Bringing Blockchain to Businesses in Kuala Lumpur
There are broadly two types of business plan: revolutionary and evolutionary. While it’s the former that tends to catch the public imagination, the truth is that we owe the majority of progress to the latter. While it makes for less entertaining conversation, the truth is that we’re most exited by very ordinary business plans, executed extraordinarily well with blockchain.
So when we were given the opportunity to organize an event in Kuala Lumpur for our partners at Black Pearl Capital (a subsidiary of Credit City Capital), we weren’t sure what the public would make of it. The current market is challenging (to say the least), our research does not support optimism about the majority of publicly-funded blockchain projects, and we weren’t about to go on stage with feigned enthusiasm and say otherwise. We had already decided that the focus of the event going to be about scaling businesses with blockchain, not fundraising — in fact, half our presenters had already raised money and were there to talk about what they’ve accomplished since then! In short, we weren’t putting together the sort of hype + marketing focused event that has become endemic to the blockhain community.
Suffice to say we were relieved when our biggest problem became accommodating as many people on the event waiting list as possible: we had a full house. Not to mention that the views of Kuala Lumpur’s central business district from the Black Pearl Capital Office were astounding. Our compliments go out to them for setting up a spacious and well-equipped FinTech hub in a central location.
We broke the ice with a short, non-technical presentation on the history of blockchain, going back to the description of hash functions in the 1950s. It’s really quite surprising how the decentralized nature of modern blockchains can be traced back to a couple of academic papers, and a piece of software (Hashcash) written to prevent email spam in 1997! In the context of the promises made by blockchain projects today, you would never guess that the core technology they depend on had such humble beginnings.
Afterwards, we invited Aswin Phlaphongphanich, CEO of DeeMoney, onstage to talk about how they are using blockchain to scale their established remittance company while offering new services. Their strategy from the start had been to obtain all relevant licenses and legal opinions, as well as build a minimum viable product before starting to raise funds. We were really pleased to have them as speakers, we feel that they really show us how blockchain is ready for enterprise adoption. Projects at this level demonstrate a level of diligence that the blockchain industry desperately needs. Interestingly, they are the first non-bank entity to obtain an international money transfer license in Thailand. They have been serving their client base for 17 years, and have been offering remittance services to them since July 2018. Having received approval from the Thai SEC, they are set to be Thailand’s first regulated ICO.
Next up, we were lucky to have Grant Sohn, CEO of Carry Protocol present how his existing loyalty point system (now with 17 million South Koreans registered) used blockchain to develop a scaling strategy and raise funds. Carry Protocol had successfully finished their fundraising months ago, having raised 47,000 Eth. They’ve been far from idle since, having grown their user base and partnerships while continuing to develop their product. Overall, what projects do after a token sale is rarely discussed, and we were glad to have an engaging speaker show us how successful enterprises begin to adopt blockchain as a scaling strategy.
Finally, we concluded with a short panel discussion on e-payment systems in Southeast Asia and how they might grow and develop using blockchain. In addition to our speakers, we were lucky enough to have our colleagues Harpreet Singh Maan from Blocklime, Michael Gord from MLG Blockchain Consulting, and Maury G., an expert on distributed ledger technologies. As cash was invented in Asia in the 7th century CE, there was an element of the surreal in organizing a panel seriously discussing its replacement.
We received some excellent questions from the audience as well, leading to a discussion on how blockchain assets should be valuated (e.g. what formula or algorithm?) which continued after the panel concluded and well into the evening. This was an excellent chance for us to meet the Kuala Lumpur blockchain community, including Jeremy Joo of Polaris Capital, Sanjay Popli from Icora, and Mark Pui of MWPartners.
As organizers, it was an amazing experience to be able to put together a blockchain event without focusing on marketing and hype — we were able to offer a window looking in on successful enterprises that are adopting blockchain for real and current use cases. Whether or not you believe we’re currently in a bear market, I think that’s a concept we can agree to be bullish on.
We would like to send out special thanks to our co-hosts Thomas and Nancy Fung, and Rashid Maidin for their kind assistance and for allowing our use of an unparalleled venue at Black Pearl Capital.
Alpha Blockchain is an advisory and consulting company focusing on enterprise blockchain solutions. If you have a challenging and exciting project, we would love to hear from you. Please reach out to us!
