On the 19th and 20th of September 2018, Consensus: Singapore 2018 was held at the Marina Bay Sands. OkayKrypto’s media team had the privilege of attending this event as part of the event’s media coverage and had the priceless opportunity of interviewing the heads of the best companies in the blockchain space.

Here are the interviews we conducted with 6 companies. Part 4

1) Wachsman

OkayKrypto: What does your company do?

David Wachsman (Wachsman): Wachsman is a professional services company that is focused on the blockchain space. We do a number of different types of professional services for companies all across this space from the biggest exchanges in the world to the biggest media properties in the world and also to the biggest coins as well. We do PR, management consulting, events consulting and financial advisory for a broad swath in the industry right now.

OkayKrypto: Who is your primary target market?

David Wachsman (Wachsman): We primarily work with the upper echelon of companies in this space. So, our target clients that we work with everyday are like Dash or Steemit or Lisk or Aeternity or Aelf, which is based here in Singapore, or Bitfinex and BitMex and Coindesk, actually. This conference’s organiser is one of our clients as well.

OkayKrypto: How does your company stand out from its competitors?

David Wachsman (Wachsman): We’re quite large and actually as of yesterday, we have a Singapore office. We have 110 employees between three markets in New York, Dublin and Singapore. We simply have more experienced manpower focusing only on blockchain that does these service offerings.

OkayKrypto: How can people contact you?

David Wachsman (Wachsman):

Website: Wachsman.com

Our website kind of explains what we do but because what we do is so customised per client, it’s best to reach out via our forum or send us an email to at info@wachsman.com to learn more about exactly what we do. We’re very excited about being here in Singapore and we think that this is going to be the hub for us in Asia as we see so much innovation happening here and I think it’s gonna be an exciting time for the next few weeks.

OkayKrypto: In the current market condition, what do you think is the most effective way to increase media visibility, reach out to investors and raise funds?

David Wachsman (Wachsman): I think the best way to increase media visibility is to actually have a product. What we’ve learned from reporters like yourself is that they’re not interested in hopes driven promises anymore. They want to see an actual product that’s working. I think that doing something like an equity round, raising enough funds to build out an MVP, finding a product/market fit and getting some customers and partners on board, is going to allow companies like mine to say, “Hey, they may have something here. Maybe we should find a way to back them up and help to make sure that their story gets to be in the limelight as much as possible because they have something that’s newsworthy.” I think that’s the best way for them to reach investors as these investors will be interested in companies that actually reach their product/market fit and have a product.

OkayKrypto: Which do you think has the most impact on your business now in terms of fund raising?

1) ICO Telegram Groups

2) Crypto Traditional Media

3) Private Investors Events

David Wachsman (Wachsman): I think that by far, the best way to stand out to investors, isn’t any of those things, really. The best way is to actually have a great product. Then, a chain reaction occurs because once you have a great product and you get to meet some investors by going to conferences like these (Consensus: Singapore) and meet people. I can tell you that there are some investors here that I have talked to who say that they’re interested in finding great projects and what they want to see is a project that has more than just a WhitePaper. So if a company has a product and attends conferences like these, they are going to meet great people. Crypto media is very important, especially crypto media that is critical of bad projects and finds the holes in such projects. Those are the ones that can separate the weak from the rest and the investors out there are looking for a signal and noise. If everything is puff, then, nothing is very good at all. So, look for the reporters out there who are willing to be cynical and who can find the holes in projects – those would be the ones I would trust.

2) Bitfury

OkayKrypto: What does your company do?

Kyrylo Chykhradze (Bitfury): Bitfury basically does mining for chips. But a few years ago, we expanded our focus and added more software products to our portfolio. Now, we mainly have three software products. One of them is Exonum which allows users to build private blockchains. The 2nd product is Crystal which is an investigative tool for blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The 3rd product is Lightning Peach. Lightning helps users to make payments in Bitcoin faster and cheaper. Each set of tools created by Bitfury helps merchants, consumers and apps to meet their needs easily.

OkayKrypto: Who is your primary target market?

Kyrylo Chykhradze (Bitfury): All of our products are targeting different markets. As for Exonum, we are targeting conglomerates. As for Crystal, we are targeting law enforcement organisation and financial institutions like crypto exchanges. For Lightning Peach, their target market is much wider as a lot of people are making payments using Bitcoin and so, they are not targetting a very specific market.

OkayKrypto: How does your company stand out from its competitors?

Kyrylo Chykhradze (Bitfury): For Bitfury, its main competitor is hardware businesses like BitMain. For Crystal, its main competitors would be Chainalysis and Elliptic. There is a long list of competitors out there for software products as well.

OkayKrypto: How can investors contact you?

Kyrylo Chykhradze (Bitfury):

Website: https://bitfury.com/

Email: support@bitfury.com

3) Satoshi Crypto Bank

OkayKrypto: What does your company do?

Jesus A Soriano (Satoshi Crypto Bank): My vision is to allow normal people to use our platform easily to access banking services such that it hopefully, becomes a day to day tool for them.

OkayKrypto: Who is your primary target market?

Jesus A Soriano (Satoshi Crypto Bank): To be honest, our market is everyone, like normal people on the streets. And, the vision behind the platform is for it to be the instrument through which everyone can gain access to use blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in the palm of their hands so that they can use it in their day to day life. Daily activities can include making payments for school, making payments for a boss, buying any kind of normal goods, buying an airline ticket and so on.

OkayKrypto: How does your company stand out from its competitors?

Jesus A Soriano (Satoshi Crypto Bank): To be honest, there are not too many competitors in the market for crypto banks. It’s a very young market in general. And, so the platform cannot be compared to fiat banks in a one-on-one manner yet. Our system will allow loans and will allow micro credits which is the only financial aspect of it. The rest is basically the infrastructure through which everything will be put on.

OkayKrypto: How can people contact you?

Website: www.satoshicryptobank.io

OkayKrypto: In the current market condition, what do you think is the most effective way to increase media visibility, reach out to investors and raise funds?

Jesus A Soriano (Satoshi Crypto Bank): Firstly, it is important for teams to organise their ideas and organise their vision. Secondly, teams should have a structure in place and have a reliable and trustworthy idea for their business or service. I think that if you’re organised and you have something to prove, the right investors will come to you instead of you having to reach out to them because your project will attract the people who believe in what you’re doing.

OkayKrypto: Which do you think has the most impact on your business now in terms of fund raising?

1) ICO Telegram Groups

2) Crypto Traditional Media

3) Private Investors Events

Jesus A Soriano (Satoshi Crypto Bank): It’s actually a combination of the three and it also depends on what you are focusing on. Private investors events allow you to reach out to other people that are doing things like you or that complement you. Private investors events allow you to raise capital or find the people who are interested in the market you’re targeting and solving problems in that market. Crypto traditional media, like you, keep the momentum alive so that we can reach other people that may not know or may want to know about blockchain.

4) QLC Chain

OkayKrypto: What does your company do?

Toya Zhang (QLC Chain): We’re building the next generation public chain for network-as-a-service. In layman’s terms, we are making a public chain for the network industry.

OkayKrypto: Who is your primary target market?

Toya Zhang (QLC Chain): This is a public chain so our major target market will be the developers of projects that want to make applications on top of this public chain. The differentiator of our public chain compared to the major mainstream ones is that we are embedded with network functions like virtual routing, storage, firewall and translation so it’s all about network services. This is where we see a difference compared to others. And, in the ecosystem of all these public chains, private chains and similar applications, they need a very foundational network layer to support them.

OkayKrypto: How does your company stand out from its competitors?

Toya Zhang (QLC Chain): From our perspective, because the crypto-blockchain industry is so young, public chain projects are not competing with each other and are instead, exploring within this industry to see what we can do. Another difference from other industries is that in this industry, everything is public and open source. You can look at GitHub to find out about the technology projects are using and you can look at their WhitePaper to find out about the business models they’re using and about the pain point they’re addressing. And, we are all building this whole ecosystem to bring about a better kind of decentralised future. That’s our mission.

OkayKrypto: How can people contact you?

Toya Zhang (QLC Chain):

Website: www.qlcchain.org

You can register your email on the first page to be added to our email list and we will frequently update you. And also, you’re welcome to join our Telegram Group. The link is also on our website. We frequently update our Medium blog and the link to that is on our website as well.

5) Dapp

OkayKrypto: What does your company do?

Kyle Lu (Dapp.com): We are Dapp.com and I think our name explains a lot about us. We are building an ecosystem for decentralised applications. We just launched our first product which is the dapp.com market. This is like an app store for decentralised applications. We have listed over 500 different dapps from different blockchains, including Ethereum, EOS and NEO so that users are able to explore what’s new in the market. We also provide a lot of data analysis on the performance of smart contracts and how active the users of the dapp.

OkayKrypto: Who is your primary target market?

Kyle Lu (Dapp.com): Our primary target market includes a few groups of people. The first group would be people who have experience using these kinds of products, like people who play Crypto Kitties and people who use crypto exchanges. The second group is people who are holding tokens but have never tried using decentralised services because they are not free. You need to have a wallet and some tokens to access a decentralised service. For example, if you want to use something that was built on Ethereum, you need Ether to pay for the service and without it, you cannot access the service. Our third target audience would be people who have never been in the crypto world like some gamers and others who like to try new things.

OkayKrypto: How does your company stand out from its competitors?

Kyle Lu (Dapp.com): We have really good branding and are a very open product. We also understand that this is still an early stage in the industry. So, we are trying to partner with as many great products as possible. So as long as they agree to list themselves on our platform, we give them incentives to help them out as well. And since we’ve been in this blockchain space for quite a long time, we have a lot of connections with different blockchain platforms and we are working closely with them as well.

OkayKrypto: How can people contact you?

Kyle Lu (Dapp.com):

Website: Dapp.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dappdotcom

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DApp_com

Medium: https://medium.com/dapp-com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dapp_com/

Telegram: https://t.me/dapp_com

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/dapp_com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr34MeIbVzP3loFQ-Xz-CmA

We are very active and are one of the biggest and most active communities in terms of dapps. We have a lot of different users with different levels of understanding about dapps and so, we can actually communicate and learn from each other.

OkayKrypto: In the current market condition, what do you think is the most effective way to increase media visibility, reach out to investors and raise funds?

Kyle Lu (Dapp.com): We are funded by VCs so we are in a great position and are not actively looking for new funds at the moment. Considering that this industry is still very new, we are bringing a lot of good companies together to create more awareness about dapps and about how to build good products on the blockchain.

6) BTC

OkayKrypto: What does your company do?

Alejandro De La Torre (BTC): BTC is a mining pool for Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, Ethereum and Ethereum classic. We also provide a block explorer through which you can discharge all the transactions from the beginning of a blockchain (genesis block). We also provide the block explorer from Bitcoin cash and Wormhole which is a new Bitcoin cash token issuance platform. Aside from these two things, we have a consumer wallet that is free and available in 24 languages in which users can safely store Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash and also buy and sell on our platform.

OkayKrypto: Who is your primary target market?

Alejandro De La Torre (BTC): Our primary target market depends on each of our products. But for our wallet for example, we’re trying to target more tech-oriented people from around the ages of 18 to 35 from all over the world and mainly, in the areas where crypto is taking off.

OkayKrypto: How does your company stand out from its competitors?

Alejandro De La Torre (BTC): Our mining pool is the biggest mining pool for Bitcoin so that usually helps. We provide fees for our miners so the miners using our pool get paid much more on average than our competitors’. Our block explorer is very quick and it has a lot of support, including for Wormhole as well. Wormhole is our newest product in our block explorer family. It is very new and very forward looking and none of our competitors have Wormhole. Our wallet is very safe and easy to use which makes it very simple to use for new users. This is very important for crypto.

OkayKrypto: How can people contact you?

Alejandro De La Torre (BTC):

Twitter: @bitentrepreneur, @btccom_official

Website: https://btc.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/btccom/

Email: support@btc.com, hello@btc.com, mate@btc.com

We’re always happy to help. If you have any educational ideas that you would like to implement to educate the market with, BTC.com is here to help.

OkayKrypto: In the current market condition, what do you think is the most effective way to increase media visibility, reach out to investors and raise funds?

Alejandro De La Torre (BTC): The good thing about our company and products is that we don’t rely on the prices of cryptocurrencies. We build products and services around it. The price has decreased and mining continues to increase. So, there’s more people mining even though the prices are decreasing. This is very beneficial for our company and our block explorer as everyone needs to look at transactions. So we’re not reliant on the prices which is extremely important for companies. A lot of new companies that came to us in 2017 are really reliant on the prices and investments and that’s hurt them very hard in the last couple of months. Luckily, we have built good products and services which we need in this industry – we don’t need many investment platforms. What we need is good products and services.

OkayKrypto: Which do you think has the most impact on your business now in terms of fund raising?

1) ICO Telegram Groups

2) Crypto Traditional Media

3) Private Investors Events

Alejandro De La Torre (BTC): Since, we do not rely on the price of Bitcoin, Telegram and investments, I would choose crypto media.

Continue to Part 1

Continue to Part 2

Continue to Part 3