It’s inspiring to collaborate with so many different innovative projects, teams, thought leaders and support their ideas to the execution. In the crypto industry, it’s all about thinking outside the box and being ahead of the curve.
MEDIA 7: Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional career?
SHIRLEY VALGE: Born in Estonia right before the Soviet Union collapsed and growing up in the most digitally advanced country where public services started shifting onto distributed ledger technology 20 years ago, IT and tech advancements have always run in my blood. In 2016, when I discovered Bitcoin after looking for low-barrier investment opportunities, I started learning about blockchain and cryptocurrencies more in-depth and since then I have never stopped. A year later I moved to Crypto Valley, Zug in the heart of Switzerland, and as the blockchain and cryptocurrencies were still an emerging industry, I could put my knowledge, experience, and passion into practice as well as become an expert in it at a relatively early stage.
I started at a Crypto Mining Investment company that had its own mining halls by Zürich lake and where I gathered practical knowledge about fundraising via ICO, STO, legal framework necessary, and even how to set up mining rigs among many other things. 2.5 years ago I got introduced to Velas whitepaper, a project which was rooted in Coinpayments.net, the world’s largest payment processing platform. Now Velas, headquartered in Zug is one of the top Crypto Valley Blockchain firms according to PWC and CV VC report and is growing in terms of global team size, new project partnerships, and inhouse developed innovative decentralized products. Velas is the world’s fastest Blockchain enabling up to 75000 tx/s at almost for free, at the highest security.
M7: What are some of the features included in your flagship product, BitOrbit?
SV: BitOrbit is a decentralized social media platform and a next-generation, encrypted mobile application, that empowers content creators and influencers through a flexible monetization system, thanks to one-tap payments in crypto or FIAT currency via Coinpayments.net integration and enabling them to keep ownership over their data and content, censorship-free. There is no need for revenue-sharing intermediaries thanks to underlying Blockchain technology, thus 100% of revenue goes directly to content creators.
News announcements and speculation are responsible for fueling price swings in crypto similar to mainstream markets. But their effect is exaggerated in crypto markets as they have less liquidity than traditional financial markets.
M7: Could you tell us more about Velas Network AG’s ecosystem of decentralized products?
SV: Velas is the only open-source, decentralized blockchain company out there, who has built its in-house ecosystem of products to demonstrate, how easy it can be for anyone, with any technical skillset to use decentralized solutions. The products are designed user-friendly, accessible, and as understandable as centralized products, but without exploiting users' data or creating a single centralized point of authority or failure. Besides the BitOrbit, we have web, desktop, mobile multi-currency wallets which allow storing, transferring, and paying with crypto-currencies, as well as easy staking or delegate staking of the Velas ecosystem native currency - Velas coin. (Staking means buying and setting aside coins, used to validate transactions made through the blockchain) Every user can passi vely earn staking rewards by locking up a certain amount of their coins for some time to support the network. Additionally, we developed a passwordless authentication system, allowing users to securely access a variety of services without a password using just their Velas Account. With Velas Account authentication, interaction with cryptocurrencies is facilitated to the level of centralized technology convenience without sacrificing user privacy and security. Velas Account uses biometric authentication on the user’s device to confirm login requests and transactions.
Velas Vault, a new technology that allows us to accelerate and cheapen transactions from other cryptocurrency systems by leveraging the speed and security of our blockchain. In this way, we can achieve true security for a decentralized custodian. There are some other products planned to be developed in the near future, like decentralized charity platform, to improve the transparency of donation collection; Velasphere which allows monetization of distributed spare computing power and disk space, etc. Last but not the least, Velas is a community-driven project. At any time our community members can vote for the next product our team will place a priority on.
M7: What are some of the biggest challenges the crypto industry is facing at the moment?
SV: The crypto industry has definitely matured a lot in these recent years and has evolved into a much more serious landscape where institutional investors and corporates are now looking into. This has naturally led regulators to place more stringent compliance measures for the space. The challenge right now, being within the space, is that the regulatory environment is extremely ununified and different from country to country. There are states by now where Bitcoin is accepted as legal tender and some other states where any involvement related to cryptocurrencies is banned and penalized.
When we speak about the technical challenges, it’s how to solve the famous ‘Blockchain Trilemma’ of scalability, decentralization, and security by not sacrificing one aspect over the other. Many companies out there have their own solution to this problem they market themselves with, but only a few have proven the solution in practice.
Another main challenge is interoperability, which Velas tackles with the vault solution, as lack of unity in the space hinders the widespread adoption of Blockchain technologies. Velas is already compatible with all ERC20 chain and Solana chain tokens and via Velas vault, there will be no limits in terms of which tokens can be transacted on the Velas chain.
The crypto industry has definitely matured a lot in these recent years and has evolved into a much more serious landscape where institutional investors and corporates are now looking into. This has naturally led regulators to place more stringent compliance measures for the space.
M7:Today, the crypto market is still quite volatile. How do you see this changing with time?
SV: Many of the reasons for price volatility in mainstream markets hold true for the crypto market as well. News announcements and speculation are responsible for fueling price swings in crypto similar to mainstream markets. But their effect is exaggerated in crypto markets as they have less liquidity than traditional financial markets. We will see this changing over time with the increase of mass adoption as well as with the emergence of established and widely adopted derivative markets in the crypto asset class.
M7: What inspires you the most about the crypto industry?
SV: The never-ending learning. The technology and the space evolve at a lightning-fast pace and to keep up with all the daily developments is a challenge on its own and makes the work in this space extremely interesting. Also, it’s inspiring to see the results of your own work and contribution put into developing this innovative and world-changing global ecosystem that Velas is about. It’s inspiring to collaborate with so many different innovative projects, teams, thought leaders and support their ideas to the execution. In the crypto industry, it’s all about thinking outside the box and being ahead of the curve.