Bounty Host Interview — James from CanYa

The CanYa bounty campaign is currently live on alpha.bounty0x.io where bounty hunters can claim over $25k in bounties.

Bounty0x recently interviewed James from CanYa — a peer to peer marketplace of services, where users can easily find the best service providers based on a reputation based system.

We cover blockchain payments, online commerce, problems with existing payment networks and how CanYa plans to solve them.

1.Please tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in CanYa and the crypto space?

Bought my first $50 of bitcoin in 2012 — forgot about it and continued along at university.

It wasn’t until the Ethereum whitepaper that I fully got involved in the space. After reading the Whitepaper and exploring the idea of smart contracts I was sold.

Since then have been fully immersed in the space, keeping on top of technical updates, attending conferences, networking with top people in the space and getting involved in all things ICO!

2.Who came up with the initial idea for CanYa?

The first idea of CanYa was birthed after two of the CanYa founders, JP and Chris had terrible experiences trying to book home services.

After a battle trying to find a reputable plumber the team came up with CanYa — A peer to peer marketplace of services, where users can easily find the best service providers based on a reputation based system.

It is a completely trustless application (using Ethereum’s smart contracts), can be international (using cryptocurrency payments) and can make finding service providers seamless for anyone at any time!

3. Tell us about the background of CanYa? How was the idea initially conceived? Can you tell those of us who aren’t already familiar CanYa the idea and concept behind it? What problem is it seeking to solve?

The basic concept of CanYa is a decentralized marketplace of services — For those who are in the space — Taskrabbit or Fiverr are both excellent examples of a centralized counterpart.

The problem with these platforms is that fees are ridiculously high. For a service provider, on the average legacy services marketplace the fee is at least 20%, often getting as high as 50%!

This means the service provider, for example a cleaner or graphic designer, is getting their earnings slashed by the platform they are using.

CanYa seeks to solve this problem by having a flat 1% fee, meaning service providers can keep 99% of earnings.

Legacy platforms also have issues around escrow — If they get hacked it’s a huge problem for all funds in escrow and all of the users information.

4.What is your role at CanYa?

I’m doing business development and community management — My role in CanYa is knowing the ICO market back to front, knowing what the Ethereum community responds to and ensuring CanYa is running a transparent and community focused ICO.

5.What excites you most about the crypto space right now?

Probably the most exciting part of the crypto ecosystem is scaling: all the dApps being built on top of Ethereum (CanYa included) heavily depend on the future scaling of Ethereum.

Although I’m open to any cryptocurrency coming out with new technological solutions, I’m especially excited for what Ethereum has to offer.

At Devcon3 in Cancun recently there was a heap of technical discussion about Casper, sharding and state channels, all of which will contribute to a future proof Ethereum.

6.In the future, where do you see the crypto space heading?

I can’t really see a way down from here long term — Crypto is now considered an asset class and when compared to any other asset class a 200-billion-dollar market cap looks like a joke.

I think there’s going to be a ‘weeding out’ of scammy and misleading ICO projects. However I also agree with Griff Green, with a ‘tokenize everything’ mindset.

I want an ice cream vendor in Zimbabwe to create an ICO within her local community for $1,000 of startup costs with a token that redistributes a portion of the profit back to token holders.

There’s endless examples of how token economics can provide utility to the world and we shouldn’t let an enormous number of different tokens scare the community into thinking this a bad thing.

7.Tell us something most people don’t know about CanYa.

A few awesome features that most people don’t know about — Our inbuilt wallet will allow users to preset the different currencies they would like to send & receive.

For example, a user could select to pay 30% in ETH, 30% in BTC, 30% in AUD and 10% Dogecoin . All of these payments are then instantly converted into CAN token, so that payment can be sent to our trustless hedged escrow contract.

The contract uses a gold backed token to ensure that even if the preferred payment currency drops in value the service provider still gets the agreed upon price.

The service provider also has complete choice over how they’re paid too, they could decide to receive 75% of their pay in Australian dollar to pay their bills and 25% in ETH to start investing in the technology.

Another unique feature we’re planning to implement for our platform wallet is a trusted/trustless private key setup .

The majority of CanYa users and indeed the world aren’t crypto experts, forcing these users to hold their own private keys opens funds up to user error.

That’s why we’re creating wallets where the users can choose. If they’re comfortable holding their private keys, the user retains full control over their funds; CanYa has no access.

We’ll also have a more user-friendly private key setup where CanYa holds the users private keys, although these private keys are still encrypted with the users password.

8.What does the CanYa roadmap and vision consist of for the next few years? What is the biggest challenge CanYa faces in achieving this goal?

One of my favorite parts of our whitepaper is our decentralization roadmap — This sets out a realistic plan to decentralize ‘out rather than up’.

Unlike many projects that start with a whitepaper and try to build a fully decentralized project from the bottom up, CanYa already has a platform.

Therefore we can start to decentralize segments of our platform. We will first decentralize payments, allowing for borderless, instant payments.

Then we’ll begin to decentralize all other parts of our dApp, user data, reputation, computation and eventually governance of the platform.

Creating a fully decentralized platform hinges on other projects and Ethereum’s development. This is also our biggest challenge.

Relying on this development may seem like a high-risk strategy, however when looking at the growth of Ethereum developers in the past 12 months we’re confident the space has a big enough community to make these things happen!

9.What is one thing that sets CanYa apart from the rest of the blockchain projects in the eco-system?

I think one of the biggest things that sets CanYa apart from the rest of blockchain projects is an already functional app.

CanYa decided to create a working product before heading to ICO, to prove to the community that we aren’t ‘just another ICO’ and that we’re committed to bringing a fair and efficient marketplace of services to the world.

We’re excited for what the future brings to the entire ecosystem!

If you would like to partner with Bounty0x, or post your bounty campaign on the alpha platform, don’t hesitate getting in touch with us.

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