Besides interacting with Matic, Visionary Financials had a chance to interact with the director of Tezos India at the Genesis DevCon 2019 conference, hosted in late November this year.
The Genesis DevCon 2019 was one of the successful blockchain conferences in India that gathered around 1000+ developers and technology experts. The event was reportedly sponsored by Tezos Foundation launched in India.
During an interview with Tabassum on behalf of Visionary Financial, Bernd Oostrum, co-founder and CEO of Tezsure, a new decentralized insurance application on top of Tezos blockchain, Bernd discussed various aspects regarding Tezos. Bernd joined Tezos in 2017 and is currently the director of Tezos India.
Visionary Financial – Do you hold or trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
Bernd – I sold Bitcoin & Ethereum but I was in it for technology… I have lost my faith in Ethereum and then Tezos came along. At first, I found out about Tezos from Tim Draper, he is the seed investor in Tezos. I fell in love with the technology “Liquid Proof Of Stake“, a form of verification.
Visionary Financial – How do you describe Tezos for non-tech individuals?
Bernd – Tezos is also a platform for decentralized applications (DAPP). They can build their apps on top of Tezos. But what makes `Tezos unique is that they can upgrade Tezos without the need for the hard fork. It enables you to create a more secure smart contract. It gives more participation powers to people who are involved in the network – in bitcoin, you have to do mining and it’s called the Proof of Work, and in Tezos, you have proof of stake and that means, you don’t need to waste electricity. It offers self-amendment system.
Visionary Financial – What makes on-chain Governance so important in blockchain for the long term?
Bernd – On-chain governance is the other way to describe the self-amendment system. – On-chain governance means you have set a system in place on-chain to prevent the need for the hard fork.
Forking in itself is not bad but what happened was with Bitcoin is that community suddenly split and then it continues splitting further with the further fork and Tezos wants to avoid that because, in the end, you need to grow your community. And Tezos wants to keep the community together.
Visionary Financial – What Dapp sector will see major growth?
Bernd – In itself, I don’t like the terminology of Dapp because if you have a Dapp on EOS, is it really a decentralized application? Because EOS has only 21 validators – so 21 entities will control the network – Is that really decentralized? No, but still the applications are built on top of EOS.
Visionary Financial – Can you share your outlook on the Dapps market? What sectors are seeing the strongest growth?
Bernd – We’ve seen some financial institutions that want to utilize Tezos blockchain because it has added the security of a smart contract. Ethereum has less security of the smart contract and Tezos saw that and decided to make it possible to have the most secured smart contract algorithm.
The biggest investment bank of South America is tokenizing up to $1 billion dollar worth assets on the Tezos blockchain. On top of that, a company in Thailand is tokenizing $1 billion worth of real estate on Tezos blockchain.
So the financial world is the biggest use-case for Tezos. Also if we speak on STOs ( Security Token Offerings), we are already in talks with multiple parties who wants to do STOs on Tezos to take advantage of added security measures.
Visionary Financial – What’s the key contribution of Tezos on the Indian community. ?
Bernd – What we want to do here is to get more people from outside of blockchain involved in the blockchain ecosystem. We want to go to universities, which we already started doing.. We’ve been to DTU (Delhi Technological University). We are planning to do a workshop in Mumbai, and we also want to do in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, – still, we need to educate all the people across these states.
Visionary Financial – How is the response from the universities?
Bernd – They are really open, they want to get knowledge in, they want people to understand blockchain. We talk to professors here and they say “okay, I have been studying machine learning, I have been learning artificial intelligence, but getting blockchain knowledge is really difficult here”.
So we want to support them and aren’t here to push Tezos alone. We want to support the Indian blockchain community in general.
One of the things we want to support is “the startup”, We currently have an office in Bangalore, We have a desk to spare. If you know any startup that want to develop on tezos, tell them to reach out to us. Everything we are doing is to broaden the Indian blockchain ecosystem.
Visionary Financial – Did you have a chance to interact with policymakers?
Bernd – I have actually; talked with them in Switzerland… I have been to Switzerland last summer for a few months in the crypto valley – all the big blockchain companies have offices their and Indian delegation came to check out how regulation works.
Visionary Financial – Were they positive?
Bernd – They were very positive, they knew that all the countries around the world are being very friendly towards cryptocurrencies and blockchain- see their upside and that helps I think to change perspective anywhere.
Image Source: Genesis DevCon 2019
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