Discussing how blockchain technology can provide commercial services for enterprises

Recently, we interviewed the Commercial Product Director of a large Blockchain company to discuss how Blockchain technology can provide business services to enterprises and why certain Blockchains are particularly suited for these use cases.

The following is the content of this interview:

Q1: Please briefly introduce yourself, your role, and how you got started in the Web3 space?

Currently, I lead the company's commercial product team. Generally speaking, commerce encompasses everything; it may be the foundation of most things, involving various business areas such as gaming, retail, loyalty, travel, ticketing, and more.

This is my sixth year exploring the blockchain field, having started in 2017. After taking some time off to care for my child, I wanted to work in an interesting, complex, and challenging technology area. I hope to solve unsolved problems rather than continue with conventional web development work. Through a friend's introduction, I entered the blockchain field and experienced an amazing learning process.

My past work experience has been focused on user experience. Therefore, I pay great attention to optimizing the "lowest common denominator", which is finding the simplest way to understand issues. I find that information related to Blockchain is often confusing, but I gradually realize that it can solve a very clear problem: asset ownership and digital agency. In traditional Web2, users do not truly own their data and online behavior.

Blockchain has overturned everything, allowing users to truly own their transactions, assets, and outcomes. Furthermore, I am very interested in the impact of blockchain technology on privacy, especially zero-knowledge proof technology.

I like Blockchain not as a standalone entity but as an infrastructure that can improve the internet as a whole. Certain new types of Blockchain actually have the potential to become the infrastructure suitable for the internet. I think many other Blockchains are great, but they often have slower speeds and higher costs, making them less suitable for enterprise use. The new generation of Blockchains has more potential to easily meet all these challenges. I look forward to being able to validate my personal hypotheses about Blockchain and the impact it could have on the entire internet.

Q2: How do you guide enterprises that have already developed well in the Web2 space to think creatively about the problems in their business and how Blockchain can be a solution?

Let's look at this issue from a business perspective. In business, we often talk about the sales funnel. This funnel game is a fundamental principle of any business, whether you are a movie theater or a shoe retailer, where you try to attract as many people as possible at the top of the funnel so that as many as possible ultimately make it to the bottom of the funnel and convert through natural attrition.

The top of the funnel is a very complex place; basically, that's where the advertising is. You are trying to attract as many people as possible to learn about your business, understand your products, and interact with your brand. The biggest challenge facing every small business owner is acquiring customers. This involves how to tell my story? How to find people who want to buy the products I sell? How to adjust my sales approach to cater to people who might be slightly interested in my products? How can I maintain sales so that even if I perform excellently this week, I can continue to grow based on that performance next week? These are all long-term challenges faced by small businesses. However, for various reasons, these challenges have become very daunting in the current internet environment.

First and foremost, the most important issue is privacy. Web2 and the internet have progressed along the path of "I need to collect as much data about you as possible in order to show you advertisements." This is why we have established rules such as GDPR and California's CCPA, which aim to protect individuals from being shared or even collected without consent. Unfortunately, this also means that the quality of data needed to build customer channels has declined.

How blockchain contributes to this data ecosystem and how zero-knowledge technology can be used to feed information about people's behavior back to the internet, but without sharing private information. Zero-knowledge enables individuals to verify facts more intelligently. The speed and scalability of certain new blockchains make them the most suitable places to use zero-knowledge to provide services for real-time internet queries.

Just as the entire online advertising world was established in the early 2000s with the online behavior, we now see that Blockchain can be used to reduce customer acquisition costs.

Take another example, loyalty. Every time I encounter a company that wants my email address, I think, what have you done for me that makes me feel satisfied? Why should I be loyal? With digital asset ownership, you can give me something that will always belong to me, which can be updated, changed, and developed. Certain blockchains have the capability to provide dynamic, composable NFTs (at internet speed and low cost), so suddenly, loyalty programs may mean much more to customers, as they can actually offer more than just more emails and discount codes.

Q3: Is this to add Blockchain to your tech stack to achieve what you are trying to do in a broader business model?

I firmly believe that certain new types of blockchains are an essential part of your technology stack. The cloud computing era has essentially introduced us to the idea of rapid scalability. Now, if you are a business that is starting tomorrow or you are investing in your infrastructure, you will absolutely include cloud computing, because not doing so would be foolish. I think certain new types of blockchains represent a blockchain era, which you can consider in a similar way. Some things are only possible through blockchains like this, or can only be secured by using such blockchains; therefore, trying to accomplish these things in other ways would be absurd. This field is still new, and it requires partners willing to build with us and embark on this journey.

Q4: In many ways, what you are describing is the opposite side of what is typically considered with Blockchain, namely building Web3 businesses.

Interestingly, the distinction between Web2 and Web3 is only useful when it helps to describe the difference between Blockchain technology and standard foundational internet technology. There will come a moment in the future when this distinction becomes irrelevant because we are not striving to create an internet to access; we are merely working to make the internet you already use better for everyone. A win-win should be for everyone, including end users, and right now saying Web2 and Web3 can help you describe that distinction. But at some point in the future, we are just talking about the internet and generalized internet behaviors and activities, and what will become a norm.

We are not trying to create an internet that you need to go to; we are just trying to make the internet you are already using more friendly for all participants.

Q5: What role do end users play in understanding the value of decentralized technology and Blockchain, as this relates to their own privacy? Do you anticipate that they will make more demands on businesses once those businesses are ready to provide benefits, allowing them to start receiving those benefits?

All of the above are present, so let's start with the decentralized technology stack. The incredible thing about decentralized Blockchain with this capability is that many people will participate to make it a reality. Many people have invested a lot, not just the company that created it, and not just the investors, but all the participants. This collective investment has been the foundation based on successful open-source technology for many years. Yet, there has always been the notion that if something is open-source, it cannot make money. What Blockchain does is tell you that you can earn money within this open-source culture because the decentralized technology stack allows you to do both at the same time, especially with Blockchain technology. Some people will delve into all aspects of the economy that need to actively operate and run well to stabilize the globally available Blockchain network, such as validation nodes, staking, and node operations. Another group of users will be very focused on what it means for their activities.

I think there is another group of people who, to be honest, don't really care about blockchain or anything else. They just want a really good loyalty program, and they want to enjoy a secure experience online. They hope that the companies they trust won't use their information for bad purposes, and they want to feel like they can access experiences and value propositions that are suitable for them. Therefore, they want to buy a hat and hope that the concept of ownership is reflected in a way that makes sense to them. They want to participate in a loyalty program that truly changes with where they are, so it's not just confined to this little box or if they scratch this particular coupon, etc. If blockchain realizes its potential, then the entire range of users will be interested in it.

This is the internet of today. Some people are very technical and dive into the details, but others' grandparents just need a smartphone with a big font; they are excited to be able to do some things on their phones, whereas before they had to go to a bank or travel agency in person to accomplish these tasks. The new generation of Blockchain will serve every one of these users.

Moreover, I also believe that in the end, even if many people try not to participate technically, they will feel safer and then expect to see it as a default option, where my privacy is provided by default. Any application that does not offer this must be suspicious. Because why wouldn’t you provide this for me? We will turn to places where individuals have more choices. I think this is fundamentally beneficial.

Q6: What excites you the most about the future of Blockchain?

What excites me the most about the future of Blockchain is the new types of login methods. This is very thrilling for me. Certain Blockchains will provide a primitive that allows you to log in using what most people consider reasonable login patterns. That is, by logging in with my email or other existing accounts, you can access the Blockchain, but it eliminates the need to remember keys or worry about forgetting the private key for this transaction. Those truly high-risk demands are gone.

This is a significant step forward, which can be said to bring a billion users to the Blockchain. It is exciting to see this become a reality and to provide a simple way for non-Blockchain businesses to leverage this capability. As more and more people adopt this technology, we will see more use cases emerge.