in the blockchain field, and also one of the few projects with implement value in the blockchain field, which has more room for development than other blockchain projects in the future.
Media Q&A content:
ccValue asks Roger Ver：What are your thoughts on mass adoption? Are you optimistic about blockchain achieving this goal?
Roger Ver：The key to blockchain mass adoption in my opinion is adoption in commerce. In order for that to be viable, people need to be able to transact reliably but also quickly and cheaply, and this has been a major issue plaguing cryptocurrencies historically, with network congestion and high fees leading to decays in the adoption of many cryptocurrencies
Take Bitcoin for example, which used to have fast, reliable, cheap transactions, but now they’ve turned it into an incredibly congested network that’s been running at 100 percent capacity for months and providing a horrible user experience … Bitcoin Core is simply not useful in commerce anymore.
Widespread consumer adoption relies on the ability to make rapid, simple transactions. While Bitcoin core and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum are being viewed as able to function as potential stores of value or alternatives to current international remittance, they aren’t yet at a stage where consumers can walk into a restaurant and pay for a meal in Bitcoin.
Nobody wants to stand around and wait 15 minutes for the transaction to clear, both on the customer side and the vendor side, it’s not practical.
This is where Grace and I really align on our perspective on crypto adoption, Rather than launching another Bitcoin or Ethereum clone with all of the transaction speed issues that both of networks suffer from, Liven has established a sort of hybrid solution that delivers the benefits of cryptocurrency without compromising user experience or practicality.
At the moment I’m very bullish on the future of cryptocurrency adoption, I think it’s brighter than ever. I’m seeing more projects that are like Liven, that are putting the user experience first and this is leading to the development of new, interesting blockchain ventures all over the world, and I honestly wish every cryptocurrency project good luck if their true goal is to bring greater economic freedom to the world by making cryptocurrencies that are useful for the world and for meaningful applications.
Beep asks Grace：What do you think is required to see blockchain applications achieve mass adoption?
Grace：I think previous blockchain projects have focussed heavily on cross border applications, which was the obvious first use case for the tech, but it hasn’t taken off as expected and we’ve come to a point where it is now time to try a different approach. In my opinion the best direction forward is to focus on consumer use cases, because after all, when you talk about mass adoption you are talking about adoption by the masses, and that means everyday people using crypto to do everyday things
More and more companies, including Liven, are aiming to solve this issue, and the focus is on improving the usability of crypto, that means improving user experience, wallet management, reducing barriers to entry, et cetera, it’s about thinking about the users experience first and the tech side second, this is something that the blockchain world struggles with, maybe because there are so many smart engineers and programmers in the blockchain space, but I think the business people have let it down so far.
People generally don’t care about how things work in terms of tech, they care about what they can do with them. Just like people using iPhones, who cares what processor or camera is in there? Can it take photos that make me look prettier than my previous phone, that is more important, that’s what I care about!
So Liven is making it easy for people to use crypto, they can spend it in restaurants in the real world, the interface is familiar to them, it isn’t scary for people who don’t understand blockchain, they can still use it without having to learn anything new, but in the background the technology, the foundation is still in blockchain, just like my iPhone processor, it allows me to do things i want without me understanding how and that is the direction that the blockchain industry needs to head in.
We focus on building a great experience for users, that enhances their dining experience, rewards them for doing something they love makes the payment process even easier than paying with cash.
We apply this same sort of thinking to the merchant side of the equation too, Liven is a multicurrency platform, as it needs to be to work seamlessly with the real world, where restaurants operate and pay their staff and bills in fiat currency. We designed the Livenpay platform in such a way that it could beintegrated into the operational flow of venues without them needing to understand the complexities of blockchain technology, they just get the benefits of being part of a network that drives consumer spending.
I think like a lot of other technological revolutions in the past, such as email for example, it starts as something very technical that is only accessible to the real hardcore scientists and engineers, but in order to make it used by the masses you need to design the experience, make it familiar for people to understand and use and hide the complexity of it, then you get a situation like Hotmail where millions of people are sending emails without understanding anything about HTML or protocols, any of that stuff.
I think once we have blockchain being used in the hands of everyday people then the cross border revolution that the blockchain industry has been waiting for will just sort of solve itself, people will have been educated, infrastructure will have developed to achieve specific use cases and then these bigger picture concept
Fruit Finance asks Jose：What’s your view on DeFi? DeFi is frequently hacked, can traders afford the risk anymore?
Jose：Smart contract risk is unfortunate and it’s a risk everyone takes when using DeFi. I expect this will unfortunately keep happening as we develop better standards and auditing. I’m excited about the potential of decentralized insurance solutions to help mitigate some of these risks.
Blockchain Dreamer asks Vadim：What changes do you think Filecoin will bring to the blockchain industry and the entire Internet industry?
Vadim：Filecoin is necessary for the blockchain industry, in which many blockchains are currently experiencing bottlenecks in storage capacity. For public chains, how to store a large amount of data on chain is an urgent problem, while Filecoin is efficiently capable to solve it.
The great changes brought by Filecoin distributed storage to the entire data storage sector mainly include the following three points:
1. More secure data storage
2. Faster on both upload and download speed
3. Lower data storage costs
No doubt, Filecoin is currently the hottest project in the blockchain field, and also one of the few projects with implement value in the blockchain field, which has more room for development than other blockchain projects in the future.
The Internet is built on the HTTP protocol. HTTP is centralized, inefficient, and costly. Centralization limits the growth of the network. With the maturity of 5G network and the imminent large-scale application, we will enter an era of information explosion and a sharp increase in storage demand.
Traditional limited centralized storage can no longer meet the needs of 5G, and Filecoin can be a solution of the storage technology problems in the market. It will open the gate and lead the development of Web3.0.
Roger to Grace
Roger Ver: Myself and the Bitcoin.com team are really excited about a future where Liven allows other currencies to be used on their platform, how and when are we likely to see this?
Grace: Absolutely, we are actively working towards this and have plans for Liven to become THE user focussed, easy to use interface for people to spend other popular cryptocurrencies which were previously difficult to use for real transactions.
As I said earlier we are doing this in a way that makes the process very seamless and user friendly, were other cryptocurrencies can simply become another payment option that uses the Liven payment rails in the same way
Aurora Wong: Thank you for sharing! ZB is now in its seventh year, but it is only the beginning of the long term development of blockchain and cryptocurrency. In the coming days, we will continue to take the road of globalization and expand our international map. We also welcome excellent projects like Liven to work closely with us, and welcome investment institutions, media partners and industry bigwigs to recommend high-quality projects and other cooperation opportunities to us. Let us work together to continue to promote the blockchain application and the massive popularity of digital currency!
