Tim Bos on ShareRing’s decentralized sharing economy platform

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have tim boss the co-founder and ceo of share ring tim welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here today thanks ashton thanks for inviting me on i'm really excited for this discussion i'd love to kick it off by just hearing

0:20more about what is sharing what does your platform do and how is it changing the sharing economy yeah sure so i mean what we've done is sharing over the last couple of years is we're basically developing the backbone of the next generation sharing economy so i i guess you might want to know what that means so in summary our vision is really build technology with a blockchain platform to

0:45connect people places and commerce globally so the things that we're basically doing is operating in certain areas travel in aviation finance and banking government cities logistics and transportation so a lot of our community know us as a company that's been working in the travel industry but we are working in a number of other industries at the moment as

1:08well um so the underlying technology that we've developed are really sort of based around identity management so self-sovereign identity um document storage and verification on demand access services like booking rentals and things like that um peer-to-peer marketplaces so e-commerce as well as um standard sharing economy and then also micro micro payments so that's sort of the

1:31platform we've developed that underpins all of those other sort of industries that we're working in it's really interesting and it's great to be expanded out into different industries and have your have your hands on all those different pots now when i think of the sharing economy and sort of the problems that are in there right now the main one that comes to mind is that

1:48the middlemen are taking a large cut of something just for having the platform now is that the main problem that you're solving or can you elaborate on the scope and the size of the problem and maybe there's other problems as well yeah sure i mean it's it's definitely one of the problems that we're helping to solve and it's not just about sort of taking

2:06that middle man out it's also helping some of these smaller companies that are forced to use those larger middlemans to be seen and and to be um to actually run their business so we're basically helping to shorten the gap between that supplier and the customer it's not necessarily just peer-to-peer it could be a business to consumer relationship a business to business

2:29relationship and consumer-to-consumer relationship so we sort of see ourselves as be to be to see other issues that you know in my experience in the sharing economy which is about 14 15 years experience other issues that we've noticed are centralization of user data so you know hacks happen all the time user data's some um is hacked and taken and used and

2:54all that sort of stuff so our digital identity solution and document verification solution helps actually solve that problem uh it's it's the speed of the transactions things like micro payments cross-border payments um sign ups like if if i wanted to use say six different sharing economy products right now i need to sign up six different times and give my id to six

3:14different companies and what we do is we try to remove that that requirement to give my information to so many different companies as well that's super interesting and with the solution is there um is there something unique proprietary is it the identity system or specific technology of the blockchain which gives you guys a competitive advantage in the market

3:39yeah i mean the identity solution is is actually very unique so we've taken quite a different approach where a lot of identity and even sovereign identity platforms what they do is they centralize the verification of that identity so uh in in that example what would happen is someone would sign up sharing would verify that id do a digital fingerprint of that id and

4:02then that would be verified but what we've done is we've actually actually expanded that and allowed for third-party verification of identity and then also peer-to-peer verification of identity so what that means is even beyond say standard passport and driver's license maybe maybe a certain sharing economy company or a company might require a unique type

4:26of id maybe an ad card from india so instead of us actually verifying it maybe there's a supplier in india that verifies that our cards so they put their digital fingerprint on it to say they are the verifier and then when it gets sent to say the the renting the rental company they can see oh that company is the one that verified it we don't support verifications from that

4:47company so we won't support that id so we actually we take ourselves out of the equation even with with the identity management and it's similar with our payment system and micro payments we actually have developed it so we don't need to be part of that whole equation we can actually support cross-border payments um fx and all that sort of stuff through

5:08our platform and other companies can jump in and provide their own payment services on our platform without us actually being involved so we don't want to create yet another middleman basically totally that makes sense and i find it really interesting with this identity management platform in the sharing economy because identity management digital identities is a huge industry in itself

5:29and i would like to walk me through that by verse build and having the identity platform in there it's like i feel like it's a lot of work to have that all in house which it makes sense but to have that sharing economy what was your thought process behind that well i mean when we started about two and a half years ago we we actually looked at what was available like i actually

5:52i truly believe in not reinventing the wheel i like if there's technology out there that does that and does a really good job and fulfills all the requirements use that technology and you know particularly around a lot of the different um daps and stuff on blockchain technology there's a lot of really good things out there but what we found when we started this

6:10process we even looked at should we build on ethereum should we build on um at neo at the time waves all these different architectures and we realized that none of them actually solved all the problems that we wanted to to to do so we decided to build our on tendermint um our own blockchain platform on top of that and in terms of identity management at

6:32the time nothing actually ticked all the boxes once again and there's some really good digital id platforms that solve certain problems but what we wanted to do is solve a a wide range of makes make something that's a lot more flexible not necessarily just controlled by us and allows actually people to extend on it and build on top of it as well so i'm hoping when when we release

6:54sharing id in the next few weeks for people to actually use and get into and build on top of people actually realize that and appreciate the fact that they can build their own businesses on top of what we've done yeah it's really interesting and you mentioned and i read on the site that one of the main focuses was travel and bookings and you know vacations and things like that

7:14and obviously that's taken a pivot with the pandemic and the lockdowns can you talk about how much that's affected your strategy moving forward yeah in fact the interesting thing is since since the pandemic happened what we what we did is we stepped back and said okay where are we in our roadmap and our roadmap was really let's launch our travel product in march

7:35and the travel product was going to be hotels with express check-in working with a lot of boutique hotels and some larger chain hotels um activities and a bunch of other things and um with co when covert hit and everything was shut down we basically said okay this gives us a chance to either sit down and wait and push through it and then relaunch when it comes

7:58back up or let's double down and actually accelerate our road map and build and enhance our products a lot more over this period of time and that's exactly what we've done we've doubled our team size got a lot more developers on board we we accelerated our e-commerce platform and developed and rolled that out which has done really well for us um we've added more functionality to the

8:20identity product uh we've we've added more sort of travel providers uh we're also working on a what we call the open world passport which is a covert 19 type passport to help open the borders again talking to a number of companies or countries and companies about partnering with them on that platform so yeah i mean for for us we've gone from singular focus on travel

8:44and then after travel is going to be this this and this to now focusing on you know travel open world passport and e-commerce all in parallel with a much much larger team as well that's really interesting and it's great to see that you're able to pivot like that really quickly now i'm curious because you mentioned uh your strategy and that there's actually a lot of

9:04growth going on first of all are there any restrictions besides obviously putting your identity in there for people to start using sharing right now and also because of the e-commerce the vacation it seems like you know it's globally accessible are you seeing growth in specific geographic regions of the world right now yeah so i mean the first question any

9:25restrictions for anyone to use it now so um we have launched our main net people can actually jump in and have a look at that we've actually released our our api the one thing we haven't done is actually unlocked it to allow people to build their own products on top of it the plan is in december that will actually allow people to start doing that in december we are also launching the

9:46the sharing id app with some travel and some other functionality in there um and then also the shop within the app so i i guess december is a huge month for us uh in terms of the launchers they're giving people the community the ability to integrate with it and then also providing more information about some of the integrations we've done with our existing partners

10:08um in terms of the other question in terms of the regions that we're looking at so uh thailand's been a big focus of ours only because we've got great relationships with a number of companies uh government and things like that over there so i guess in terms of the first regions the asean region so there's the sort of southeast asian nature nations is really where

10:31our primary focus is now not to say that we're not sort of looking at other other areas but that's where we seem to be getting the most traction at the moment that's great and i was reading that you've also partnered with the china blockchain service network who've also partnered with ethereum neo tazos and some of the largest blockchains that's really interesting

10:51uh can can you tell me what does that relationship mean and what does that look like going forward yeah i mean i guess the simplest way to explain what it means for us is it it means more access to our platform so through the blockchain services network what they're doing is simplifying access for businesses to integrate and use blockchain technology

11:12um through their sort of portal and api and all of that sort of stuff so it means a lot to us in terms of providing more access to more companies to be able to easily build on our platform but the other thing is it also gives companies the ability to sort of say a cherry pick technology so they might sort of see some daps on ethereum or one of the other platforms that have

11:34partnered with the bsn and say let's use that here and sharing's digital id solution and this over here and actually create a single system um that i guess is a homogenous system that uses bits of technology from the other chains instead of aligning themselves with a single block chain which is great for us and all of the other chains because it it actually helps our technology shine

11:57instead of just talking about what blockchain platform we've written on that's great and yeah with tendermint and cosmos one of the keys is blockchain interoperability especially as the space continues to grow you want to have everyone working together you know rather than competing against each other because this is still so small in early stage in with this new technology

12:17so that's great to hear now you mentioned a couple of things uh with what's coming up the share id a lot of things coming up in december i just want to look and one more step forward beyond that and sort of your vision for sharing in 2021 and how you see yourselves growing yeah i mean i think 2021 for us is really like it's all about user and business

12:40acquisition uh so if if we look at sort of what our plan as a business is the the two the three areas that we focus on for 2021 is user acquisition so we've got a number of campaigns lined up to basically bring users on board it's partner in business acquisition as well so a number of assisting a number of companies to integrate with our platform um to consume information that's that's

13:06from say um identities things like that on our platform uh and then also to start working with the community on building um their own dapps and their own sort of interaction and integration with our platform we've had huge amount of demand demand from developers or people with ideas what they can build on our platform and we're we're actually looking forward to

13:26opening the doors a lot more and allowing them to sort of come in and start start interacting with the platform and building some really cool apps that's the one thing that probably excites me more than anything is to see what other people can actually build on top of it definitely that is exciting and you mentioned that the mainnet is live but you're looking at that

13:43dap solution for developers and also just for people that are interested in the sharing economy what's the best way for them to follow along with the updates and get involved with sharing yeah i mean they can they can jump on our on our website at sharing.network we've got a great blog there one of the recent blog entries was actually publication of our api so they

14:05can sort of look at the functionality that's available there we've also got a very strong telegram community so the telegram community is at sharing so so basically they can anyone can sort of jump in there and ask questions it's it's very very welcoming there's a lot of very smart people in there that are more than happy to ask answer questions as well great

14:26well i'll leave those links in the description box below as well that's all the time that we have for the interview tim but i really appreciate you coming on and all the best with sharing hopefully you guys have a great december and let's follow up in the near future awesome thanks ashton appreciate it you