Interview with MyBit founder Ian Worall

Interview

Hello Ian, thank you for the interview! We want to talk about ICO, MyBit company, MyBit foundation business and what problems did you meet while preparing the ICO. Let’s start! Tell us something about you please, about your business, how you came into Blockchain industry and what is your experience in it?

Ian: Back in the 2012 i was studying International Finance in college and always liked to trade stocks. I was really young and bitcoin was just something that you can trade and make a bunch of money with it. I got involved didn’t really know what was happening. After a few month of trading i dived into Blockchain technology, saw the potential how it can disrupt the world like how Internet did 20 years ago.

From then i started mining bitcoins, built computers or even built some lab apps for bitcoins analytics. Then I’ve been a supporter of Ethereum for a very long time once it came out. It really sparks my mind just seeing foundation of the machine economy, Internet of Things and Ethereum. I moved to Europe about 6 months ago to really focus on using Ethereum and smart contracts in renewal energy space. And that’s how MyBit idea you know was discovered! We have started building it in like January or February and expanded our team by 15 or 20 people. So that’s it!

Oh, that’s great. That’s pretty interesting. Did you make a lot of money on calling kind of bitcoin course?

Ian: Actually, I did.

Let’s talk about your company MyBit, as we know, you’re preparing an ICO for MyBit now and the ICO will happen in the middle of July, am I right?

Ian: Yeah.

Can you please tell, as detailed as possible about MyBit business, and what is it, what problems are you solving?

Ian: Right now we can see that all utility and electrical companies are looking for decentralized options because they started to realize that the traditional power grids won’t be able to scale fast enough to meet up all these power requirements and that can explain growing Internet of Things. People in emerging economies using phones, electric cars, consuming a lot of electricity, e.t.c. So all of these utility and electrical companies around the world are looking for decentralized grids, basically, they just want to build the infrastructure (grids at people’s homes, at commercial properties), but the issue is that they are doing nothing on the financial side of it. Investment banks, small groups of people and funds will control the entire market for these utilities and can be even more of a monopoly.

On our case in MyBit we are doing contracts with Ethereum or other small contracts — these are best platform to investing in them and decentralizing them. In that way me/you/average person/anybody can invest in the decentralized grid and get revenue sharing from it. Everybody has an opportunity, not like rich people get even richer or poor people get poorer. These big decentralized funds are also able to invest in this but it just levels the playing field to give an option to invest to the average person, which is needed to the World.

Ok, that’s great. So in the future an average person might buy solar panels and set up on the roof, and start earning money from MyBit, am I right?

Ian: Yes, you are right. Solar panels are just the first thing that we will be doing. Our whole team has a passing for clean and renewable energy and the profit from solar panels are pretty high ever right now in Europe, investors can make 7 or 8 percent returns with almost like zero risks, very little risk. That’s just our first market and this can be applied to anything that generates revenue: it can be property, farm equipment, the machines, everything get more automated, everything of those can be crowdfunded and available to anybody to buy it.

For example I’d use Uber. Uber is controlling the entire fleet, that’s the big thing with the platform, the socio-economic benefit. You can’t use self-driving cars on the road, if they moved into self-driving you’d have like millions of people who will no longer have a job, so they have no way of generating income. The investment banks have financed it so they can generate money coming from it, but now if somebody has the option to but ownership stake on one of these cars then they are on the same level as the investment banks and they can make good returns passively without working. So it’s just kind of it helps everybody out: it makes funding more available to companies that need funding and it just gives people the opportunity to make money like these big investment banks that control everything now. We want to decentralize that control of the people — this is how it should be.

Okay, sounds great. It’s a really interesting business but there are a lot of ways to implement decentralized crowdfunding and why did you choose blockchain, don’t you think that’s a little hyped technology?

Ian: Not really. What we are building you can do with traditional technologies, but the issue is it will involve piecing together, all these different things like equipment software, accounting software, identity management, a lot of different platforms and so on. Everytime you bridge together two apps you are creating the talk-abouters so this is makes the network vulnerable. However, if you take a look at Ethereum — it has built up everything that we need: from managing open accounting, cash payments right on it. Smart Contracts can automatically do things so you don’t need lawyers involved and it really reduces risks for entire network and whole application, also not relying on all these third-parties to distributed payments. So for this case I don’t think blockchain is hyped, it is just the most cost effective and more economical way to bring this course to market.

Okay, so tell us more about MyBit business, what’s the main source of income of MyBit foundation and how do you get your money?

Ian: The network is a whole, so everyone involved in this will get 30% of all the transaction fees or everybody that owns a token/funded asset get a payment based how much you hold of these. Our company itself makes money by doing different integrations. We’ve already talking to some people on China about a property integration so they can do the same thing that we are doing with solar panels but with commercial property. And so on we want to do stuff with self-driving cars, there are a lot of use-cases. Back to company foundation makes money off of these custom integrations that people will contact us to do. Here we can see the benefits of network as a whole: the more assets and business billable on the network, the more activity, more money that’s flowing through — the more money that goes back to the people. So it helps us as a company to generate money to stay afloat and then it helps all the token holders to get more money as we go.

There are three ways of making money at MyBit: transaction fees, solar panels, and investors. So, I just need to buy a token and then I can get a percentage of the income flow at MyBit, am I right?

Ian: First way you can make money is just through price appreciation of the token. By just holding the token you’ll be getting revenue sharing from all the network fee. You can also make money by investing in specific projects. So you’ll still make the network fees and receive your portion, that’s just what’s in it. Or if you want to go and invest in solar panels project, then you’ll also make money from the excess energy that that produces. It’s getting bigger and bigger as more as people use it, just like what we’re seeing with Ethereum and what we’re seeing with Token sales, the price of it just goes up based on laws of supply and demand — the more tokens we get, the more tokens will worth.

Can you disclose the made income in the first year as well as the marginality of the business?

Ian: Sadly, we can’t really give any numbers, we’re not planning launching the beta version until next January or February. So 2018 will really be the first year when profits are coming in and I’m not comfortable giving an estimate answer. Just by a guess we have some figures in our white paper. I don’t know, but it off the top of my head they’re pretty lucrative. For example: we have 100,000 installations of solar-lit panels than everybody that has like 1%, like if he owned 1% of the tokens so he would make $1000 a month and that’s just that… I don’t know, the numbers off the top of my head, they’re very appealing looking from all we’ve done and I’m pretty sure they’re all on the white paper, some of them too are on the website.

The next question, in which market would you start? In which countries can you use MyBit? Because there are plenty of law problems with it.

Ian: Right. So, right now we’re staying out of the US because there’s too much compliance issues, not just token sales, the energy, the peer-to-peer payment stuff just is way too much, so we’re launching the market in Germany. Germany is the most country with solar panels, so consumers that want solar panels in the German market will be able to get some, but investors are welcome to invest from anywhere in the world except the US right now. So somebody in China or other places in Europe can invest in Germany.

After Germany we’re going to Austria, because Vienna is area that also great on clean energy. And then our 2-year goal is to really hit emerging markets, like Northern Africa. These countries don’t have the infrastructure in place right now, so they would benefit a lot from decentralized grids and solar panels. Also the climate is great there, we can generate great returns, so the emerging markets and the meaner regions like the middle east and northern Africa are really what we’re going to target to really expand it.

What are the limitations to the German registrations at the moment which could prevent this full-fledged entering into the market?

Ian: Nothing right now in Germany prevents our current platform. Our goal peer-to-peer energy. In Germany all we will be able to do is sell energy that’d be produced in solar panels back to the power grids. What we want to be able to do in 2 years is to be able to sell energy to your neighbors or people that need it and right now that legislation is still being worked out. That’s why right now we can’t go to market with that.

Can you give some details about your contracts? Because from white paper we know that they’re the contractors or the manufacturers of robots, drones, etc.

Ian: Yes. Tom, our Chief of Operations is managing all that and we’re going to release those partnerships like in the middle of July right before the token sale starts. So we’re still waiting on some few signatures, we don’t want to publicly disclose something and have lawyers start jumping on us but that information is coming really soon.

Great! We’ll wait for it. It’s okay about business, I remind everyone who want to know more details about MyBit, you can read white paper, it’s really excited and well-detailed information. Let’s talk more about ICO! It’s so hyped now, everybody talks about ICO, but nobody knows how to do it. We already know about regulations, but can you give more details of regulations of ICO in Switzerland?

Ian: Right now, what we’re doing just like many others are doing is registering a non-profit organization in Zug (Switzerland).That’s pretty much the standard that everybody is doing because they have very friendly regulation towards us. Then we’ll also have an operating entity that’s doing all the business out of Germany. Now the only thing about regulation is we can’t open up the token sale to US residents. Other than that, it’s still in a gray area where we’re compliant by all the rules. Also we know that things could change very fast because there’s been billions of dollars of these ICO’s in the past year that’s definitely on the regulator’s radar, so we’re just being very proactive and staying on top of any rules, so that we can stay flexible and we can stay compliant with everything.

Ok, so the problem only with US citizens. As I know, there are regulations of ICO only in Japan, Singapore and Switzerland. Do you know something about other countries? Which countries has regulated ICO and it’s okay to participate in ICO of MyBit?

Ian: Singapore, Japan and Switzerland have passed legislations where it is completely OK. Other countries throughout the world have not passed any regulation and it’s still OK for people to join. The US is really the only country because of the SEC and all their compliance policies, it’s the only country where it may not be legal right now and we don’t want to mess with the US.

How does the process look like? We sell token — we get Bitcoins or Ethereum. For example, Ethereum: how can we use this money, how can we change them to dollars in Switzerland? The money that we receive through ICO.

Ian: That’s actually really easy; we can cash it out right there in Switzerland exchanges into our company bank account. Or we can find private buyers that we’re already setting up to buy large amounts of it. Also we assembling the funds from a New Zealand company called the “Brave New coin” which is very reputable (they did it for Bancor, MobileGo: all like the major ICO’s). We use escrow and that’s just to protect investors, so if we get billions of dollars we don’t just walk away with it. So escrow is just make sure that we stay on track with all our development, we’re good to our community and over the course of two or three years the money will slowly be given to us as long as we keep proving that we’re on the right track.

Which platform are you going to use to do that? Is it the Ethereum network to make an ICO? I mean, are you going to use Waves, Ambisafe or something else?

Ian: We actually built our own. So it’s fully functional on the website right now, just go look at it and we’ve had it security audited and everything and it looks good. So, yeah, we just built our own on that. What we are planning to do is use Wings as a forecasting tool; I was talking to the guys there few weeks ago and they did the forecasting for Bancor and the platform itself to run the ICO is proprietary and we just built it ourselves.

Okay great. Why do you make this decision? What can you tell about platforms like Waves platform, Ambisafe, etc.? I’m sure that you have analyzed these platforms.

Ian: I mean I have nothing bad to say about any of them. We just decided to go on our own so we had more flexibility in creating whatever we wanted, and honestly, it’s pretty easy to make. It wasn’t that hard to do on our own. And we just wanted to be in control of different functionality, so we don’t’ rely on a third party, in case something went wrong. We wanted to be able to fix any issues on the spot while the ICO is going.

Now more about technical issues about your ICO and architectural for your platform. In your white paper you wrote that transactions will be source through Bitcoin blockchain but for what purpose are you going to use IPSF and BigChainDB, what information would be stored there?

Ian: Well, to start with Bitcoin: what we want to do in a perfect world is use the Bitcoin ledger as kind of a backup. We’re writing everything through Bitcoin, but we also want to sense with Ethereum. We’ve seen the hard fork, the rollbacks, we really want to be able… But Bitcoin is the most secure ledger today because it’s been around the longest, has the most computing power. That’s just a good backup, in case something happened with our Ethereum ledger. We can use Bitcoin but there is an issue, the transaction costs might be too high now because of it’s price. Bitcoin has gone up so much, so it’s something that we want to do but we need to really explore the economics of it a lot more and see if there’s a way around that. And then IPFS and Mongo. we’re actually planning on using a BigchainDBs Interplanetary database and they’re out in Berlin and they have a partnership with Mongo. The reason why we’re doing that is to store all the extra information: any photos, any personal information. And we want to make this a fully decentralized application. I’m a huge proponent of decentralization, because if we had a centralized database and somebody got into it and started changing values… that would wreck our whole application, so we’re going to see pretty much everybody using these decentralized databases and Big chain or Interplanetary database or Swarm or stuff like that. So that’s why we’re planning on using a decentralized option for that.

Great. You talked about MyBit API in your white paper, can you give some practical examples of applications that are likely to be developed just from the basis of the API?

Ian: Right, so we’re first starting the market with just solar panels but if somebody approaches us and wants to use our platform basically for crowdfunding and, you know, for commercial real estate or health care equipment like a lot of different assets that generate revenue. Even Bitcoin ATMs, people could crowdfund those and get a portion of the fees that are charged, so that’s why we’re exposing an API, so different applications can be built on top of us, if another third party wants to dive into a space while we’re still working on solar panels.

Okay, but there is a problem with MyBit API as I see it, for example, if I as a developer want to build a circuit between MyBit platform and a certain platform, why should I use MyBit, or can’t I just use Smart Contracts on the Ethereum and create the same proprietary network?

Ian: I mean, you cared. The main thing of the MyBit platform and anything open source is there’s always… to do a correct open source application. In my eyes, you need to have a proprietary layer at the top — that’s usually like a user interface or some tools that make it easier to use. So our core technology on the backend is all open-sourced and could be replicated. But we’re really differentiated as is how much time and effort we’re putting into the prom end and the ease of use, so anybody around the world can use it without any technical expertise and doesn’t need to know how to code or anything like that, just like a plug and play module.

So MyBit will be much easier to start a more Ethereum network, yes?

Ian: Right.

But what part of the MyBit platform will remain proprietary?

Ian: Our user interface and the onboarding of new assets and just pretty much like the whole front-end and registration components of it.

Okay, so the one, who makes the decision on when to start on the MyBit platform will be the management team MyBit foundation, yes?

Ian: Yeah.

So you’ll start with solar panels and after that you’ll enter different markets in Middle East?

Ian: Right. And we’re really letting the community drive our decision on that, so we’ll take into account where people want to see this go next.

Why do you think that it’s a good decision? Don’t you think that a lot of parts of communities will start to enroll their assets on Ethereum network and they don’t want to use MyBit platform?

Ian: I mean, the MyBit platform, other than the technology is a big component — the community and marketing and everything, so being able to put like a brand behind what they’re doing makes their application much more usable than just building something on Ethereum and hoping people use it. You get what I’m saying? It’s really the brand behind it.

The last question, do you want to tell something for ICO investors? Why do we need to participate in MyBit ICO and what advantages we’ll get?

Ian: Yeah, sure. So, when we were starting this company we were choosing between traditional venture capital funds or an ICO like the token sale. And the reason why we decided to work with the token sale is because we wanted to open this up to the community and the average person. The whole point of our platform is not to let these small rich groups control the money flow everywhere, so it wouldn’t make sense if we were building an application to level the playing field but the only people who are allowed to invest are rich venture capitalists. That’s kind of why we chose the token sale route because it just opens the playing field to people and it’s a fairer way to do it.

Secondly, the most important thing for me is the liquidity. If you invest in a regular start up, not a token stale, you can’t cash out your shares until the company bought or acquired etc., with this it reduces risks because the second that you buy them and it hits an exchange like within a month you can sell those shares if you need cash. And then, for token sale investors our cap right now is 11 million to 12 million dollars, it’s about 48/49 thousand per year, I believe, or 45 thousand per year, so that total cap is low. If in the first year we become partners with a few solar panel companies, and get 10 or 100 installations carried out, integration and installations, then our net worth will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and people will make 10 20 30 times their money. So, unlike some of these token sales that we’ve seen where they raise 50 million/100 million/150 million, that’s a lot of money to start with, that’s going to be hard to grow that network and get really good returns for their investors.

So, by keeping our total raise low, it’s enough money for us to get everything we need to be done but without being greedy and taking in crazy salaries, it gives the opportunity for investors to make really good returns. So, I think it’s you know a good opportunity for everybody.

Okay, sounds good! As for me I’m going to participate in MyBit ICO and I think that our listeners will do the same. Thank you, a lot, for your interview, it’s very interesting information. I still advise all our listeners to read the white paper, they have a lot of detailed information there. Thanks a lot!