As we have seen from the thousands of ICOs and hundreds of community-funded coins launched in 2018 alone, the race to produce the killer application to bridge the gap to non-technical users has continued to pick up the pace.

However, despite the combined efforts of a now complex orchestra of blockchain projects, general adoption still remains years away, as some of the more pressing challenges remain unsolved.

How nascent and even well-established projects navigate these tumultuous waters can easily mean the difference between success and failure, as is clear by the myriad of projects struggling to make a change in 2019.

We got the chance to chat with Gee Chuang, co-founder and CEO of Listia and Ink Protocol, to get a better look at where the blockchain industry is headed, and how new crypto startups can be successful in 2019 and beyond!

Could you please tell our readers about yourself?

Sure thing! My name is Gee Chuang, and I am one of the co-founders and CEO of Listia and Ink Protocol. I received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 2001 and then moved out to Silicon Valley to pursue my startup career.

The startup part of my career almost never happened though! In 2001, the dot-com bubble burst and it got a bit harder to begin a startup for a few years. After working as an engineer in the networking industry and building a successful online marketing business, my co-founder James and I finally started Listia in 2009.

Listia is a peer to peer marketplace for buying and selling primarily used goods. Over 100M items have been transacted on the marketplace over the last 9 years. Most recently, we launched a product called Ink Protocol, which takes everything we have learned running Listia and distills it into a decentralized, blockchain-based reputation and transaction system for all marketplaces.

Tell us more about Ink Protocol? Why incorporate blockchain technology?

Ink Protocol helps users securely buy and sell anywhere with decentralized reputation, escrow, and dispute resolution. Our vision is to enable trusted peer-to-peer transactions on any marketplace or platform.

Building a scalable marketplace system at Listia took many years, and over that time we came to realize that most of the solutions we were building could be generalized across all types of marketplaces. So, leveraging our years of experience in running a marketplace with over 100 million items exchanged, we created a blockchain-based transaction system that can be used on every platform, called Ink Protocol.

Ink Protocol is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, which is a critical piece of this system since it allows us to store a seller’s reputation and complete transaction history in a public, decentralized way. This means sellers can own and maintain their reputation in a way that is both reliable and also free from the clutches of centralized marketplaces and platforms.

For the first time, you will be able to take your hard-earned selling reputation and feedback (for example, from eBay or Amazon) and use it to sell on other platforms, like Craigslist or FB marketplace. Ink Protocol’s reputation system, which is implemented as a series of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, makes this possible without the need for a central service or middleman.

What would you say the greatest challenges are in creating Ink Protocol?

The greatest challenge so far has been finding vibrant communities of users who are actually engaging in commerce via cryptocurrency. So far, over 5M items have already been listed using Ink Protocol’s XNK currency on Listia, but most of the other mainstream marketplaces still function 100 percent via traditional fiat payment methods. We strongly believe this will change over the next few years and will be in prime position to help make that shift possible.

However, in the meantime, we are also building a new decentralized marketplace app that will make it extremely easy for anyone to buy and sell across all types of marketplaces via Ink Protocol even without any cryptocurrency knowledge. Expect this app to be released in Q1 2019!

What are your near terms goals for the platform? Anything interesting in development?

Yes! We are currently working on building a global decentralized marketplace powered by Ink Protocol’s blockchain-based reputation system. The marketplace app will feature mainstream payments via PayPal and allow users to safely buy and sell across multiple marketplaces while earning public, transferable reputation.

It is very important to note that this will be a mainstream consumer app that will finally bring real consumer blockchain adoption to the masses. It is built on top of our existing Ink Protocol reputation system, the Ethereum blockchain, and Ink Pay’s infrastructure, but with a completely redesigned front end that is easy to use. No plugins, wallets or cryptocurrency knowledge required. We think full featured decentralized applications (dApps) are coming, but are still a few more years away.

Our main short-term goal is to get as many buyers and sellers as possible using the Ink Protocol reputation system outside of Listia. There are so many huge marketplaces that need a robust reputation and transaction system, so we will be starting there. We also plan to allow users to import feedback from previous transactions onto Ink Protocol to kick start the marketplace.

How do you imagine the online marketplace landscape will change over the next few years?

We believe the online marketplace landscape will become increasingly decentralized over the next few years. Currently, almost all of the p2p transaction volume is controlled by a few large marketplaces that own all of your data and charge high fees as a result.

As distribution via social channels and free classifieds-style marketplaces and apps continues to increase, we think that the centralized model will start to lose out to true peer-to-peer transactions. A buyer who finds a seller online should be able to easily and safely buy a good or service without the need for a rent-seeking middleman.

We think decentralized models will completely change the way we buy and sell online within the next few years. Additionally, payments will happen more cheaply and efficiently using cryptocurrencies such as BTC, ETH, and of course stable coins as they become more widely available to regular consumers.

How do you see Ink Protocol fitting into the landscape in the next five years?

Ink Protocol was designed to sit right in the middle of p2p marketplace transactions. It is a completely free and open platform that handles all of the basic states when completing an anonymous p2p transaction online.

It all starts with the decentralized reputation system, which is at the core of Ink Protocol. We believe that decentralized reputation will play a huge role in allowing buyers and sellers to slowly move to a decentralized model. This will likely happen over the next couple of years. After that, we believe the pure cryptocurrency transaction system within Ink Protocol will start to take over fiat payments, making credit card processing fees obsolete within online transactions.

This means marketplace transaction fees will start to approach 0 and as long as Ink Protocol is enabling easy and secure transactions, there will be little need for fully centralized marketplaces that control the entire flow. We believe these marketplaces will still exist for things like liquidity, discovery, and curation for some time, but they will no longer be the ones in control of your data and thus will not be able to charge huge fees anymore.

The number of ICOs has drastically increased in 2018, but the fraction of these being successfully funded has fallen considerably. Why do you think this is?

I believe this is primarily a function of the rapid decline in the overall cryptocurrency market cap. Much of the enthusiasm and interest in cryptocurrency occurred during the massive growth, and as people lost interest, so does interest in new projects.

We are in a rebuilding period right now, which is great because the best and most technically sound projects will rise to the top and filter out much of the noise that we saw throughout 2018.

2018 was one of the worst bear markets on record. Do you think we’ll see an end to it any time soon?

I don’t believe we are near the end of the current bear market just yet, but I do believe that it has so far been very healthy for the overall ecosystem. It’s very possible we can see new lows in the major cryptocurrencies, but only because of the irrational behavior of the market.

My bet is that we will recover as an industry sometime over the next couple years and cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech will be ubiquitous and exist as a base layer within the apps and business tools we use every day.

What advice would you give to other crypto projects looking to start up in this harsh climate?

If you believe in cryptocurrency adoption and blockchain technology, this is a great time to start building. The world is just getting introduced to the benefits of this tech, and I believe we are still in the 1st inning of adoption.

The climate is only harsh for speculation, but that has nothing to do with the real tech that is being built right now, so if you are a builder — then now is a great time to get started.

Which blockchain trends do you think will grow in popularity in the coming years?

I love following blockchain adoption within gaming! I believe that one of the primary ways blockchain will enter a mainstream consumer application is through gaming. Specifically, we are very interested in NFTs and crypto collectibles both within games, but also within other consumer applications.

Digital ownership and provable scarcity will be huge driving forces within gaming for years to come. We are very excited to play the next generation of blockchain games this year.

In your opinion, which cryptocurrencies are undervalued right now?

I try to stay away from cryptocurrency speculation, but my guess is that if we look back 5-10 years from now, the entire crypto market cap will look vastly undervalued at the beginning of 2019.

If you had to give props to another blockchain project, which would it be and why?

I love what they are doing over at Coinbase, which might sound like a non-answer, but they are truly paving the way for consumer adoption. They are one of the only legitimate on and off ramps in the U.S. and without them, consumer adoption within applications would be almost impossible.

Do you have any final words for our readers?

I know many BeInCrypto readers probably feel tired and beat up from the dramatic shrinking of cryptocurrency market caps in 2018, but for those of you still here, my advice is to keep learning and building. Speculation may have brought you into the industry, but I hope it is the real technology and applications that will cause you to stay. Thank you for the interview!

Do you agree with Gee Chuang’s vision of the future? Will Ink Protocol live up to its promises? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!