Transcript — AMA with Concordium’s Commercial Team.
On November 9th 2022 Concordium’s Commercial Team participated in an AMA that answered questions raised by the community. The topics covered ranged from exciting projects we are expecting to how we approach CEOs to use our chain.
You can listen to a recording of the AMA on YouTube.
Introduction
Maria Amalia Rojas (MAR): Okay, perfect. I have started recording so we can post this later on our YouTube so those who couldn’t join can listen to it later. Hello everyone, my name is Maria, I work with the marketing team at Concordium. Thank you so much for joining us in today’s AMA. Today we have with us our Head of Business Solutions Torben Kaaber and our Senior Business Solutions Manager, Maria Pelch. Thank you both so much for being here today.
Maria Eisner Pelch (MEP): Thank you for having us.
Torben Kaaber (TK): Yeah!
MAR: Before we start, maybe let’s introduce both of you. Maybe Maria could tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do at Concordium?
MEP: Sure thing. So Torben and I are sharing a computer, which is why it seems like DeGen Kaaber (TK’s Telegram ID) is speaking, but we’re just sitting in the same room. But to give you guys a bit of a background on me, I work as a senior manager at Concordium and I’m working mainly on bringing sustainable solutions into our tree. I have a background working with climate-tech and new technologies, so that’s some of the experience that I bring.
Then, because we have so many exciting things to do at Concordium, it’s a bit all over the place, so I do get to work on a lot of these use cases that we have coming out. Anything from metaverse to gaming. I have a background working as a consultant and in a Nordic think tank that also focused on technologies.
MAR: Great, and what about you, Torben? Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and also your role at Concordium?
TK: I for sure can. So my role is I’m the head of commercial and we are the one who is brought to life by putting use cases onto our blockchain. And my background is purely financial. I’ve spent many years in the financial world, starting in banks and working with brokers in the eighties and nineties. And then I started with Lars Seier in Saxo Bank in the early days and in the end I was the commercial head in the bank and I had the luck of opening a lot of offices around the world around 20. So all from Australia to South America, Montenegro, and after that I formed a little insurance company in Denmark and I did some AI. I also traded in the past electricity and now I’m here in Concordium. I’ve been here for more than a year and it’s been a fantastic journey.
MAR: Awesome. Okay, so let’s dive into the questions that the community has sent. Days ago, we opened a form to gather questions from our community, and I will be asking them on behalf of our community. So everything that I’ll be asking today has been sent through the form. Maybe we can go with the first question. It’s a long one and it says:
How does the Concordium commercial team typically operate: how do you generate leads and pitch the solution? How do you collaborate with the Concordium advisors and CEO and their huge network?
TK: Okay, I would take that. So if you think about the Concordium space, we kind of have three spaces where we operate and I call them the crypto space — which is all the use cases that have been in this market for a long time. We build games and are a little bit more crypto oriented and then we also operate in the institutions space and that is where as part of the question, the CEO and the network of our advisors come in and I’m actually also from the corporate space, the institutional space. So we have a fantastic network. Lone is of course on the board of Volvo and on IKEA, and she is an advisor to Credit Suisse. So of course that network comes into play. But usually when you deal with institutional clients and big organizations, it takes a long time. So if we have projects coming from that, you know, it can take a year, but then when it comes, it’s big ones. And then our third leg is our dear Maria, who is taking care of ESG and has a little bit of a different network than I have from the institution perspective.
So we use all those three parameters when we go out there. And then below that we join a lot of events around the globe. We don’t go to all of them because there is one every week. We try to see if it makes sense for us to go. Last week we went to Portugal, in Lisbon and joined the event there. There were a lot of people, 70,000 and we got a lot of contacts. I mean, all the big guys are there, but we jump in and then we just try to get as many contacts as possible and we got that. And then, of course, we have the community we got you. And also from that angle, we will get use cases and then we have what we call regional managers, and that is people that represent us in countries around the world. And of course, we go to those regions where crypto is kind of popular. So we, for instance, have regional managers in Turkey, we have it in Japan, Nigeria, Spain and we’re going to expand on that, of course, also in the future. And then we also get use cases from our grant program. And on that one, we get from all over the world and many, many different projects come in via that channel. And you probably also read that Lars Seier capital is now also giving out grants. So he’s also helping us with his whole community.
And then just to round this out, I can say we have lots of projects coming in at the moment and we are fighting to get all those projects on-chain. And I hope that they will actually start this year, but Q1 will probably be our quarter with many projects coming on.
So I think that was a little bit about that. I can say that you’ve probably seen that we are getting press releases out more frequently than we’ve done in the past and since August, I think we’ve got between one and two press releases out every week. And that, of course, means that we are getting traction and we are getting use cases. So it’s a testament to that.
MAR
Yes. And also on the grants side for the community, remember that if you know any good projects that could be built on top of Concordium, just reminding you of our grant program. Maybe Ralph or Sak can share the link to the form in our community so that you can share with all your contacts. Then the next question we have here is:
Can you give us the Concordium elevator pitch addressing CEOs (no tech talk): What is Concordium and why should I listen?
TK: Oh, Maria gave that one to me because I’m the old guy in this company.
MEP: Yes. You’re more likely to be the CEO, perhaps. Yeah.
TK: So my pitch is that Concordium was founded by Lars Seier and he comes from the financial world and he went out in 17 when he left Saxo Bank, he went out to look at projects in the space. And after a while, he realized that he wanted to build his own blockchain. So what was he thinking about when he was trying to build that?
He thought, well, at one point regulation will come. So I need to build a blockchain that is ready for regulation. And the next thing he thought about is that I want to build a blockchain that is based on science. I don’t want a blockchain built by, he usually calls it people sitting in the garage, and build a blockchain. He wants something that is backed by science. And so coming back to that, you can say he searched for where the best people were in the world and he found Aarhus University that is number one in the world when it comes to cryptography. And then he found the university ETH Zurich that is among the top ten when it comes to blockchain.
So he made a cooperation with those two universities and they started to make science papers. And so far they’ve done between 70 and 80 science papers and that is what is backing up our blockchain. So tick box on that one. Then he wanted to say, well, this being anonymous on a blockchain is very fine, but it doesn’t work in the long run when regulation comes.
So those clever people sat together and figured out how can I make the blockchain private and how can I make it so that if it is being misused, you can actually find the guy who is behind the wallet. So he created this identity layer at the protocol level, and that means that it doesn’t mean that everybody can see who is working on the blockchain.
Not at all. But it means that if you do illegal stuff, you can, with a court order, figure out who the person is who is working on the blockchain. And that comes together with a revoker, an identity provider and us, so it’s a three party cooperation. And actually we don’t know at any time the identity of any person working on the blockchain. But the identity revoker will do that together with the law enforcement.
So that was I think very, very cleverly done. So that was a tick box to the regulation and of course, the science paper that backed it has made it so that we have a fairly fast blockchain. And one of the things that when you want to have a solid blockchain, that is also being used by what I call normal companies like institutional clients, they would like to know what does it cost to make transactions?
So he actually made it so that the transactions are fixed in Euro terms. So a simple transaction costs one euro cent and I think that was the speedy talk on what a CEO wants to hear when I talk to them. And there was no kind technical talk in this. I would not be able to do that. Maria is better than me at that.
MEP: I think those are some of the key points that we use when we’re in dialogs, both with CEOs and and basically also most projects. So I was just in the Philippines last week and it was a huge conference with a lot of different use cases being presented. But at the end of the day, it’s quite nice coming up on stage after that and going, you know, all of these cases could be built on any blockchain, but what’s the added layer of trust? And I think that’s where Concordium really differs. So the points Torben made about science, that resonates really well across conferences, across industries, across different levels, hierarchies in companies. And then the ID layer, because how are you going to ensure the identities of the people who are involved or accessing your brand, if that’s in the supply chain or if that’s in the metaverse, those things really hit the CEOs right in the stomach because it’s about ensuring their brands.
MAR
Yeah, exactly. Let’s go now to the next question that I think fits really well here.
What are you most excited about in the next 6 to 12 months in terms of Concordium adoption?
MEP: So for one, I’m personally insanely excited about the plus 30 cases that we have currently building that will go live. It’s probably going to be our quarter in Q1 as Torben just mentioned. So that is a huge thing for us. Another thing that I’m personally very excited about and more on the technical side of it is, the development of our ID.
So we’ve gone from the version one where you’re merely identified on our chain to a version 2 where you can start doing this zero-knowledge proof with, for instance, age and with a location. And then we’re going to go into an ID version three within the next year. And I think that one is going to be very crucial for the adoption and application across cases.
So that will be where ID gets to serve as a soulbound token. So you can identify yourself for instance, with your university diplomas or with your membership to a given sports organization. So you will get all of these credentials that will grant you specific access to certain experiences. So that is a huge thing I think coming out and compared to a lot of the competitors that we have, that’s really where we set ourselves aside.
Then there’s our defi roadmap. Torben I know you love that one, so maybe I will let you do that one.
TK: Yeah. So what we are missing at the moment, of course on the defi is a DEX and there will be a DEX coming out in January and this is just the first part of the whole defi roadmap. We are so lucky that we work together with Bictory that actually has and they are going live soon with our token and they are also securing the domain names which is very nice. So for our projects they will be able to have their token on a central exchange and on a DEX. So that’s important for us. And of course on the defi you’ll be able to stake, you’ll be able to run pools, you’ll be able to probably also have involvement of a lending protocol and all those things I think is what is important for Concordium because again, we have, the ID layer and we have the readiness for compliance. So I think it’s important. And I also think it will give us the transactions that everybody is talking about. We love transactions and that is the next step. And what most people don’t realize is that most transactions today actually happen on dex’s and not on central exchanges. And it could be that the last 24 hours are different with all the mess that is going on. But actually it proves decentralization is the case, doesn’t it? I mean, yeah, it does. And so that’s my perspective on that one.
MEP: Yeah. And I think on top of the ecosystem just expanding and we will actually start getting these transactions on-chain and on top of the defi roadmap. One of the things that I’m also excited about is following how the pull is starting to change from the industry. So there’s a lot of conversations that we as Concordium are being pulled into.
One thing is, thanks to the ecosystem and thanks to our community that is you, it’s also thanks to our network but our USP is really starting to resonate and we’re traveling a lot with word of mouth and so we’re getting a lot of new projects coming in just from hearing about Concordium and the USP that we have. So I’m really excited to see, you know, what new verticals will move up that we will be part of that isn’t necessarily gaming or metaverse, but maybe also more on the governmental side and more ESG.
MAR
For a fact and now also that Torben mentioned Bictory, I want to remind you all that tomorrow we’re going to have an AMA in Bictory’s Telegram group with our CEO Lone. So I see Joha here. Maybe Joha, you can share with us the link to Bictory’s Telegram group so everybody can join us tomorrow in the AMA.
So the next question we have here is:
Can you tell us more about the EXARTA metaverse collaboration and what this means for Concordium adoption?
MEP: Sure thing. So I’ll grab that one. Exarta, as you may know, was one of our very big announcements in October, and it’s a collaboration that we’re really excited about. For one, the team behind is insanely talented, but also the graphics of the metaverse are really incredible and unmatched. So with that, the team has actually been named by the Business Leader magazine as a global top 32 metaverse company.
I would encourage all of you to go check out some of the visuals that they’ve published on their specific channels. But it is really incredible. And I think the quality and the fact that they have a proprietary system behind their virtual world means that it makes it quite a lot easier for us to bring in clients that, for instance, are requesting a metaverse infrastructure for some of their own projects. And so with these clients, what Concordium will bring is a zero-knowledge proof on the ID layer to the metaverse and then Exarta will be the ones bringing this unmatched virtual experience. And when it went live, we hinted there was a big brand coming to Exarta and yesterday they announced Unilever, who is building a metaverse in Exarta. And they’re bringing the brand TRESemmé, which is a hairstyle brand to create their very own metaverse called the TRESverse for giving avatars a better haircut. So I don’t know if you’ve been part of any metaverse, but unless you have hair like Torben, it’s really difficult to find that wig that matches what you look like in real life.
- TK: There’s not a lot of hair.
MEP: But that’s only one of the examples, I think. And oftentimes what we see in these dialogs is that it really just takes one company to show the way for others to get the adoption. So this one is hugely important and it’s insanely well done by the team behind.
MAR
Can you tell us a little bit more also about RJE and their use case?
TK: Yes, it’s called Royal Joh. Enschedé, and that is a very old company out of Holland, the Netherlands. And they have been making both stamps, money bills for, I can’t remember, 300 years. And at one point they realized that, you know, stamps are going out of fashion for normal use, but still it’s a collector’s item.
So they would like to have other streams of earnings. So they made an agreement with the Austrian post office to do stamps, twins, both as NFTs and a physical one. So the first auction they made some months ago and they offered 250,000 stamps at €10 each and in an NFT and of course, as a physical one and those were sold out in 2 hours. And nobody really believed that it was going to happen because the usual people who collect stamps have the same hair as I have. They’re kind of old, but it was sold out in 2 hours, 250,000 stamps and then it was ten Euro a piece. So it was two and a half million in revenue.
And that actually made this interesting also for the post offices in Holland and in other countries. So now that they are building the future stamps on Concordium and we are helping them with this venture. But at the same time, they thought, okay, stamps are one thing. We’re going to go for others, there’s also bank notes. On the banknotes side, they have and of course, it’s not real banknotes, but they made tickets. And at the moment, I think about the world championship in football, they are also making tickets for that event. And those notes are a little bit special because not only do you get them as an NFT, but you also get them as a note.
But there’s AR built into it and when you use the app and you put the picture on top of the note, you know, a football player will jump off the note and I’ve seen it myself and it’s quite cool. So what they’re doing now is also trying to make bank notes as tickets to events all over the world.
So I think it’s a fantastic thing to have a 300 year old company going into a new revenue stream that is kind of different from what they are used to. So they’ve embraced all of this and we have a very close collaboration with those guys and I think we’re going to see more coming out from that collaboration.
MAR: Yeah, I’m sure that this is just the beginning with them. There’s going to be so much that we can do together. So excited! Okay, let’s get to the next question that the community sent you here. It says, in a video from a sprint Lone mentioned a picked up use case which was building a platform with people from the big recording companies. Can you tell us more about this?
TK: Yeah, I’m quite sure she referred to Hivery. Hivery is a music NFT platform and it’s not live yet. We hope it’s going live next month. And so we have actually two NFT music platforms. We also have B token from Denmark as well. But what I like about this, and I don’t know anything about Tik Tok, but I know music and videos are very famous on Tik Tok. I’m not there myself, probably because I’m a bad dancer.
Yeah, but what I really, really like about these projects is so when I was working with Lars in the financial markets, we came out and Lars had the vision of using the Internet for the first trading platform, and we thought it was a little bit insane because he was talking about trading is going to be for the for the normal people now, so we want to democratize it. So I heard this before. So now what you can hear from this is we also are going to democratize music. And what I really, really like about this is that the musicians today get only 12% of the revenue and with this way of doing it and playing that music, selling their music, they can actually increase that 2 to 3 times.
And everybody knows this music thing that is green that we won’t mention out there, but they earn nothing when their music is played there. And actually part of all this with the musicians is the whole thing about paying them is a nightmare. And sometimes the musicians wait a year or two years for getting their final payment because it’s a lot of payments and they go left, right and center and think about it.
Now, there is a smart contract that when they start selling, everything is coded. So all the people that need to get paid, they will get paid and they will actually get paid instantly and not, you know, in one year’s time. So not only do the musicians earn more money and they should, because they actually did the one who is producing it, but they are also getting paid straight away and all the people involved in it are getting paid straight away.
So it serves all purposes. So, you know, as an old banger, I like this with people getting paid straight away.
MAR: Fantastic. Okay. If we have any musicians here in the community they like it too. I’m 100% sure.
TK: Yeah.
MAR: Okay. So the next question here is Concordium is a new blockchain compared to others with a large ecosystem, is the layer one ID enough to convince new use cases to not go to another platform with a wider adoption?
MEP: So let me take that one. I think in the beginning when I started at Concordium it was a little bit different right, we were in a bull market everything was going great. No project has failed and everything was just all fine and dandy. But despite the market conditions being a bit tricky, it’s actually falling into our favor in terms of what you want, to be sure that whatever you built is built on a foundation that you can trust. So that’s the science aspect of it, but also that you’re involving people that you actually have faith in. So I think for those specific questions, it’s definitely enough for the projects where ID is absolutely central to their solution. It is enough to make them change. Sometimes it requires a bit of an introduction to how the ID actually works.
But the added value of having it in, for instance, your metaverse, if you’re dealing with brands where you want to protect those brands, or if it’s gaming where you want to ensure that you’re not paying out funds to someone who isn’t an account, or if you’re paying it out to someone you did not intend to pay in the first place, you want to make sure that it’s real people behind.
And that’s often very important when you have to deal with these larger brands. And so to me, it’s a definite yes. I think we’re also seeing a bit of a change in terms of some of these larger companies that are getting into it. So beforehand there were a lot of companies building on these private blockchain. So you have the IBM collaboration, you have the Hedera ones as well, where sometimes you wouldn’t know the people that you’re interacting with.
But as businesses become a lot more connected and you can’t really predict who your customers will be, you have a circular economy coming into being something you have to deal with. You can’t really keep things in a closed loop anymore, which is why when they want to transition their existing solutions, Concordium will be the only option because you need to be able to ensure that you actually know the people behind and you can verify that they are from that specific business.
So I think Concordium serves as the perfect middle way in all of that. So the ID is definitely still a huge selling point for us.
MAR: Perfect. The next question we got says on the partners page on the website, we see a lot of different categories. What did they mean and how would you define strategic partners of Concordium?
TK: Now when we look at the strategic partners, we started with VerumCapital, BCG, NTT, Deloitte, KPMG. So those are companies that are having use cases. And if we take NTT out of Denmark, it’s actually a Japanese company. But we’ve been speaking to the global heads of innovation in Denmark and it’s 150,000 people company, I think 125,000 actually, and they operate globally.
So it’s very strategic for us because if we teach them what Concordium is about and how they can build on Concordium and how we can assist them, if they got use cases that wants to build on Concordium, then you can say, we put our resources into this relationship and they will actually bring us use cases and we don’t charge money for this, but we put our resources in place for them to use. So it’s not an actual use case, it’s people who have use cases. And that’s why we call them strategic. And I think they’re very important. And we would like to have a lot more because what that is about is that we have people out there that knows us and know they can build on us and can actually promote us. So it has so many advantages for us.
MAR: How deep is the collaboration with all the other organizations that are listed on the website? Are they actively building use cases and what is the nature of each of the partnerships? Then the person goes here to mention that there are 70 plus potential projects mentioned, what are they building and why they choose Concordium. I don’t know if you’re going to go through 70 projects.
MEP: Massive question!
TL: And also, you know, some of them we have, I’m not sure all of them want us to state who is doing what. So I think it’s a little bit of a different kind of conversation to have. You know Bictory is on that website and Bictory has helped us all along from the very beginning. So it is standing there as a live project, but I would also call it like a very strategic partner for us because, you know, we help them and they help us. And they’re using our blockchain, of course, which means that I regard them as a client as well. And they have a lot of projects and of course I’m not going to mention their projects. Not that I don’t want to..
MEP: Maybe that’s for the AMA tomorrow.
TK: Yeah, that will be for the AMA tomorrow.
MEP: But I think it’s a great question and I think, you know, elaborating on some of these strategic partners, it’s a mutual education, I think, in a lot of ways. So they have clients just starting to come to them asking for metaverses and asking for NFT strategies. And the way we support them is sometimes they would send us a bit of information on a specific case and we would send them some of the supplies that we have in our network.
So one of the examples is, one of the consultancies asked for some track and trace cases that we helped with some of the introductions. We had a huge gaming company ask for some projects, so we send things across and we educate them on the importance of ID and the importance of science when they start working for their clients.
TK: Just following up on this one, because I’m not sure if we mentioned it, but at the moment we have around more than 30 cases that are building on the blockchain and some of them will go live at the end of this year, but most of them will come live in Q1. And I think we are talking to 100 projects at the moment. So the pipeline, as we call it, is quite big.
MAR: Yeah. And we also invite everybody in the community to go to our medium and to our blogs there. You can read more about some of these use cases and what they’re building. Then you can also find it on our website under the news page with all the press releases we have released in the past weeks.
MEP: Yes, but trust us when we say that as soon as something is ready to be launched and ready to be promoted, you’re the first ones to know. There’s just sometimes with these brands, they need to be certain of what information gets out and when, which is why you won’t necessarily find all of the information on the website. But once we have it, you are the first to know.
MAR: Exactly! Okay the next question, what challenges have you faced, demonstrating and convincing both current and intending partners of the reasons why they should choose Concordium.
TK: One example I can mention is when we talk about NFT platforms and using us, then the first thing that comes up is this horrible big one that has a lot of NFTs.
MEP: It rhymes with open me.
TK: Yeah. So they have a lot of attractions and they have a lot of NFTs and a lot of selling is going on. And then you look at, you know, our space there where we have two NFT platforms, Spaceseven and Bictory is a platform and of course the volume there is lower than on opensea.
And what we’re telling them is that, you know, hey, we are all starting at one point, we are a new blockchain, we are different from the others because of the reasons we spoke about earlier. And there’s other advantages to being with us. It’s always difficult when people want to compare a new car brand that is going to sell their first car with Volkswagen that is selling I don’t know how many million cars a year. Why would you choose that one, you would say quality or whatever. So yeah, that’s a good example.
MEP: Yeah. And I think to add to that, I think oftentimes when you’re working with sort of bigger brands and bigger corporates, for them they’re really focused on the layer twos. So for them they’re looking into what layer two solutions can we do? And it’s not really a discussion for them with the layer one. So it’s also about demonstrating as the question is the importance of choosing the right layer one to build on.
And that’s a conversation if you’re first stepping into an area that you don’t know that much about, it gets even trickier. So a lot of it is sometimes education. It’s mostly with these traditional web2 companies. There’s a lot of education going into it, teaching them. What’s the difference between public and private? Why does science actually matter? Why is it important to have an ID layer? What would the solutions look like and the risk looks like if you didn’t build it in a trusted network? So I think all of these things then top of them having to decide what specific solutions they want to build, those are some of the challenges I at least find in some of the conversations.
MAR: Interesting. Again, the next question we got is actually a really, really good one. It says, tell us something exciting that no one asked. What are the unknown unknowns that you can tell us about?
MEP: So if I mute now and Torben yells it and then we unmute. Then it’s still said out loud, but no one can know. It’s a difficult question Maria.
TK: Yeah.
MAR: Any, any. I don’t know. Use cases we have again now that are exciting or that you can give us a little peak?
TK: I think we’ve got so many use cases and it’s kind of difficult to explain some of them. But I think we’ve mentioned before that Lone sits on the board of, you know, car companies and also IKEA and works with banks in Switzerland. So, you know, it wouldn’t surprise me if from one of those angles we will get a use case. I mean, that’s very exciting.
I can also say another use case is that, you know, I used to trade electricity and we are working together with the people in that industry. And very soon we will come out with a case from that industry that is massive. And they do 31 billion transactions a year. And of course, they’re not going to put all of them on-chain.
MEP: But close to it.
TK: So they are actually choosing us because we have a specialist , which is our good friend, who was the guy who built our blockchain, and we’ve helped them with their solution. This is an EU wide project, so we can’t name them yet, but it’s that’s the industry that we are trying to go after and that is again, these corporate companies we are talking about and you know, it takes a lot of time and we spend a lot of time getting those onboarded. But when they are onboarded, you know, first of all, they’re going to stay there for life and they will make tons of transactions. And it just takes a long time.
MAR: It will be exciting. I think I have to share some regrets about that. But I think the community will appreciate to know.
MEP: Because this creates an unknown unknown.
MAR: Yes, but then hopefully we can share with the community soon. So the next question we got is what is Concordium doing to progress the volume on its blockchain?
TK: And I think we answered that a little bit earlier, didn’t we? So first of all, all those who come on an exchange are damn expensive. So it could be cheaper after today, actually. But so it’s also a matter of how many exchanges should you be on?
And if most of the volume is on DEXes why not focus a little bit on DEXes? So my personal opinion is that we should focus more on the DEX side, and that is also what we are going to do in Q1. So I hope that we will be present on, you know, two or three full exchanges of the big ones in the DEX space.
And that is where we are missing out. I don’t think we miss out on the central exchanges. We are on them now. Three of them are probably in the top 10 or 15 at least. So yeah, it’s nice. I mean, of course it would be nice to be on Binance, Coinbase or Kraken or whatever. But, you know, I think we should spread it a little bit and then go for the DEXes.
MEP: Yes. And now it’s mostly focusing on building and creating the ecosystem and creating the utility around the token. And then it will follow.
MAR: Next question our community members send it says next to the ID layer Concordium has the unique selling point of an uncontaminated native token, the $CCD. Are there other industries where this is an absolute must to deal with a public permissionless system?
MEP: Well, I touched upon it briefly before there’s a lot in this understanding of what we use blockchains for and why it’s not beneficial anymore to have a private closed system. So in many ways we’re seeing industries converge and a lot of the bigger you can imagine, for instance, a car company, a lot of the things that they put into their products, for instance, a car battery that will need to go from cradle to cradle all the way back into production.
If you have 7000 pieces going into just making one car, you will need 7000 separate private changes to control all of that information. And then what happens when the car is produced and you hand it over to the person to drive it? You would still want information about how it’s driven, how’s the battery being treated, all of those things you need to adapt and I think for that you need these public systems and you need public permissionless systems for anyone to join and anyone to build and engage with, because we don’t really yet know how far our businesses stretch and how far, for instance, products stretched into their lifecycle. So I think across many industries we’re seeing that the traditional way we build blockchain solutions is just not viable in a more connected economy.
MAR: How large is the interest in the upcoming Web3.0 ID solution that can be used to add value to many existing Web2.0 use cases? Do you target use cases like review systems, dating, business platforms that suffer from the lack of trust, from bots or fake accounts?
TK: Maria will take that one, but I’ll just start out saying if you are a little bit active on Twitter these days, the answer lies there, doesn’t it?
MEP: Yeah, it’s massive and I think we’ll really see this starting to come in. We already have it in a sense with, for instance, University Diplomas. You have it with social media accounts, which are huge as well. For instance, in the Philippines, I think they’re the country with the most social media accounts and a lot of the trading and infrastructure that they have for doing business is done via social media.
So, there’s so many aspects where the ID makes huge sense in terms of trusting the person behind it. But then an added layer, it’s that trusting the credentials that they have, they really take this education that they claim they have the certificates to operate this new cool or whatever that could be. So, the interest is huge, obviously.
There’s also the written dating I think it’s in one of course original pictures with the Tinder swindler. I think it was called. So all of these cases, the foundation of all of it is the digital idea and the fact that we’re able to know who each other is, but also accountability to it and, yeah, I don’t think that interest is going to go away, especially not with the good Elon Musk trying to claim $8 for a blue certificate.
TK: And remember that, we are from Scandinavia, Denmark and probably we are among the most secure countries in the world when it comes to identification. We have our social security number and everything is digital in Denmark, but it actually is not when you come to other parts of the world. And they’re, as Maria saying, they needed so and we will also get used to having it because the next phase of the digital age in developed countries is that it’s your data and it could be, I don’t want to share my name, but I would like to share some of the things that I have in my wallet and that is the thing that we’ll have to get used to in the more developed countries when it comes to the digital ID.
MEP: And then there’s all the fake accounts and the bots where I think especially within gaming and esports, a lot of the value of a company is based on how many people actually plays the games and how many tournaments they host. And the fact that you can attach real data on the number of players and have real, actual players behind it, I think that’s going to be huge as well.
MAR: Can you give us an overview of the current flow, if the Telegram admins receive a question or a request from the community member? Is there a ticket created for the relevant department and is telegram the correct channel to ask updates and certain questions from the team?
So yes, telegram is definitely the best channel, especially when you redirect any of the questions to our community managers, they will make sure to get the answer for you.
So our community managers are in constant communication with the rest of the team. Like literally every day, every hour, all our teammates are. We have a Slack group where all our community managers have, you know, can just ask the questions to the relevant departments. The relevant teammates are that internal communication is really, really fluid. And I’m like our community managers are always getting the answers for you.
I know sometimes there could be delays in the replies, but that could be because maybe we require some clearance from the legal department or maybe from our listing or partner. We need to get confirmation from them, especially if we have agreed that we have a joint press release or for a joint announcement or information that is not only on our side but also with another partner.
And so definitely just send your questions to our community managers, they are in contact with the rest of the team.
MAR: The next question we have is, is there any chance that the CMC ranking will be fixed now?
TK: We do not like those guys. Haha, I’m not allowed to say that. No, no, we are in talks with CMC and we want to be able to do this. But they have some different requirements that we just have to live up to. And we are in dialogue with them and we’ve been in for a long time and it’s a little bit annoying but we will fix it.
So, for now you just go to Coingecko, that’s all. We can say it. But yeah, it’ll be fixed and it’s unfortunate, but that’s life.
MAR: Next question we have here says, Lars recently tweeted ‘’Blockchain is about massively improving critical processes in businesses, and that is what Concordium was built for.’’ Can you give us examples beyond Metaverse and NFTs, where you see Concordium being used?
MEP: Yes. So actually, in the pitch that Torben gave earlier, in the pitch to CEOs, they usually split it up in that there’s two ways. So there’s one, which is new revenue. What are the new ways a brand or a company can interact with their crowds and then there’s the business operations side of it. How can you use blockchain to ensure, for instance, some of your data that could be ESG data.
How do you access that data correctly? And it could also be in terms of supply chain. So how do you track and trace some of your products? So I think some of the real world use cases that will come to Concordium very shortly is the track and trace. How do you track supplies through a supply chain that shifts hands?
How do you track a product after it’s been sold and once it has to come back into the system of a culprit, for instance, for free use or for reproduction or or updating or creating a product. So there are a lot of these cases that have to do with the business operations side and ensuring data and also ensuring handover from if it’s from businesses to businesses or even if it’s from businesses to individuals.
TK: So, one of the things that we’ve seen is that the paper based businesses have remained paper based because it’s about trust and they see the paper and with the decentralized applications, you can actually put that trust into the digitalization and that’s meaning. For instance, if you have some ships, all the members on board, they need to have a lot of certificates, education, and that is by law.
So the guy, the captain of the ship, probably has a book that is 30 centimetres tall with papers of all the people working in the ship and all that papers. It is, of course, very cumbersome and it could be made much more trustworthy using a blockchain. So, that is kind of the thing that Lars also means if you also just think about when you say track and trace, part of track and trace is also putting in place verification of where the goods are.
And when you do that with a blockchain, you also come in and then suddenly it’s automatically digitised. So everything is not on paper anymore. It’s within the blockchain and internal databases, but based on the blockchain. So, I think that’s also true. What are you thinking about that it’s much more easy for the flow and it creates just less work.
So cheaper, faster.
MAR: Next question says how active is Concordium in the fintech area with the startups and existing companies?
TK: So, of course, when we give grants, it’s usually to startups. So, in that sense you can say we are very active, but I think it’s one of the areas that we need to build out. I mean, we’re still young. We don’t really have the bandwidth to be active in all areas and we just went to a company yesterday that are heavily into startups, and we agreed that we would like to help them when they do hackathons and stuff. So, that’s one way of us helping and being active in the area, but we don’t do it ourselves but I’m quite sure that along the way we will do our own hackathons and we will do our own help to startups. So, it’s an area we love. I mean, we are still a startup. I mean, we are so young as a company and there are so many things we need to have been built and so probably a little bit too premature for us to help other startups apart from, the whole grant side of it where we of course, help a lot.
MEP: So, apart from the people actually building on Concordium I think that that’s our main focus of helping startups for now.
MAR: Is there any news regarding the U.S. market?
TK: Well, if you are a U.S. citizen then today, you can open a wallet. So, it’s opened in that sense.
MAR: Are there any portable use cases that will be developed on Concordium mainnet, for instance, by Geely? Can you tell us more about the joint venture and what this means for Concordium?
MEP: With 2 minutes left, I’ll give you the quick rundown of it. So, they have a replica of the Concordium blockchain in China, and they’re doing quite interesting use cases in terms of NFTs. But, obviously you can’t trade crypto or speculate in NFT assets. So some of the things that we’re learning from each other is use case developments, but then with the missing link of actually having cryptocurrency, but we are co-developing on some of the specific points and they do have a very good network in China for helping brands onto this Web3.0 world just without the cryptocurrency.
MAR: And just one more question, because we are already on time.
TK: I would just mention one thing that I actually forgot a little bit earlier on the exciting things for next year, it’s ‘sharding’.
And sharding is a little bit of the holy grail because nobody really has it yet and the science people in Zurich have been writing up the science paper on sharding and we are now converting that into the blue paper that will be the foundation for how to build it. We hope that this will come during the first half or of not the first quarter, but probably mid-year next year.
That’s what I have right now and could be earlier. But that’s a huge thing for us because we’re probably going to be one of the first ones to have true sharding. That’s good news.
MAR: Yeah, that’s definitely the way to finish an AMA.
Well, thank you so much for joining both of you and also to all the community members who joined us today. We will release this AMA on YouTube too, so you can listen to it later and share with all your friends and family and all the people who missed it. Remember to subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss any of our news also to our Telegram News Channel.
Thank you so much for all the support and for helping us spread the word and we’ll see you there in the Telegram group. Thank you.
MEP: Thank you guys for listening in and remember to give your family and friends the Christmas present of this AMA.
MAR: Thank you, Bye.
