by Riley Kim, ConsenSys Asia-Pacific PR Lead.

Konnichiwa! Hajimemashite! Douzo Yoroshiku!

Good day, glad to meet you for the first time, and I look forward to your guidance. I can also count to 100 in Japanese, but this is pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the language. Sumimasen to my Sensei.

Straight over from Seoul, we got to Tokyo for Japan Blockchain Week. Like South Korea, Japan wields considerable influence in the cryptocurrency market: figures from July indicated the Japanese yen was responsible for 11% of bitcoin trades. ConsenSys has always been keenly observing Japan, including John Lilic, our colleague who works out of our Manila office and helps drive business growth in Asia and around the world.

As with many of us at ConsenSys, John wears more than one hat, and has been actively promoting the company and Ethereum in Japan. Here are his blog posts from 2016 that showcase the diverse community and scenic views from the Land of the Rising Sun: The Rise of Ethereum Part 1 and Part 2, and his presentation (in Japanese) at Slush Tokyo 2018.

Be in Tokyo

We kick off with b.tokyo, hosted by N.Avenue and Coindesk Japan, focusing on the idea of “Value Revolution” to lead us into a new era. Matthew Iles, CEO and founder of Civil, took to discussing how tokenisation could incentivise the evolution of media.

Civil is a community-owned journalism network backed by ConsenSys. For the unawares, Venture Beat summarizes well what Civil does and hopes to achieve. In essence, Civil is deploying a blockchain token registry to build up a list of credible news sites. Using the economics of a token curation registry, the Civil community of reporters will apply their collective journalistic eye to help ensure legitimate and good reporting.

A challenge system is built-in, so that the members can call out inaccuracies. However, the beauty of token economics also helps prevent frivolous abuse, as members must stake their tokens and flagged entries are then voted on by the community. The desired outcome is a virtuous self-sustaining cycle of credible and trustworthy reporting, with the aim of reallocating incentives back to newsrooms.

This raison d’etre is behind Iles’ comments at his panel, which was moderated by Kuniyoshi Mabuchi (Director of Facebook Japan), alongside fellow panelist Julien Genestoux (CEO of Unlock) that works to empower and compensate content creators fairly.

The opening question around Civil and Unlock’s motivations saw different points of departure that converge on the same goal. Genestoux looks at how the existing metric of measurement, which is clicks, resulted in click-bait behaviour. This ranged from relatively benign practices of making readers click through multiple pages for one piece of content, to outright fake news. To him, the value of a good piece of content should originate from the reader or user.

In founding Civil, Iles wanted to solve what he sees as the problem of today’s internet — that it is utterly broken. What started as a platform for the people to accommodate diverse thoughts and opinions has become a tool to mislead and confuse. He sees blockchain and distributed technology as a paradigm shift to break us out of an environment controlled by the few and back to one that’s owned by many.

On the issue of incentives, Iles called out the internet giants (ahem.. Google…. cough cough… Facebook). Their business models rely on users spending the most time possible on their channels in order to obtain and sell the most user data possible to advertisers. He puts it plainly that “the accuracy of the content is not of concern.” Iles is concerned by the lack of recognition of how serious things are — beyond acknowledging the bad of internet scams — governments and societies are in conflicts because of fake news. Iles remains optimistic that blockchain and decentralisation will be powerful tools for responsible journalism, and reverse the decline of good reporting where newsrooms shutter after losing revenue and valuable readership to internet giants.

[From left: Julien Genestoux, CEO of Unlock, Matthew Iles, CEO of Civil, Kuniyoshi Mabuchi, Director of Facebook Japan]

Fast, Furious, Frictionless

True to the adage that Asia never sleeps, we were at Unblock Tokyo on a Saturday morning. Organised by regional media group Asia Blockchain Review, the programming held at local community space BINARYSTAR was a full day of content discussing protocol and applications to fast track the ecosystem. Again, a full Saturday : )