Primalbase Community: Meet Maurits
Our members are the beating heart of Primalbase and we love hearing about what they are getting up to in our workspaces.
In this series, we sit down with the developers, entrepreneurs and researchers who make up our community to find out what they’re working on, get their thoughts on the latest tech, and find out how they’re using Primalbase to further their goals.
In this edition, we spoke with Maurits Dewina, Head of Investment Strategy at WOCAP digital assets. Maurits and his partner, Gijs Burgers, started off as payment technology innovation consultants, advising large corporate and government organisations. They have since shifted focus to advising new projects in the blockchain and crypto space.
They take a fresh approach to consulting that operates more on the investment side — investing in new firms and using their knowledge to help optimise the product and team. Their mission is to contribute their knowledge to accelerate the adoption of new technologies.
Innovating with New Technologies
The need for innovation today is greater than ever. We stand on the precipice of a new age, one in which technologies such as AI and blockchain are helping individuals and organisations achieve their objectives. Innovation is no longer the preserve of individual geniuses, the Elon Musks of this world with their hyperloops and colonies on Mars. While we might not all be working on new ways to make other planets habitable, everyone now has the tools to innovate. We just need to find them.
Companies need to understand how best to use new technologies and have the right strategies in place for their integration. Maurits helps companies do this, specifically with blockchain technologies.
Maurits believes that something that often gets overlooked is that “Innovation is usually only 50% tech, and 50% about connecting different actors to create something together.” They help their clients to understand technology and make sure they work together to realise the results.
This is especially important for technologies as new as blockchain, with organisations often largely still working out to use it effectively. This could create problems down the road if they fail early on, creating a sense of disillusionment which could lead some to abandon the technology.
Maurits explains that, “At this stage, blockchain gets blamed for not delivering any results, but it’s not because blockchain doesn’t bring a lot of value — it’s because the potential of blockchain innovation is mainly to be found at the supra-organisational level, not so much within organisations. This is a shame as the potential benefits of blockchain-related technologies are so profound.”
How to Innovate
The key thing to understand when adopting new technologies is whether you really need them. This is not always easy, given the level of marketing hype and the clamour to make grand, sweeping claims that sometimes have little basis in reality.
Maurits notes that, “To innovate properly, you first need to ask yourself if you really need a new technology. Is it going to benefit the business or do you just want to use it because it’s cool?”
They get clients to think about business fundamentals. “We want them to look at their business goals and how a technology will feed into them,” says Maurits. “It shouldn’t just be a question of ‘Where can we stick this technology?’ This won’t bring results past being able to say that they’re using it. If that’s the goal in itself, then you’re serving your purpose, but it’s not going to have a sustainable impact on your business in the long term.”
Still, however, this will not happen overnight. Rather, Maurits believes that “the ‘transformation’ will be gradual. Existing business models will change one aspect at a time to make use of these new opportunities. Then, someday in the future, you’ll wake up and realise a lot has changed — but you can only see that looking back. It will happen bit-by-bit across traditional and new players.”
Is Tokenisation the Future?
One of the most famous use-cases for blockchain currently is tokenisation. While there are many projects currently working in the space, it also requires a gradual approach based on the understanding of needs.
“Tokenisation is basically a new way of representing value in the digital space,” explains Maurits, “whether that’s new types of digital value or more traditional value. As with all blockchain technologies, it is not always necessary. The benefits should always lead back to the equation ‘profit equals revenue minus cost’. If you don’t know whether your project is increasing revenue or driving down costs for your stakeholders, you’re not set for optimum performance.
“Tokenisation can contribute to both goals, depending on the context. That even goes for government projects. So they’ve talked about voting systems on blockchain — even that’s about reducing the cost because it’s about having a better way to make voting safe.”
Again, it will be a gradual change. Maurits points to the example of Primalbase: “They are successful because they only changed one aspect of an existing business model — putting an office membership in a tradable token. The rest was already proven to be successful — namely running a co-working space.”
This is not the only benefit Maurits experiences from Primalbase. The flexibility that is provided by tokenisation also helps. “Primalbase tokens are interesting and suit our purpose because they have an actual value proposition,” he says. “We don’t need an office full-time as we travel a lot. Using the office through a token gives us flexibility without fixed monthly costs that are, with other shared office spaces, usually unrelated to how often you actually use the office.”
This goes to the heart of the concept of tokenisation — minimising an assets downtime. By making tokens available to lease, you ensure that even when you are not using an asset, someone else will be using it instead. This means you won’t be losing out, and the asset will not be sitting there twiddling its thumbs.
Leading From the Front
Maurits’s belief in blockchain and tokenisation, their desire to innovate, is what drew him to Primalbase. “This is a new concept,” he explains. “We only really learn about how something new works by actually applying it in practice. That’s part of the fun of Primalbase — seeing something previously only theoretical become reality. It’s also a good practical example to use in our conversations with clients, a way of showing them how blockchain technology can have an impact in practice.”
“That it’s international is also great. When we visit other cities to meet clients or partners, we can host them in some amazing locations, in their own city. So you come into their playing field but you’re starting from the position of being a host. That adds a lot of value if you do business internationally. If Primalbase is in the city that you need to go to, it crosses over very well.
“There is also the community element that comes from everyone working in the same field. Co-working spaces often say they are about bringing companies together, but when it comes down to it, in practice they find that’s hard — people just sit there with their own company or friends and they don’t really interact. This makes the promise of co-working spaces hard to realise. At Primalbase everyone’s in the same industry so there is more interaction. There are also regular events, which we didn’t know about before we joined. These are a great way of bringing us into contact with new people we can collaborate with, or just chat throughout the day!”
