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Jeremy Hague

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ShareRing 2021 Update with Tim Bos and Elvin Transcript

January 20, 2021

April 13, 2023

CEO Tim Bos and Marketing Director Elvin discuss ShareRing’s achievements over the last 3 months, ShareRing’s roadmap for 2021, and much more!

Introduction

I’m Tim Bos, the CEO and co-founder of ShareRing. I’ve got Elvin with me, our marketing director. We’ve got heaps to go through today, a few exciting things to talk about, and a bit of an announcement.

We’ll talk about the achievements we’ve made over the last few months, discuss any of the delays we’ve had in the app.

We’re going to talk about some of our refocus around ShareRing ID, talk about and display our roadmap, do a bit of a shout-out, I’ve got a couple of videos to play with you for you, and then talk about a couple of new things that we’re introducing.

ShareRing’s Achievements Over the Last 3 Months

In terms of achievements over the last three months, it’s been an incredible few months. The things that we’ve done as a team has blown me away, even last year, we started the start of the year with about 15, 16 staff on board and a few advisors, and we ended the year last year with a total of 34 staff and some advisors.

The team has grown heaps, most of the team has grown around our technology team. We’ve opened new offices in China, in a place called Shenyang, which is the north-western part of China, we’ve also opened a new office in Thailand, we’ve added more people into our Vietnam office.

The growth has been spectacular. We’ve got someone working for us in Canada now as well, United Arab Emirates, so really the growth has been around our development team and our sales team.

ShareRing’s Achievements in Development

In terms of what we’ve achieved in the development. There’s a lot that we’ve done, we’ve added a lot of new functionality around our ShareRing ID product. We’ve added something called verified that source. We realized that as a company, we couldn’t be a bottleneck in terms of verifying identities and all of that. I’ll talk more about what that means shortly.

We’ve added functionality and started work on developing our One World Passport, we’ve done a huge number of updates to ShareRing Shop based on the initial tests that we did, we’ve also done a huge number of blockchain updates in the background.

There’s been a lot of feedback and questions around the app delays that we’ve had. We don’t do things unless it’s for a good reason. I do apologize that we haven’t communicated with you a lot more effectively around why we’ve had delays and things like that.

We looked at the app where it was in around October last year, and we could have released something than to allow you to log in to ShareRing ID and maybe make some bookings and things like that.

One of the issues that we found though, is a lot of the feedback that we got from our clients and our partners that we’re working with was that the way that we were doing ShareRing ID at the time, actually made ShareRing a bottleneck.

It meant that our customer service would have been overloaded, what we were doing was we were verifying every single ID, it was happening automatically but there were a few outliers that meant we need to manually do that.

We designed something called verified that source. What that actually meant was that partners could verify an ID and put that verification on the blockchain, and that means it removes ShareRing from the equation of being a bottleneck.

We spent a lot of time over the last few months actually developing that technology so that we can release it to you and put it in the product. That was the cause of one of the delays, other ones were in terms of some things that we needed to update on the Blockchain.

We didn’t want to release the app, let you do ShareRing ID, and then have to get you to do it again when we release the final version of the app. We chose to basically do a soft rollout, we’ve got the app going out to a lot of people at the moment that is helping us test.

It went out to staff first of all, next step it’s going out to our masternode holders and community members, It’s then going out to the wider community members and then we’ll open it up when we launch our referral program.

This process is going to take a number of weeks to basically get out and we’re launching really a cut-down version of the app, which just includes ShareRing ID first so that we can get a lot of testers running ShareRing ID, which is really the core part of the product and then we can add the features and functionality on after that.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to jump in and talk a little bit about ShareRing ID and a lot of our refocus around that as our foundation product.

We presented this to all of our staff last Friday and got a lot of really good feedback, have updated it a little bit and it’s time to basically take the wraps off it.

All right, one of our taglines around ShareRing is that we’ve developed the world’s most secure and flexible identity verification system. So hopefully I’ll be able to explain a little bit more what I mean by that.

Effectively, when we looked at our products over the last two years, what we found is there’s a single thread that basically goes through all of those products, and that single thread is ShareRing ID, without ShareRing ID, none of our products work. So that’s the single most important thing as part of ShareRing ID, that basically becomes our foundational product.

As a business, who are we and what do we do? We talk a lot about the sharing economy, we talk about travel, and a lot of people have wrongly said that ShareRing is a travel company.

That’s not true at all, what we’ve done is developing is an ecosystem that facilitates travel, that facilitates a number of other things as well. And the main thing that underpins that is ShareRing ID.

As a company, what we do is we provide ShareRing ID, which is effectively a lockbox that enables users to access products and services through our ecosystem.

I’ve got a lot more examples of the types of products, but things like transmission of documents and certificates, it could be university graduation or something like that. ShareRing Shop, which is the distributed commerce platform, travel, health, rentals, and a huge number of other things.

What does ShareRing ID do? What is it? Is it just an identity verification system?

Well, it’s not. It’s a lot more than that. What ShareRing ID does is it basically provides our users and members with secure, direct, and global access to a number of online and offline services.

Anyone that adopts ShareRing ID, which can be done in as little as two lines of code to start accepting ShareRing ID, can become part of our ecosystem and then can provide services within our ecosystem.

What the ShareRing ID product does is it provides a self-sovereign identity. What that means is that members have complete control over their own ID and they can choose what and who can see any of that ID information.

We don’t have a central database when you sign up with us, we don’t store your identity, passport, or anything like that in our central database.

The only thing we have is your name and email address, and we use that name and email address to basically connect back to your blockchain ID and all of that when we need to send you documents and things.

Your ShareRing ID is stored on your phone. So it’s actually in your phone and you can easily transfer the ShareRing ID, which is effectively a lockbox when you replace your phone. So there’s a number of things, I uninstalled and reinstall the app this morning on the phone, and one of the things it did is it searched my phone and found a copy of my ShareRing ID.

Which means I didn’t have to do my identity and all that stuff again. I could also save it to say a Google Drive or something like that. Then when I change phones, I could just pull that ID back in, so you can choose to back it up.

We talk about lockbox, and the reason why we talk about lockbox is, as I mentioned before, the ShareRing ID isn’t just about storing a passport and a driver’s license and things like that. I can store any type of document that helps basically extend upon or verify parts of my identity.

That could be something like a negative COVID test, so that would be stored in my lockbox, it could be a graduation certificate, it could be any type of document where it’s important that it doesn’t change or it’s also important that it’s verified or that the source of that document can be verified and it’s guaranteed that it hasn’t changed in transit.

Why would you need a ShareRing ID? One of the things to sign up for the services that require your identity or other personal information, so we talk about an Open World Passport, which I accidentally called One World Passport a while ago.

Our Open World Passport, which basically contains things like your COVID19 test results, might be your travel visa and things like that. We can also use it and we’ve tested it around logging in to websites without using a password so we can effectively kill the password using ShareRing ID.

That can be done literally with a couple of lines of code from the website provider, so I could open the ShareRing App, click on my QR reader, scan the QR code on the website, it would send my identity information that’s required by that website. That would log me on and then I’ve got access to the services on that website, no passwords.

The type of documents, as I mentioned, it can be things like passports, driver’s license, so they’re ones that are verified by ShareRing. But then we’ve also got documents that are verified by third-party providers, so university degrees, COVID test results.

We’re already talking to a huge number of companies across like universities, city councils, countries, COVID test centers, trailer rental companies, you name it, we’re already actually in discussions with to bring them into ShareRing ID and start getting them to be part of that ecosystem.

There’s also no limit to the types of documents that could be stored within the user’s ShareRing ID. So if somebody comes up with a great idea of the type of thing to do with it, you’re welcome to develop it on the platform and actually incorporate it into ShareRing ID.

A few examples of things that you can use ShareRing ID for, access to an office building, so let’s say you get a new job and you need to access an office building, you could go there and just scan the QR code at the entrance and maybe there are rules around that.

Maybe it needs to send your ID to the provider, maybe you can only get into that office building if you’ve had a negative COVID test, or maybe you can only get in there if you’re an employee of XYZ company, so you can basically do that.

Proof of vaccinations, previous prescriptions, you could use it to reserve a table at a restaurant, set up a bank account. We’re already talking about that to a number of companies, sign up for insurance, travel visas.

We’ve got some huge stuff happening around our travel visa program that we will announce in the next couple of weeks, I’m really excited about that one. Book a flight, ferries, buy groceries, order takeaway, hire a gig work, and so on. Really your imagination is limit to what we can do with that.

We’ve really got three integration levels, number 1 is full integration with the ShareRing App. What that would basically mean is if anyone is familiar with WeChat, how it’s got mini-apps, so you could effectively have a full app within our app that has the full workflow and functionality.

Let’s say it’s a trailer rental business and they might have full integration, so you tap on that and you would actually choose the trailer, the location, you’d pay for it using ShareRing Pay, and then you’d basically be able to rent the trailer, you’d be able to do ratings as well as reviews, messaging to the provider, and so on.

We also have full integration with things like our accommodation, our activities, our COVID test, and our Shop, so all of those are ShareRing developed integrations that we have aggregators on our backend that we work with.

We also got partial integration. What that basically means is that it might be part of the App that only uses ShareRing ID, it doesn’t use a payment system or anything like that.

So the user will scan a partner’s QR code and the documents would be sent to that partner within the App.

Then you’ve got a white label, what that basically means is we’ve developed an SDK, and that SDK can be incorporated into someone else’s app, so you don’t have to use the ShareRing App, you could actually incorporate it into their own app.

It might be a banking app that requires you to sign up for banking. And what that would do is the SDK would look on your phone to say, have you got a ShareRing ID? And it would pull in the right information for that ShareRing ID from your phone.

In terms of pricing, we basically got three quite easy pricing levels. We’ve got something called a skinny ID, so most people when they first sign up will create a skinny ID, and that basically is just your email address and full name, there’s no verification required, It’s just a basic sign up.

The verified ID, which includes your email address, your phone number, address, which is not verified, passport number as well as a passport photo. For users that are completely free, whenever someone signs up for this, we don’t charge our end users to sign up for that stuff.

What it is, it’s actually the consumers of that information, so the companies that receive that verified information and they’ll pay around a dollar for that.

If you look at industry rates, the market right for that type of information is between $2.50 & $5 and we’re looking at charging around a dollar for that information.

The verified plus and what that basically means is it’s got things like third party verification, it might have addresses, it might have integration with our partner Onfido, it might be utility bills that you upload for address verification, that will depend on that type of document that’s required and how much is charged to those end users.

In terms of the cost when we talk about a dollar, that’s split between going to our providers, which might be Tencent for some cloud verification stuff, it might also be a company like Onfido or other companies that we work with.

The rest of it basically goes towards the blockchain fees. So it’ll really push more SHR token through the Blockchain and create a huge number of volume there.

Where our initial partners in our launch areas are now, you’ll find Thailand, China, Vietnam, a lot of people know that already, we’ve got Australia, we’ve got a little bit happening in the United Arab Emirates.

We’ve also got a huge amount now happening in Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. That region there we’ve found through our research and now our salespeople that are working over there is a huge growth area for us. You’re going to see a lot of stuff coming out of there really soon.

The second growth area for us is really sort of around the UK, Europe and India, Middle East, Africa, and India as well, then push further into sort of Hong Kong, China region too.

I promised I’d share a bit of a roadmap with you. We’re going to sort of present to put this on our new Website shortly with some more specific dates.

Where we’re at now is Q1 2021. So we’ve got a referral program launching, we’ve got a hackathon that we’re launching, which I’ll speak about very briefly at the end, which is going to be a really large hackathon.

We’ve got our App soft launch, which we’re rolling out now, and that includes a passport verification and some other third-party add-ons, we’ve got a new website coming February, March, or later this month, we’ve got Open World Passport coming within the app this month, which is around March.

We’ve got the ShareLedger minor update, so the minor update that we’re doing with ShareLedger is to basically update it for some of the things that we’re doing with ShareRing ID. So the verified at source and the way that we hash the documents.

Then also a lot of people have been asking about the Blockchain explorer.

The reason why it’s lagging, we’ve found out that actually the service provider that it’s hosted on, we use a cloud provider, we found that the link between that service provider and database is actually lagging.

What we’re doing is we’re just putting all of that on our other cloud service over the next week, so you should see that improving.

Q2 2021, from April onwards we’re going to see a more broad scale rollout of the apps and anyone really downloading it and using it. So we’re looking at that happening around sort of March, April timeframe.

The completion of the hackathon will be in April. The ShareLedger major update, the major update is really bringing it up to the latest version of Cosmos, which will support things like State Syncing, which will have a huge benefit for us on the amount of disk space that’s been used.

We’ll have a travel platform launched along with ShareRing Pay, which is our tactical version of ShareRing Pay. Then Q3 will be a more sort of broad version of ShareRing Pay. We’ll have the booking engine updated within the app, the new merchant dashboard updated, and then a lot more identity types.

In terms of identity types, we’re hiring some new developers that are focused just on adding more ID types and things like that into the API and then adding more of our aggregators in as well.

I’m sure that’s a huge amount to consume, that’s probably about half of what we’ve got to do during this livestream. There are also things like the blog update, the blog format updates that are happening. The website’s going to be updated to focus more on the ecosystem side of things.

For our sales team, it’s been a real sort of challenge for our sales team when they point to prospective customers to our website and see travel, travel, travel. You’ll see big changes around that as well.

I’m just going to hand it over to our marketing director, Elvin.

I just want to give you a quick update just to add to what Tim mentioned the app has been rolled out to some of our partners to be tested as well, so we are working with partners to bring in a lot of sign-ups to start off with, and right now this is our core focus.

Of course, we don’t want to miss out on our community, we want to make sure that you guys know what’s being done behind the scenes and we want to share some of the updates, some of the screens that we’ve been trying to achieve with the overall launch to you all as well.

We have refined the whole sign-up process, just to make sure that when you’re done with that, you can actually see the video that shows you what can actually do with ShareRing ID, before you sign up.

It’s something that you can tell your friends and family, as in you can use ShareRing ID to pay for eVisa, rent a car, pay your COVID pass et cetera, et cetera. This is the overall mission that marketing is trying to achieve to make sure that it’s easy to understand and it is easy to convince people to use the technology.

That’s one of the videos that is going to show in one minute or less what ShareRing is going to try to achieve.

Upon the App launch, we are also going to be doing the referral program. So it’s something that you can actually get incentivized when you refer people.

Everything has already been put in place, as of now, we are really just focusing on testing with the B2B, making sure everything is working, working with partners who can actually bring in a lot to sign-ups right off the bat before we rollout this whole thing.

Please be patient and we will make sure that we roll out a very sexy, nice product to you guys very, very soon.

Just a quick shout out to the community, a special thanks to Emile for bringing in a lot of new followers and investors to the group.

We have a big Spanish group with over 4000 members, so if you haven’t joined it, feel free to join, and again a big shoutout to Emile and also Ron from TechTipsTogo.

We have also had some PR mentions and we also going to have more PR coming out regarding the whole app. We have a lot of PR lined up for the launch as well. Stay tuned and if you guys have any questions let me know.

Meanwhile, I will also be putting out the invitation list, probably end of this week or early next week so you guys can sign up and I will personally send you the app for you to test out as well, just to make sure that everything is working. We are just waiting for a set day to launch the whole thing.

ShareRing Hackathon

The final thing before we jump into a few questions is really around a hackathon, so what we’re going to do is over the next few weeks, we’re going to launch a really big hackathon. What we want to do is get more ideas and products developed on the ShareRing ecosystem.

What we’re going to be offering is a very large cash prize and an investment into a startup that you may create as part of this hackathon. The structure is basically going to be we’ll have any number of people basically put together their products or their pitches for what they want to develop.

We’re going to involve the community to vote for the top 10, so across our different communities will vote for the top 10 and then that top 10 will get a little bit of money to refine their pitch. And the

ShareRing 2021 Update with Tim Bos and Elvin Transcript

CEO Tim Bos and Marketing Director Elvin discuss ShareRing’s achievements over the last 3 months, ShareRing’s roadmap for 2021, and much more!

Introduction

ShareRing’s Achievements Over the Last 3 Months

ShareRing’s Achievements in Development

ShareRing Hackathon

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