Driverless cars and drones delivering parcels to your doorsteps, chatbots getting orders online, robot doing the hard physical work – these days, technologies in IoT and robotics are called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In the future, it will deprive millions of people of jobs and subsistence. Yet Ian Worrall, co-founder of MyBit IoT investment ecosystem, has invented the way to make money on new technologies without leaving home. His startup is located in Switzerland and develops two products, namely, MyBit DApp decentralized investment platform and MYDAX, world’s first decentralized IoT asset exchange. In an interview to Invest Foresight, Ian Worrall explained how his platform operates and what devices are worth investments.
– You have chosen a good time to develop the platform. According to Research and Markets, by 2025, it is being projected that more than 100 billion of the Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices will be installed which will generate a revenue of close to $10 trillion. Did this inspire you to create MyBit?
– I was always on the lookout for alternative investments that had a high return potential, in particular the ones that the mainstream had not tapped into. This is how I eventually became involved with Bitcoin and crypto as a whole. I saw a massive opportunity for IoT automation when I read an article about that topic. The article stated that by 2030, 800,000,000 jobs will be lost by automation. This makes up for roughly 1/3 of the total workforce in the United States alone.
With all the new technological possibilities that are being developed, it is good to re-think what our economy is all about. After I did my research I found out that the global IoT market is projected to generate 10 Trillion USD in revenue by 2025, and till now there is no effective way to invest in this colossal opportunity.
Traditionally, I would have to trust my money to a third-party investment fund. Nothing about that made sense to me. The frustration of needing to trust someone else with my money, having them take 20% for managing my investment without any transparency at all brought me to the idea.
After coming up with the idea I realized that it also had a socio-economic impact. By removing the barrier to enter the investment opportunities, more people are able to invest in projects that were usually only available for the rich lucky few. Traditional funds have quite significant minimum capital requirements (often hundreds of thousands of dollars). MyBit restructures the entire economic landscape and gives every individual the power to invest in a fast growing market. When automated solutions replace jobs, most people will actually own the machines instead of just the rich and powerful.”
– You use Ethereum’s smart contract system to democratize and decentralize investment by introducing the concept of fractional ownership. The company boasts that it will enable anyone in the world to invest and profit from the “emerging multi-trillion dollar industry of autonomous vehicles, renewable energy, robotics and smart IoT devices”. What’s the concept of fractional ownership mean? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this model?
– Investors are able to own a portion of a revenue generating IoT device via our platform. All of this could be securely managed with Ethereum Smart Contracts. These make the whole process much more efficient by reducing the fees (by 10x), creating full transparency in a global market, and as an investor I never have to trust anyone with my money or payout (MyBit takes 1% from the transaction. While traditional investment funds take 20-30% of the proceeds). It just made sense to use Smart Contracts to redefine the way we invest.
– How does your platform work? Please give some examples.
– It all begins by the asset manager who sees a profitable opportunity; a story owner has a small corner in his local store to place a Bitcoin ATM but he lacks the funds. He places his request on the platform where several investors belief in the profitable opportunity and fund portions of the Bitcoin ATM. An order gets out to the supplier of the ATM and the machine gets delivered a moment later. From there on the machine will start to generate revenue. This revenue is split between all involved parties according to the percentage of their ownership. MyBit redefines the way people generate income by letting them invest in the machine economy which will grow significantly in the near future.
– And what an investor should do if the owner of Bitcoin ATM went bankrupt and ATM was taken away by creditors? What protection measures do you guarantee?
– The owner can’t go bankrupt as the machine has multiple owners. Asset managers have put funds in escrow, making them dependent on the success of their projects.
– You try to democratize the ownership of machines and its resulting revenue streams instead of letting them fall into the control of centralized financing institutions. But is it possible to compete with financial institutions?
– We believe that blockchain technology offers the right foundation to actually compete and win this competition. Our objective is to make the platform so user friendly that everyone able to directly use it which opens the doors to mass adoption.
– You spent token pre-sale is in 2017. ICO has met your expectations? Have you collected the right amount?
– Our token sale was a great success and gave us the right financial foundation to build and scale (10,004 ETH). We are right on track.
– At what stage is the project now? How were many investment deals made on your platform?
– MyBit just released its Alpha to a group of community members. The Alpha is on testnet to make sure that all bugs are solved and that user interaction can be measured. After everything is up to our high standard, the Beta will come out. This will be the first version of the testnet with live transactions.
– When will the beta release?
– The beta is scheduled for the end of Q4 or Q1 of 2019.
– Steora smart benches have become one of the projects on MyBit. What interesting projects should investors pay attention to?
– Our platform will offer a wide variety of products to invest in. We just signed a partnership with Slock.it which enables people to monetize objects that can be (un)locked; cars, houses, offices, bikes etc. etc. But this is just the beginning. In the future we will see drones, autonomous vehicles and maybe even an autonomous cargo ship one day. The IoT industry knows no limits so we are not bound either.
– Mybit came to be because we didn’t like the way the future was going. We see when all these automation technologies hit the market, like self-driving cars, delivery drones, it displaces tons of jobs”… – said yoy in the one interview. Of course, technology will eliminate many jobs – it has always done so. At the same time, one study from Gartner Research states that while 1.8 million jobs will be lost by 2020, 2.3 million new ones will be created. Please comment.
– Although new jobs are generated, the human population is increasing faster than ever. This means that there will be more new people than there are new jobs as machine automation becomes more effective and efficient. This trend will continue until there are too much people and not enough jobs to support them, creating a disbalance in the economy. MyBit redefines the way people generate income so everyone has the opportunity to participate in the future economy.
– In this fourth revolution, new technologies combine the physical, digital and biological worlds. These technologies have great potential and help regenerate the natural environment through better asset management, potentially even undoing all the damage previous industrial revolutions have caused. But the fourth industrial revolution will affect the distribution of roles between countries. Who will go to the top-5? Where is the place in Switzerland?
– We can’t really answer this question but what we can say it that we went to Switzerland because of their open stance towards crypto companies. This surely makes them stand out which causes a lot of international talent to move to their country. We are located at Crypto Valley labs in Zug, a place where the we have the perfect supportive environment for us to further develop our company.