Article by:

Jeremy Hague

Bionic Reading

March Telegram AMA with Rohan Le Page + Tim Bos Recap

March 17, 2020

April 13, 2023

On March 16th 2020, Bitmart invited ShareRing COO, Rohan Le Page for an AMA in their telegram channel. A massive thank you to Bitmart for hosting and to Rohan for giving the time to answer some questions!

Bitmart’s Prepared Questions

Question 1

It was mentioned that SHR will have a royalty programme for its most active community members, where they can go out and get companies on board of the SHR platform. If they are successful, they would get some royalty for that. Is that still on? Can you tell us more?

We have several incentive programs in the works. It makes sense that we work with businesses that partner the travel industry directly and indirectly. If you know a great service provider, let us know via hello@sharering.network. There are various solutions that can provide incentives and royalties dependent on the service provider. We will also consider regional reseller agreements for locations we currently don’t operate in.

Question 2

Why another company should use ShareRing. How can they make money on P2P platforms? Why should they choose a decentralized system instead of creating their own centralized version where they have all the power?

This has been our ethos from the beginning. ShareRing is not looking to disrupt the travel industry, we are here to revolutionize it. ShareRing works with travel service providers to enhance their current platform. Having a centralized system is expensive, potentially insecure and inflexible.

Currently, we are focusing on B2C, not P2P. We provide a technology suite that allows any travel business, of any size to either start from scratch and launch, or complement their existing platform with highly secure transactions with added benefits that are unique to our technology suite. Check out website our for details https://www.sharering.network

Question 3

How many real-world partnerships do you have confirmed now? Including those under NDA or still to be announced? How will you be on-boarding them all smoothly, is there any technical limitations to the number of providers, or will this scale with MN numbers?

Right now we are focused on the partnerships we have announced along with other verticals. There are many more in the works. These partnerships are those who provide ShareRing with the best opportunity for success.

Onboarding takes time from a technical & commercial agreement standpoint. Each partnership has its own challenges. We are working from several offices in various countries that all have their own legal requirements also. The team does a great job of handling all the moving parts.

There is no limit to how many providers or users can be on our platform

Question 4

What is the best argument that you use while presenting the ShareRing framework to companies? If it depends from case to case, what are your best arguments? Which ones do normally make them ‘say yes’?

When I present ShareRing to a potential client, I talk about the status quo in the their particular industry, the big players and costs they face. My aim is not to get a “yes” but a “why wouldn’t I?” ShareRing is a platform that sells itself. A technology suite that does everything the sharing industry does right now, then layers on world-class blockchain technology that protects both the service provider and the end-user, not to mention all the advantages of our other verticals as a value add. All at a much cheaper entry point, with very low ongoing costs. Super secure and easy to deploy, “why wouldn’t you?”

Question 5

In the bad situation of the Covid-19 epidemic, the tourism industry was heavily affected. Is ShareRing’s initiative a great solution? What are your plans to turn challenges into opportunities for ShareRing’s development?

There is no hiding from the fact that Covid-19 is having a profound impact on the travel industry. The challenge for ShareRing or any business for that matter is to be commercially responsible. We are not a one trick pony. Our marketing plans have been changed in light of the pandemic. This “pause” in the travel industry allows us to refine our product before we launch the app and focus our development energy on other verticals we operate in.

Question 6

A while ago you were planning to start in Europe, Asia and the US. However, then you have decided to start in Asia first. What are your plans regarding worldwide SHR expansion? Is there a timeline set for certain regions? P.S. Would love to use SHR in Europe

As we have progressed with our partnerships around the world, it has become clear that our resources are best placed in the various industry hotspots that allow the greatest growth for our business. Our relationships with partners in Europe and the USA are still open, just not a focus right now as we put our energy into partnerships in Asia Pacific. Once these kick off, we will be able to launch in Europe and the USA with a proven platform.

Question 7

You will agree with me that ADOPTION and UTILITY is very key to project survival and success, what’s being done to drive global adoption of SHR amidst crypto regulations, legislation and competition

Yes, I would agree. Region by region marketing will drive the growth of the ShareRing ecosystem. We expect a great deal of viral growth as users utilise our app worldwide. It is important to remember that SHR is a utility token. The user is utilising a utility token, not a cryptocurrency. There can be some challenges in countries that don’t allow crypto. We address these as they come. The beauty of the platform is if the case of spending crypto in a region is an issue, we can just turn those features off and the end-user can use regular credit card payments with transactions still recorded on the blockchain.

Question 8

Will the temporary shutdown of the eVOA program mean a loss of business in the short-term and are the other B2B projects unaffected?

Covid-19 has had far-reaching effects on many industries, eVOA included. While these programs are on hold, eVOA providers will feel some pressure, as will we, but we have other verticals that can pick up the slack. One of the advantages of the ShareRing ecosystem. We don’t rely on one revenue stream.

Question 9

How many transactions would the team be hoping for on the blockchain in 12 to 24 months from now? And when will more Masternodes be available to interested people, 40 to 50 was mentioned previously as a solid number for a sound consensus.

Impossible to say, but our current contacts and prospects would put us at over 3,000,000 transactions per month.

As for masternodes, we are looking at releasing some later this year. To be confirmed.

Question 10

Rohan, has your view of ShareRing’s potential in the market changed since the very beginning of the journey?

Are there any new things that have come up? Any new directions or niches to potentially capture?

I would say that my view of ShareRing’s potential remains the same. What has changed is the direction we are travelling (pardon the pun). When we started out, there was so much potential it was a matter of finding where to best place our resources.

Now we are focused on various verticals that complement themselves. It allows us to prove the platform and then add other verticals. Organic growth makes the most sense and this will come from our partner networks and end users.

ShareRing’s decision behind delaying our travel app.

We’ve decided to postpone the release of our travel app.. we were holding off to see which direction the lockdowns, etc took us, but as it seems to be getting worse before it gets better, it’s crazy for us to release it right now. Instead, we’ll keep pushing forward on a few areas…

1. The travel app will keep being developed according to our roadmap.. we’re adding activities, more hotels, homestay, travel insurance, etc.. this will continue, but we won’t release it or waste marketing on it yet.

2. We are working on further optimisation of our API and backend to allow for the community and our partners to develop their own apps/enhancements directly onto our platform (as well as using some of the tools we’ve built).

3. We have some large paid projects and partnerships that we’ve been developing products for.. we’ll push forward (faster than planned) on these.

4. We’ll accelerate the delivery of some additional blockchain functionality that we were holding off on.

Community Questions

Question 1

When will the live explorer be released, assuming mainnet is live and transactions are already flowing? Seeing explorer will be very reassuring for the community. Also, flowbacks were supposed to start 3 weeks ago. Can we have any updates on that?

The main net is live.. we’ll have the explorer online for you tomorrow. We’ve got an updated explorer that we’re working on, but it’s not ready.. so we’ll just bring the old one up so you can see the blockchain numbers going up. We’re up to block 330,000 already.

Question 2

How much of SHR’s success depends on the BTC market speculators or the Travel industry?

BTC market speculators = none
Travel Industry = about 20%.. but mainly due to the eVOA and Travel Insurance products. However, this slack has been quickly picked up by the other 2 projects that were mentioned in the blog post.

Question 3

Tim, how is live? how is doing business in this kind of (corona) world? How are the Partners doing? What did Corona change in the vision of ShareRing? Are we dependable on travel only?

Thanks for asking.. I’m in mandatory isolation for the next 2 weeks… the support we’ve got around us is great though. My local butcher dropped past a bunch of steaks and other items, as well as some Corona..lol.

The last few weeks have been stressful travelling through Germany, UK, Finland and Thailand.. but it was very good for ShareRing.. I’m glad to be home though.

What did Corona change? It changed our priorities, but not much else. I’m excited to move to a couple of these other projects.. they’re absolute monsters. We’ve been collaborating very closely with a very well known cloud platform (amongst other services) company to add functionality to our OneID to satisfy the requirements of these partners too.

Question 4

Are you done travelling for partner meetings and potential new business for the next few weeks/months given the risks involved in moving outside your own controllable environment?

Well, I can’t leave home at the moment.. so yes. I’ve been asked by Nikkei in Tokyo to do a keynote at a conference they’re scheduled to have in late April, but at this stage it looks like it’ll be postponed (it was originally going to be last week, but they postponed it once already).

Question 5

Seems that SHR team had troubles about dealing with hard dates like 8feb & 8march and others in the past. It is OK, delays could happen in any company.

Because of this, don’t you think there was a problem with communication?
Maybe SHR are too optimistic?
Related to this, can we trust 100% in the revenue numbers estimated for this year given by Sharering?

The community is looking for some facts to happen soon and real use! Thanks Tim, you are the best

I apologise for the delays.. sometimes we can be a bit ambitious, and then we have a few curveballs thrown at us, or our partners request new features/changes, or I don’t like something and decide to change it.

1. Communication can be improved, I agree… I hope we’re doing a bit better now.

2. Not necessarily optimistic.. see my points above.

3. No, you can’t trust 100% in the revenue numbers… when is it ever possible to trust forecasts 100% for a startup? We create forecasts based on what we know right now… but many many factors can change that. Sometimes we’ll beat them, and sometimes we’ll miss them. After we’ve been running for a few years, we get better at forecasts, because we have more data to go off… but right now, we base it on our pipeline of customers that are over 70% chance of winning them, plus some other magic calculations.

Question 6

What things help $SHR to attract investors easily? Who are your competitors and what unique things your project has to compete with your competitors?

1. A clear story and understanding of where we are heading (vision). A good team. Good contracts in place…. and a plan that shows we can scale quickly.

2. We have competitors in different areas. I wouldn’t say we have 1 competitor for everything we are doing… so that’s a hard one to answer.

Question 7

How you raise funds successfully for your project and what main factors or other things help to raises fund for your project? Where and how you get the idea of $SHR project and who helps you most?

1. We’re not raising funds right now. We’ll consider it when it’s strategically right for us to do so.
2. That’s a big question.. probably better to put that in a blog post. I’ve had the idea for ShareRing for many years.. it just seemed like the right time a few years ago to launch it.

Question 8

Hi Tim, in your tweet, you mentioned that Sharering was not only about travel. (since you cant disclose partners yet, Could you please give us a break down of the different markets Sharering is focused on in order of how much of revenue they will generate.

Transport – including logistics, track/trailer rental, proof of delivery etc.
Insurance – OneID has turned out to be perfect for this industry.. for insurance applications and claims.
Sharing economy – bike rental, car rental, car sharing, etc.
Travel – Which is really a subset of the sharing economy, plus a few add-ons that take advantage of the blockchain and OneID

Question 9

When we can expect specific (names, what Sharering will be doing) info about renect partnerships?

Most likely as we launch each one to production. Most of these companies want to keep low key until the launch, otherwise it hurts their own marketing plans. These aren’t just R&D type collaborations.. we are developing real products with them that have a real market.

Question 10

Your team doing swap from erc20 to bep2, so why you are moving from erc20 to bep2?

BinanceChain is written on top of Tendermint/Cosmos.. and so is ShareLedger.. it makes it easier for us to integrate with for things like pooling/staking, etc on our chain.

Question 11

How is the financial situation and economical runway for SHR?

It’s good.. we don’t have any concerns at the moment.

Question 12

Hi, are all masternodes live? Is there a timeline for onboarding new masternodes? Did/will requirements change?

15 of the ShareRing ones are live.. we’ll build the rest on the weekend and then ask the Masternode holders to start building.

Question 13

Hey Tim! What are the priority adjustments that SHR has focused on in the recent travel bans and can you shed any light on the recent on your newest collaboration?

Also, any updates on the college program SHR has laid out, will it be online based due to the recent corona virus outbreak?

I think I listed the priority adjustments. The first one will likely be the insurance app.. our partner is aiming for a May launch of this. It’s going to be very high profile.. so let’s see where we land in terms of an agreed launch date.

Question 14

can Sharering weather the storm of the financial collapse/recession, how have financial projections changed?

I believe we can. The non-Travel industries we are working with are in areas that I don’t expect a downturn. In fact, a few might see additional traffic.

Question 15

How are all the current nodes running? Any issues.
Has the timeline changed for when more nodes will be available? Is all the SHR backend running smooth?

All is going well. We’ve been slowly bringing them all online.. only 2 people have the master key to authorise the nodes, so when I’m offline, I can’t authorise the new nodes that we are building. It’s done for security sake though.

Question 16

Can you tell us something more about this big partnership that you tweet about?

There’s a few..

One is in insurance (actually… there’s a few, but one is bigger than the rest)
One is in transport and logistics
One is a collaboration (joint tech development and integration) in the area of AI and cloud computing.

That’s just the last couple of weeks. I’m equally excited about all 3 of these. The last one will impact all the products we are working on.

Question 17

When will the masternodes start to receive income?

We’ve got accrued income for the node holders already.. we just need to turn on the tap after we’ve given you the go ahead to install.

Question 18

When do you forecast SHR to be running at a profit? #SHRAMA

Question 19

As a company, I don’t expect it to be in 2020.. we’ll be reinvesting for growth and new functionality.

Question 20

When is staking?

For pooled nodes.. not for a couple of months.

Question 21

What is actually live on mainnet right now and how many tx per month are you anticipating?

Right now, we’ve got a couple of car sharing systems running, and some car rental.. but we’re about to push through a logging system (using the same tech we built for OneID) for a transport company. Basically, every job booking and change will go on the blockchain.. it’s significant volume.

Question 22

Isn’t the number of blocks irrelevant since they can be empty? How many transactions have occurred so far?

Correct. No transactions yet of significance yet (other than some transfers).. we wanted to run it empty for a couple of weeks first. Ideally, we’ll turn off empty blocks, but the current tendermint release doesn’t play very well when we do that. We created a workaround, but that wasn’t perfect, so we’ll just mine empties for now..

Question 23

What’s the status of flowbacks? Why they haven’t started yet while mainnet is running?

We haven’t turned on the tx for main net yet.. see my previous answer

Question 24

Can we expect some announcements of partners?

When they let us announce, we’ll announce.

Question 25

Previously you mentioned that you’d use the Tendermint functionality to only create blocks when there was a transaction. Has that been implemented or have those plans changed?

Yes.. see my previous answer.. it’s not perfect. The issue is that it destabilises the network.

Question 26

I know you might not be able to answer this right now, but could you please provide us with another snapshot of the financial state of the company, similar to the one you gave when listing on Binance Dex? Revenue, burn rate, cash remaining, etc

I’ll see what we can put together to build confidence.

Question 27

How many people working at Sharing and are they all safe?

They’re all safe. We’ve implemented a work from home policy in Vietnam, Melbourne and Thailand as of Wednesday morning. Our HK guys already work from home. Last count.. about 22 people (not including the awesome community management team!)

Question 28

When will documentation of the ShareLedger API be publicly released so both individuals and businesses can start building apps that utilise it?

Very soon… it’s self documented. We’ve been doing it in GraphQL with great results.

Question 29

What is the rough estimate for the launch delay?

ok.. part of our decision was due to one of our partners explaining to us about a C-Trip mini-app launch during SARS. Apparently, they were about to launch, and then SARS hit.. they decided to hold off for a few months until it passed, and in the meantime, they looked at their competitors and worked on new functionality that gave them a big edge in the market… when they launched, they managed to get a huge market share. We’re learning some lessons from how they approached the issue back then.

Question 30

Excuses for keeping repeating the same over and over again, but flowback question seems not to be answered still.

Sorry.. I thought I answered it. We’ve got the flowbacks ready.. but with the few companies that will be pushing tx through, we pre-purchased some tokens for them during the pilot rollout. The ‘real’ purchases will probably happen when they run out in a few weeks.

Question 31

You mentioned copying another company’s SARS release strategy. Thing is SARS was easy to contain. This thing could go on for a very long time.

You’re right.. we’re not copying it. If we were, we’d be doing nothing other than improving the travel app.. but that’s not what we’re doing.

One last answer from Tim

One more.. I saw the question from John. Yes, we’ve missed deadlines, and so did Tesla, Microsoft, and many many companies. When we first set our roadmap and deadlines, it was based on a number of factors that included: More availability of the right development talent (ie. blockchain devs, etc), a better crypto environment (for fund raising), more partners that are willing to take the blockchain risk, and a product roadmap that turned out to have many holes in it. Unfortunately, a lot of those turned out to be false expectations, so we have adapted and changed with the moving landscape, and in the end, I believe we are a much much stronger company, with many more opportunities and projects than we had 12-18 months ago.

Join ShareRing’s telegram channel here! https://t.me/ShareRing

March Telegram AMA with Rohan Le Page + Tim Bos Recap

Bitmart’s Prepared Questions

Top 3 Community Questions

ShareRing’s decision behind delaying our travel app.

Community Questions

Keep reading

Recap: ShareRing Livestream 2024 - A deep dive into future of ShareRing with Tim Bos

ShareRing 2023 Review - Riding The Bear and Readying The Bull

Weekly ShareRing Trivia Competition

Venture Beat – ShareRing Launches Blockchain-Powered Car Sharing On Top Of Existing Rental Services

Upcoming AMA – 31 October 2019

A letter from Tim Bos: The future of NFT Events and ShareRing

Transcript: Beyond Bitcoin – DeFi with Algorand, Algomint, and MeldVentures

Tim Bos Keynote Presentation at the Innovation Thailand Expo 2020

Keep reading

Event Roundup: Alien-Tech Club

ShareQuest Adventure

ShareRing Foundation: Paving the way forward for Web3 identity. Part 2

ShareRing Foundation: Paving the way forward for Web3 identity