30 Questions with Jake (HADAX AMA, 27 August 2018)

On 27 August 2018, prior to the voting session hosted on HADAX to get RTE listed, we carried out an AMA session with Jake and Cheryl Gan (Graduate Associate, OCBC Bank) to host an AMA session with Jake. Here are the answers to 30 of the many questions that came in from members from the English, Chinese and Korean community!

1. Can you give us a simple overview of Rate3?

Rate3 Network is a decentralised dual protocol that bridges enterprises to the blockchain through cross-chain asset tokenization and identity management. The Rate3 Tokenization Protocol is an end-to-end protocol for tokenization of assets across both Ethereum and Stellar networks, while the Rate3 Identity Protocol helps enterprises to create and manage a unified cross-chain identity. This protocol is a smart contract through a combination of trust and asset tokenization, safeguarding enterprises through tokenization and helping trustees manage assets.

2. Which exchanges are RTE trading on?

RTE is currently trading on 9 exchanges — HADAX (now Huobi!), Fcoin, Coinrail, BIBOX, ABCC, BitForex, DEX.top, DDEX and IDEX. Coinrail, a Korean exchange, is able to accept fiat currency and has crypto-to-fiat pairings. We aim to reach out to bigger exchanges, with roadshows and greater outreach to come.

3. Rate3 have a long list of well-known investors backing the project. Can you share more about them and why they chose to invest in Rate3's project?

We have over 30 investors, like Fenbushi Capital, Alpha Coin, Nirvana, Node Capital. The most significant investor is Matrix Partners China. As to why they chose to invest in us, I believe it is due to the feasibility of our project; our project aims to achieve something that is extremely real and practical. To create asset-backed tokens and to bridge enterprises to the blockchain are huge goals that we want to achieve.

In today’s world, the entire blockchain market is not even half of that of Amazon. Many enterprises ask, ‘why, then, do you want to use your own token to create your own ecosystem?’ It is because we aim to specialise in the world’s Top 500 companies; we want to bridge them to this blockchain technology, to the value-chain (suppliers & manufacturers) in the ecosystem, thus achieving a common vision.

4. SGDR has been mentioned in the primer. Can you explain what SGDR is?

SGDR is a stable coin that will be backed by Singapore Dollars. It is legally compliant and completely transparent. This stable coin has a smart contract that can exist on different public chains. For example, it can be used to make cross-border payments on Stellar while smart contracts are made on Ethereum.

5. How does Rate3 differ from other projects out there?

Rate3 started off as a payment token, but we discovered that there were 2 main problems.

Firstly, token price is unstable and merchants might not accept it. Hence, stable coins as a solution. The second problem is, who would truly utilise it? About 50% of the market’s volume lies in Bitcoin, but the number of merchants who actually utilise Bitcoin as a currency are few and far between. As such, we shifted our focus from payments to dealing with settlements and credit.

With regards to settlements, we met with many enterprises and banks and found out that financial institutions are more concerned with trust, and not transaction fees. As such, it is very unlikely that a growing project is able to compete with large corporations; we can only coexist strategically. Hence, we seek to bring blockchain closer to such large corporations. Currently, we have achieved a strategic relationship with Paypal and are able to start working with the many companies that are already in connection with Paypal, resolving the payments issues (with stablecoins like SGDR) that they face one step at a time.

6. Who are your immediate competitors?

Polymath and Trusttoken. As for Polymath, they are actually targeting security tokens — something which I think of as an immediate need, and also an improvement to how security is being drafted today.

As for Trusttoken, it is a tokenisation platform behind a very famous token called True USD, which is currently tradable on Binance and other platforms. It is a one-to-one stable coin backed against the US Dollar, which in my opinion, holds some risk. We, however, are backed against the Singapore Dollar, which is a better currency to hold. Because of Singapore’s low/no debt, our reserves is near a trillion dollars, and the US debt ratio is more than a trillion dollars. In this manner, you would want a coin that is backed by a more stable currency, and also more universally accepted currencies.

7. Can RTE tokens be used in international deliveries and direct purchases? If not, how can RTE tokens be used in real life? Can you elaborate on stable coin?

The token itself is used as a collateral, to stake underlying assets. Our token is no longer a payment token; it is not being accepted or used for any sort of payment purposes, and is neither a medium of exchange. We need to remove the notion that RTE token functions like money; it does not. Money serves 3 functions: storing of value, unit of account, a medium of exchange.

To reiterate, our token’s main purpose is staking and the first product that we aim to tokenise is Singapore Dollars, and make this stablecoin usable for international delivery and purchases online. The concept of a stablecoin is to contain and control the volatility of tokens. A token can be $7,000 today and $3000 tomorrow. With this kind of problem, how are we going to accept the token today? For real life purposes, you want to use it to pay people, you want to use it to exchange for real goods and services. Stablecoin is one that is able to control the price, such that it is being backed to something. In our case, we use it to pack it to our currency, which is Singapore Dollar, we call it a one-to-one fiat-backed token, with this mechanism, this is called the stablecoin, with that the coin is stable for it’s numerous purposes.

8. It seems that many people are interested in utility tokens and systems that are related to payments. Is Rate planning to create a system wallet where several payments-related coins can also be stored and traded in the Rate wallet?

I want to elaborate on the misconception that our token is being used as payment or any form of money. Primarily, it is actually used as a form of staking, in that case, it will be used in different kinds of consumer-facing wallets that already exist in the space today. Most people actually send tokens using QR code addresses, and we do not want to create another kind of app for people to download and use. Instead, we want our token to be used in the numerous wallets already out there. The reason why is because we are not out there to fight for the market share when it comes to creating wallets, we are there for all the wallets to adopt us. So that’s our main focus.

9. Do you have any plans to ever make Rate3 own its own blockchain? if yes then how soon is that going to be?

Owning your own blockchain is a quite a misconception because blockchain is essentially a database that is used in a distributed manner. The reason why a blockchain is more useful in a distributed manner than in a centralized manner is because the information is publicly recorded, immutable, and can be viewed by all.

Building our own blockchain is not an accurate statement as blockchain is available for all to use. That is an important concept that i want to drive across. What Rate3 can specialise in, however, is meeting the different needs of different types of enterprises.

Specifically, a big company with many illiquid assets might want to change that into digital form. That digital form can be broken down into pieces, into numerous transactions, mortgages, loans, interactions with anybody in the world in a trustable, public and viewable record. That means that you can now have an asset in Nigeria, in Korea, or anywhere in the world.

That’s what we are trying to build here. We are bringing blockchain technology to the real world enterprises through tokenization, and (we also want) to build a shared identity among the different blockchains.

10. As compared to other projects, the timeline for roadmap is slightly long. As Rate3 progress at a slower pace, would you be worried that competitors replicate or utilise the current advantages that Rate3 have?

The planning for our roadmap is actually based on the overall market, regulators and various aspects, and as realistically as we can. We are actually looking into security, and securitising assets, and we also understand the fact that enterprises need more time to truly understand and adopt the technology behind digital tokens.

We have been asking ourselves this: Why build something that is good-to-have and not a must-have? I think by 2019 or 2020, our technology will see huge growth in adoption among the big enterprises. The progress is actually quite up to speed, in terms of how we look in the entire space, and how we think enterprises would adopt blockchain in the near future.

11. What makes Rate3 better than other similar projects and what are Rate3's advantages?

We have two key advantages. We are working with a third party trust and bank, working with established institutions makes it more reliable. People will be more familiar with this process of tokenisation. Secondly, it is cross-chain, and with the different existing public chains, like IOST, Ethereum, Stellar, we can coexist to digitalise assets on the network, through the different benefits of the public chains.

12. What special marketing or strategic plans does Rate3 have?

We are backed by real funds, and we are backed by Matrix China. They have been in this space for 18 years and back more than 500 startups and some startups are as big as companies like Baidu. The real-world advantage is that we can tap into the network owned by these funds, and bring real-world adoption to all the companies that they are backed and we truly want to solve the problems they are facing in an altruistic manner.

13. Does the Rate3 team have their own’s secret weapon that they can use to win their competitors?

The key here is not to come up with something and win the existing products, but to go to existing enterprises and ask them if they have been doing things in the most efficient way. When you adopt something that is decentralized in nature, you are not actually finding competitors. You are telling all the competitors and people in the market that you have a better solution for them, and it’s for free.

Rate3's solution will be solution that every business in this world would need — making their current assets more liquid, programmable, and enable them to do numerous things beyond transactions or interactions, or any purposes they want to use it for.

14. Why you are making own protocol instead of partnering with business that are already working on it?

Firstly, I think the current progress in the industry has been slightly slow, and we have the capacity and knowledge to build our own protocol so that it is interoperable with other protocols.

Secondly, I acknowledge that partnering with protocols is a good thing. That’s why we partner with IOST, they have much potential. We are selective in the partners that we work with, because at the end of the day, we want to help enterprises have a real world contribution. Enterprises will trust us if we go through a tedious and proper selection in the partners that we collaborate with.

15. You’re creating cross chain links between Ethereum and Stellar, are there plans to include any other top ranking platforms? e.g. EOS

Why we choose Ethereum and Stellar, is because RTE itself is already built with atomic swap in mind, that means cross-chain on two blockchains. The vision here is to move to five blockchains, because each public blockchain has its own advantage, and we want to be able to work on a public blockchain that has a strong community, a strong development team and also a vision that we think will come to reality.

One good example will be IOST. IOST is the third blockchain we will build on, after Ethereum and Stellar, and subsequently other more reputable chains that have huge community support. The blockchain community needs to come together and work together, so that we can bring real life solutions to the problems that we face today.

16. I saw Rate3 community’s announcement about how you are now at PayPal, where you are hosting the HADAX live AMA. Why are you there? Is there a special reason?

We will be announcing the news together with Paypal in the upcoming weeks, soon, hopefully, about Paypal’s strategic relationship with us. In that aspect, we are able to leverage on their resources and their expertise, especially the expertise they have when it comes to doing anything online. Paypal started off as a payments gateway company, and I think they have evolved into many things. Like how Stripe is actually with Stellar, and that is what Paypal envisions Rate3 to be. We are the answer to Paypal, the same way Stellar is to Stripe.

17. Have you signed the contract with Paypal? What benefits and impetus can we bring to work with them? Will the market value improve through this partnership?

Firstly, the contract has been signed. The benefit of our relationship is that we can be in touch the existing merchants under them, Paypal has millions of online merchants, and offline payment platforms. This will have a significant impact on the market value.

18. Any new partnerships for the future?

There are a lot of partnerships that we have not announced, as there are many projects that are still work-in-progress. We will build and tie up with these business and once the product can be rolled out for use, that’s when we will make the announcements. On hand we have at least 4 or 5 partnerships, please wait for us to announce this news.

19. It seems that Rate3 has transited to a B2B business model, can you share with me what kind of benefits Rate3 can bring to the crypto world?

In a bearish market, you can easily see which projects are able to survive harsh conditions. Recently, there was an article which stated that out of one or two thousand projects, only less than half managed to pull through.

We aim to get the Top 500 companies in the world to direct their funds towards cryptocurrency. As traditional enterprises issue their own tokens, they will invest funds and bring forth development. All in all, the cryptocurrency industry will see a series of more structured plans, and with the support of the Top 500 companies, the more practical tokens will surface and become more prominent in the industry.

20. Do you have any clients ready that are interested to use this tokenization business model?

One advantage that we have with the funds that backed us, inclusive of the companies that they backed, we have more than a thousand companies. Second advantage we have is that Paypal has more than one thousand existing businesses on hand. Specifically in Korea, we are friendly with GS global, and they have already publicly questioned how to bring “this budding technology into the existing businesses that (they) already have?”

That’s something we are currently working on — to develop the tokenisation model — so as to ensure that it can exist on the various public blockchains. When it is done, it will be used by companies that we are already in contact with. The demo testnet for the tokenization process is coming out live next week. You may take a look at how it’ll work and how it will fuse to tokenise any assets. Enterprises will be able to jump in for free, and see how tokenisation will be beneficial for their current business. Because there are so many kinds of businesses here, we cannot dictate how each actually work. We are able to build a common protocol that helps any business with assets, and bring them onto the blockchain.

21.Can you please share more details about RateX, and RateS?

The two other products that you have mentioned is the first product that I built. I built a cross-border payment product when I was in college, and it was to solve a very simple issue. When I buy things from overseas, I think I’m paying too much for the transaction fee and exchange rate.

First, we tackled the border payment problem. Money flows still rely on banks. However, banks have numerous issues, and that’s why we decided to explore the blockchain space. Adopting blockchain technologies allow us to bypass the financial institution.

After talking to financial institutions, we realized that we want to help them solve their problems. It’s not their wish to give us bad exchange rates. The current way that they are doing transactions with each other is not the most efficient way. Now that our Rate3 network is born, the current product (RateX and Rate S) will be integrated into Rate3 itself, such that we will be distributing RTE as a form of cashback, we will be doing crypto purchases from e-commerce, and one sector is only for e-commerce, there are also other businesses that we want to tackle.

For the SGDR that I mentioned, the tokenised stable coin, it will definitely be used in our product and other products that any company like Paypal, would wish to use. We have evolved quite a bit, and we are always trying to solve the problem that the company faces, one step at a time. Many tokens are moving with the cryptocurrency payment solution.

22. Do you have any issues in respecting the roadmap? Is everything right on schedule?

Yes, we are actually moving faster than what we planned out for, the testnet will be out by the next two weeks, that is actually much faster than what we planned for in 2019, the idea here is that we want to quickly bring what we promised into fruition. Also, to enable the next generation of people or enterprise or investors in fact, to able to bring the idea to what we envision to build. Moving to tokenisation and identity is something that is very revolutionary and forward-looking, our key point here is to bring something that seems untouchable into the real world as fast as we can. In short, we are progressing much faster than we planned.

23. Can you share a bit more about the YouTubers? Who are they?

Coinsight is one that we have been talking to so far, and there are various other influencers whom we are talking to. Just stay tuned and keep a close eye on our official announcement channel, join our official telegram as we are hitting 100k soon, and you will get the latest information there.

24. What plan are you going to list on Korea’s famous exchanges? Will you guys be going onto Cashierest (KR exchange)?

We are in contact with everybody in the space, in Korea. We have been going for a few roadshows, and live presentations in Korea. The next thing we are going to do is to collaborate with the YouTubers, to share more on what Rate3 is doing to the Korean community. Our Korean community is very strong and we are already trading on Coinrail, which is a very reputable Korean exchange. I cannot directly comment on when or who that we are in contact with, but with a good project like Rate3 in the Korean exchange, it will be a matter of time that we will be on the various exchanges that you have mentioned.

25. When will Jake come to Korea for a meetup with the community members?

Likely in September, because I will be having a livesteam with Korean YouTubers as mentioned earlier, then we will most likely be doing an inhouse roadshow, just for Rate3 to chat up with our community members and also to share more about what we have done so far in reality.

26. When will the geographical expansion of the project to Europe come?

That’s a good question, firstly we look at the top 500 companies in the world then we slowly tackle them, we are pretty global in that perspective. Rate3 is primarily focusing in Korea, China and Southeast Asia. I will be going to Berlin in late October, to host a hackathon, that’s when we can do more roadshows and live chats with our European supporters.

27. Do you have any plans to do meet up in China?

I will be heading to Shanghai on 7th September, doing large-scale roadshows with Fenbushi Capital and Wanxiang Group Corporation. The first week of September I will be doing offline roadshows.

28. What was it that made you interested in blockchain?

As we scale previous payment solution, we face huge problems in working with intermediaries and large institutions, that’s when we think that is there a way we can bypass, the vision and real value of blockchain, has always been decentralisation. We want to find a solution that is more fair, and more transparent, and to create situation whereby everyone in the ecosystem can use.

29. Jake, what’s your life philosophy? What do you wish to achieve with this blockchain project called Rate3? Also, what kind of convenience and benefits to society and people do you wish to give?

To answer that question, my life focus right now, is to truly build something that people want and use, and that to debunk the myth all the numerous things that people say about cryptocurrency. The things that we do here are real, and we want to change the world in the manner that we can. In light of that, my life philosophy actually is one with the company’s mission to have real world usage and bring adoption to enterprises. If you can create a win-win situation, through this adoption of blockchain, we can envision a way where society will benefit in a multi-sum game. That is something that drives me, keeps me up at night and gets me up in the morning.

30. Can you give an overall conclusion to this AMA session and a summary about Rate3’s future plans?

In conclusion, Rate3 will help bridge enterprises to blockchain by solving bridge real world. We will achieve this through our asset tokenisation and identity protocols, and be recognized by enterprises for our solutions.

Thank you once again for joining us at the AMA session, and we hope to see you in the next one.

About Rate3

Rate3 is a decentralised dual protocol for cross-chain asset tokenization and identity management. The Rate3 Tokenization Protocol is an end-to-end protocol for tokenization on both Ethereum and Stellar, while the Rate3 Identity Protocol is a protocol to create and manage a unified cross-chain identity.

Website: https://rate3.network
Twitter: https://twitter.com/officialrate3
Telegram: https://t.me/officialrate3