Kent Yan on TraDove’s blockchain payment solutions

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Ken Tian the CEO of turd of a next generation blockchain company based in Silicon Valley Kent welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you here today Thank You Ashton thanks for the opportunity I hope hi everyone I hope

0:20you're all staying healthy during this current of crisis but it's excellent time I think to get a lot of things done well we can really cool down here and focus on what we really need to do yeah definitely a lot of people have their heads down focused and I'm interested to hear what trade off is doing in this situation right now but if we could start the interview by kicking it off

0:45with a little bit of background on yourself and in business blockchain and how that led to founding turd of that would be great okay so I start in the US you know I studied a graduates I started I started as going in the graduate program at MIT Electrical Engineering computer science and got a Master there and then I also got a MBA in finance from from MIT Sloan School Management so

1:15kind of understand the technology and finance and business well I I started you know I was used to do like international trade between US and China and in front of their big banks in the payments on the payment side especially trust and those things you know how do I make sure get paid for products services active Eva and vice versa and then there's a lack of trust trust because

1:39this is Ramona's of people not knowing each other or trust each other so you know I started treat of you know as it's kind of a you know in the social network basic you bring two sides together so they give me you that kind of trust in a social network format but then two years ago we find out you know we detect when the auction technology starting emerging

2:04with or it's a great idea to use broad technology to build the international trading tool that you can do like letter of credit you know very low cost instead of you know pain like 0.25% and also let them quit it's not accessible right to a lot of me to small companies it is paper and time-consuming so and then what so you can avoid you can avoid the International why're you do soar the

2:31banking system where you have to pay $45 so yeah so here we go we launched the beta version to skimmer months ago and it's been tested right now that's great so tread of is a payment solution and I believe that you focused on b2b but it's not limited to that you have all these other applications as well and could you give a synopsis of now what are the

2:54primary solutions and primary customers of the tradeoff platform right so the I was quite solutions to the path hope so the traditional ones what wait targets meet with small companies that does international trade cross-border trade even though he walks in all occasions and so you can you can help them avoid a lot of you know wiring cost which is quite a part for for those meet with

3:23small companies and again most important thing is for the first time they compute your own letter credit or other kind of programmable payment that they can build a milestone and was this kind of thing on our broad term solution but even though we started our technology as b2b it turns out we have wide applications for let's say zeros you can do supply

3:47chain payments so big companies like for example food companies they can use they supplied the views are broad chain two payments technology to actually choice their suppliers all the way to the end for compliance issue for food safety or all kinds of things and they will also help them so instead of having fear cash flow in supply chain you have the token

4:10flow so they can also help them increase the cash flow as well and then the hope they their suppliers to reduce the transaction cost yeah and also other application area you can for example you can pay you can make bank loans protein-based bank locks so you have talked about its loans you know this will help Bank tween you still have the token it's not have the

4:33Fiat money flow flow pay their borrower the Linden token the borrower can pay other companies or people in token and all the bank needs this guarantee is a token for conversion one-to-one this can help the bank and should make more money they can they can improve that and we can you know these days you still have to pay interest we use their token but

4:57on the other hand the money sits in the bank for a longer time and so they can use it for other purpose another exciting area would include checks for example you know United States and Canada for example you were at 28 billion trillion actually payments are being done in checks we're processing on how much actually sorry 18 trillion it's

5:24an 18 trader I think we're processing 828 million checks every day and every check will cost one darn 22 cents or 2 – uhh – aah – process and there are a lot of errors like bounced checks like all those kind of issues so if you use brought to you based checks you don't have bounced checks and then you can cash out directly from the issuers bank or payers back instead of going through

5:50your own bank go into the for party it goes for one party so the can significantly reduce the processing cost ah we you can also use our technology for credit card payments credit card processing it has a potential to without using the the current credit card network like Visa or MasterCard and save the merchants 2 to 3 percent you know that's what they're paying for the

6:15critical payments and which is very significant ok well yeah and this is only possible because of trade of x' blockchain network and payment solution on the blockchain network can you talk about the efficiency in why is sure doves blockchain so much more efficient than using the Bitcoin or the theory and blockchains I think Bitcoin easier and they are the first generation of

6:40knowledge in the open the whole error of proxy revolution but as time goes by and there are a lot of use cases that Bitcoin ëthere and blockchain doesn't fit I wonder if the area is on the performance side you know I think Bitcoin you can process only 7 to 8 transactions per second and if you're in about 20 to 30 I think for international trade and what's going on

7:06a credit card check you know digital check or even long supply chain payments those doesn't work anymore and also it's very cumbersome not scalable so that's why we come up with what we call light central having distribution we do the light central because you have to do kyc and all those kind of thing for compliance issues but another hand you want to push the computing power to the

7:29depot to the end device so you you don't have to you have much to spend the other words you don't have to have tens of thousands of servers to processes payments like just like PayPal or remember that's a centralized example it has four centralized as you say our distribution side on the other on the Bitcoin you have tens of thousand mining machines processors so so this way you

7:53can you can make a balance of both between the central and full full distribution and and then I also provide a better solution architecture for for the for the obviously for the future users of branching yeah yeah it's great that you touched on the scalability of Bitcoin and etherium not really being able to be a provider of payments and a

8:21payment solution for the world because it really isn't at that level yet now with trade of blockchain scalability have you found a way to scale to you know global readiness but at the same time still maintaining a high level of security and some level of decentralization as well yes you know that's as I say you when you push computing to the end device so you

8:45will you know actually basically allow any device cell phones smartphones pads computers serve – actually you can allow anyone to play anyone anywhere free of charge I would say a very low-cost charge and I cannot say fully free and in the mean time you use it you use certain blockchain architecture to maintain the integrity security of the network to make sure you

9:11know there's no bad guys double spending fraud are like us like there so so that's why you need to make a combination of central and decent twice ah but I would say probably probably 85% decentralized or distributed or probably 10-15 percent centralized and they make a combination of both so you can you can provide I would say a better solution

9:38for for the world economy from here yeah it's interesting that you actually have the nodes running on everyday users of the platform's you know devices and that sort of increases the decentralization if I'm not wrong could you explain the choice behind building a mobile first a blockchain and having that mobile readiness because it seems good in a theory I'm we're very

10:01desktop related I would correct it a little bit so it I would say I don't think you can run it I I don't think you can run a note on the cell phone but you can store the ledgers on the cell phone so that will make it very in other words you push the storage I'm just you can still say computing power on the end device so you store your own ledger while the blockchain that's running

10:27behind that all those who have very limited storage that's needed to process those payments so this way you can make it very light for the for the blockchain itself not processing those orders yet you store the ledgers on your your cell phone or your your end device or it could be a desktop server so that I

10:55would actually I would say push all the computing costs to the end device so you're paying that and the computing power and we are just in curved Airy minimal one so looking at four over the service it's buried in charge but we still make money you know we're a profitable company another perfectly for-profit company so you still have to you know we make money on the flow

11:19because if you want to use the system our service for the b2b tray for example you have to buy the toca so you send the money to thank you partner and then you get a token you pay out our side token the other side can cash out the token from a banking partner and then during that time they did the escrow account and the banking partner will carry average balance so okay messed saying

11:42like money market accounts US Treasury and all that yeah so it's I would say very little bit transaction fee but mostly it's hung on the the escrow account and part of this mobile based platform is that in a lot of under banked and you know underserved countries they run almost primarily on mobile devices you know is that part of the target is expanding into a global market where

12:10people don't have the traditional infrastructure yes that's that's how we start so we started from mobile to desktop server so there are a lot of developing countries they're only internet connection or mobile phones okay so give you one example in in Africa for example in in in somewhere of China and somehow India for example and Nestle if biggest one of the biggest

12:35food company they have 700,000 farmers to pay you think about how they pay that okay so the mobile phones are certainly very important and also there are a lot of mom-and-pop shops living in United States in Europe and mostly run their position you know they have handy cell phone so you can you can make it would make it very easy for you to transact

12:58with each other ah most for business cell for consumer as well b2b and b2c as well as I said you can do credit cards you can do checks I of course on the business side and the bank loans like oh this yeah and the trade of beta application it went live a couple months ago can you talk about the growth so far and what lies next on roadmap on the way to releasing the full

13:22application so yeah so we releasing the the better version and it's been trial right now that's a we call MVP right says walkable solution but they're still climbing proven we have to do based on the feedbacks we gather so I think doing is coronavirus saying you know I actually had the pleasure actually of opportunity actually to focus down into the project and develop the next version

13:51which is much more secure much more scalable and and much easier to use yeah that's great yeah so was so we have next release probably coming out end of end of October yeah great and as you release the full application what kind of companies and strategic partners are you going to be working with in the business so there are you know we always want to partner with the bank's remember

14:15we have to form a banking line so unlike a lot of branching companies who was hyper I want to compete with the bank's or replace the banks we think the bank's provides a critical role in the economy they provide equity role in the economy think about what's happening right now the coronavirus it's a bank that's released releasing those eight money from the government so the Kami really

14:38replace so what a walk with the banks you know server escrow account like there's another hand we want to walk with those itu parameters like absent or university de LOI IBM of the world basically we want to be the technology providers who want to support them so they can implement those new products to do supply for example supply chain a blockchain payment for the major

15:02companies a big or midsize companies up they can implement this to the bank for digital checks for credit card you know we could we could even you know one Chris visa for example because we can we can help them significantly reduce the processing costs was that technology worth developing yeah well and as you move forward to launching the main application are you

15:24looking to expand your team your developers and also are you looking for more investors as well yeah this is actually an excellent first of all I have to say treat of we are you know we're in a very good financial position were very healthy in financially our money can last from thirty six months to forty month which is very significant compared a lot of

15:48other startup companies I think this crisis is good for us because we're very well position you will queue a lot of the crisis kill a lot of competitors and it's excellent actually accident time for us to expand so that's why we are still looking for investments the more money we have the better because we can spend one dollar like two right now because everything is

16:10cheaper right so yeah we're raising you know we are offering currently offering our we're offering favorite terms from her investors the $1 share thirty two million pre-money valuation so we really got coupled me in committed you know welcome to anyone you know who are interested to join us you know the more investor who we have the better because that we have investor you know we have

16:38top investors from like a former CEO of Bank America former CFO moving steady my professor at MIT you know of the US Congressmen former US congressman you know like that so we're very fine quality investors a very high quality team we have 30 40 people in US China and Europe and our 14 were from like MIT LinkedIn Facebook Alibaba Amazon the world so it's a very high quality team

17:06very high quality company yeah wow that sounds great and if the if there are any viewers that are interested in learning more about toward of or reaching out to you to connect what's the best way for them to learn more sure we're looking for three kinds of people okay so we're looking for a bank for example you for a banking partner very well into talk talk to you we're

17:33always looking for partners like IT Accenture you know university LOI IBM of the world we want to talk to you and the investors of course I always welcome and my you can contact me my email which is ke and T Kent dot y a n at trade off that's T our I'm sorry T our project C are a TL v e not net so let me just

18:07repeat one more time says Kent ke and T dot y a n at trade off as TR a D o ve net of course you can contact Aston as well if he has my email address yeah awesome Thank You Kent I will leave a link to the trade off platform as well as your connection as well in the description box below for the viewers and that's all the time that we have for

18:33the interview but it sounds like turd of is on a great path forward and I'm looking forward to seeing the launch of the main application as you said and let's follow up in the near future yeah thank you very much ash them for the opportunity thanks everyone I have to emphasize that in Chinese the crisis and opportunity is one word okay so take this crisis as opportunity as

18:58we're doing now in at Reno and I think we merge out of it we all will be very strong thank you very much you