Community Update — July 13th, 2018
Tags: P2p Lending, Ethereum, Blockchain, Fintech

Good day everyone and welcome to this community update.

Exchanges

We are working closely with the Quoine and Qryptos team as they are working diligently to fulfil their regulatory requirements in Japan and Singapore. Given the recent scrutiny of the Asian regulators on exchanges and token issuers, we felt the need to undertake clearer regulatory and legal analysis on the cryptocurrency landscape in Singapore and in relation to our LND token. This analysis will be completed in the next few weeks at which point we will be able to give a clearer indication of our listing date on Qryptos.

Business Development

In the last two weeks, Linda and Steve have been travelling to meet clients and potential partners in New York, Chicago, Seoul and Hong Kong.

New York & Chicago

We met with a number of our partners including banks, exchanges and hedge funds while in New York. We also met a few trading desks in Chicago and attended networking drinks on the rooftops of one of our partner firms. During these meetings we saw the scale in which traditional financial institutions are embracing the cryptocurrency space in a massive way and are paving the infrastructure and tools through which they can be accessed.

However many of the institutional players are still waiting and strategizing for the right step to approach the market, given the regulatory uncertainty. Through this process, we have been able to establish ourselves as a go-to industry partner to cement our relationship with these institutional players as they approach entering this market.

Seoul

We attended a Blockchain event called Chainers in Seoul where we met with interesting Asian based projects, exchanges and emerging institutional players. We also met with different exchanges and funds which we previously had relationships with.

We quickly navigated a depressed attitude in the South Korean market which is attributed to the strict regulatory oversight by the financial regulators. This has meant that it’s been very difficult for exchanges to offer the same services to retail clients in 2018 that they have been able to do last year. This meant that exchange volumes for the top Korean exchanges have decreased by almost 60–90% of their 2017 volumes. In addition, their strategy towards the market is also changing and have all now professed a more institutional outlook for their go-to-market strategy. Yet, this is still challenged by the fact that the regulators currently do not allow deposits to exchanges to be made through corporate accounts and are restricting mainstream financial services players from offering cryptocurrency products to their existing retail or corporate clients. In practical terms, this means that any ambitions Korean institutions have for entering the crypto market is now funnelled out of their domestic markets and into the Hong Kong or Singaporean markets instead. Across the conversations we had in Korea, this attitude from locals have helped us re-evaluate Korea as a key market for Lendingblock so we will focus our attention closer on Hong Kong and Singapore as key access points into the Asian markets.

Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, we had a more positive experience with regards to meeting many traditional new crypto financial institutions who are young in their digital asset experience yet are ambitious to grow and have recruited heavy weight teams supplemented by the wealth of experience and local financial industry talent in Hong Kong. Here we met our partners Octagon Strategy, as well as a few other hedge funds, both traditional and crypto focused. Discussions here mirrored our experience

The trip quickly reinforced our relationships with both new and existing partners and helped us navigate the Asian markets for developing future relationships in the region.

Regulatory Update

Feedback from our Gibraltar lawyers on the DLT License application suggests the GFSC are becoming increasingly demanding on firms in the application process and several firms have been asked for significant additional information, extending the timeframes of the application process. We are on track to submit our full application at the end of July and intend to provide a comprehensive set of documentation in order to minimise the level of additional questions and document requests. We have undertaken a review, with our legal advisers, of the US regulatory landscape as it relates to the Lendingblock business model and have drawn up a plan for obtaining US regulatory approval. This is likely to be a lengthy process and very few firms have so far obtained approval to operate on a fully authorised basis in the US. Whilst it may be possible to operate for a short time with non-US entities of US clients, we believe that obtaining full regulatory authorisation in the US will provide important commercial advantage for the long-term operation of the platform, including the potential for bringing tokenised securities into the product set. With the General Counsel having started two weeks ago and the new Head of Compliance and Risk due to start next week we now have almost the full team needed to pursue the various regulatory approvals that we need to obtain across the globe. Next step will be to begin a review of the regulatory environment and all of the key territories which Lendingblock clients operate.

Tech Update

The tech team are continuing with the build of the platform and service infrastructure. Sprint 7 was closed last week, and included the following work:

Adding user settings, KYC, notification end points to the API

Build out API docs and user guides for key functionality on the website

Further work on devops

Complete loan smart contract development

Build out mobile version of the website

Login/registration build and UI completion

Sprint 8 is now mid-way through and looks to provide the following deliverables:

Institutional settings and KYC UI and build

Execution panel UI and build (the component which will allow users to execute orders)

Further API development

Creation of price engines

Creation and storage of loan wallet

Further devops work

Team

We have had a number of new joiners start in the past few weeks including Ehsan, Sebastian and Ben, our General Counsel and Business Analysts respectively. In the next two weeks, we will have a new backend developer, Head of Marketing and Head of Compliance starting as well.

We are glad to report that despite the growth we’ve had in the recent weeks at Lendingblock, the new joiners have been able to adapt to our culture very quickly and are getting on fantastically with the rest of the team.

Community Update

For the past two weeks we have been focusing on the Ambassador Program and co-ordinating to publish the Ambassador produced content towards the end of the month. It is paramount to generate and distribute articles/blog posts/videos that are well written, correct and most importantly, feel organic, thus we have been concentrating on these traits.

As a reminder, you can apply to be a Lendingblock Ambassador here.

Given our increased focus on Hong Kong and Singapore, we are putting together a plan to grow and engage with Chinese speaking community there, which will be implemented towards the end of the month.

We are also planning to host a Lendingblock meetup in London at the start of August — more details next week.

In case you didn’t get a chance to attend the Tax & Cryptocurrencies event earlier this month, we will be posting the recorded talks on our YouTube channel in the near future.

Pathfounders Event

On June 22, 2018, Linda spoke on the Instituionalisation of cryptocurrencies and the financial infrastructure that Lendingblock is building to facilitate the market dynamics. https://fintech-blockchain.thepathfounder.com/agenda

Women in Silicon roundabout

Our product manager, Tara, spoke at the Women in Silicon Roundabout event on 27th of June, speaking on “How Lending and Borrowing Provide New Opportunities for the Cryptoasset Market”.

https://www.women-in-technology.com/entrepreneurs-and-female-founders

The Europas

Charlie Beach gave an interesting discussion on the process of an ICO, by using our own ICO process as an example.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/31/more-speakers-panels-at-the-europas-and-how-to-get-your-ticket-free/

Links

Website: https://lendingblock.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lendingblock

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lendingblock/

Telegram: https://t.me/Lendingblock