The Intersection of Digitalisation and Tokenization in Supply Chain…

The intersection of digitalisation and tokenization in supply chain management is a hot topic in the business world today. As more and more companies embrace digital technologies, the use of tokens to track and manage the flow of goods and services is becoming increasingly prevalent. In this blog post, we will explore the ways in which digitalisation and tokenization are transforming supply chain management and the benefits they offer to businesses.

Digitalisation refers to the process of converting analog information into digital form. This includes everything from converting paper documents into digital files to using sensors and other digital technologies to track and monitor the movement of goods. Digitalisation allows for greater efficiency, accuracy, and transparency in supply chain management, as it allows for real-time tracking and monitoring of goods and services.

Tokenization, on the other hand, refers to the use of tokens to represent real-world assets. These tokens can be used to track and manage the movement of goods and services in a supply chain, as well as to facilitate transactions between parties. Tokenization allows for increased efficiency, as it allows for the automation of certain processes and reduces the need for manual intervention.

Together, digitalisation and tokenization offer a powerful combination for supply chain management. By using digital technologies to track and monitor the movement of goods and services, and using tokens to facilitate transactions and automate certain processes, businesses can achieve greater efficiency, accuracy, and transparency in their supply chain operations. Additionally, the use of tokens allows for increased security and reduced risk, as tokens can be programmed to include certain conditions and restrictions that must be met before they can be used.

One of the key benefits of digitalisation and tokenization in supply chain management is the ability to track and monitor the movement of goods in real-time. With digital technologies, businesses can track the location of goods at every stage of the supply chain, from production to delivery. This allows for greater transparency and visibility into the movement of goods, which can help businesses to identify and resolve any issues that may arise.

Tokenization can also help to streamline and automate certain processes in the supply chain. For example, tokens can be used to represent ownership of goods or services, allowing for the automatic transfer of ownership when a transaction is completed. This can reduce the need for manual intervention and improve the efficiency of the supply chain.

In addition to increased efficiency and transparency, the use of tokens in supply chain management can also improve security and reduce risk. Tokens can be programmed to include certain conditions and restrictions that must be met before they can be used, helping to ensure that transactions are conducted in a secure and controlled manner. This can help to reduce the risk of fraud and other types of abuse in the supply chain.

While there are many benefits to the intersection of digitalisation and tokenization in supply chain management, it is important for businesses to carefully consider the implications of these technologies. For example, the use of digital technologies and tokens may require significant investments in infrastructure and training, and there may be regulatory considerations to take into account. Additionally, there may be privacy and data security concerns to consider when using digital technologies and tokens to track and monitor the movement of goods.

Overall, the intersection of digitalisation and tokenization in supply chain management is a powerful force for transformation in the business world. By leveraging these technologies, businesses can achieve greater efficiency, accuracy, and transparency in their supply chain operations, while also reducing risk and improving security. As these technologies continue to evolve, it is likely that we will see even more transformation in the way goods and services are tracked and managed in the supply chain.

Giving no F(xxx) about Voice.com and so should you

Dumping most likely north of 250Million of funding into being late to the party.

Yes, I know starting with bold statement can shoot the opposite way. Most people who know me in person would say, I am not the person who does that. In general when something new launches in the Blockchain and Crypto space I am excited and positive, but what BlockOne is doing here with Voice.com is complete, not understandable. In simple terms, they are late to the party, and no one is telling them so decide to do that and be happy to be converted.

Being late to the party
For once people involved in Cryptocurrencies and the Blockchain space tend not to be late to the party either early to the game. But what BlackOne is doing here with there idea of building “another social network” is just ridiculous, and it seems like more a reaction of having a “shitload of money” available and something needs to be done with it.

The verdict Voice.com
For a start, they spent 30 Million USD on the domain voice.com. One lesson learned in the past, domain names doe not matter as much as people think especially in the age of mobile is king. The lesson learned functionality does matter more. When I heard for the first time BlockOne’s plans launching a social network, I rubbed my head. The reason for this is that space is so crowded and “just” starting a social network does not work out in nearly most of the cases. Having money is not always the advantage to win the game, its passion and uniqueness.

We have seen it in the past for 1 Instagram hundreds of social network platforms which started had to fail, its finding a needle in a haystack. Last cycles success snapchat has a hard now, having made it for some time and allowed early investors to cash in big time. A new star in the social network world is TIKTOK. TIKTOK is unique and has for my taste not much to do with any traditional social network which, according to the information voice.com will be. TIKTOK is the anti-Instagram where only the rich and famous get followers versus on TIKTOK it’s not so much about the looks (at the moment) more about what you do.

3 Points why Voice Will fail (personal opinion)

• Voice.com will need people to go through a KYC/AML process, which is bringing a lot of hurdles into the onboarding process
• Voice.com will try most likely to attract existing stars from of Social Media Platform and lure them in by rewarding them for “transferring” their userbase over to voice.com and incentive the Influencers to do so. This may bring the most for short term growth. Implementing growth mechanisms like this does make sticky users who ar are coming back again and again and again. Influencers will after having gotten there referral commission most likely utilize voice.com just as another outlet where content will simply be repopulated.
• Voice.com is simply too late to the party and imagine there was once G+ from Google which got initial nice traction but died out very quickly. Googles success in social networks is and simply was always youtube.

Things in mind why they do this
I personally do not understand what was in the minds of BlockOnes Management when they made the decision, but I assume someone like Brendan Blumer came up with the idea himself (i consider him as a smart person) and no one of the executive team wanted to argue with the guy who provides and feeds them with the millions (billions) he raised for BlockOne. As they have a ton of cash, a ton of things can be tried out. And who am I to judge I did not pull off a 4 Billion dollar raise.

SUMMARY
All overall, that amount of money will go in development and marketing, and it will generate jobs. For the greater good, it will provide a livelihood for families at least :).

My prediction is, the social network voice.com will 99% fail once hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into it. Big splashing, flashing and showbusiness as its know in crypto land where no one cared about the product and users (in most cases beside exchanges) isn’t the game one can play in 2020 and especially when wanting to get a foothold in the social network space.

I would like to see pitching them Voice.com to any VC, I assume most will say, guys, you are late to the party. We will see what will happen with voice.com over the next 24 to 30 month and if I been completely wrong or even myself got converted to voice.com as it is the most significant and most excellent experience unseen so far.

How to build a Crypto Unicorn in less than…

FTX.com – Fact & Fiction of a money run

Before we dive deeper into this, I may have to explain what a unicorn is. A unicorn is a privately held startup company valued at 1 billion USD. In traditional startup land, it is not so common to get to this valuation, and it needs some hard work sweat and tears to go there. For companies like uber, it took around 4,5 years to become a unicorn for Airbnb it took around a timeframe to become one.

Unicorns at speed
Looking into the crypto and blockchain space, one of the first unicorns was Coinbase which raised a 100 Million USD at a 1,6 Billion Dollar Valuation. Coinbase was founded in 2012 and reached that status in the cryptocurrency craze of 2017. Binance toped this, and within a few months (around 6. month) of launching, they achieved unicorn status. Binance is as well profitable and can be considered the fastest profitable startup which achieved unicorn status. It’s valuation is now considered to be somewhere around 2 Billion Dollars USD. As of late 2019 Binance just crossed the 1 Billion mark in cumulative profit with bringing in 183,5 million USD in Profits only in Q3 2019.

Enter the Next Wave
Entering FTX which is a derivatives trading platform which launched its operation in Mai 2019 by Alameda Research. Having initialy done an ICO for there FTT token which washed in around 8 Million USD, they as well got additional funding in the tens of millions from CZ aka Binance. In December of 2019 they claim to have a daily trading volume of nearly half a billion USD across all of there products.

1 Billion Valuation here we come
Having just announced in early 2020 options into there offering a new funding round is up and ahead. This time in the form of a public sale for tokenized equity issued at a valuation of 1 Billion USD. Each FTX_Equity token is valued at 2USD, and it is estimated that they plan to get in an additional 30 to 50 Million USD. By raising an amount like this, they exchange equity for around 3% to 5% and validate with this the 1 Billion dollar valuation.

Fact or Fiction
I am getting it that the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency space is hot and particularly companies which are providing exchange services. We have seen it with the likes of Kraken, Binance, Coinbase etc in the past. All of those companies have proved they can catch the momentum and get users and maintain as well have a consistent user base. Taking a closer look into FTX shows that they are in terms of users still on the lower end and a large amount of “Phantasie” is priced in this 1 Billion dollar valuation.

Personal Statement
I am a firm believer in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space but what is happening with this ultra fast-growing unicorns is not healthy. In my opinion and I may be wrong, but it looks like, companies are specifically built and pumped up. It is almost like getting those high valuations for early-stage companies with the idea intent to flip them as fast as possible.

In the end, we are living in a free world, and I belive and like the startup spirit etc, but this is like Capital and Company building on Steroids where most likely we maybe see another “disaster” like the one with WEWORK. Interesting is that cycles have accelerated and things are happening much much faster than just half a decade ago. #Moneyrulztheworld #Speedkillscompetition

A new frontier for New Media Art thanks to…

How to sell a pile of pixels for more than 2000 USD

Being myself an avid fan and follower of the New media art scene where most works of art are only available digitally. I have myself experimented with small bits and pieces over the recent years and once having come across couple years ago the idea of NFT’s it always was clear for me they will add value to the New Media Art Scene.

What is the current state of the art?
When one looks into all these 3D VR projects, one can see it attracts a ton of new media artists, and they are showcasing their artworks in virtual galleries such as https://www.cryptovoxels.com/parcels/461 . Platforms like superrare.com are running even complete platforms and helped artist so far to earn nearly 1 Mio USD in total. So we can see there is a demand and a market is developing despite still being at an early stage.

Experiments for new mediums for New Media Artists.
I have to say there is one thing which bothers, it’s the underutilizing of the Virtual Space for 3D new media Artworks. Being myself interested in the space, I decided to think as well about how it could be done and was coming up with the Artwork “Scalping-Bitcoin” a couple of months ago. It was great to see the response from others as buzz was going on about it.

I think using a full parcel (virtual land plot) and the elements provided by Virtual worlds one thinks as well beyond the two-dimensional canvas, and so I did. Initially, I thought it is just for fun but then after getting requests and asked if that “artwork” is for sale, I put it up on opensea.com a place where people can trade non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum chain, and got lucky and found buyers.

I agree one factor is for sure that the land plot it is built on is in a prime location in cryptovoxels and a lot of people who entered for the first time cryptovoxels more or less stumbled across it. In the end, I put it up for auction, and it was snacked up by an avid digital art collector in the space. Initially, I did not know who the buyer was. I conducted some research and found out who he is and had a good chat with him about his intention. The buyer assured he did not buy it because of the land but because he liked the iconic work in the cryptovoxel universe and will let it be how it is.

What will the future bring
I think we will see much more of those things happening in the future as a market is developing, and there are as well buyers for that kind of works. Virtual space and tokenized digital artworks will become the norm, and we will see better utilization of the third dimension for artworks. In the future, I will build a handful of works per year as I enjoy the process.

Ideas for other artworks are already in my mind, and I will focus at the moment on the cryptovoxels environment. The cryptovoxels universe fits more my taste when it comes to digital arts, and artworks then other universes like Decentraland and Sandbox. Those two further digital worlds are more focusing on a gaming-oriented audience, then an art appreciation one.

Major Sports Leagues are betting big on Non-Fungible Tokens

Sports Leagues such as NBA & NFL have millions of fans and followers not only in the real world but as well in the digital space. Looking always for new ways to create engagement with there fans, they are highly interested in doing so. Panini (https://www.paniniamerica.net/blockchain.html) which is well known as a traditional player in the industry, started to issue blockchain-based cards for major sports leagues such as the NFL, MLB and NBA beside various soccer teams.

Room for Growth
As a ton of digital natives have been growing up with Panini sticker albums and most of them are now online, there is no doubt that this could unlock additional revenue streams. Looking only into numbers of existing social media channels of the NBA one can guess the estimate of potential buyers of those blockchain-based player cards.

Beside Panini other companies help sports clubs as well to tokenize their top Players. One such recent event is Juventus Player Cristiano Ronaldo getting his own ethereum token with a partnership of French fantasy football company Sorare. The card is issued in 3 different categories where each player will have one unique card, ten super rare cards and 100 rare cards which brings the cards issued per player only to 111cards in total. Further European football clubs are aligned to do so as well. Sorare supports the cards to be used on their own platform and for sure the cards will be traded as well on secondary markets as regular “paper” issued trading cards do.

First Big Successes
Kobe Bryant’s (hopefully rests well in heaven) Blockchain-based player card which is issued by Panini sold for over 60.000 USD. SWAP (https://fantastec-swap.io/) has as well just recently closed deals with major names in the Football industry such as Real Madrid, Arsenal and Borussia Dortmund. Panini thought as well further and announced it would release officially licensed blockchain trading cards with a 1:1 representation of a physical version of the card.

As we can see, there is a lot of movement in the market, and first Pilot projects are done. Blockchain is a useful technology for making collectables more secure and bringing them into the digital space.

Security tokens are the investment product for the digital…

I confess I am still a strong believer in Utility Token Ecosystems, but I  agree that the ICO craze was not sustainable. As neither those who issued tokens nor those who invested understood what they were doing, it is good that alternatives, such as security tokens, are popping up. 

For me, they are simple digitized shares or bonds of small and medium-sized companies that are a financing instrument to them—nothing more and nothing less. Some may argue they are tokenized “pink sheets.” 🙂

Some influential people see them as instruments for a whole new generation and that the generation who grew up with the Internet and everything digital is the market for Security tokens. I personally do not think this is right.

Millennials are crazy and they do buy expensive brands, invest, and trade, but they do not use traditional company assets. They do it with things like limited edition sneakers, pop art, or brands like Supreme. 

I do agree that we are at an early stage in the game. There have been past ideas to tokenize real companies’ shares, like those of Facebook, and make them more freely tradeable and transferable between people across borders. But, as we all know, that is not so easy. 

The most interesting space where the tokenization of traditional investment products is happening is in discussions about real estate and physical assets like gold, silver, and palladium. I see great potential in them and in the potential that millennials will like those kind of assets, which they can acquire simply, comfortably, and digitally in a nontraditional bank or other investment method. 

Challenger banks, like Revolut, have been offering cryptocurrencies along with standard banking products, and they gained a lot of attention and new customers because of that. 

Recently, I was at the Goldzip launch in Hong Kong where 300 MIO worth of gold was getting tokenized, and people will be able to purchase Gold easily in a pure digital form. At a similar time, popular European crypto to fiat exchange Bitpanda added digital gold to their offering. How long it will take to see their property offerings? 

In conclusion, I do not think millennials are the main investors in security token offerings, nor will they be. Security token offerings will most likely not be volatile at all as most of the companies that issue them do so as revenue participation notes or profit shares. There are not many companies who are offer security tokens that represent equity because the nature of tokenized equity for early-stage companies includes some problems. Tokenized equity is more appropriate for projects that need a one-time funding round, such as property projects or movies— not start-ups, which generally have multiple funding rounds. 

Tokenized Virtual Worlds – VR Platforms and Blockchain Technology:…

Digital scarcity is a recent emerging trend when it comes to projects like Decentraland, a VR platform powered by Ethereum, where users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications. One could see it as a decentralized, three-dimensional version of Web/Serverspace. 

Land in Decentraland

As of today in May 2019, Decentraland has become more or less of a concept, and most of the activity on it involves people buying and selling virtual land plots on the platform. The whole world consists of 90000 land plots, where each land plot represents space on a map and represents a kind of 16×16-meter area where one can build on in the future. All this “digital land” is fully tokenized and represented as an NFT (non-fungible token). 

But, there is a catch 22 to this. As we have seen with Crypto Kitties, people can pay exorbitant amounts of money for a virtual item. To bring it to the next level, when it comes to land in Decentraland, single land plots change hands with prices around 500 to 2000 USD for those in prime locations.

This is not the only thing a user can do; the platform has editor and construction tools who can build in a kind of sandbox environment, and soon, avatars should be launched.

CryptoVoxels the Mincraft of VR meets Blockchain

Another project I have been looking into is CryptoVoxels. CryptoVoxels is reminiscent of Minecraft. The advantage of this world is that it’s more or less up and running. Yes, it is still in its basics, but one can purchase land against Ether and with their colour token. A user can even bring colour to the world as well. In terms of land speculation, there is not too much going on at the moment, but we will see. 

Most of the people I meet inside CryptoVoxels are people who want to sell other NFTs in a virtual 3D store. CryptoVoxels makes it very easy to implement NFT sales and listings from opensea.io, which is the largest marketplace for crypto collectibles.

Conclusion

The marriage of VR and Blockchain is still in its early days, but I have heard of many other projects that want to build VR experiences. For instance, there are Beachhead2020, which focuses on the tower defence game Beachhead, or Verses, which even wants to reinvent the whole Web to be on its own and make it spatial. 

So far, I think NFTS  (non fungible tokens) as virtual tokenized game assets will be a multi-billion dollar market, but we are still in the infancy of that market segment. What is great is that some of those projects are really creative and community driven and are growing themselves naturally while they are being built. I am expecting some major announcements in this segment, as well as something like the VRBA (https://www.vrblockchainalliance.org/) with famous members such as High Fidelity or JanusVR.

Some Thoughts on Polymesh: The world’s first security blockchain?

I am personally a big fan of Charles Hoskinson because he is a very approachable and friendly person spreading awareness about decentralization and blockchain. However,  he does like to jump ship, and it seems like he is off on his next sail.

Charles Hoskinson announced, together with Polymath—yes, Polymath, the company Trevor Koverko runs and was once the hottest contestant for winning the security token issuance platform race—that they will launch Polymesh, a purpose-built blockchain specifically focusing on security token issuing and will be the world’s first security token blockchain. They want to marry issuers, investors and regulators together.

Polymath is currently using the ERC20 standard on its platform, but as Ethereum still has some scaling issues, Polymath finds it appropriate to launch a new separate chain that focuses solely on securities. 

Some questions I want to ask are as follows:” What are the real intentions? Will  the price of the Polymath token go up as it did for Binance when it announced its own chain? Is it just the next port for Hoskinson? And after “abandoning” ETC, will he now  abandon ADA? 

This was all strategically announced during Consensus 2019 in New York. So far, not much price movement on the Polymath token, which hopefully will be usable for Polymatchain as well. Or, are those guys going to do a separate fundraiser for it, which would actually be pathetic. 🙂 

We will see what will happen in the near future. A small side note: They claim to be the first ones, but there is already a private/public blockchain focusing on security tokens. It’s called $CHX from https://weown.com/ but more on them another time.

Fake Bounty Hunters and an Inflated Telegram Channel are…

The Prostitution of ICOs for 5 minutes of fake…

What’s wrong with ICO event organizers

The other day, an ICO pitch event organizer stressed to me that some of the ICOs I am working with should join his tour. He had a whole presentation prepared regarding which ICOs he has worked with and how many millions they have raised. On the sidelines, he mentioned as well that I would get a referral commission if I brought him ICOs for his roadshows (I assume he does not totally understand the role of an advisor, which is most likely). I advise the founders of the projects I consult with that the competition they should get involved in is for community building in the crypto space.

Naturally, I have a lot of concerns. They like to be on the stage and at the big events but forget very often who their audience really is.

ICO PITCH EVENTS send the wrong message

By putting ICO projects up against each other, like at a Miss World Competition, the whole thing ends up mostly being like a “beauty competition” and about “who can pitch the best.” Founders waste time to build perfect narratives for their pitches and polish them with nice visuals and large numbers.

This is not how ICOs work

ICOs work by doing the hard work on the ground and building up the community. Every minute spent by founders on polishing a pitch deck to attract the next big fund is a minute not spent on building up their community base. Once the community base is strong and has validation from the crypto community, the project flies to the moon and the funds are wanting to get in. But yes, this takes time, and it’s not just a “we raised X millions of dollars in 3 days” thing; it’s most likely something that takes the ICO around 6 to 12 months, depending on how well the founders are already rooted within the community.

The judges and audience can’t evaluate properly

Most likely, the winners will be (as they were recently at the competition held by EOS in Hong Kong) those projects which have the biggest “Vision” and shiniest “Idea”. In most cases, the judges and the audience will not have enough information to be able to validate and compare the projects that are pitching because in this space, they can be from vastly different segments. The ICOs most likely present their standard pitch deck, which is more or less the same as other ICOs, just with other faces and other numbers. Proper due diligence to give proper feedback or make a meaningful evaluation is not there.

ICO event organizers are not investors (and most likely, the audience isn’t either)

At most, they are just event organizers who want to grab the money to be made at ICO pitch events because they are standard in the industry and one needs them. They are attracted to getting as many ICO projects as possible to their events because they will use those who succeed as a kind of validation for the event.

Lastly, ICO competitions also involve a moral hazard of giving the ICO who wins a false sense of pride because a ton of these events are rigged. In most cases, the ICO has not done much aside from make a good presentation; they are simply lucky enough to match the advisor’s industry taste. This can be very demoralizing for projects which are highly technical and most judges or people in the audience do not understand.

Stop wasting your time and do it this way.

Stop wasting your time and stop entering ICO competitions. Build your community instead of pitching at events, and if you do present, then present what your company is solving or give an informative overview of the space you are in and how blockchain changes or things can disrupt this space, as well as what part you and your company will play in this.

Always consider that those projects which really fly are those projects which have a strong community; the community makes them fly and not fake numbers in your Telegramchannel. Pitching at numerous ICO pitch events is not the way to go. It is better to do community meetups once you have enough followers to do so, and make them offline as well as online with ambassadors of your ICO project.

Always consider that those big projects were not born from newbies or someone who just had an idea and wanted to do an ICO; most of them have been in the minds of people for a long time and are solving real problems. Questions like “when MOON?” and “when LAMBO?” would not be asked because the community stands behind a project and it is not a simple pump and dump.

I have invested in more than 30 ICO projects alone in the past 6 months, but none of them was at any competition I attended; most of them just popped up on the Internet everywhere and had a strong community behind them. Some were personal referrals from people who work with the projects, and others just had such a unique idea that they stood out from the crowd and captured my attention.

About the author

Juergen Hoebarth is Managing Director of Tokenization Ltd. His involvement in cryptocurrencies dates back to 2014, and he was an early ICO investor of Ethereum and NEO. Juergen has profound and solid experience in the digital start-up and blockchain ecosystem and is also an evangelist who speaks about the potential of tokenization enabled via platforms such as Ethereum, EOS, NEM, NEO and Cardano.