MOAC Foundation hosts Blockchain Investor Panel in NYC

Blockchain technology is rapidly evolving beyond its earliest use cases and the rising trend in commercial applications of blockchain revolutionizes the way many businesses operate. No longer is blockchain limited to financial transactions, but now it plays a crucial role in supply chain management, infrastructure, digital identity, asset tokenization and in combination with other cutting edge technologies. The MOAC Foundation wanted to offer insights on some of these applications by presenting perspectives from industry experts currently investing in these projects.

On Tuesday September 10th 2019, the MOAC Foundation hosted a Blockchain Investor Panel at Distributed Global in New York City. The panel was moderated by Mike Rogers, founder of Millennials In Blockchain, and included Cherie Liu, Partner of Outpost Capital and Head of US for the MOAC Foundation, Kevin O’Brien, Managing Director at Rock Tree LEX, Jack Laskey, Partner at the New Economy Fund, and Evan Feng, Founder and CIO of Tapestry Capital.

Panelists tackled a wide array of topics from trends in the Blockchain VC space, the migration from traditional finance to digital assets, to the barriers slowing down institutional adoption, and the potential implications of 5G technology.

On the topic of the major innovation in Blockchain, MOAC Foundation Head of US, Cherie Liu said that apart from the creation of Bitcoins, blockchain technology “can also support many other functions such as stable coins that are backed by securities or other assets……..It could also be applied to the financial industry and FinTech as secure payments solution also reduces a lot of paperwork.”

“I think Bitcoin’s future is more towards becoming a commodity like digital gold,” said Cherie Liu.

Cherie also pointed out that there are a lot of interesting and encouraging blockchain applications coming out of China. “For example, we (MOAC) are helping China with some traditional businesses such as China Telecom with whom we have a partnership and they came out recently with a White Paper (‘Blockchain Smart Phones in the 5G Times’).” The White Paper describes a blockchain application ecosystem created by China Telecom that is built upon the innovative MOAC blockchain technology developed and run by another sister company of MOAC Foundation in China, called Jingtum Technology. It aims to use the unique decentralization technology to lead the new revolution in the digital economy, providing a more secure hardware infrastructure for 5G mobile phones.

“Blockchain technology is not only used in the financial industry as a payment system but also can be adopted by any traditional businesses……It also changes the way people collaborate and the ownership of personal data to protect everyone’s privacy,” said Cherie Liu.

Jack Laskey, Partner of the New Economy Fund, added that: “One of the major things, just as an example, that I think blockchain can bring, currently not served by our payments infrastructure is micropayments. It’s really not so hard to spend $20. It’s not even that hard to send $1million somewhere…. It’s really hard to send someone 5 cents. And I think that blockchain is really going to get a foothold more from the 5 cents realm of things, than from the million dollars side.”

RockTree LEX MD Kevin O’Brien, in answering the question “What is Wall Street 2.0?”, said that “It’s our own investment thesis, but it’s probably a branding term that we’re pushing out there into the ether to define essentially what’s going to happen over the next couple years to the point where we went through the ICO craze…….. We’re looking at Bipster type protocols, we’re looking at the convergence stack…… From a technology point of view, Wall St. 2.0 is looking at a convergence stack. I mean the entire supply chain system that’s bringing together IOT, AI, big data, analytics, and of course blockchain.”

On why one would leave traditional finance for blockchain, Tapestry Capital Founder Evan Fung believed that blockchain technology will shake up the legacy secular financial and accounting systems that he used to be a part of.

“Having been part of those large companies, I realized as obviously as they’re doing the best they can to give value to their stakeholders and shareholders but there’s so much friction in the legacy system and a lot of ways of doing things that are not necessarily as scalable or as free flowing as the way we’re used to having information move in the digital age…Realizing the power of blockchain and cryptography within the context of solving a lot of these problems, or even the biggest problem of peer to peer uncensorable money, I still feel that we’re very early stage in this whole movement,” said Evan Fung.

The discussions are available on the MOAC Youtube channels: Current & potential use of blockchain, Importance of 5G and Traditional finance to blockchain where many more thoughtful insights were shared by the panelists.