Today, we sit down with John Corr to answer some key questions about Railz and learn a little about his background and vision for the Railz project.
John Corr is the CEO and co-founder of Railz. John’s original vision in Railz is to create a blockchain-based next-generation protocol for a trillion machines to talk, negotiate, and deliver the internet of things economy.
John’s has a 30+ year business career in helping clients and owners to deliver over $16 billion of shareholder value working with leading international firms in the banking, manufacturing, payment systems and technology sectors with firms such as AOL, Barclays, Citicorp, General Motors, the National Grid, and Time Inc. He has been a Director and consultant with leading strategy firms AlixPartners and AT Kearney.
Q1. John, why are you so excited about Railz?
A. We are on the verge of what is being described the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ where leading industry experts such as Cisco see 50+ billion IoT devices by 2020 with ARM Holdings forecasting over 1 trillion IoT devices by 2035 which McKinsey envisage have the potential to create over $11 trillion of Added Value by 20XX.
Railz is intended to make commerce between these billions of devices much easier.
Q2. What’s different and special about Railz?
My view is that ‘Utility coins’ can be very valuable if they are focused on a differentiated and specific ‘use case’. I see little merit in simply trying to be a ‘copy cat’ or ‘go faster’ version of Bitcoin or Ethereum. The use case that we are focused on is enabling billions of autonomous IoT devices reach an ‘optimised consensus’.
Q3. So what do you see as the biggest challenges you face?
The biggest challenges I envisage are:
- Making the Railz technology work at scale, that’s why we have partnered with Winjit Inc a leading global innovator in the world of Blockchain, AI & IoT
- Winning early adopters amongst innovative SMEs where an ability to exploit the exciting new Social Media channels (particularly the more serious channels Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram) will help us gain global reach at low cost
- Gaining adoption with major global manufacturers to adopt the protocol where my background in major business to business sales will be most helpful
Q4. On a lighter note John, what’s the most fun you’ve had with IoT
The most fun I’ve had is building Robots with my 10 year old nephew Frank when we’ve built a ‘self-driving’ model car together. Frank is much more dexterous than me at assembling the parts and he will soon be a 10x better programmer. All in all it’s a great introduction to the world of IoT.
Q5. What should readers do next to learn about Railz?
I would suggest going to our website http://railz.org to download and read the Railz White Paper and Technical Yellow Paper. Then it’s worth viewing the videos at: http://railz.org/videos that go into greater detail on how the Railz protocol works.
