Mikko Ohtamaa is the CTO of TokenMarket, an exchange and research platform for tokens of decentralized technology projects. He serves as an advisor for FirstBlood, was formerly CTO of LocalBitcoins. His current project, TokenMarket, was created out of the belief that decentralized technology provides great opportunities, but those good opportunities can be difficult to find. TokenMarket streamlines the process of buying, exchanging, and researching tokens, creating a more strategic and unified place to enter this developing space, all through a secure and familiar interface.

Hi Mikko, thanks for chatting with us! How did the idea for TokenMarket come about?

I’ve been friends with the CEO and Co-founder, Ransu Salovaara, for many years. We’ve been working on this idea for quite a while. Ransu has a background in old fashioned trading, bonds, stocks, stuff like that. We wanted to apply this new blockchain idea to regulated markets. We are still doing that, but as you know, regulation takes time to change. We do expect that in 3 to 4 years, the regulatory environment will have evolved to be highly supportive of token crowdsales.

We were working on this idea of a token crowdsale marketplace, when late last year around November, we saw a crowdsale boom coming on the horizon, and decided to pivot our plans towards crowdsales. I am advising FirstBlood team and we did very well with that crowdsale. We started to get contacts from many people asking for help with their token crowdsales, and wanted to create something to help them. In December, since Ransu has a background in investment banking, and since I have a background in creating proper smart contracts, we teamed with Mr. Gavin Knight, who is managing our investor relations and knows many high stakes investors in the crypto space. Ransu began making phone calls, saying “We are launching TokenMarket, we want to support cryptotoken projects, do you need any help?” TokenMarket has grown from there.

You mentioned being in touch with regulators, and eventually creating a blockchain for regulated markets. Which regulators have you been in touch with?

We are headquartered in Gibraltar, so we’re working with regulators in European Union. They know what we’re doing, and they expect us to come up with good ideas on how this sort of market could work in the future, so that it’s safe and transparent for investors.

Since you interact with a number of different projects at TokenMarket, you have a “bird’s eye view” of the blockchain industry as a whole. From what you’ve seen, what aspects of token crowdsales could be improved?

Let me put it this way: I estimate that this year, there will be up to 300 blockchain crowdsales. Most of those teams, they go out too soon, before they have anything ready. They just think: “We’ll launch a crowdsale, and money will come in.” Many of the teams that approach us don’t have a CTO, or the team members may have some technical background but can’t write code. Since most of these crowdfunded projects are some sort of token, it’s best to have some sort of prototype or proof of concept to say you can actually do it before the crowdsales starts. At the same time, I’ve been scraping crowdsale data since last September, and I’ve seen most token crowdsales make 90% of their money on the first day — so it doesn’t make sense to me that so many teams focus their marketing efforts on what happens after their crowdsale has started. It’d be better to have a working prototype before the crowdsale starts.

What resources or infrastructure do you think need to be in place in order for more people to participate in crowdsales?

At the moment, the status of wallets for Ethereum is quite bad. For example, you can’t participate in crowdsales from cryptocurrency exchanges directly. That makes it more complicated for many people — friends and family who would like to participate in crowdsales but don’t have the technical know how. That’s going to get better with time, as Coinbase and Kraken work to support ERC20 tokens. Once that happens, participating in crowdsales will be much easier. We’re also working with vendors trying to link fiat currency directly to crowdsales.

What excites you about the WeTrust project?

As a business, or an industry, insurance is something that can and should be automated. The insurance industry end-to-end is purely math, so you could and should replace an insurance company with a smart contract. I see WeTrust bringing efficiency to a very old industry. That’s a great application for smart contracts.

What kind of blockchain projects would you like to see in the future?

I wanted to mention that right now all the crowdsale teams are building smart contracts and token contracts from scratch. There is some wasted effort in this, because all those crowdsale smart contracts look the same in the end. I’ve started working on a crowdsale smart contracts GitHub repository for standardized and modular crowdsale contracts, that comes with tests. I’m working with an auditor to go through it these days.

Thanks for chatting with us Mikko, and for everything you’re doing for the community!