WeTrust (TRST) Wins 3rd Place in Multi-Continent Start-up Competition!

Per the most recent announcement from the WeTrust team since the crowdsale, We Trust came in #3 out of several competing entrepreneurs from Europe, North America and Asia. With this, they had the opportunity to present their banking and insurance products to make processes more efficient using their ethereum-based smart contract technology!

The following updates are from WeTrust's blog page.

"WeTrust Community Update 5/10/2017

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at WeTrust. We are very grateful to everyone who has participated in our crowdsale. Thank you for believing in our vision!

Since the end of the crowdsale, we have been hard at work. As one of the Finalists in the Nanjing City Start-up competition, WeTrust earned the privilege of being flown to China to present our vision to local government officials, entrepreneurs, and academics. WeTrust CEO George Li represented us at the event held in Nanjing, China, helping us earn third place out of more than 25 start-up competitors from across Europe, Japan, and United States. In addition, George spent time with local governments and financial institutions in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guizhou provinces, building relationships with organizations who are interested in learning about how blockchain can be used to improve their operations ranging from insurance claims processes, transparency in poverty alleviation efforts, and financial inclusion. We identified potential opportunities for collaboration and came away impressed by the openness and willingness to adopt new technologies."

Now, with a great start-up making connections, advised by Vitalik Buterin, Bo Shen and a dev team full of Google pros, I find the 27 bitcoin sell wall at 9000 satoshi to be a scare tactic so the big guys can rake up coins cheap before this one blows up.

"WeTrust’s Tom Nash at the Auckland Blockchain Conference

Recently, WeTrust Front End Developer Tom Nash attended the Auckland Blockchain Conference, an event aimed at helping people understand how the blockchain and smart contracts are going to change and disrupt every business sector from agriculture to finance. He talked blockchain and WeTrust, networked with folks doing some pretty groundbreaking work with the blockchain, and learned a lot of new ideas that he shared with the WeTrust team. Those ideas have led to a lot of interesting discussions around the WeTrust office as we work hard on creating the best product possible. Here, Tom shares a brief summary of his experience at the conference.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aFbS4VtL-0sTJ4wy.

Tom Nash’s Rundown of the Auckland Blockchain Conference

For the last six months, one topic has consumed most of my time. Over the last couple of days, I had the opportunity to find out how this topic affects a wide variety of industries.

Spanning two days with over 25 presentations, the blockchain conference in Auckland, New Zealand, saw the fundamentals of blockchain explained, explored and subsequently applied to business models ranging from agricultural supply chains to hotel bookings.

Day 1 consisted of a pretty quick rundown of blockchain: what it provides, broad principles of how it works, and warnings to anyone who thinks they can ignore it. Mark Pascall (BlockchainLabs) explained how to tell your friends about blockchain without their eyes glazing over, Pamela Morgan (Third Key Solutions) warned tech-averse lawyers that blockchain was about to consume their practices unless they provided services outside of being an intermediary, and Andreas Antonopoulos gleefully skewered centralised institutions who have — until now — been able to tell us what money is and how we can use it.

Day 2 started off with a deep dive into how blockchain-based solutions are already shaping business models. Christoph Jentzsch (slock.it) explained the thinking behind TheDAO and how DAOs are not just possible, but almost trivial using blockchain tech (as long as you don’t write bugs); Margaux Avedisian (Transform PR) schooled us all on how to raise money through a Token Crowdsale; WebJet talked of their work with Microsoft to blockchain-ify their bookings platform over the last year using a private Ethereum-based chain; Emma Weston (Agridigital) detailed how blockchain is already playing a role in agricultural supply chains (with Agridigital firmly spearheading the charge); and Kaidi Ruusalepp gave a rundown of her venture Funderbeam’s blockchain-based stock trading platform, particularly noting how around 80% of stock trading middlemen could be cut out with a switch to such a platform.

After seeing blockchain successfully applied to massive industries, we were taken on a journey into a possible future. Max Kaye (Flux) briskly whacked the current political system around the head and gave a well thought out, technologically infused alternative. Max systematically dissected the flaws in the current methods of vote counting, whereby the vote of a specialist on any specific topic is worth the same as that of a layman, after which he proposed a solution utilising ‘weighted votes’. I’m simplifying his thorough explanations massively, so definitely check out https://voteflux.org/.

Peter Borah (Ownage) put the pro-blockchain narrative hard into reverse and gave us an overview of why blockchain performance is lacking right now, why a worldwide computer can only process around 14 transactions per second, and the solutions currently in the works to bring higher performance blockchains to the fore. Projects presented included sharding (fewer initial validators per transaction), state channels (doing a heap of transactions off-chain and then uploading the results), and TrueBit (cheaply gamifying the verification of complex computations). Peter kept our expectations in check and firmly stated that performance enhancements are crucial if the groundbreaking principles of blockchain tech are ever to gain a true foothold and bring real change to the greater public.

Finally, we were treated to the main man himself, nerd-jesus Vitalik Buterin, who crafted a great ground-up explanation of how cryptoeconomics — a field of which the first viral application was Bitcoin — can be leveraged to provide a self-facilitating system of borderless trust. Vitalik went on to explain how these principles can be applied to many different areas where economic theory alone often fails to provide a scalable solution, but the universally-binding laws of cryptography can give answers.

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Tom Nash of WeTrust with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin

I managed to grab a few words with Vitalik to ask him about a problem I’m facing with a project. He thought for a little while before telling me the most straightforward solution would be to make my own blockchain with a modified proof-of-work algorithm. Easy, thanks Vitalik!

Again, I’ve massively simplified all the presentations here and omitted a fair few of them for brevity’s sake. If you would like to watch them for yourselves (I thoroughly recommend doing so), the videos will be released after they’ve been through the editing mill in the next few weeks.

I came home with a massive reading list even though I was very picky with my notes, so I expect to have my head in books and academic papers for the next few months. A lot of ideas shared at the conference could potentially be leveraged to make WeTrust the best product possible, and I’ve shared these ideas with the team and had great discussions about their applicability.

It was a pleasure to meet so many others who share a fundamentally similar worldview, I’ve made real connections with intriguing folks over just a few hours of interactions, and come away with a resolve to keep in touch with many of them."
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