Learnings made: Nikita Fuchs
By: Stefan Perlebach
Tags: Interview, ICO, Cryptocurrency, Investing, Blockchain

Never listen to an „ICO advisor“ — it is like building a car and asking a VW dealer because he would probably know about cars.

What is your role in the Blockchain universe, where is your expertise?

I develop decentralized applications that run on Ethereum and focus on integrating them with other systems like payment services or hardware.

I do ICOs for a couple of my clients, of which the most well-known was the Envion ICO raising $100 Million dollars. Not taking any credit for their ambitious project, but a couple of the ICO smart contract features I’ve built like dynamic token pricing and downstream-KYC — both a world premiere that time to my knowledge — definitely were appreciated by the investors and maximized the conversion rate. Also noteworthy is the sophisticated Blockchain Aeternity, to whose development I’m honored to contribute to. Since recently I also spend more and more time though on consulting companies about distributed ledger technology in general, because they all do not want to get left behind, and the smarter ones even get some advice before starting hiring and building.

What is the biggest misconception about Blockchain?

Being a solution to all IT problems companies failed to solve ever since.

Can you name 3 use cases where Blockchain technology creates value?

For now:

- Trustless data verification mechanism: You can verify data and even identities without requiring a trusted source (or storing actual data on-chain!)

- Trustless fairness: Think of value distribution or claims/rights management through smart contracts

- Trustless trading of expensive goods and services: You may not want to pay two dollars transaction fee for a cup of coffee, but buying a house with crypto ? Why not !

We’ll talk again about dramatically extending this list once we have multi-party state channels and „zero-knowledge“ for smart contracts.

How do I know whether or not Blockchain technology could improve my business?

For now, having the blockchain sticker on your company’s logo will certainly drive it’s valuation at last. But it would be wrong not to think about Videostreaming in times of ISDN, when the DSL era is actually coming. So if your business could benefit from

a). Cutting out middlemen,

b). Decentralized trust and transparent fairness or

c). Liberating itself from centralized vulnerability points,

get educated and start prototyping now!

What would you recommend projects, who are planning to do an ICO?

Never listen to an „ICO advisor“ — it is like building a car and asking a VW dealer because he would probably know about cars. ICOs are no joke, and not raising the money because of a bad strategy and copy-paste token code design is by far the least tragic thing that can happen. Talk to somebody, who was engaged in Ethereum developing before the ICO craze and be safe. Don’t mean to denigrate anyone, but many of the newer people joined only because they smelled money. Figures, marketing and smart contracts make only the small part of the effort. It’s about knowing how to integrate your token into your electrical vehicle charging station, if that is what the token you sell is supposed to serve for one day. Or at least building some proper website interface for your token sale, not just some „send your crypto now, get your tokens delivered later“ — that is not what an ICO supposed to be and does not worship the technological capabilities of smart contracts that blockchain technology was actually hyped for: Send funds and get what you were promised, or nothing happens at all. Everything else is online shopping.

What are common mistakes Blockchain projects make?

Thinking they need blockchain.

Thinking it’s a storage solution / data base.

It usually goes like this:

0.) Learns about smart contracts

1.) „Put everything on blockchain!“

2.) Starts company

3.) Learns about limitations (transaction, block size, no data privacy, tech stack)

4.) Either silently drops actual implementation of blockchain feature of project („It’s there, somewhere !“) or announces „private blockchain“ („Solving scalability issues!“) or turns to hyper ledger („We’ve got something with blockchain still, there you see!“) — because the pitch deck was hard work and it’s beyond the point of no return.

My partners and I can tell stories about any of the types of projects mentioned above. My personal favourite from not long ago: „Yeah so we’re doing this ICO to raise money to have a blockchain developed that would meet our requirements and suffice with the GDPR“

What was the biggest learning you made during the last year?

Never sacrifice self-determination, independence and freedom for anything — ever.

What’s the best advice you’ve recently received?

When explaining something to somebody, especially not from your field, ask him to explain it back to you. That way you make sure he got 100 percent, not just 80. Thanks Felix!

Which industries will be disrupted by Blockchain in the next 5 years?

Following the only existing universal business rule more complex than „there is no such thing as a free lunch“, being Harvard Prof. Clayton Christensen’s book turned-silicon-valley-bible „The Innovator’s Dilemma“ it’s those who by criteria like company structure, margins, client-lock-in and/or simply arrogance will never jump on a wave that’s about to wash them away. Hey Deutsche Bank, I did a $100 Million ICO with a dozen of people, not looking good for your IPO game.

Who is your favorite super or real life hero?

Elon Musk of course.

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