Ingo Rübe on New Blockchain Business Models

From October 30th to November 1st, hundreds of blockchain professionals from industry and academia are joining forces in Athens, Greece at Decentralized 2019 to engage in workshops, talks, and networking. One prominent keynote speaker was Ingo Rübe from BOTLabs, whose talk was titled DAOs and TCRs — New Blockchain Based Business Models.
Ingo began his talk with a background on blockchain:
“In the blockchain industry in the last 10 years, first we had blockchains, that was Bitcoin’s time, 5 years later we had smart contracts, that was Ethereum’s time, now we’re tokenizing assets, which is basically tokenizing real estate or a company or so on, and the next question is: why can’t I virtualize the whole company on the blockchain?
In 5 years, it will lead to DAOs and self-owned assets, like a car that leases itself and lends itself out to drviers, pays itself, and pays the lease that way.”
The next logical step is the DAO, though it was tried in the past and failed:
“The DAO failed in 2016. You can’t just talk about technology, you have to take into account regulatory issues. Blockchain gave us machine-generated trust. On the regulatory side, we got regulation for tokens.
Then came smart contracts, which enabled us to put software on the blockchain. On the regulatory side, we had a reaction to and regulation created for ICOs.
The next step is the tokenized asset and banks are pushing it. On the regulatory side, we’ll have security tokens. From the technological side, nothing really changed.”
The DAO wasn’t ready previously, but regulations are changing with “virtual persons”:
“Next up, we have a virtual person. We had a legal person and a natural person, but we don’t have a company directly on the blockchain. On the legal side, we need a sandbox company on the blockchain, and on the regulatory side, we need the virtual person. Based on our conversations with regulators, this is definitely happening.
There are two problems we have to talk about: first, it’s the software problem. If you give a smart contract to a regulator, they'll never be able to read it. They’re regulators, not computer scientists.
As we’ve seen in the DAO case, small errors can have devastating consequences.
We have to build one underlying middleware on the blockchain and build companies by configuration on the middleware, which authorities can work with.”
Ultimately, regulations will co-evolve with blockchain for greater understanding to push the industry forward.
