Arguably unexciting till you see this. The world of decentralizing mobility & power runs the future of businesses using web3 technology . Analyzing the intricate workings with Harry Behrens, the Founder, Chairman, and CTO of BloXmove. We explore the challenges faced by the current power and mobility industries, where asset and customer information, as well as payments, are scattered across various isolated systems. Restructuring the challenges faced by the traditional power and mobility industry, into creative sustainable solutions that were previously unimagined, this energetic conversation leaves you wanting a sequel. Don’t miss out on this enlightening conversation with Harry Behrens, a true trailblazer in the fields of decentralized power and mobility.
Transcript
BloXmove - Decentralizing Power & Mobility Businesses with Web3
Participants:
• JP (CMO of AdLunam)
• Harry Behrens (Founder, Chairman, and CTO of BloXmove)
JP
Welcome. Welcome to this episode of Diving into Crypto. This is JP from AdLunam Inc. bringing you everything about web3. This show is all about the movers, the shakers, the candlestick watchers, and everybody who is making some spectacular waves in the Web3 industry. And we're here to hear and learn about their journeys. A few points before we begin, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to remind you that views expressed on this program belong to those of the speaker and information shared is meant for educational purposes only. It is not to be considered as financial advice in case we get cut off from the show. Please come back to AdLunam Inc.
JP
And you will find yourself a new link where you can jump back in and continue our program as scheduled. Should you have any questions for the speaker, we have a segment towards the end where we can take your questions and our guest speaker today can answer them for you. If not, write them into AdLunam Inc. or to the speaker and we will see that they get answered as early as possible. That being said, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to also remind you to please interact with our speakers, so use those emojis. Feel free to send in a comment about something that you've liked because our speakers here spend their time sharing their journeys, their insights, their strategies, and also their gems of information with us so that we can better in this industry. That being said, once again, I'd like to welcome you to the show and also our guest today is Harry Behrens.
JP
I hope I'm saying that right. Please correct me later on. He's the founder and chairman and the CTO at BloXmove. BloXmove has been doing some very interesting work in this space and I'm going to let Harry tell you all about that. Harry, welcome to the show. Thank you for accepting our invitation. Over to you.
Harry
Yes, thank you for having me. And, yes, so I'm looking really forward to speak about decentralization applying it to the industries of power and mobility and, yeah, in general exchange about this, what I find one of the most exciting and disruptive fields of technology that's out there right now.
JP
And indeed it is, Harry. So before we dive right into that, it's a very interesting space that you're working in because it opens up such a wide arc of opportunities, especially in the Web3 space, in the Blockchain space and in the crypto space as well. And I want to hear all about that. But to start with, just to give the audience a little perspective about who you are, a little of your background before you jumped into BloXmove and what got you here today.
Harry
ures all my life. But then in:Harry
To Be mobility is a service which you consume with an app and how your actual moving will not be you buy a car, but it will be consumer service. And that got me hooked. And I was privately always connected to the blockchain world ever since I saw the disruptive and revolutionary potential in what, at the end of the day, first Satoshi Nakamoto and then Vitalik Buterin have brought to the world. And I managed to convince the company that this new world of mobility as a service very well, is very fragmented and fragmentation and decentralization fit, like hand in glove. And that's essentially how I got there. So they accepted it, the board accepted it. I got the opportunity to set up the Daimler Mobility blockchain factory. We developed exactly that kind of technology. And then when it came to take to market, I got the chance.
Harry
There's a longer story behind this. To do a management buyout with two co-founders. We took the software that I had been developing there with my team for three years. We took it out. It's now ours. We went into Outlier Ventures, which is probably the European best accelerator program, if you're in the Web3 world, and, well, the rest is the history of BloXmove.
JP
Wow, that's quite a remarkable journey. I love how you put that and certainly also want to have a brief about that story where you were able to get a buyout. Those are the moments that really make these journeys interesting. I want to focus for a second before we go down that arc on what was the moment that you realized that, hey, Web3 is the space to be for me?
Harry
Well, I have always had, you would call it crypto, anarchistic, libertarian street. So I don't like dominance of markets. I don't like trusts, I don't like monopolies. It feels unfree, it feels exploitative, it feels oppressive and what we've seen. I'm a big fan of technology, and I love what the Internet, what TCP IP, and everything that's built on top of it has brought. But then we've seen it become the property of very few people. And the large 80, 90% of the profit that's being generated on the internet, which is such wonderful technology, accrues to very few people. And that seems to my personal disclaimer, purely personal, no political statement here. But that seems wrong. It shouldn't be like this and it should be that not an aggregator who sits somewhere, burns Silicon Valley money to basically dump and burn markets, puts everybody out of business because they're essentially dumping, because they're delivering below cost.
Harry
Everybody else goes bankrupt. They get the customer relationship, they hold the data, they're the only ones that can improve the product. And the people that actually deliver a service, take Uber or Bolt, they become cogs in the machine. And then these kind of aggregators turn around and basically start squeezing and turning the screw. 10% commission, 15% commission. And now it's 25 up to 30% commission. That's of revenue, not of profit. And if you think about it, I know no legal business except for pharma maybe where you have margins of 25%, it's not doable. So, long story short, when web three came out, it promised and it still promises. You can scale at the speed that we have seen in the internet, which is what you need to do in the world of software, but you can scale in a decentralized way, which is decentralization. It's exactly the opposite of aggregation.
Harry
So it doesn't end up in the hand of one company and one pocket and one wallet, but it becomes a common infrastructure which is shared and probably creates more wealth in total and in a much more balanced way. So the people that produce the value get the value. That's what got me hooked.
JP
I like how you put that. We are all cogs in this entire wheel and the role of aggregation and they have been benefits, right? But when you really look at it and you look at the aspect of a commission model, so to speak, taking away that 25, 30% away from revenue and not just the turnover as a whole, that's a huge chunk.
Harry
Indeed, yes. And of course for the customers, nothing. I mean for the customers it's perfect. I will admit I love what Amazon gives me. I have to admit there is no friend in my life who gives me such good recommendations to read books. I love reading books. Right? The recommendation of Amazon is beautiful. My best friend would not be able to choose a book as well as Amazon does respect.
JP
Right?
Harry
But how did that come to happen? All of the improvement potential lies in owning every single interaction. Business relationship, billing relationship, customer relationship and then putting the power of AI, data aggregation, data analysis on top of it. And this is why these services are so good. But it is based on it belonging to one central organization and power is nice, but absolute power corrupts, and this is not sustainable. And you already see it. The policymakers have finally woken up to that. The heyday of the big aggregators is over. They're getting flak everywhere. They're being pushed back from the US to Europe. Even China, in its own way, is putting them back into their place. This cannot continue. We must find a new way. Generate wealth, make business. I'm not socialist in any way, but make the people that produce. We be the people that benefit and still give the customer the benefit of this seamlessness, this smoothness.
Harry
I don't need to install more than one or two or three apps and I get all I want. That's the goal, the objective. Right.
JP
The more that you're able to have a direct line to your customer, whether it's a business to business, or whether it's a business to a customer business, to any of these business models, right. It's always been recognized that is, of course, by far the most sustainable model, because you have your brand loyalty that comes into it. You have your loyalty that comes with that business, and it's an undermined portion. But that's the holy grail that every business seeks.
Harry
Precisely. Exactly. Because what does web3 give?
JP
No, please, go ahead.
Harry
And what does Web3 give you? I mean, in the end, what is it? I mean, you can do semantics. You can focus on the crypto part, on the investment part, on whatever. I'm essentially a techie at heart, so I'll focus on the mechanisms, the power that it puts in your hand, the tools. And all of A is, why did Airbnb and Amazon and Uber get so big? What is the benefit? They provide seamless handling of the business transaction. If you boil it down, essentially the customer does a one time onboarding, identifies herself, provides a billing connection. End of discussion. Pretty much. Sometimes KYC, sometimes not. But anyway, that's that. And then everything is handled fully, automatically. And Amazon and Facebook and Uber, they've put in amazing software machinery precisely for that, which, due to it wasn't available, is their own proprietary. But now what is web3?
Harry
Well, let's put it this way. What is the web2? Web2 is a network that manages flawless, more or less universal transmission of data packets from one sender to one or more receivers. So it just transports data. And it does this without you having to worry about this. It's behind the router. It's part of the common infrastructure already. So whatever you write as code, you don't write TCP IP, you don't write SMTP, which is a protocol for email. You don't write Http, you don't write any of that. Not a single line of code anymore. You focus on the business on top of it, and the rest is outside of your router, in the big cloud. Now, what's Web3? The very same. But what's outside of your router is payment service provider, banking, accounting, settlement, reconciliation, all of that is now all of a sudden part of the it's there anyway.
Harry
You don't need to program it anymore. And it's handled flawlessly. No claw back possible. It's totally immutable. It's essentially ultra secure. It's definitely more secure than any banking software you got running on your laptop or on your phone. And that is if you think that through now, that puts some amazing power into the people that understand it and know how to put it to use. And to put it to uses, you just code. And let me tell you, as a coder, web3 is incredibly hard to understand the learning curve. And the understanding curve is very difficult because it's this crypto approach. You deal with completely different concepts that have no parallel to your real life. But the code is actually very simple. If I want to set up a simple web to webshop, I am downloading a framework that's an easy 200 megabyte, 500 megabyte of source code.
Harry
And I haven't written a single line of code the whole ERC, seven to one. For those who don't know that's NFT is less than 500 lines of code. Less than 500 lines of code, which you can read on a leisurely afternoon, is all there is to it because the rest is in the protocol. So the programming is incredibly cheap and incredibly efficient because the code is still so very small.
JP
I love the fact that you've put it that way because it creates a lot of perspective for those of us that are not coders and those of us that often do not understand the complexity behind what we see as the ease of use. Classic case where you're talking about it's so easy when it comes to Amazon, the recommendations that come in. It's so easy when it comes to, you know, you interact once and then it's got your data and your recommendations come in. Or your ease of use is the only thing that we focus on. The one thing we do not focus on is the complexity of the code. So it's very interesting when you break it down that Web3 has that simplicity in the complexity.
Harry
Exactly. That's the beauty of it. That is truly the beauty.
JP
Indeed. Indeed. Now, I'm curious to follow this up with you've started BloXmove, right? And you've looked at it from a perspective of a business. And I'm going to go out in limit and say it a business that does not appear sexy, a business that does not appear to have a lot of appeal when it comes to when you're talking about, okay, from a mobility standpoint, some of us are grappling with that. But yeah.
Harry
I am not hearing anything.
JP
That you wanted to work in Web3.
Harry
I'm not sure if you are cut off or I'm cut off. I'm not hearing anything.
JP
Okay, let me repeat that question. What I wanted to know was what led you to start BloXmove and in the space of mobility, as you said, it okay.
Harry
Yes. So that's an interesting story. Yes, of course it's less than sexy. But if you measure it as a market, the mobility market, mobility as a service market, that is humongous. It's hundreds of billions. It's in the range of 500 billion to 1 trillion worldwide per year. Because, think about it, I would assume that I'm not sure how many people we got in the group here. It looks like about 100. So if we have 100 people in the call, my fair guess is at least 80 of them live in a city. So that's number one. And if you live in a city, you will either live in a city and drive a car and then suffer traffic jams, or if you're lucky and here, the European cities are pretty much on top of everything. Plus Singapore, you will more and more use transport means public transport, taxi, whatever.
Harry
Uber for all it's worth. BloXmove now in Nigeria, but whatever. So you're using mobility. So the amount of it's called people kilometer per year. So the amount of kilometers that people move is steadily increasing, but it's becoming harder and harder, especially in the city, because the cities also don't want it. I mean, just look at congestion charge in London. People don't want the cars in the city anymore. And there was a big strategic movement in all of the automotive industry. So let's exclude Tesla, because Tesla always is unique in its own way. But every single European car maker, they had something they called case, or a derivative of it. Case stands for connected autonomous or automated service or software and electrification. So it's the new paradigm shift in how mobility gets consumed. Your father probably bought a car in cash. If you're American, then he might have already leased.
Harry
If you're European, he probably bait cash. You yourself, I don't know exactly how old you are. I'm assuming you have a car. If you have one, you're probably leasing it, or your company is leasing it for you. And by the sound of your voice, you probably are still in the age group where you do have a car. Now, if you look at the 18 year old or those that are becoming to 18 years old, some of them don't even have a driving license, which was unthinkable in my age group. We had a driving license 18 plus one month we had a driving license. Every single one of us, at least from the male side of things, that was definitely the case, right? So the love of the car and the acceptance of the car is moving, is going away, it's reduced, and mobility is still active.
Harry
And how is mobility now delivered? Well, you call a taxi, you buy a ticket and enter the subway or the tram. You use an electric scooter, whatever. So you're using services depending on the mode you currently need. So a fragmentation, first of all, in the modality, in the means of moving. So there's a fragmentation from it used to be the car from A to B and B to A. Now you possibly take the car, let's say in Europe, to a park and ride at the outskirts of town. Then you take the trunk overland, so Espan subway, something like that, into the inner city. Then you walk, possibly rent a bicycle, whatever. So you're switching modes to get from A to B, and you do that back. And each of the modes is different. And for each mode, you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 operators. So that's fragmentation already on this level.
Harry
Then you got fragmentation on the number of companies that do this. And then you will find that every city is an island on its own. So you have another fragmentation between city A and city B. The operators are not the same. So all of a sudden, you don't have one company that handles all of your mobility, whoever you bought your car from. But you're consuming mobility from over the course of a month, possibly 10, 15, 20, 30 companies. What is the dream user experience here? Think Amazon again. The dream user experience. All of this is doable with one onboarding, one digital identity, and one payment relationship. That's how it should be. You don't want those 15,20 mobility apps that you're currently using. Well, based on that, the analysis was and still is, this can either go, it must be streamlined. So for the user, it must feel like how Uber and Bolt and my taxi feel right now, that's from the user experience, it should be one app or one entry point, but it shouldn't be the same for every single user.
Harry
If I want to use this white label app, then I use this white label app and I should be able to consume the integrated services. If you buy your app from another company, they should also be able to do that. This is not possible right now. And the integration between one operator and the other is impossible. The only way to integrate is basically to gobble everybody up, which is exactly what's happening. So the big players gobble everybody up and they integrate it by swallowing. But if you look at Web3, you can do this in another way. You can basically integrate simply because of the composability of Web3. Because Web3 is a protocol like TCP IP. It's composable. So one company builds something and the other company builds something. We don't need to coordinate, we don't need a contract, we don't need to negotiate, because we're using the same protocol, the same technology.
Harry
My software can interact with your software. This is what made DeFi so big. Lots of people programming on the same protocol stack, and then you can just plug the one to the next and nobody needs to be asked for permission. And here this is why Daimler said, all right, we understand the story. Show us you can do it. And they gave me the opportunity and the mandate to build a platform that essentially builds the technical infrastructure for check in, check out rental modes, and it handles everything. So you buy a ticket, essentially, it's an NFT ticket. You buy an NFT ticket, you can top it up, and then you present it when you check in. You present it when you check out whether it's a driver or whether it's a digital device. And the platform just handles everything, and it distributes the revenue in that moment.
Harry
That's essentially what the platform does. And it's not sexy, but it's a huge market.
JP
When you tell that story, the entire reveal is, of course, enormous. When you consider that a normal human being is just going to transport themselves through all the methods that you've described. If you're using public transport, you'll walk from your house to a bus stop or a Metro station, right? And then when you're getting to your office or the place that you want to go, you're either walking again or if you have the opportunity, you can cycle in various you when you think about it, if we just take the taxis, for example, right? When you're in Singapore, you're using Grab. When you're know other spaces, you're using Uber. If you're in the US, you're using Lyft, and it would be numerous, especially if you're a traveler in various spaces, or sometimes even in various parts of the same country or the same continent. Right. You have a strength with different service providers.
JP
This, as a solution, really begins to get us to understand why this space is so huge. It's one that we hadn't really paid a lot of attention to.
Harry
Yes, exactly. It's not obvious. And for me, I would have, let's be honest, if I hadn't entered Daimler and I was the last CTO in China of car to go and car to share. It was their two offerings. If I hadn't been accidentally exposed to this and realized this, I was infatuated with Blockchain and Web3 before that. I would most probably not have picked that topic. But once I saw the topic and I saw the opportunities, it's humongous. However, because it is not sexy. It takes patience, it takes a lot of bridling power. You need to build. You need to focus on getting it done. And you're never on the Hype wave with this business. That's definitely.
JP
Is. And this is certainly something that it makes for a fantastic case. Right, Harry, this is your spot on when you say that, until you pay attention to it, you don't realize exactly how huge the impact is of what you're doing when it comes to this. So I'm certain that this must be challenging also in a way for you to get more people involved, more stakeholders, more of a community. What has been some learnings on this journey for you?
Harry
Yes, the learnings are I'll give the short version first and then I'll elaborate a little bit. The learning is the good enough is the very worst enemy of progress. That is the lesson I've learned. And I'll put that in context in mentioning what leapfrogging is, and then explain a little bit with mobile money. Mpesa so good enough. So if you look at Europe, Germany, especially Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, countries I know very well because I live here and I know how things work. Things are definitely good enough. So we have public transport, we have bicycles, the roads are good. In such an environment, you will not be able to come in and do and deliver a service which is radically disruptively, different it will not work. There's so many resistance, so much inertia. We've never done it this way. Why should we be doing this?
Harry
Why take the risk? Et cetera, et cetera. So, at the end of the day, the biggest lesson learned do not go into a market which has a lot of good enough for something that you're trying to offer, which took us to we ultimately pivoted and said, all right, we will go to market in the emerging markets. So went live, of all places, not exactly the first place you think of, but it does make a lot of sense, Nigeria. So went live in June in Nigeria. And here I'll speak a little bit about leapfrogging. And actually the definition of it is older, but the most famous example happened in Kenya, in Africa, roughly 20, 30 years ago, when mobile banking appeared, it was nothing else but seriously glorified SMSs. So you did an initial pre identification of your mobile phone, I'm not kidding. And then the money transfers were just SMSs, which were a little bit authenticated, and somebody had a banking license in the background, and then based on that sent you another SMS.
Harry
And because they had enough critical mass, this became mobile money. And Mpesa is the people who started this. And this is where it falls together. Because there was no good enough in Kenya at the time, neither on banking nor on all of the technology, they completely leapfrogged. So they basically omitted the generation of technology which is in place in the so called developed countries, which they didn't have, and they went to the next level of technology, which is the better technology. So all of a sudden, when it comes to ease of doing mobile banking, Africa and China are vastly ahead of Europe. I can tell you that. I lived in China and I've seen how it's done in Nigeria. The speed and ease of mobile banking is much more comfortable than anything you got in Europe because they leapfrogged and they didn't have good enough.
Harry
So they were willing and able to really embrace radical in you. That, at the end of the day was for me, the deepest learning because I was not prepared for that. I hadn't realized it until I experienced it. And in crypto, that's the case. I mean, look at how slow crypto is in many ways in the US. How slow, relatively speaking, it is in acceptance. Also even in Europe. And look at on the other side, you can think what you want about them politically, but look at countries like El Salvador, for instance, or also Venezuela, and also Argentina, and also, by the way, Nigeria, where it's really being.
JP
Exactly, exactly. I think you're right when you put it in that context, especially when it comes to sorry, Harry, go ahead. I think I cut you off.
Harry
No, you didn't. I did not say oh, all right, okay.
JP
So I think, yes, you're spot on there because these are exactly the hotspots where they've embraced crypto and crypto in a way that it's used for payments in your usual transactions. Right. Because we don't think about it anymore. We don't pay attention to the fact that we're using a direct from your mobile pay system, or a credit card or an online payment system, or your phone to phone network. Right. I like when you've spotlighted these specific economies in these countries because they're the ones that didn't pay a lot of I wouldn't say it didn't pay a lot of attention. Right. I'm getting tongue tied with this point because it's one that excites me a lot. I like the fact that these economies are ones that I want to put a spotlight on, especially because of exactly like you're saying, the leapfrogging effect. Right. These are the ones that are going to pave the way when it comes to the adoption of this new financial system.
JP
And in so many ways, just by virtue of using the finance first, the rest of the technology being integrated into every other business is what will really bring those economies out. Now, this is what of course, I'm going by a particular economic trend from the Industrial Revolution, of course, but I believe that these are the spaces that are going to have something to offer in the years to come.
Harry
Yeah, I agree. So it's definitely a different world to do business in. And in the end, we will re import it into Europe. So we will just like mobile money, at the end of the day, it was re imported. So now we have it more or less in Europe, still not half as good as China or Kenya or Nigeria, for that case. In Nigeria, if I do a bank transfer, bing, bing. I can do it on the phone. And while I'm talking to you, I will hear the bing in your mobile phone that the money arrived. Forget that. In Germany, I'm seriously, it's two days.
JP
Wow.
Harry
I'm not joking. It's two days. Two days and no bing, bing on your, minimum one, usually two. And if you do it on a Friday. It's three.
JP
Wow, that's remarkable. I mean, I would never have expected that this aspect would be it would take that long.
Harry
Yeah. Banking is because it's protected and because it's good enough and because it's hyper regulated, the players can afford to be very smug and very well. Anyway, we got our captive audience. No need to get radically innovative.
JP
Well, of course, that's an interesting perspective. I'm also curious to know if you could shed some light on the quantum of middlemen that would be involved in a transaction like this. Because especially when you talk about such high degrees of regulation, there's going to be your immediate points of validation by some agency or corporation, and then you're also going to have a back end audit that comes into it. So there's a lot of players that are going through one financial transaction.
Harry
Yes.
JP
Wow.
Harry
Especially when it comes to financial transactions. I don't know when you last tried in a Western world to open a bank account. I have no priors. I'm a law abiding citizen, so I walk on the straight and narrow, right. Yet if I am to open a simple bloody bank account, to just pay whatever my bills, the effort it takes. So I was in Portugal for almost a year now, and I tried to open a bank account. Forget that. Forget that. It's not happening. Show me this, show me that. We need this form. We need that form. Oh, no. And bring me this document. And bring me that document. It's really painful and very slow to just open a bank account. And then whenever you want to basically register yourself with, I don't know, register yourself with an online portal here, online portal there. You always got slowdowns.
Harry
Now look at web3 MetaMask on boom, tuck, tuck. Okay. Got everything I need. I'm enabled. So the speed of things is just so different. And unfortunately, there is one thing which comes on top of all of this. Again, disclaimer. This is my personal point of view. It's not a political statement, blah, blah, blah. But we live at least in northern Europe and in China, definitely, and in the US. We live in a world where regulation is becoming, let's put it nicely, not exactly enabling of productivity anymore. And regulation has gone so far now and it's at every level, and it slows down things so much also in the building of it. In order to build a simple web shop, you need to get approved here, compliance here, whatever here. Regulation is now becoming a big technological impediment on its own. And all of that, at least for the time being, is not really there in crypto yet.
Harry
In crypto, at least when it comes to the doing, you can do when it comes to the possession of things you can handle immediately. You don't need to ask anybody. There is no middlemen needed because whatever the middleman, the accountant, the taxman, the auditor, the compliance officer. Well, consensus handles that for you. Your smart contract is all of that, plus more and infinitely more secure.
JP
Indeed.
Harry
So you don't need the middleman. You don't need the middleman.
JP
Exactly. That circles back to exactly the same point that you'd highlighted, especially when it comes to mobility and when it comes to companies having a business model where the more they interact with the customer, the more that it builds loyalty, it builds your steady user base and a relationship, most importantly, a relationship between your customer and yourself. I'm sorry, I'm at a loss again, because I'm still thinking about it's been a year, and that bank account in Portugal. Good Lord.
Harry
Yeah. Give it a shot. Next time you spend more than a month in a place where you don't have your bank, just give it a shot. Try it yourself. You will find how painful it is for all of the whatever, well meant reasons that are being quoted here for this. But the effect is the friction is 99% of the effort is stamp this stamp or that stamp.
JP
Oh, boy.
Harry
It's got nothing to do with the technical ability.
JP
That's far too long. That's just far too long. I mean, in comparison, I was involved in opening up a business in Singapore, and I kid you not, they did exactly what they said they would do. Right. They do that in 48 hours. Go into your registration. Yeah.
Harry
Singapore, Hong Kong, a few places in Switzerland, there islands of happiness left in the world. I agree.
JP
Yeah, indeed. Because it can be so nightmarish when it comes to just having these regulations. I mean, even Dubai, for that matter. It does take a little while, but at least, you know, you're aware, it's clean. Your expectation is clearly set. And I think that is one of the things that really goes to show that a place is organized and well enough. But also, coming back to this, and I want touch upon this point when you see that there's a lot of truth in the statement you've made when it comes to regulation not being empowering. The entire objective is actually to have smoother transitions and ease of not just doing business, but the ease of that transaction happening. And it's either the quantum of middlemen or the quantum of regulation that seems to be counterproductive, though. The intention is to make things actually go smoother.
Harry
Indeed.
JP
Yeah. It's baffling that's where it reached.
Harry
Yes. But we all live in the real world, right? There is two intentions. There is the stated intention, and then there is also intention, but the one that you don't speak about. So I would argue, and again, without pinpointing it to anybody directly, so let's take the example of banking and the regulation there. The arguments why it's needed are always the same, right. But there is another, at least an effect that it has and show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome is what one of the Buffett partners once said. So the fact of this is, and people actually use this even in venture pitches, that it creates a beautiful entry barrier into a business for the incumbents. And this is actually when you go to a venture company, one of the things that they want is they want this so called unfair advantage.
Harry
And if you have a license in a regulated business, that's a typical one example here, it's very hard for somebody to get a banking license. It takes millions of dollars, right? So it makes life easier for the incumbents. This could of course be purely coincidence, but the effect is there. And then we do know what lobbyists are and we do know how the political system works. So one thing leads to the other here. So the longer this is in place, it all starts well meaning, absolutely. But the longer it's in place, the more it will become loaded with friction for whatever reasons. And this is unfortunately, I see this and again, this is my personal opinion, but I do believe that especially the Western European approach to regulation, which is essentially if it's not allowed, you can't do it. If there's no law, you're not allowed to do it.
Harry
As opposed to Singapore. And Singapore is on a tipping point right now, but Singapore originally, Hong Kong definitely still, and the US in some aspects is if there's no law, okay, go ahead and do yeah, go ahead and do it. This is simply not possible. And especially in the German speaking countries, there's a certain mentality people actually don't like that people don't want things to be allowed if they're not regulated. But the effect of it, that's all at the end of psychology. But what it means is think about building a product. And again, I'm an engineer, right? I'm thinking about simply the mechanisms needed and the tools needed to deliver the product, not more, not less. So if I build a product and I can use something like web3, ignore all of the other overhead that is there, I end up having 10% of the effort that I need to do it.
Harry
If I do it based on web2 and all the middlemen and all the regulatory steps that are needed to get it into place. So we are in a world now where regulation and reporting and compliance and data protection and all of that together is 90% of the actual effort of the cost.
JP
Right?
Harry
And that is irrational, in my personal opinion. And you don't have that yet on web3. In web3 you do it's anyways 100% transparent and there is zero of that overhead. So you are orders of magnitude faster in delivering a product in the Web3 world than you would be in the Web2 Orders of magnitude, not percentage, multiplies.
JP
That being said, Harry, I really want to, we've spoken a lot about regulation and I also want to, curiously, and I know that our listeners today and those that are going to listen later as well will want to know rather, you've taken with BloXmove, a business that may not have a direct appeal, right? We talked about mobility. You also hit on power. We can spend more time on that. But I also want to know, from your perspective, when you speak about product, when you speak about it being empowering businesses, what I want to know is, what are some of the other businesses that may have come to your mind as ideas that really could benefit, that could make pivotal or the leapfrogging advances that you've seen in the spaces that you've been. What are some of the businesses that should get into web three and make our life easier?
Harry
The company that we have founded is actually not called BloXmove. It's the brand name. The company is called Power and Mobility. That's the two industries. So power, electric power and energy in general. And so we all by know now what carbon credits are. I think in one way or the other, we've all heard the term carbon credits. Carbon offsets. It's measured in units of carbon dioxide. There are certain calculations behind it and there's voluntary carbon credits where people go invest and essentially you plant trees, et cetera. And then you have something which is closely related because the purpose is the same. It's essentially to make the world a greener place. It's called Renewable Energy Certificates, which is proof of electricity having been produced green, meaning no fossils. And the term here is renewable Energy certificate. Here the unit is kilowatt hours, as opposed to carbon dioxide kilograms or tons.
Harry
Okay? Those are the two main certifications that are used in the energy sector to prove and document that you are greenifying. Whatever process you're running, whatever factory you're using, whatever mining for bitcoin, for instance, whatever mining rigs you're operating, if you look at, and that's a business we are still pretty much in stealth mode doing right now. But take the example of a Renewable Energy Certificate, which is it allows me, for instance, I operate an event, I calculate how much electricity I will be using, 10,000 kilowatt hours. I'm inventing a number now. And now I want to ensure that I'm doing this green. What do I do? I procure. And there's a market, there's markets for this and Registries, there is companies in Norway that let water run down the hill or wind will, or run solar panels in Northern Africa, et cetera, that produce 100% certified green power.
Harry
proof that they just produced:Harry
I need to know somebody whom I can call, and then I purchase it. He looks into his local database, then he sends me a PDF, and that was the deal. Which means I cannot resell it, obviously, because if I resell it, how do I prove this PDF is original? There's not even a digital signature on these things. So, long story short, this is very much over the counter and very much not really digital yet. What needs to be done here is, and this is where NFTs are perfect. So what needs to be done here, you take such a certificate, you convert it into what's called a verifiable credential, which can then very easily be translated into NFT. And all of a sudden you got the big wide world of Web3 to make very safe and very traceable and immutable and fully transparent transfer of possession in unlimited form until ultimately, at some point in time, somebody so called retire these renewable energy certificate at which time the NFT will have to be burned and then it has been consumed.
Harry
gest financial product of the:Harry
Digitize it, automate it. Don't even call it tokenize. Of course it's tokenization, right? But that'll scare people off right now, just automate the bloody process, which means, in fact, you will be tokenizing it. That is the biggest opportunity right now, which I see.
JP
Wow, that's a lot to think about because when you think about carbon credits and it being listed, for example, as a commodity on the stock exchange, that's a whole different ballgame. Right. That's a fantastic way to bring attention to it in the people that move it, who will then double down on an engine that creates awareness about it. It always starts by following the money. If that becomes a commodity, then yes, greener practices all across the planet. It could spark a movement, maybe not from the best source, but definitely something to look forward to.
Harry
ve the stock exchange was the:JP
Indeed. Indeed. I mean, there's certainly interesting times ahead. Harry, I've got a lot more questions for you, but I know that we've got limited time on the show. So I'm going to ask you one of the questions that was foremost in my mind. We speak about this in some ways. I'm also curious to know if there are certain businesses that should either a not be tokenized or ones that at this point just it's a lost cause. Well, what are your thoughts?
Harry
I'll take you there's. Two businesses which at the beginning of Blockchain, everybody and his neighbor said, oh, blockchain, blockchain. And the most obvious one is supply chain. So there was a huge hype oh, supply chain, blockchain plus supply chain. And the typical example was the child labor mining for the cobalt batteries in Africa. So a warlord operates child slavery to extract cobalt and that cannot be allowed. Blah, blah, and blockchain to the rescue. And this is where I hold my head in despair. Because guys, blockchain cannot help you in any which way. Why? Blockchain is a 100% digital thing. It has nothing to do with physical reality. In fact, it is purposely cut off of physical reality to the way that you even need what's called oracles to get facts from the web two into a blockchain is already a difficult and a break in paradigm.
Harry
So blockchain isolated in itself. Within that, it's perfect. But it's 100% virtual digital. If you have a real world identity proving problem, then blockchain is not your technology. Once you have ascertained the truth and here's, something like verifiable credentials and decentralized Identifiers, but most of all, the actual audit. Who do you trust in all of this to provide you with? I have seen that this basically what the NGOs do nowadays. They are real people, they must be on the ground. So this is stay away from anybody who's trying to sell you a business. I am inventing a new blockchain system to make this supply chain or that supply chain better. It cannot work because what you need to ensure is, physically speaking, you need to prove that this block of cobalt comes from here and not from there. And that's got nothing to do with blockchain.
Harry
And the other one is something like real estate. People also believe now blockchain would be perfect for real estate. I have to say it's simply not needed, because if you have a vertical chain of trust which is in place and which will not be broken, and should not be broken, which is the actual land registry, however it's called in your country, the way it works must be this way. There is no other possible way how a land register works and the players are already there. So you can centralize the land register, you can digitize it, but it doesn't make sense to put something like blockchain decentralized in it because think about it, when you buy a piece of land in most countries anyway, you need to go to a notary for a good reason, by the way. So if it's on purpose that you physically ascertain the players and get their faces, their signature, their passport, et cetera, because of the domain of business and that all of the players are there and known, blockchain is simply it doesn't make sense tokenize real estate.
Harry
It doesn't make sense because the cut off is essentially do you have a lot of individuals who shouldn't need to know each other's name, who shouldn't need to negotiate, but who still want to somehow make business? If you got a scenario like that, blockchain is your friend. If that is not the case, then you're probably not well served with blockchain.
JP
Fair enough. I think that is crystal clear, the domain that which blockchain falls in. And I know that there's going to be a lot of broken hearts across the industry when it comes to both these cases that you've pointed out, both with the utility of blockchain and the tokenization of real estate, which at one point of time was a huge movement. But I think it got relegated to just to simplify it basically a timeshare to be able to utilize a property a fractional ownership. Right. That's where they went with it. All right, interesting. Harry, I want to get your perspective before I take a question from the audience. The industry, when it comes to both power and mobility, right? In both cases, where do you see this going, say five years from now, ten years from now, well, the two industries.
Harry
And this is why they're emerging from a forget the software technology. What is happening more and more is and this is where their name comes from, renewable. So what is now, it seems, at least one of the biggest problems on mankind's mind is climate change and how to deal with it. And part of that, as we all know, is to completely electrify mobility. So no more diesel, no more gasoline. So electric mobility, now, that's number one. And also now make sure that the first half of the equation. So electric mobility means you don't emit carbon, but it doesn't say anything about did you put black electricity or green electricity into your car? I could belching coal fumes in order to produce the electricity to power your car. Or I could do pristine solar panels. Okay, so that's the first half of the lifecycle. And those two need to be greenified.
Harry
Okay, so far, so good. There's one big problem with renewable energy. If you have coal and you burn it, or if you have nuclear and you use it, whatever, you have a machine. So if you use it, then you turn the machine up. If you don't use it, you turn the machine down. Your coal stays there for whenever you want to use it. The energy stays there. It doesn't run away. Right. Renewable is not the case. You need to harvest the wind now. The wind now is not a wind tomorrow. So if you want to harvest it, you need to harvest it now. But the biggest problem with networks is networks are not storage systems. Networks are networks.
JP
Right.
Harry
You put something in it's, like a pipe. Very simple. A pipe is a pipe. So if you put something into the pipe, it needs to flow out, otherwise your pipe will burst. And this is what happens in the energy sector with renewables. You got days where windy summers, and even better, everybody's on vacation. You're simply producing more power than is required. And so you need to store it. There is not enough storage left except mobility. Come to the rescue. The batteries in electric cars can easily supply more energy storage than all the hydroelectric plants which are used now. Nowadays, what people do is essentially you pump water up the hill to store energy. So you use electricity to pump it up the hill. And then when you want the energy back, you let the water run down the hill again, and you retrieve your energy by way of turbine.
::Harry
But those are in central Europe. They're all used. The Swiss, the Norwegians and the Austrians make a lot of money out of their water with this. But that's taken electric cars, vehicle to grid can solve that. It can really solve that. And this is where power and mobility yes. And that's one Tesla or forget it, one Tesla has enough power. Let's say you have a two or three ben household in that battery is more than you will be using in five days of power in your whole household. A car battery, don't forget, a car battery moves a ton of metal for let's say, 500 km. That's a hell of a lot of power. So what you would have to do is now when they're charging, be directional charging. So not only can you charge them up, but you can also retrieve the power. Or you can store the energy in the battery of this electric vehicle when you don't need it.
::Harry
power off now and just before:::JP
Harry, the way that you've described it, you're describing the decentralization of power, right? Literally decentralization of power by creating that many nodes, if you will, which can take as well as give back more importantly into the grid. That's phenomenal.
::Harry
cars. If they all come in at:::JP
Well, interestingly, my brain goes to the fact that all these EVs that are lying underutilized or unutilized can now be put to good use. And the sooner that regulators get around to that, the better for everybody, to be honest.
::Harry
Yes, and that will be interesting because there's a lot of intricacies here, a lot of devils are in a lot of details. Yeah.
::JP
Oh, well, fantastic. Harry, it's been absolute pleasure listening to you on the show today. There has been so much to learn. I really would like to take this for another hour. Maybe we'll do a part two of the show. A lot to speak about. But my last question to you before I take one question from the audience, I can see there's around 14 or 15 questions that have comments that have come in. My question to you is, Harry, you've shared with us not just your background, but what your vision has been, the area that you're moving, you're hacking away every day to create a wonderful future. But my question to you is, Harry, what's your personal philosophy and what keeps you going?
::Harry
What keeps me going is I hinted at it. I believe in free individuals. I believe in the self sovereign individual. And I believe we need a space where a self reliant, self sovereign individual can live freely. This is what keeps me going. And this is one of the biggest fascinations for me with Web3, because look at the network state, which, if you Google it, they are trying to do this at a higher level. But I believe, and I personally love the degrees of freedom that potentially something like Web3 can put in the hands of those who know how to use it. That keeps me going and I would pay to do my job right.
::JP
Wow. I think that those are words to live by. If you found purpose so deep where you would pay to do your job, that is hats off to you, Harry. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, Harry, very quickly, I'm going to take one question. I believe this has come from Helena Lewis. It says, how does using blockchain components help to improve cross company transactions in the mobility industry?
::Harry
Well, that's a perfect example for what we are doing. Essentially. Think of it this way. We have an engine at the bottom of our platform which is called NFT. So it's an NFT which has the necessary information and also the necessary ERC 20s. So the liquid currency to pay. Okay? So you can have ten different app providers, ten different companies offering all kinds of services with all kinds of vehicles or assets or charging stations which belong to them. And in Web3, if you then agree that I hold the customer relationship for you, Helena. So you have come through my white labeled app and I sold you that NFT ticket and Peter sold an NFT ticket to John. But the operator for Peter can now accept your NFT without having to know anything about it and give you access to his service without any coordination and with knowing that he will receive his money.
::Harry
Because the engine, the Web3 machinery underneath makes sure that when you check in, a certain amount of ERC 20s are blocked. And when you check out, a certain amount of ERC 20 are sent to their account and nobody else's account, because that's in the smart contract. So one company offers you mobility with their app for electric scooter, another company offers you charging with their charging and their app. And the customer of both can be the clients of both without any contracts, negotiation, interfaces or whatever need to be put in place at all. It's completely seamless. This is the power. Of decentralized technology. And do note the important part. Both of them own their respective customer relationship. You never lose your customer as the provider and as the operator. That's the beauty of using it in a scenario such as mobility.
::JP
Brilliant, Harry, thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you so much once again for being part of the show today. We've had a fantastic discovery of this journey and the vision that comes. Know you've painted us a fantastic future to look forward to.
::Harry
Well, there's nothing good unless you do it, as they say in German. So let's do it. And it was a pleasure, by the way.
::JP
Indeed. All right, perfect. Thank you so much, Harry. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being on the show today. Remember, next week we're back at the same time in the same place with a new show on Diving into Crypto. Tune in. Also on Tuesdays for our sister show the Future of NFTs, hosted by AdLunam’s co-founder Nadja Bester. Ladies and gentlemen, I've been JP from AdLunam Inc. bringing you everything about web3. Have a good one. Cheers.
