[Investor Talk] Blockchain Investing and 2020 Key Developments with John Ng from Signum Capital

Widelia: John, it’s great to have you on the show.

John: Thanks, Widelia. It’s great to be here.

BACKGROUND STORY

Widelia: Signum Capital is founded in 2017. It’s not the earliest blockchain investment fund, but it’s definitely among the most reputable funds, which are still active today. So, John, can you share with us how you first came to know about blockchain?

John: So, prior to investing in blockchain companies, I was with a VC company and I have my own private investment firm as well. And I’ve been investing since I was like 20s early twenties. I’m 40 this year. But I started my first company when I was 11 years old. After spending so much time doing so many things, I thought that it was time for me to take a break and you know, I won’t use the word retire, but just take a break. And then I met a friend of mine whom some of you might know, YY, who introduced me to blockchain technology. And that was in early 2017 or late 2016. And that is how I started getting into the space. I didn’t form the company until much later 2017 officially. But prior to that, we were already investing in Ethereum and of course in Bitcoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin cash.

FOUNDING SIGNUM CAPITAL

Widelia: What prompted you to formalize the investment in blockchain by setting up Signum capital? And what is the investment mandate with Signum capital?

John: I think it’s more so that we saw that the technology, blockchain technology could be, we’ve missed on a lot of, opportunities back then you know, it’s like great opportunities in the tech space prior. And I think that blockchain, will help to revitalise the space, you know, I won’t say newer technologies, but to be able to help other companies be more efficient and safer in a sense. And so, investing in blockchain technology is something that, all of us, as partners felt that it would be the next big thing. But it’s gonna take some time. So that was one of the propelling reasons for us to invest in the space. Also, the, you know, the community engagement that we’ve seen surrounding this space, it’s tremendous.

You know, you don’t get to see that with most traditional tech start-ups to be honest. So, I think, with that, we decided to formalize this investment company. And, and get the ball rolling in this space.

Our mandate, it’s really pretty basic. It’s, it’s, I’m investing in infrastructure projects. And back then there was in protocol. And the reason for doing so was because we felt that investing in such projects was akin to like investing in roads, or in water supply, or in power plants for example, that gives a country, you know, the infrastructure that is needed to then allow foreign investments to come in to build condominiums, to build whatever they need to build in, in the country. So, I come from a property background, I see things a little bit different, I guess. But, yeah, so the investment thesis was in that, that stage, that time, it was just purely on a protocol and yeah infrastructure play. Of course, that has evolved after three, four years down the road. And on hindsight things have changed now.

VALUE OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Widelia: What do you think is the overarching value that blockchain, you know, together with the value, there’s also the investment, investment opportunities around blockchain that the technology brings?

John: You know, I’ve seen so many different kinds of use cases for blockchain, I would say. And some of them work. And some of them are really playing out. They don’t really work. Okay, well I don’t want name those that don’t work. But, let’s take it from a point where the majority of the people that are into blockchain right now, at least, are pretty young right, like from, as young as 19, 20, you know, it could be younger, all the way to the maybe mid-thirties, 35, 36 majority. And you, you know, I, so how do I put it, the guys that were 18, are now 21, the guys that were 31 are now 34, the guys that were 34 are now 37, we’re talking about like three to four years down the road and now it’s 2020.

I think that, you know, with the demographics of these folks, right, comes the ownership of, you know, we have right now we are in the phase of mobile phones being the most, you know, not only the most, I think it’s like a wife too many, many people or husband to many, many ladies out there. You can’t live without your hand phone and your hand phone does everything. From a traditional point of view banking on a hand phone or even investment through hand phones are not really heard off but now with blockchain technology or blockchain companies that enable financial freedom for a lot of people, especially the working class, the middle class, I think that’s going to be, you know, there’s going to be huge in time to come. It’s already starting to gain so much traction in this space. I think that banks, you know, are looking at how, you know, how to, I won’t say compete, but how to adopt, right, these solutions into their own traditional conventional banking methods. But, I think, well, I’m going to go through this decentralized finance. It’s, it’s going to be the one that’s going to take this by storm. I’m still very much into the finance play and especially in Asia. And I think that, yeah, finance will be the key to winning this space, everything else will come later.

Widelia: So, we talked about the, you know, you mentioned about decentralized finance and using blockchain technology. So is the value that the blockchain technology creates is on the technology that it enables a much lower transaction costs or enable transactions that were not, you know, like operations that were not possible before, but it is now possible, or does it also have another layer of, you know, the thought about getting rid of centralized authority in, in that. So, there are like two, two parts to the value. Do you see that as two parts?

John: Well I do, actually. I think that, so maybe an example would be, so I have, okay, so this is actually, this is a true story. So, I have a friend that has multiple properties around the world, including Singapore and they are all fully paid up. The properties are fully paid up. So now he is asset rich, but I won’t say cash poor, but he doesn’t have as much cash as the value of his assets. Now he’s trying to monetize the asset without losing the asset, right? the collateralised loan, but it’s not very easy in the banking world, it’s really difficult, very, very difficult to get cash out of an asset unless you sell it. You know, it’s not an easy because properties aren’t the most liquid in the world, so you want a loan and that whole process is mind boggling.

It’s really, really tough to do it. You need to have a certain amount of money in your bank. You need to have, you need DSR (Debt Servicing Ratio) and all that, that comes into play. And with, you know, with DeFi, I have heard of a company but I can’t remember which company that allows you to do that, to collateralize your assets, your property, and get cash instantaneously whether be it in USDT or you know, stable coins or cryptocurrencies, which then you can, you can do other things after that. You can spend it on investments. If you do the maths right and you probably could own more properties to be honest. Also, the second part of that value, what was the second part of the question. Sorry.

Widelia: Yeah. So, one part is literally on what was possible and what wasn’t possible. And then another part, which is bring us to a different mindset situation because before we have been, you know, involved in the society, while there are central parties like the bank, you would rarely question if you are in a developed country, you rarely question the, you know, that the money, the bank, you know, and how blockchain enabled us to basically move into a different mindset into something that we are able to do things without the central authorities that we were so accustomed to. So, that was the part.

John: So, yeah, I mean going with banking. And I was an ex banker with Standard Chartered Bank and, first-hand knowledge on, I wouldn’t say how inefficient it is, but it’s because of all those authorities and regulations, right, that come into play. Yeah. Why not? Blockchain is actually a much more efficient solution to, it will be a much more efficient solution that the banking needs. The whole idea of, I like to use examples because I’ve been in a traditional space for so long and moving into the blockchain space. I’ve seen how good, how efficient, this has transformed my life to be honest. You know properties, right? So if you sell a property, or you want to buy a property, you have a go through above five regulations, five regulating authorities, in order to know whether the property is sold, not sold, how much does it cost, how the banks are going to value their property and so on and so forth. Now, every one of these things can be done in one single click, one single click, so easy, but hopefully this can be done soon. But it can be, I don’t know, I did invest in a company that did that — Konkrete which is in Australia. And they’re trying to bring that technology to Singapore. Hopefully. So, but then again, it’s, it’s, it’s not easy to transform people’s minds, right? Because this has been something that has been used for, well, I don’t know, 50 years no it’s 40 years actually in Singapore at least. Right. So, trying to get these guys to adopt, the technology is, it’s not going to be an easy task, but I think it’s going to happen eventually.

Widelia: Do you think the most of the value right now at this current stage will be created by traditional industry using blockchain technologies to do things that they weren’t able to do before? Or was it that the main value will be created in the small, in a small kind of niche area that fully focus on blockchain. So, in this case, that example of traditional financial world using blockchain technology versus decentralized finance, how do you think about the value play between the two?

John: Right. So, so currently, you know, we have lending and, and I’m pretty sure you know about lending Bitcoin for example, and lending Ethereum, you know, this is great because lending gives you 8–10%, thereabouts. And if you have a stash of Bitcoin, or you have been following your miner, I think that’s pretty good cause it covers your expenses if you’re a miner. For traditional finance. I, you know, recently we invested in a company called Lightnet. I’m not sure if you read about it on the news. There was a launch I think on CoinTelegraph and Business Times in Singapore.

Quite a lot of major media, mainstream coverage, which was quite surprising, right? Because these guys are actually traditional companies, owned by, the CEO of True. And he is the guy that also owns Fortune magazine. So, we invested in him.

Widelia: Can you tell us more about the project?

John: Lightnet is a company that disrupts the remittance business in short.

Yeah. So, I asked him once, why did he choose to do this cause he’s running a traditional finance, he’s, he’s in the trade finance. He’s built up a billion-dollar company and he’s moved into Lightnet, which is a, I’ll call it the disruptor of remittance or a super SWIFT. Now, the interesting thing about this is that it’s a blockchain enabled company backed by traditional companies such as UOB bank, one of the largest banks in Asia. Seven Bank, the guys that, in Japan and own the most cash in / cash out points in the 7/11 as well. And other players like ourselves Hopeshine and Du Capital as well Hanwha Securities and that’s big, they are one of the largest conglomerates in Korea. And they’ve also entered the blockchain space along with all of us. So, we can see that a lot of traditional finance is moving into adopting blockchain for its low cost and high efficiency. And you know, being able to reach more people globally as opposed to being stuck traditionally. Right. So, this is something that I think that’s why the media, traditional media has covered it so extensively. It’s because, and it’s something that I think we will not, it will happen over and over again where you see large corporations adopting blockchain technology, and you know, building. So, they built along with Stellar. They have chosen to partner with Stellar to build this. And you, I think you’re going to see more and more of this happening. Large companies adopting blockchain technology to enable their businesses to grow much faster, to reach out to more people, especially the underserved.

HOW TO ASSESS BLOCKCHAIN INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Widelia: And you mentioned that you invested in this company was mainly investing in the founder. So, when looking at, and especially you came from a traditional world and also had the traditional VC experience. So how do you, when you assess a blockchain investment opportunity, what is your due diligence like and how is your thinking? How different from the way you know, like the traditional VC will think about an investment opportunity?

John: Yeah. So, we don’t really delve into, as you know, when a blockchain company starts, we expect the burn rate to be pretty high to be honest because of so much development work is needed. But then again, we look at the use case again, of the, of the project, if it’s going to beat other company, if the company is going to serve something that we feel that, has high demand for it. In the end we will. So how do I put it? We invest in companies, but we not only just invest in the companies, we also lend our networks to help it grow, accelerate the company to grow as fast as possible. It doesn’t come with a fee; it doesn’t have a fee and it’s something that we do as investors. And I think that, we still go to the basics on, on investment with a company.

We’re going to look at the team, we’ve got to look at all the backgrounds, and see if they will, if they’re good to go for the next, at least for the first six, eight months, that they’re gonna stick together cause we have invested in the companies and it’s quite normal to see. I think you’ve seen it before. Founders leaving co-founders leaving, CTOs leaving, you know, and something, I think it’s mostly because the investors don’t really, aren’t really involved in helping them to, to build the companies. Most of them are pretty young people. I would say a majority of them are young. Lightnet, of course, is not young, but a majority of the companies out there are young. Some of them don’t have working experience, some of them have one year of working experience and they’re not finance, treasury management are not in their books. So that’s something that’s very important. It’s not just putting money into a company, but it’s also being involved in helping the company, though it can be tedious. You know, after you’ve, you’ve invested in more than 50 companies and you are trying to 50 companies, it’s, it’s tedious. It’s very tiring, but, it’s worth it because you have to do it. If you don’t do it, then they might end up, you know, shutting down and which we can see right now, you can find a lot of them running out of money. And I wrote about three, two years ago, I wrote an article, I think there’s an article in Tech in Asia, which I, I predicted that this year would be the year of equities. In fact, it was earlier last year, more, more and more ICO companies was trying to raise equity because most of them I believe have already been through the runway.

And the adoption rate is too slow. Plus revenue is not, you know, enough and a lot of competition, many, many, many, many competitions coming up. There are so many projects that are similar right now. And you know, that is a bit cause of concern that I think by Darwin theory the strongest will survive, once again. So, you know, yeah, the team is important but so are the investors, if the team doesn’t know how to utilize the investors’ network and experience, or the advisors’ experience and network then I think they’re losing sight, yeah. But again, investors should be proactive in helping these companies to grow as well.

EQUITY VS TOKEN INVESTMENTS

Widelia: There are typically two ways to invest in blockchain companies. One is that you invest in the native crypto assets of decentralized networks or invest in the private equity of their parent companies. And which most of the time, most of the time its parent companies will be centralized entities. So, and you know, you also mentioned as we see the ICO, which is kind of investing in the crypto assets of decentralised networks moving towards investing in the centralized entities. So how do you see that in terms of driving investment returns?

John: So, we invest in both equity and tokens. The reason why we invest in both it’s because they are not selling equity. But then again, it does give you, you know, to be honest, it does give you a much faster returns than investing in equity. In 2017 and early 2018 it did give you a much faster returns, right now you do get a few companies that do give you not bad returns, but it has dwindled because the hype has kind of died down.

One of the main, biggest difference between tokens and equity is commitment. As an equity investor, I am committed to the company to help to grow the company because it’s a win-win for both of us. Valuation goes up and we perform well. We can go to the B round or the C round.

However, if you invest in tokens, let’s say the same amount of $2 million in tokens and I invest another company, $2 million in equity. I can sell $2 million of tokens and not be committed to the company anymore. There’s no point for me to be committed to the company, right? If I sell all your tokens, what’s the point of helping you to grow bigger after that? There is zero loyalty in that sense. So the whole token portion of the business is, I think the founders of these companies also have to understand that investors aren’t really your main clients for your tokens if your tokens are utility token, you know, the investors aren’t really the main clients, investors are there to invest in you, whilst receiving, something in return which is the tokens. And, in an ideal world, the investors will not sell, but unfortunately there is an exchange. There are many, many exchanges out there that allow for the, you know, secondary market sales to happen. And, and thus, you know, you can see broken prices. Charts are pretty much the same throughout. They start off on a high and end up on a low, unfortunate, but, you know, it’s, it’s what happens in this finance world. The moment you open up exchanges and sell tokens. There is going to be trading involved. This is going to be buying and going to be selling. And there’s so many players out there, again, the moment you stop being interesting, the next better player comes up and many people will then focus on the next new token. The next hot token and all interest in the previous hot token has died down. And I think, we see that happening over and over again now. And I think 2020 will be a case where many companies that started in 2017 and early 18, they might be shutting down. Yeah. I dare to say to be honest.

COMPETITION WITHIN SAME VERTICAL

Widelia: I think it’s interesting that you mentioned two related points. So, one part is that there are, you, you, you start to see more companies involved in the same area. And then secondly you mentioned about the value add that the investors can bring to the entrepreneurs, the team. So together, let’s say from Signum’s perspective, often if you were an investor in one company within the space, it adds a lot of credibility to that particular team. So how do you, when you are faced with multiple companies of the same, doing effectively the same things, how do you pick the one to invest in?

John: You know, I try to, we try to stay with just two of the same. And I think so far it has always been two of the same, if it’s data it’s two data companies; if it’s a sharding company we invested in two that does it. So, we, we try not to go more than three per same industry, the same segment I would say. So, we can at least, well there’s Coke and Pepsi. So, you know, I like to invest in both from an investor point of view. If something new comes up, it’s going to be very difficult for them to try to compete on this level because right now, time is, you know, the speed is so fast, everything’s moving so fast and time is their worst enemy right now.

So, the later they start something of the same segment, I don’t think they’ll be able to catch up because everybody’s four steps ahead or five steps ahead. So, with the existing portfolio, we will just stick with them.

RE-EVALUATING EXISTING PORTFOLIO

John: And my understanding or my, I shared with the team that, this year is the year that most, that I think there will be some funds that would agree me, that we have to look at our portfolios again look at who is, who has survived, who has created value across the ecosystem, who has a very good runway still maintaining the team and growing. And, and these are the companies that we will refocus on again and reinvest in again. And we’ve been doing, we’ve been doing that actually we’ve been reinvesting into these companies. Since October 2019, we re-evaluated our portfolio and we found, you know, some clear winners, and we like to support them more by investing much more in them.

Yeah. When I say invest, I mean going into equity. So, it could be like when we invest, we invested in tokens at first and then now we take on the equity portion of the, of the company. But they have to show very strong growth. And I think that those who, you know, there are two kinds of companies, one, companies that have, they want to achieve their growth because they’ve grown to a certain point and they need more cash to grow. And number two, the second company is the one that ran out of money and they need, the only thing that’s left to sell is equity. So, you have to be really careful on that.

Widelia: When you re-assess the portfolio and looking at the value that the companies within the portfolio has created, what are some of the metrics to assess the value that they create?

John: I think we, we, that’s something that we are able to open the books on again. So, you know, when we, when everybody first started, you know, no one could see how much money they were actually making and what’s their capital expense a month or a year. But you know, before investing right now we are able to look into those numbers so we can see growth, very strong growth, let’s say year on year growth how many, or month on month, how much percent is being increased in that sense and the user base, of course, you know, how many users are using their particular project and what’s the growth from that. It’s like investing in an app, you know, traditionally like you want to look at how many users are there and, how many active users are using your, your, your platform and your project. And of course, how much money you’re making off of these users.

And when we look at that and we think that the additional injection of capital you are able to, let’s say break even or at least turn a decent profit for a start, then we would do so, but if the company has very little traction and for the last two years and they’re almost at the brink of death, then it’s pretty hard to survive. Because giving, I know from an investor, from a start-up point of view, you know, having started some companies in my life and quite a fair bit actually. I know, what it is like to be at the brink of death with no. And thinking that an injection of capital will bring my company back to life. In most cases it doesn’t. In most cases it doesn’t. Yeah. So again, that’s something that we are very careful of. We’d like to see companies work with as many, other companies to share resources and, you know, that’s, that’s great, working with partnerships with different companies. This is a great thing, but then you, you know, and you cannot forget the monetary aspect of that.

The whole idea of revenue generation. That’s something that’s still very important cause, as we know, I think we’ve seen in, I think we, we’ve recently seen with WeWork right so it’s, it’s growth first, profitability later and that wasn’t really a great model. And then there’s another report that showed that many companies right now are looking at profitability first, then growth later. And you know, there’s something that’s very funny to me. From a traditional point of view, we always look at profit first. I mean, we want growth and profit to be at the same time, but we, you know, it’s like having 1 million users and $20 in your bank account, and it doesn’t make sense.

BLOCKCHAIN DEVELOPMENT in 2020

Widelia: And we often hear people talk about one day in crypto is like 10 years in the traditional financial world and we’ve gone through many up and down cycles and now we’ve just entered 2020. So, where do you think we are in the cyclical development of blockchain?

John: Oh, let’s wait till May for the halving. Yeah. You know, I think we are at the stage where, I will say, 2020 will be the year when we see companies that have survived again, for the last three years, four years, that they really take on shape and form and to produce really strong results. And I think that, 2020 will definitely be something, a lot of retail, traditional investors, family offices will take notice of the space much more attentively. Last year it was, last year was, was good. Last year was actually pretty good. Overall and this year I think it would be much, much stronger.

People have come to be more mature on, they’re not so panicky as before. You don’t hear the word FOMO and FUD so often as 2017 and 2018. Right. There’s so much talk on FUD and FOMO and all that. And now this time round you don’t because everyone has kind of matured, grown old right, older, let’s say, three years older and they’ve seen the, they know what’s coming. If the coin drops by $1,000, okay, that’s great. You know, that’s, that’s fine. We just wait. And then it comes back up and you know, you can see that happening in Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s not really volatile. You compare volatility to other like foreign exchange, you know, FX out there, which is very high volatility, but Bitcoin is not really that volatile. Other than that, the whole crypto space I think will, will, it will, it will do well, it will do really well this year. But then there’ll be a number of companies that will not survive, that’s for sure, if they can’t get equity funding that they require, yeah, they will eventually just fade off and I’ve seen first-hand we’ve already experienced that as well. So, we can see more and more of that happening. More and more, which is good for the market overall. It’s a temporary inconvenience for a, you know, permanent change.

BITCOIN HALVING IN MAY

Widelia: And you mentioned the much-anticipated halving of Bitcoin in May this year. I just can’t help, but asked your opinion in terms of, right now if you look at it, there’s two camps. Like one camp is of course, you know, basically pointing to the huge price hike that usually happens one year after halving, and there’s another camp that is pointing to the fact that if there’s efficient market, you know, hypothesis that the price of the halving, the potential price surge created by the halving has already been priced in. So, you know, what is your view, which camp do you belong to?

John: So, we do, we have mining farms as well. We also built mining. We have, you know, the farms, the land. We also have the equipment. We invested with RockX, rock miners, Chinese based, Hong Kong based firm actually, but their farms are mostly in China and they’re pretty big, pretty, pretty big company. I think one of the largest miners out there. And to be honest, we know our costs. I mean as miners; we also know costs. And we have the charts. We have seen, we have all the historical charts, right? That shows us, what happens before and after halving, time frames and all that. We are not overly all concerned.

I think this year would not be the same as the past few times. I think there will be, I’ll say it, there’ll be a correction and used to be a correction in the prices, but overall, I do see prices of Bitcoin surging up later in the stage. And thus, I think there’ll be a lot of movement of prices this year. I think there’ll be a lot of interesting people who are going to hedge it with futures and options. So, I do see these two areas gaining a lot of traction in the futures market. And, uh, of course the option market as well the derivatives market gaining a lot of action because of all these. So, in which camp, I sit on, I, I’m on the, I’m not on the one that is priced in yet. I don’t think it’s priced in yet. But I do see the prices coming down a bit, before surging up high. Yeah, I would, I don’t want to put a price to it, but I do think that the price will surpass last year’s expectations. Yeah. Or, last year’s price.

IMPACT OF DIGITAL FIAT AND LIBRA

Widelia: I guess that’s, that’s like good news and bad news for some, depending on what position you got in. Moving on to a bit broader discussion. I mean, we talked about, you know, we see the Chinese government came out and supported, you know, blockchain technology. And we also see the discussion of multiple central banks around the world trying to launch digital Fiat and also of course, you know, the Facebook project, Libra. So, what do you think is the main impact of all these developments by governments around the world?

John: I don’t think that’s gonna be a really big impact. I mean it’s definitely going to allow, you know, the whole idea of, like for example, Singapore or, creating its own digital currency and, using it, I don’t really see the plus side of it to be honest, unless you say that I can use that currency and inject it into an exchange and the exchange would say, okay, you know, that’s Singapore dollars. And you can buy whatever tokens you want from the exchange. Right. Other than that, I, I, I don’t know to be honest how, what’s the, I guess it’s a lot of forms of regulations and control once again. And that’s, I think the main, the main thing you know, if I, if you know how much money is moving out and then you can track it, then they kind of make it capital flight a bit more, you know, less prevalent for the country.

But other than that, I’m not, I’m not really entirely sure why, how it actually benefits. How I would be using, I mean, I’m trying to look at myself from a consumer point of view. Like, because right now I can send you money from my bank account to you to Vietnam. I think pretty cheap. It is still pretty cheap centralized by traditional telegraphic transfer. It’s pretty fast actually. It’s pretty fast. Digital currencies, digital dollars. I don’t know. I, I really think that they should let the private sector handle this with some form of regulation, you know, from the government’s point of view. But for each government to create their own digital currency, well, maybe then I don’t have to carry my other credit cards. I have no idea. So, I, to be honest, this, this is something that has puzzled me for a long time. I haven’t really got into that thought portion.

Whereas for Libra that would be, that makes sense for them. Right? It makes sense for that would be to have their own currency. It’s something that interestingly, I actually came up with a project that was two years ago with a friend of mine to do exactly the same thing or three years ago, yeah, to do the same thing — a currency within that space to service every, every single thing, like if we know how big Facebook is. So, of course there’s fears among governments that this is not right. You know, that, how can you create your own currency out of thin air in that sense. But I mean, the world is changing and people’s appetites are changing. So, if you don’t know what the people want, then it’s going to be quite tough at the end of the day.

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES IN 2020

Widelia: And so in terms of investment opportunities that you think are very, you know, hot or are going to play out in 2020, what are some of them?

John: I think, so there’s a local company in Singapore called Sparrow. They’re gonna announce something pretty huge, pretty soon, very, very huge actually. And they have received, a very well-deserved pat on the back.

And they are an options trading platform. Its volume is just crazy. You know, how last year, how two years ago this was lending, staking options and all that wasn’t a big thing at all. And in the crypto space, right. And then only when prices started to tumble down that we see lending, staking, in a way volatility comes a lot of play for the derivatives market. And a company called Sparrow that you know, we invested in them both in tokens and in equity. And not only us, they will announce the major partner that did invest in them quite a fair bit actually. I think these companies, will I think there will be another one that would be interesting. The future. There’re so many people offering futures now, so I don’t dabble in the futures, but I’m pretty much an options guy. I think that overall there, this market will be kept creating a lot of trading volume this year because of the movement in prices and I think there’ll be offering much, you know, I think retailers are going to have, they will be spoiled for choices, the retail investors, um, everything can be done on phone, right? So, it’s going to be so quick and so efficient. Or hedge against some risk. And for those who are risk takers, they probably do some riskier investments.

But yeah, I do believe that, you know, it’s just a, it’s just a consequence of what’s going to happen this year. This year is going to be, I feel like the movement is gonna be up and down pretty, pretty wild. And I think that that’s a very big opportunity for the people who trade on the derivatives market. And I do see that being a very good investment this year. This year especially. Yeah.

UNICORN DISCUSSION

Widelia: Now we’ve come to the last section of the show, which is also a fixed section that I ask each guest to share their personal view on unicorns. And just a recent report by Hurun and it showed that there are at least 11 blockchains unicorns by now. As an investor, what is your view on unicorns in terms of the blockchain space.

John: Unicorn in the blockchain space, how much are they? Like a billion dollars over? Yeah.

Widelia: Yes, unicorns are defined by having valuation above 1 billion USD.

John: Yeah. Today they will be one billion, tomorrow, it’s like 900. I think, I think the whole idea of unicorns is great. It’s like, it gives people that whole, I guess it gives many, many different forms of investors, bragging rights if you invested in one of them. But we never searched for unicorns to be honest, I, I thought that every company that we invested could be a unicorn, but in the end of the day it’s really just, it’s us doing again, doing the job together, to get, I always believe in one thing. I’m very traditional pragmatic kind of guy because of my family come from a traditional property family. And we believe in success first, then money comes after success, right? So, we always want to try to build it to the best that we can. When I say success, I mean the development of the people in the company; the development of the, of the products of the company; the development of the company on a general, on a scale, the growth, you know, that that is to me a successful company, whether it becomes a unicorn, whether it is a unicorn, it’s always something that’s not in my mind to be honest. I prefer to have 50 great companies than 49 crap companies and one unicorn in my portfolio at least so I guess that’s my, my take on unicorns. I don’t search for it and I was joking with other people that so many unicorns have died last year. I think we should find another animal.

Widelia: What would that be to replace unicorn?

John: Like Pegasus, I don’t know, it’s not easy to find. I don’t know. Something, something that’s you’ve got to go watch Harry Potter or something. Maybe a Pegasus we should find Pegasus, if that’s, that’s at least in the Greek mythology. So maybe you can call it Pegasus or something. But yeah, unicorns died last year. Many unicorns didn’t survive last year, got bashed last year. So, I think this year is going to follow suit.

Widelia: Yeah so maybe we’ll see another creature that is going to replace unicorn and do much better than unicorn.

ENDING REMARK

Widelia: Due to time limit, I think we’ve come to the end of the show. Thank you so much John, for sharing so many of your honest feedbacks, your experience investing in blockchain space.

John: Thanks. Thanks for having me. I mean, if I were to say something last for everyone out there, it would be, you know, try to invest in your own merit, kind of don’t overextend, you know, the world is, you know, very, the world’s in a very volatile situation. So it’s, it’s good to like, you know, read up as much as you can, see which areas are, that you can invest in nothing is, nothing, you know, well, in the end of the day we just have to follow, what the world, what’s happening in this world. So, if we, if we keep going on, like if we keep following major companies’ investments, sometimes we could just be caught up in that whole idea that if Signum invests in company A, it must be a great company. I think everybody has to do their due diligence before investing so just to be safe.

Widelia: Yeah, that’s very well-said. I think it’s always important to invest in things that you fully understand and also hedge your downside risk. And I think we also, I really like the saying that being a bull is good; being a bear is also good but being a pig is never good.

John: Right, right, right, right, right. That’s a good one.

Widelia: Thank you again, John. Really great to have you.

John: Yup. Thank you for having me again. Thank you.

Published at Wed, 12 Feb 2020 02:00:19 +0000

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