LemoChain was first established in China and is now taking off in the U.S. The platform has brought blockchain to the B2B landscape by helping companies of different sizes share secure information directly with one another.
According to Andrew Ma, the Founder and CEO of LemoChain, blockchain is transforming the B2B data exchange landscape. Digital journal caught up with him to find out more about the advantages of blockhain for businesses.
Digital Journal: How important is blockchain becoming for businesses?
Andrew Ma: Blockchain is becoming an infrastructure for future businesses. Just like the internet, a lot of new services will be built upon blockchain. These services will significantly increase efficiency, lower cost, and enable businesses to acquire resources much easier than ever before. Blockchain will also change the relationship between different, independent businesses – in a blockchain-driven business world, entities will be able to work directly with one another to maximize profit.
DJ: Why does blockchain have such an appeal?
Ma: At this moment, the main appeal of blockchain comes from the token market. The market cap has increased significantly since early 2017, which makes cryptocurrency the best object to invest in.
But fundamentally, the spirit of decentralization and the potential to revolutionize production relations are the main reasons why people have started looking at blockchain.
DJ: How is blockchain is transforming the B2B data exchange landscape?
Ma: Existing data exchange infrastructures go mostly through centralized silos, who store the data and sell it to purchasing companies. Aligning with various other industries, blockchain will be able to provide disintermediation for data exchange, thus facilitating a true B2B exchange and decreasing the need for third parties whilst significantly reducing data exchange costs.
Blockchain also provides a considerably higher degree of security to those exchanging their data, as they no longer have to trust hackable third party data storage companies such as Equifax, who lost data on 143M Americans in 2017.
DJ: What are the current issues around how businesses buy and sell their data?
Ma: The biggest concern regarding data exchange is in regards to privacy. Putting trust in a third party data storage provider has repeatedly proven to be a risky venture. Now, with decentralized blockchain infrastructure, the use of these third parties has been rendered unnecessary.
A second issue is in regards to data validity. It is often difficult and costly to prove the authenticity of data being sold. With P2P and open source technologies, credit and rating systems can be put into place which allow users to rank the quality of a merchants data, which helps ensure the authenticity and trustworthiness of data being circulated.
Finally, current data purchasing methods are outdated and inefficient, with companies purchasing large packets of data (e.g. 1000 users in Manhattan). The fact of the matter is that the majority of this data holds very little direct relevance to the purchaser.
DJ: What services does LemoChain offer for businesses?
Ma: LemoChain will provide easily accessible API’s and SDK’s for businesses of all sizes and technological capabilities to access blockchain technology, through authenticating and circulating their highly valuable yet under-utilized customer data.
We want to lay the groundwork which will facilitate the structured creation of various industry specific marketplaces. LemoChain itself is not the marketplace, we’re more of the foundation on which an integrated marketplaces can flourish. We are building a network of interlinked, existing online and offline businesses to form a true data circulation ecosystem, focused on optimizing business performance through delivering a more efficient user experience.
DJ: Why is this important for data ownership and privacy?
Ma: Removing the need for 3rd party data storage hugely addresses the trust issue that currently exists within data circulation. Businesses will no longer have to risk data losses that are out of their hands. Instead, they can operate solely on a trusted B2B basis with a tremendously low risk of data hacks.
LemoChain is also providing a data matchmaking infrastructure, through the use of homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation. This means that data purchasers won’t have to purchase large and wasteful packages of data. Additionally, data sellers understandably don’t want to be selling large amounts of user data to one individual company, regardless of whether or not they are a competitor.
So, through matchmaking only the relevant individual customer’s data with the corresponding purchaser, companies can expect considerably higher conversion rates from their data purchase, whilst having the competitiveness of their data secured.
DJ: Where has this been tested out?
Ma: We have tested it in the social network industry which involved 5 social apps. We’ve helped them share their traffic and user base, and increased the overall conversion rate (pay rate) from 6.5 percent to more than 11 percent.
DJ: How are you planning to launch into the U.S.?
Ma: We plan to release our main network this summer. After that, we will need to go through a series of auditing to enter different markets. We will officially launch in the U.S. after a third-party code auditing is done. Code auditing is a service provided by a third-party that ensures the software product we provide is safe, stable, and as described.
