The 2019 Rate3 Manifesto Part III: Key Strategic Focus for 2019
Our manifesto is split across several parts:
- PART I: Rate3 Network’s Three Primitives
- PART II: Our Approach to Building a Protocol & Token Utility
- PART III: Key Strategic Focus for 2019
PART III: Key Strategic Focus for 2019
In Part II of our 2019 Rate3 Manifesto, we covered in detail our approach towards designing the Rate3 protocol and the utility of the RTE token. In this post, we’ll explain our three main strategic areas of focus for 2019, and why it was crucial for us to double-down on them.
1. Flexibility Through Interoperability
Among a long reading-list of books floated around crypto-Twitter, Antifragile has by far been one of our favourites:
Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it speaks about a concept of antifragility, one that “is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”. We believe that for blockchains to fulfill its promise of forming the bedrock of the Industry 4.0 revolution, it needs to be antifragile.
Giving asset issuers the flexibility of multiple blockchains to choose from isn’t simply just a matter of providing more choice. It’s equally about ensuring that there is no ecosystem lock-in.
This point is extremely important. There have been countless examples involving popular technology platforms making rule changes that marginalize their developer’s interests.
Having the flexibility of switching gives developers — as well as the users enjoying those Dapps made by said developers — the freedom to “vote with their feet”, that is, to seamlessly port their users over to a different blockchain should one end up not serving their needs. This is why we chose to implement cross-chain interoperability for the Rate3 protocol.
We aim to enable cross-chain swaps of all tokens / stablecoins between Ethereum, Stellar and IOST on the Rate3 protocol by the end of 2019.
2. Partnerships with Industry Enablers
Our tokenization protocol serves to enable asset-owners to tokenize their assets in a manner compliant with regulations. In order to make this work, we’ve spent the remainder of 2018 post our pivot establishing partnerships with various service providers. These include RHT Taylor Wessing as our legal advisor, trust law practitioner Dr. Tang Hang Wu as an advisor on our team and a Monetary Authority of Singapore-licensed trust company with 10 years of experience. All these ingredients were necessary for us to build the foundation to approach other interested tokenization partners higher up the stack.
We also managed to be just one of three selected incubatee projects under the PayPal Innovation Lab program, opening up numerous discussion doors for us in the process.
Also, while we’ve held numerous discussions with other aspiring “asset tokenizers”, primary issuance platforms and exchanges, what we’ve learnt is that Asia still remains an extremely nascent space in the context of tokenization (in spite of all the STO conferences).
Our goal for 2019 revolves around getting more industry partnerships to enable a full tokenization ecosystem.
Keep in mind though, that it is also crucial that we work with the right partners — those who believe in abiding with regulations. See the following case in point on the importance of this.
Targeted partnerships would include CMS-licensed (Capital Markets Services) primary market issuance partners, compliant RMO-licensed (Recognized Market Operator) exchanges, savvy asset issuers looking to tokenize as well as educators who could help us to boost the level of knowledge around this matter within the region.
3. Further Involving our Community
In 2009, US political scientist Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on the management of public goods (a.k.a solving for “the tragedy of the commons”).
This post on the Crypto Commons elucidates on how decentralization and crypto businesses could possibly one day turn the management of public goods into a “surplus” — as opposed to a “tragedy”.
A protocol is very much the definition of a public good, or in the words of the aforementioned author, a crypto commons. Good governance of this said public good is key to turning it into a “surplus of the commons”, and that is a goal which we aim to attain with the aid of our community.
Our goal for 2019 would be to afford and encourage more decision-making rights to our token-holders.
As we progress through 2019 towards our Sigma mainnet release in 2020, we will gradually move towards a more decentralized governance structure, giving token-holders more responsibility on issues such as:
- Voting on assets to be supported for swaps
- New blockchains that are to be integrated
- Decisions around upgrades made to the Rate3 protocol
- Establishing a treasury from the fees generated from our other services, such as Cross-Chain swaps (and potentially from our team RTE reserves too).
Finding a sweet spot with regards to our pace of attaining full-decentralized governance is a delicate thing to do; it would be irresponsible to “flick a switch” and hand over all development and decision-making immediately. Based on the amount of ongoing daily involvement from our community members (be it on the tech, marketing or business front), our pace will be adjusted accordingly. We believe that this is the right approach to turning Rate3 into a thriving crypto commons.
Conclusion
We hope that this post clarifies to our community members on our three main focus of interoperability, partnerships and community, and our reasons for doubling down on them for the near future. 2019 will mark an integral year in the development of Rate3 Network, especially in light of the depressed macro climate and sentiment brought about by 2018’s bear market.
As a company we’ve long taken measures to minimize non-essential expenses (e.g. avoiding needlessly sponsoring events & booths overseas, paid influencer marketing, rejecting unreasonable listing fees, etc.). We’ve already reaped some benefit from this — the fact that Rate3 has yet to have to lay off a single employee during the entirety of 2018 attests to that. We plan to continue with this current mantra with regards to our expenses, while not having our plans be influenced by the rumblings of the market. Despite the numerous reports of layoffs having cast a grim shadow over the industry, morale within our company is still high!
Those who stand the test of time will remain as flag-bearers mainstream blockchain adoption, and we are upbeat on our abilities in fulfilling them.
About Rate3
Rate3 is a decentralised dual protocol for cross-chain asset tokenization and identity management. The Rate3 Tokenization Protocol is an end-to-end protocol for tokenization across multiple blockchains, while the Rate3 Identity Protocol is a protocol to create and manage a unified cross-chain identity.
Website: https://rate3.network
Twitter: https://twitter.com/officialrate3
Telegram: https://t.me/officialrate3
