DREP Strategy | Why we target Australia amongst all the rising blockchain markets?
Blockchain folks are flocking to all kinds of blockchain conferences in Asia, Europe and United States, discussing hot industry topics, marketing strategies, beliefs and anxieties, large and small. Due to the obvious geographical advantages, Singapore, South Korea and the United States are the most popular destinations. Everyone gathers around the venue of the 500-meter square, hoping to conduct efficient and effective exchange of information, in fear of missing out the trip. As they follow the crowd blindly without deep, critical analysis, people’s intention to expand overseas markets could often be misplaced.
1. Will Australia become a digital currency continent?
This year is the 27th consecutive year of the Australian economy’s growth. It has been among the ranks of developed countries for decades, and its GDP per capita has ranked among the top ten in the world. Australia has gathered labels such as “health paradise”, “home resort”, “mine country” and “immigration paradise”, sufficient to summon a label of “Southern Blockchain Hub”.
Since 2017, Bitcoin has become a legal currency in Australia. Several Prime Ministers also seized the opportunity on Blockchain development, from Malcolm Turnbull who explicitly directed the government’s Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) to study the blockchain, to the current Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the blockchain technology enthusiast in the eye of media, who has been pushing the agenda of blockchain taking on big banks and disrupt the Australian financial system. As we all know, the four major banks in Australia have stabilized the oligopoly of the banking industry. In recent years, the profitability has been very desirable. The net profit after tax stands at 20%. The Australian government has strengthened its protection policy since the financial crisis, providing a strong shield to the local economy. Morrison’s speech this time proves again that the Australian government’s intention to implement blockchain technology is very strong.
While visiting the Blockchain Centre Sydney, the DREP team had the privilege of communicating with Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) official Qi Adam Gong. Adam said thatAustrade has been committed to exploring the multilateral cooperation between global technology companies and the Australian government. During the Wanxiang Global Blockchain Summit in September this year, more than 30 frontrunners in Australian blockchain industry have participated and visited Chinese blockchain ecosystem, including ISO TC/307 international blockchain standard group, venture capital institutions, incubators, blockchain start-ups, third-party service operators, large banking financial institutions, and law firms.
Based on the summary from the Austrade Committee, the latest policy benefits and significant developments in Australia’s blockchain sector in 2018 include:
- The World Bank partners with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CommBank) to issue the world’s first blockchain bonds, which will be created, distributed, transferred and managed based on blockchain technology
- The Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) became the first securities exchange in the world to announce the practice of “clearing systems based on blockchain technology”
- Australia is the ISO Chair of the International Organization for Standardization and is responsible for the management of ISO/TC 307, and is developing blockchain industry standards.
- The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has partnered with IBM and Herbert Smith Freehills to form a large cross-industry smart contract platform, which is renowned as the Australian National Blockchain (ANB).
- More than 610 million Australian dollars have been invested into blockchain research projects through the Australian Cooperative Research Center Program (CRC).
2. Can Australia accelerate the development of blockchain companies?
Australia’s blockchain projects focus on the development of technology in vertical areas such as energy, real estate, agriculture, finance, and payments. For instance, AgriDigital, one of the well-known blockchain companies, aims to create the world’s first agricultural supply chain and commodity management platform. Another example is Power Ledger, a trailblazer in Australian blockchain + energy space, will be implementing smart contracted P2P energy trading.
DREP core members visited our long-term partner Blockchain Global (BGL) team in Australia. As the leading blockchain company in Australia, Blockchain Global was established in Australia in 2014 and has completed the investment and incubation of more than 60 blockchain technology companies, with its investment amount totaling to more than 200 million US dollars. Blockchain Global’s holdings include DigitalX, the world’s first blockchain listed company, and ACX.IO, the largest digital asset trading platform in Australia, and Blockchain Centre, local well-known blockchain education and communication community.
The blockchain project originating in Australia is more targeted at specific problems in the industry, and not many projects are looking at blockchain infrastructure. Leon Liu, a senior partner of Excel Fund under BGL, shared with the DREP team that Excel Fund has been increasingly focusing on the real use scenarios and circulation values of the tokens in the past year’s investment strategy. The value of going live is greater than the value of a propelling story itself, as is also the current industry trend. Helen Yang, head of asset management at Excel Fund, said that he is excited to see DREP, a blockchain company that can serve traditional Internet companies and the real economy. In the future, Excel Fund will introduce more listed companies in its portfolio to cooperate with DREP.
So how big is the Australian digital currency trading volume? Since the Australian government announced Bitcoin as a legal currency in 2017, Australia currently ranks 14th in the world in terms of the number of BTCs and is still growing. ACX.io is Australia’s largest liquidity and trading platform for digital assets. BGL representative Karri Wang introduced the background of ACX.io and also communicated with the DREP team about distributed private key management and secure multi-party computing (MPC) in the DREP solution matrix. It is worth noting that DREP has a featured service for the trading platform. Not so long ago, DREP co-founder Xiaolong shared the public transparency and data privacy technology optimization solution provided by DREP to the exchange when he participated in the Huobi Chain Superhero Campaignship programme.
The developer community is one of the most cherished and yet most difficult part for implementation for all blockchain companies. The essential element is the talent resources of colleges and universities. Australia has many world-renowned universities such as the likes of University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, Monash, and Royal Institute of Technology. The Blockchain Centre is based in Melbourne and has been deeply rooted in the Australian developer community for many years through community activities, educational sharing, and mobile apps. After learning that DREP has inked strategic partnerships with well-known Asian universities such as Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, South Korea’s SungKyunnkwan University and (KYunghee University, Blockchain Centre representative Bonnie Liu said they will facilitate more Australian top universities to interact with DREP’s CSR initiatives.
Sydney also boasts some active blockchain communities. NextGenius is Sydney’s first Chinese entrepreneur community. Every week, it hosts a blockchain-related workshop at Haymarket. DREP co-founder Xiaolong delivered a speech at the STO-themed meetup, and shared his thoughts on DREP’s exploration in the field of STO with some founders of several Australian technology companies exchanged DREP’s explorations in the STO direction. Xiaolong also established ties between DREP with Blockchain clubs from University of Sydney and University of New South Wales.
As a new channel to boost investment confidence, STO has attracted the attention of many first- and second-tier market players in Australia. As a data public chain, DREP has deeply deployed financial credits and laid the credit foundation for asset certification. Sydney-based Blockchain Centre Sydney, the Sydney Blockchain Hub, with its open event space and professional meetup equipment, is another gathering place for blockchain enthusiasts and developers. The Australian blockchain + IoT leading enterprise UCOT is the main supporter of Blockchain Centre Sydney, they too have long-term exchanges and cooperation with DREP in the IoT field.
3. How does DREP facilitate enterprises’ transition into blockchain?
All good news aside, it is also true that Australia’s isn’t nearly as up to date as its Asian counterparts in terms of Internet development, especially compared with China. In 2006, Yeeyi (http://yeeyi.com/) was founded. These 12 years witnessed the rapid development of China’s Internet and mobile Internet, but in Australia, it seems that the wave is two-times slower. During the meeting with the DREP team, Steven Li, Yeeyi founder and CEO, commented that Yeeyi is Australia’s most extensive and most visited Chinese portal, and its product model is consistent with Chinese classified advertisements website 58.com. However, since mobile payment is not yet widely used in Australia, Yeeyi, which is used by almost everyone in the Australian Chinese community, has only improved the functions of information brokers and cannot act as a transaction intermediary. And in the early days of product development, the Yeeyi website was developed based on Discuz open source code, so Discuz’s many vulnerabilities and “semi-open source” issues have become the thresholds in Yeeyi’s product iteration. As early as March this year, Steven expressed to the DREP team their desire in transitioning into a blockchain-based enterprise using DREP solutions.
Therefore, to facilitate similar problems faced by these traditional Internet platforms, DREP has been carrying out work regarding traffic realization, platform economic system reconstruction, and debugging for open source platforms such as Discuz.
China’s internet dividend has come to an end. Australia’s mobile Internet dividend has only just begun. Harkhark’s vertical field of delivery has also focused on capturing the “last mile” of logistics development opportunities. Harkhark co-founders Leon Liang and Lexi Xu hosted the DREP team in their Sydney office. They said that many Australian entrepreneurs easily get into the business logic of the original industry, and the understanding of the blockchain concept is not as in-depth. The DREP team has signed a MoU with Harkhark in July this year to establish a cooperative relationship. The current confirmed solution is the DREP-based tokenomics for the platform user incentivization, and make it a close loop ecosystem with other functions such as take-out and advertising.
The real estate industry has always been Australia’s economy pillar and the evergreen industry, but during the 2017–18 period there was a rare continuous downturn. The DREP team visited the famous Melbourne-based real estate development group Landream and engaged in insightful conversations with CBRE’s Australian business representatives from the top real estate consulting group. The reason for the recently downturn in the Australian real estate market is largely due to significant declines in investment and trade, reduced speed in population growth, and an increase in property inventories, among which, credit reduction is the biggest roadblock. Based on this, the DREP team introduced them to the STO model — tokenization of the real estate industry could facilitate them to gather more funds, reduce the threshold of real estate investment, and potentially rejuvenates the real estate market. Landream Chairman Kevin Li has always been an unwavering supporter of DREP in the technical value and business model of the data public chain, and also provided a lot of resources for the DREP team. The STO direction would make a feasible area of cooperation with DREP — although global compliance still has a long way to go. It would wise to start the strategic positing right now, when everything’s still at an early stage.
Daigou, a.k.a shopping overseas on behalf of someone, is another featured industry in Australia.The large immigrant population and overseas students group have become the main force of Daigous to purchase Australia’s local high-quality food, wine, health care products and skin care products and then ship them back home. ANZIIG is a pre-ipo company engaged in the production, sales and brand operation of healthcare products in Australia. This August, ANZIIG head John Shen and DREP team exchanged ideas, hoping to introduce blockchain technology into the production and sales of its healthcare products. Its goal is to achieve anti-counterfeiting and traceability function, and at the same time build a community of consumers who will spontaneously spread the reviews by word-of-mouth with economic incentives within the ecosystem. During DREP Team’s visited to ANZIIG’s Sydney office, they communicated face-to-face with John for a viable implementation solution.
The DREP public chain + cross-chain reputation agreement program has continued to serve representative companies in the Internet, finance, supply chain, energy and other industries and sub-sectors. The Australian market will definitely become one of the main markets for the DREP service entity economy.
Under the downward trend of the global economy, blockchain enterprises are also facing increasingly difficult living environments. It is an inevitable trend to go out and embrace more users and explore more scenarios. From February till today, from the Middle East to Australia, the DREP team visited hundreds of companies, institutions and universities to explore the most promising market opportunities.
We have been on the road.
ABOUT Myself (Momo Chang)
Momo Chang, Co-founder of DREP Foundation
Former securities analyst at Orient Securities. Four-year serial entrepreneur in pan-entertainment industry. Master of Finance from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Applying her knowledge and expertise from a rich finance background, Momo’s keen interest in fintech led to her delving deeper into the blockchain space.
