BLOCK Issue 4

OWNING YOUR
SUCCESS
拥 有 您 自 己 的 成 功
A WEALTH OF EXPERIENCE TO THE BLOCKCHAIN AND CRYPTOCURRENCY
REALM. MARK VERNON, THE MIND BEHIND TAGBOND AND CO-FOUNDER OF
THE FINTECH PHILIPPINES ASSOCIATION SITS DOWN WITH BLOCK MAGAZINE
AND SHEDS SOME LIGHT ON WHY ASSET TOKENISATION IS THE FUTURE.
AS THE FINTECH REVOLUTION SWEEPS ACROSS THE GLOBE,
WHERE DOES THE SEA REGION STAND?
There are a lot of innovative services appearing, and this has
the knock-on-effect of getting incumbent players in the market
to take notice and make change happen. There isn’t enough
funding for the smaller start-ups - if you take the example in the
Philippines, the three largest e-wallet players got most of the
funding but, comparatively, others in the market cannot raise
the funding they need. Issues remain on KYC and identity, credit
scoring due to lack of transactional info and regulation that
slows things down. But these are all opportunities for companies
to innovate, so it is an interesting area in which to be involved.
There are initiatives to help SEA countries work together, with
countries like Singapore working with APIX API platforms to get
fintechs and banks working together, and each country creating
sandboxes in some format to help move things along.
TOKENISATION FOR GAMING CAN GENERATE AN ABUNDANCE
OF NEW REVENUE STREAMS. IS THIS THE FUTURE OF GAMING?
Gaming (as in eSports not gambling) is dominated by the big
players like Epic and Blizzard, but I have heard news recently that
they are working with or considering working with player-owned
digital assets - this will be a growing trend, as and when technology
makes it possible. Players want to own what they spend a lot of
time earning in game, that they can either sell or use in other
games. You just have to be careful how those assets are paid for
and used, otherwise you might fall afoul of gambling regulations.
There are quite a few blockchain-based games, but limited
to people who understand the technology. But for new game
creators to the market, absolutely there will be new revenue
streams - you only have to look at decentralised assets
changing hands at Enjin or the opensea auction site to see that.
The idea of really good immersive virtual reality games is still not
quite there yet, and although there are a few companies working
on metaverses, the companies that are really well placed to
make that a reality are those same companies that have millions
of players already and the funding to make it happen.
CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR LATEST PROJECTS?
I have been involved with cryptocurrency and blockchain since
2012, and I started getting really interested in Non Fungible
Tokens when Cryptokitties hit the market. At the time I was using
the Stellar blockchain to tokenise assets like Fiat currencies,
commodities and shares, since the Stellar blockchain offers
some control of assets that is needed in regulated markets and
it was a lot easier and cheaper to do than getting into Ethereum
Smart Contracts. I had also created a geoTAG game which
rewarded users that visited a geofenced area, but it wasn’t on
blockchain at the time.
34 | #AIBCsummit Issue 4