AMA Summary with ShareRing CEO and Cofounder Tim Bos – December 2019

ShareRings Main Area of Focus & Other Areas of Interest

Tim Bos: What we’ve done is we’ve built a blockchain platform. It’s a customized Tendermint framework.  Then we have customized that with a number of modules for the sharing economy. We also look at where the best growth area is and what’s the easiest way to scale very quickly.

Tourism is huge, as 2 billion people travelled last year internationally.  Tourism also has a huge component of sharing involved with it. So anything from the ride sharing when you get off the airport to the hotels themselves. The booking and usage of the hotels are effectively part of the sharing economy, including all of the services that are wrapped around it. 

What we’ve basically done is we’ve built a set of APIs, the app and then white-label platform, on top of our blockchain that’s enabled for travel. We are still talking to other companies that are outside of the travel industry to look at actually utilizing our blockchain.

We’ve had a lot of companies try to talk to us and work with us. We’re basically just cherry picking the ones where we’ve got the capacity to work with right now, but also where we believe they’re sort of low hanging fruit where we can easily sort of develop and white label into them too.

One good example of this is Dhipaya Insurance. If anyone speaks Thai and they watch the news tonight, they won’t just hear about Dhipaya insurance doing travel insurance on our products, they’ll hear the president of Dhipaya basically saying that they’re partnering with ShareRing to look at putting their insurance products on our blockchain. Not just travel insurance, car insurance, pet insurance, product warranty, extended warranty insurance. So all of these products where people can make instant claims and things like that. So that’s just one other use of our blockchain, outside of specifically the travel industry.

ShareRing’s Travel 4.0

Tim Bos: One of the things that we talked about in the presentation I did with Dhipaya this morning was talking about travel version four.  Travel version 4 focuses on the person and all the services and things that they do to go on a holiday. It’s not just hotels, flights and activities which are what a lot of them offer.

For example, one of the things for other services is eVOA. We partnered with gateway services who are one of only two companies in Thailand to offer electronic visa on arrival services. So we’ll offer that through our platform but gateway services are also working with us to put their whole visa approval process on ShareLedger.

In transactions alone, we’re looking at probably a minimum of 5 million tourists per year that would come through on eVisa on Arrival. Then we work through for the E visa, which is the longer term visas, which would go on the platform as well.

That’s just another example, and that creates the blueprint for how we’re going to expand into other countries as well.

Dhipaya MOU Overview

Tim Bos:  All good partnerships start with an MOU. If we entered into a contractual relationship with Dhipaya Insurance from day one, it would be a very tight and small contractual relationship. So as part of the MOU, we get to start working with them, constructing a proof of concept and developing a lot of that together. Then build the contractual relationship out of that. So it shows intent to take that further, and if it wasn’t a big deal for them, they wouldn’t have invited press and the media along; they are very, very serious about taking this further. 

Our relationship is a two way street, and the MOU itself, I can read you part of it says; ShareRing and Dhipaya have agreed to cooperate and enter into negotiations with a view to establish, arrangement for Dhipaya to use the sharing ecosystem for software solutions. 

So essentially, Dhipaya will be using OUR ecosystem to provide their insurance products. Then ShareRing will offer Dhipaya insurance products to their clients. So this is very much a two way street with this arrangement, it’s huge. They’re a listed company. They’re partly owned by the Thai government. I can’t really overstate how big this one is.

Why Insurance for ShareRing?

Tim Bos:  It’s one of the things about building a blockchain is to make it flexible and work across a number of industries.  And when you think about, the sharing and rental industry, every single component of that requires some sort of insurance.

So it benefits us to be able to offer it on our blockchain, but it also benefits Dhipaya that they can utilize or make use of our blockchain and add things like smart contracts for their insurance, instant claims and things like that.  Then part of what we discussed with the Dhipaya President was eventually they could have 100% of their claims and also 100% of insurance contract on a blockchain. The president was also talking to me about offering product warranty insurance, pet insurance, life insurance and all sorts of things outside of that. We also talked about how they can leverage the ShareRing blockchain to make things more efficient for them.

What are the implications of this? And what does this mean for other partnerships that can come on board?

Tim Bos:  Insurance costs, comparatively, take very little to run and manage, right? So what we could do is effectively rent out, say a hotel room, but offer free insurance with it.  So the margin would be made essentially in the hotel room, but the insurance would be free.

We could package that with everything that we sell. But on the flip side, with their insurance, when they sell insurance, they can offer out extra services. For example flight bookings, hotel rooms, travel services, car rental, car sharing, car purchase and other services that we might offer in the future. So it really interlinks and brings them as part of that whole ecosystem as well, instead of just being an isolated product.

OneID Overview

Tim Bos: For example, when I go to rent a car right now at a car rental company, I go there, I give them my license, they photocopy that license and I give them proof of address. They photocopy that but they don’t go off to some authority to check it or anything like that.

So what if we could do it where I take a photo of my ID, I take a selfie; we check it automatically with authorities like AML,  and we do OCR on it to make sure that the positioning of all the things isright. We also do face matching to make sure the photo matches what’s on the passport.

Then we can encrypt that file, take a fingerprint of that file (which is like a hash of that file) store that hash on the blockchain, but keep the file either on your phone or your Google Drive or iCloud, which is encrypted with your blockchain private key. What that actually means is when my ID is sent from me to this car rental company or the bits that are needed. 

The system can check that hash on the blockchain and make sure I haven’t hacked in and changed the photos or change my address or anything like that. So you’re giving the rental company an absolute assurance so that ID hasn’t changed, and that is that person that’s renting that car.  

It’s almost a hundred percent secure, almost a hundred percent verifiable and it is also traceable. So you know it gives service above and beyond what anyone else does. So now, what that does is allow us to, for a few examples, do things like very quick and easy car rental, very quick visa applications  and express checking in of hotels; without having to wait and hand my passport over.

How OneID speeds up the eVOA process

Tim Bos: The ShareRing eVOA application process takes between two to three minutes; verses about 30 minutes if you did it through a standard website.  The reason why is because if they book the hotel and flights through us, we’ve already got the confirmation and we’ve already done their passport check through our self-sovereign identity model, OneID. 

We’ve got a machine learning engine that will actually do an optical character OCR on the passport as well as the booking confirmation if they bought it through someone else. So we can extract all the data, log it into the blockchain and then confirm it on the blockchain. Then they’re basically ready to go.

Other Uses of OneID

Tim Bos: I had a meeting yesterday with somebody who wanted to utilize OneID for the foundation of a charity that they’ve set up. They actually wanted to use it as part of the charity process, so we sat down and sort of walked through that. So, yeah, I mean we are speaking to a number of companies that are interested in utilizing sort OneID for their own purposes as well.

For example, VAT refunds where you’re doing tax refunds at shops and things like that. We’re talking to some transport companies for deliveries, so the drivers use that as a method of ID can use it to identify themselves when they’re doing pickups and drop offs. Obviously, insurance to prove who you are when you’re doing an insurance claim, but then also think about driver behavior insurance and all of that to actually track and monitor what you’re doing. 

ShareRings Relationship with eVOA and Alipay

Tim Bos: China actually requires an eVOA to enter into Thailand, which costs them money and they have to wait at the airport for about an hour. So that’s why the Electronic visa on arrival means that they can apply beforehand, get the approval, and get through the airport only in a couple of minutes.

At the moment, with our partnership with gateway services, people from China can apply for an eVOA through a mini-app in Alipay as well. So the plan is when people apply for a visa on arrival through Alipay, it would actually use the ShareLedger blockchain to do the OCR on the document to verify it and push it through to us.

So we would effectively get close to 100% of all of those transactions onto the ShareLedger blockchain. Then the next thing is looking at Indian tourists coming in, that’s the second largest number. 

Then once we’ve got that blueprint, we can take that blueprint and enter into other countries. So we’re already talking about a few other countries where we’ll take some of that blueprint and start and drop it in there and start doing partnerships in those countries also. 

How does ShareRing make money from eVOA?

Tim Bos: At the moment there are two charges for an eVOA. Firstly, the Thai government immigration charges a fee. Then there’s also the processing fee. So we’ll make some money off the processing fee itself. So basically the processing fee is broken down into a margin for gateway services, a small management for us, and then the transaction fees on the share ledger blockchain.

One of our plans though, always, because the cost of that is quite low. If somebody books say the hotel or the flight through us, we’ll do the eVOA for free. So it means that we don’t make money off the eVOA. It’s actually become a cost. But we make money off the hotel booking because that’s where there’s more margin in it for us.

Expected Number of Transactions

Tim Bos: The number of transactions that will come through the network shortly after launch is expected to be quite high. As an example, yesterday for Gateway Services processed 1700 eVOA applications in one day, but they’ve been averaging about 1400. An eVOA application for us will be somewhere around four or five transactions per application on the ShareLedger. So that’s somewhere around 6,800 transactions per day, just for that one service.

What is ShareRing’s Main Way of Generating Transactions and Revenue?

Tim Bos: I would expect that B2B will probably generate more transactions and more revenue than B2C. The ShareRing app (B2C) at the moment is one of the main focuses of onboarding users. However, for B2B, what we have been doing is we have an API that allows other companies to white label ShareLedger and OneID.

When we go to companies, we show them the ShareRing app, they love the app and we talk about how we can bring the functionality of our app into their system. So, we won’t be just selling ShareRing the travel app. It’ll be all of these other businesses that are bringing their own clients into it as well.

An example is Gateway services, through their website for the VOA applications; they’ll actually have hotel bookings, flight bookings and all of that on their website. That’ll just back end into our systems. So if you look at how we sell and service within our platform, it’s not strictly trying to funnel people through the app.

ShareRing’s B2B White labeling

Tim Bos: Clients can build their own businesses that will run on our blockchain, what we realized is the best thing to do is to actually build a managed service on top of that, which is where we have our API, and that allows us to do the white labeling on top of that API.

So as an example, if somebody wants to come in and build their own app to do hotels, they can access our APIs, the whole one ID ecosystem, things like express check in and all of that.

So we do have an API that’s been published to allow for that white labeling. But the other thing that we’re doing is with the app itself, is we’re going to be building out a software development kit. So you can just grab any of these modules and plug them into your own existing app as well. So there are a few different options about how to do it, and we will offer that essentially as a managed service.

So we will, we’ll run the platform or host the platform. We will just basically make a margin on the transactions on that platform, with transactions hitting the blockchain as well. 

For some larger companies, we may charge a monthly fee, which is a service fee for the hosting of the centralized part of that platform as well.

Thailand Joint Venture & Future Expansions

Tim Bos: We have local partners in Thailand that are basically doing a joint venture with us to launch into the market here. This enables us to focus pretty much a hundred percent on the development side of things; while our joint venture partners can focus on the marketing, the roll out, the sales, and the business to business relationships. 

It’s essentially funded by those partners in Thailand, while we focus on funding the development side. The beauty of that is that it allows us to scale into lots of different countries very effectively, without us having to do individual styles in each of these countries. 

As part of the joint venture relationship, the president of gateway services is also our honorary chairman. So that’s quite a large thing. He used to be the CEO of the mass transport association of Thailand. 

So the vision is to have all of these services online. However, hotels, flights, eVOA and insurance are really the first ones that will come out of the gate. And that’s also why we’re only focusing on one country to start with.  

Vietnam is next and we’ve already have sales people in Vietnam that are starting to work over there. And then we’ll have some other countries in Southeast Asia launching.

ShareRing App Testing

Tim Bos: There are around 50 community members who are actually testing with us at the moment; they’re doing a great job providing feedback and all of that. From the token, buying the hotel bookings etc. is pretty much finished. We’re just testing the eVOA stuff and doing a bit of tweaking on that as well.

Is it Possible for a Project to Copy what ShareRing is doing?

Tim Bos: Anything can be copied. So I would suggest that, yes, somebody could copy what we’re doing; it might not necessarily be as good, or it might be better.  The first mover advantages aredefinitely an advantage but I think that with any business in this, the ability to succeed and grow that business is built on the relationships that you’ve created and the network that you’ve got. It’s also the people who drive for that business to grow

In terms of why we may be more successful than others, number one is the network of relationships that we’ve got. Number two is the drive that the whole team has to push the company forward. Finally, number three is probably the first mover advantage.

When can you Stake SHR Tokens & Will Bookings be Available on Desktop?

Tim Bos: Staking will definitely commence just after the mainnet. Staking will occur from within the ShareRing app itself. We are looking at making a standalone wallet where you can stake, transfer SHR and all that sort of stuff. Some of the testers have already noticed that in the latest version of the app you can transfer share token and you can look at your share token balance.  So essentially, we are starting to use the app as the wallet. Then as part of that, you’ll be able to transfer SHR into a staking wallet where you can pool your stake in with other masternode holders.

ShareRing Roadmap and Specific Milestones

Tim Bos: We do have a new website and I’m promised that it will be released within the next one and a half weeks to two weeks. 

In terms of a roadmap itself, step one is releasing the app with hotel bookings, eVOA applications. Step two is to add insurance to the app itself, and flats and activities. So we’ve already got the agreements in place for those, and we’ve signed contracts for those, not MOUs. And then while we work on that in parallel, we work with the road map in terms of how we do the closest, sort of the more integrated insurance, and then tighter integration with things like the currency exchange and that sort of stuff.

Next year we’ll really be focused on perfecting that blueprint in Thailand. I would say from June onwards, we would look at the other countries in Southeast Asia that we’re already talking to and start looking at how we roll out in those countries. We just want to make sure that we get it right in this one country first before we roll out to other ones.

Video Recap here

PDF Report: https://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/CYTCryptoGem-ShareRingFINAL.pdf