FintekNews is pleased to bring you our new series #BlockchainProfiles – featuring thought leaders within the blockchain and digital currency space. For the next feature in this series, we’d like you to meet Moshe Joshua, Chief Product Officer at Blackmoon, a Blockchain FinTech company creating tokenized investment vehicles that will bridge the gap between the fiat and crypto universes.
NAME:
Moshe JoshuaTITLE:
Chief Product Officer (CPO)COMPANY:
BlackmoonWEB ADDRESS:
https://blackmoonplatform.com/How did you personally become involved in blockchain?
I have been working within wall street firms for over 20 years. The fundamentals of the blockchain industry have something that have always attracted my attention from the outset of Bitcoin’s whitepaper, due to the direct overlay to my work in derivative markets and credit-based trading systems.
My first official job for a blockchain related company was as a market-maker and liquidity provider for Ripple. That relationship led to me consulting directly for them and developing their first stab at a streaming market-data and FIX-Protocol translator for Ripple’s Consensus Ledger (RCL); a technology called Ripple Stream that led to the further development of their current FX market product line.
What does your firm do/offer within the blockchain sector?
We are tokenizing fund investments, all for one purpose: liquidity. Importantly, we are focused on a two-way bridge where traditional fiat investors can gain access to crypto’s current volatility, and inversely grant a crypto owner some de-risk options to invest in traditional capital markets.
We select traditional fund managers looking to tokenize their fund via our platform. A one stop solution that provides IT, Compliance, Marketing, Reporting, Security and Investor/Customer Support. It’s not simply a matter of cost and efficiency, but also marketability and access to markets other investors cannot currently access. We provide investors, both crypto as well as traditional fiat owners, the opportunity to select from a diverse set of curated investment vehicles for their portfolio, all within a liquid and tradeable environment.
What is your role within your firm and what do you do there on any given day?
I am Chief Product Officer for the Company. No day is the same as the last, especially now that we are growing so rapidly. My main focus is providing vision and strategy towards what I believe will work, and stay in-touch with the industry to maintain a pulse of the market’s demand. It's my job to make sure our products and platform have relevance and are actually meeting a need, and not simply doing it because it’s cool (which it totally is anyways!).
What area/s of blockchain do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?
Without question blockchain as an industry that is moving towards its second phase of acceptance. I think we are still a few years away from a full-blown mainstream usage pattern, but the discovery phase is over. Bitcoin and Ethereum have been the proving grounds for what blockchain’s promise can attest to in the real-world vs. what it cannot compete with, and now we are seeing those usage patterns entrenching themselves in new and novel ways. New technologies and protocols are still trying to unseat them, either through better latency and/or higher throughput, but the focus will still be on where decentralized ledgers (DLT) generate new value, and create new verticals, as opposed to simply a better underlying digital infrastructure.
What do you believe the next major innovation in financial technology will be and why?
DLT has been great in exposing the need for a major financial technical overhaul, and we are now in the process of replacing and upgrading its core.Paradigm shifting technologies take time to absorb themselves into our lives, and I don’t see anything “new” occuring for another decade (barring a major advancement in a quantum computer or cold fusion). We saw it with the advent of the internet, and the laser - it takes time for the world to catch up and for those technologies to realize their true potential, with products that were inconceivable at the outset. Now with DLT and the internet-of-value it’s no different. The next decade will be focused on how to best utilize the common denominator of all these technologies and those players that create the best user-experiences will win out in the end.
IoT is on its own interesting future curve, and considering the long-tail reputation-credit-value argument mentioned above, I believe we will start to see financial products and innovative value-transfer that is directly embedded into physical everyday handheld devices.
What are the biggest problems facing the blockchain industry in the future?
As far as I’m concerned, the future of blockchain’s adoption intoall
technology frameworks is inevitable. That’s how excited I am about it. However, specifically in the financial arena, without a doubt, the possibility of being permanently pigeonholed into a regulatory framework that was not built to support a borderless environment is problematic. For those unregulated industries that can let their creative imaginations run wild, they are only limited to what they internally self-regulate (social networks not allowing porn is a good example). However, financially regulated companies, like Blackmoon, are forced to work within their jurisdictional compliant limitations. The borderless nature of the internet, coupled together with the advent of digital currency, create logical problems for regulatory frameworks, which are legislative and bordered by definition. Interestingly, regulators stand to gain the most from DLT’s public transparency, and I am hopeful that feature-set will in the end succeed in expanding the current regulatory environment into a more global purview. We must maintain the existing regulatory investor protections, they are the bedrock of the financial system, but we will also need it to upgrade and adopt a global consortium and internet-based standardizations to unlock DLT’s full financial potential.What has been the biggest success in your firm to date?
Other than raising $30M in under 20 hours, I would say that the current launch of the Xiaomi IPO token is one of our most notable milestones. Blackmoon is the first company in history to tokenize an IPO this way and allows cryptocurrency investors to users access to the Xiaomi Corporation IPO.